Hot Dish

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Authors: Connie Brockway
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her wisdom. And he thought of all the years of companionship and joy they had shared, and how very, very much he loved her. So much, in fact, that he almost told her.”
    A riff of light laughter arose from the group.
    “Miss Lind, it says in the material here that you got your start at age seventeen when you stepped in to pinch-hit for a local morning show hostess. Would you expand on that?”
    “Certainly,” she said. “I, along with the other finalists in a local pageant, was scheduled to appear on
Good Neighbors
, a program being broadcast live from the Minnesota State Fair. When we arrived on the set, we saw the star of the show, Sharon Siverston, being taken away in an ambulance. She’d had an accident in the previous segment at the Baby Barnyard Petting Zoo.”
    “What was that?”
    “A calf bit her,” she said with a small sigh, as if calves biting people were a common but unfortunate occurrence in Minnesota. “Her next spot was a cooking one and the producers were trying to decide how to fill the sudden eight-minute gap. I had just won a blue ribbon for baking, so I volunteered to do the segment.
    “Shortly afterward, I was asked to do a regular spot. When Sharon stepped down a few years later (the poor dear’s nose never did look quite the same)”—here she paused and, by God, she really
did
look saddened—“they asked me to replace her and there I have been ever since.”
    “You were Miss Fawn Creek?” a voice from the back abruptly asked.
    She looked around to find the speaker. “Yes.”
    “Your hometown must be very proud of you.”
    “I hope so.”
    “Do you ever get back there?”
    “Oh, yes. As I always say, I’m very fond of the Fawn” Her press release credited her upbringing in Fawn Creek as the inspiration for manyof the “heritage” recipes used on her show. “My folks still live there. So, yes, I get back quite often.”
    God, you had to love a gracious, mature woman who called her parents “folks” and did so without a hint of self-consciousness.
    “If you were Miss Fawn Creek 1984, then you were also the model for the butter sculpture Steve Jaax cites as being the turning point in his career. Am I right?”
    At this, a buzz arose. A couple reporters who’d been eyeing the door stopped. This was unexpected. Apparently by Jenn Lind, too. And that was interesting.
    She blinked and, using the armrests on her chair, lifted herself up so she could better see the questioner. “Excuse me?”
    “Dan Piccatto, contributing arts editor for
Vanity Fair
.” This awoke a fresh surge of murmurs. What was an arts editor doing here? Especially an old silverback like Dan, who usually only covered highbrow art news. “Are you the model for Jaax’s
Butter Epiphany
!”
    Someone guffawed. Steve Jaax, arguably one of the most celebrated sculptors of the twenty-first century, pinpointed the origins of his signature works to a few weeks in the summer of 1984, a period he fondly, and without any consideration for veracity, referred to as his “outlaw period.”
    Over the years, the story had gained almost mythical stature. Jaax, so it went, was running from the law (and his then wife, the internationally famous fashion model Fabulousa) when he’d taken a gig at the Minnesota State Fair carving the busts of winning dairy princesses out of frozen butter. While working on a hundred-pound block, he had been visited by a vision, seeing in the way light shone through the semitranslucent butterfat the basis for the fiber-optic-and-resin pieces that would become his trademark.
    Though a few detractors claimed Jaax had become as celebrated for his celebrity as his art, it didn’t matter. Jaax was still big news. The reporters started scribbling away.
    “Are you?”
    “Yes, I … I am.” She adjusted an earring. “I haven’t thought about that … it … in years. To be honest, I hadn’t realized anyone even knew about it.”
    “But that’s why I’m here,” Piccatto replied, clearly

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