Ordinary Time

Lane McKiernan
Food Shelf Follies
Playwright's Center
2301 Franklin Ave. E., Minneapolis

Fri., Jul. 31 @ 10:00 p.m., Sat., Aug. 1 @ 5:30 p.m., [A] Sun., Aug. 2 @ 1:00 p.m. Thu., Aug. 6 @ 7:00 p.m., Sun., Aug. 9 @ 5:30 p.m.

http://www.fringefestival.org/2009/show/?id=1078 

“I do not have any difficulty believing the Host is Christ’s body,” said my Roman Catholic friend.  “What I have trouble believing is that it is bread.”  Apparently, however, transubstantiation is a fragile process.  Because according to the Vatican, whether real bread or wafer, the priest can't make Jesus without gluten. 

Orders are orders.

My son had a teacher in the fourth grade, at Percy Priest Elementary School in Green Hills, Tennessee, who was a veteran of the first Gulf War.  Mr. Chase.  He was a former Green Beret.  Mr. Chase’s kids lined up differently in the hall from other kids.  They had more homework every night than other kids.  And they won all the contests on Field Day.  Had it been permitted, I think Mr. Chase might have had his students dig their own latrines.  Aidan simultaneously loved and feared Mr. Chase – both wanted his approval, and resented his discipline.   For a young man, however, Mr. Chase was sick a lot.  Gulf War Syndrome, we were told.  Chemical exposure.  Although he came home without obvious wounds, his immune system was shot.  He took medication for this, but it made him sleepy.  During the school year, if he was feeling well enough, he often reduced the dosage, something that was not recommended.  But a soldier needs to be alert.  So does a fourth grade teacher. 

Even if it means disobeying orders.

Several years after we left Tennessee, we heard Mr. Chase had died.  Not from Gulf War Syndrome, exactly.  From food poisoning.  He had eaten a rare steak, and the steak had contained e-coli.  Not a strain that would bother anyone else.  But toxic to him. 

On my way home from a meeting today, I had to stop at the grocery store.   I hadn’t had time to plan the week’s meals; I just knew I was out of a lot of what is normally considered healthy food.  (It should go without saying that this includes dark chocolate and whole bean coffee.)  I ended up in the grocery section of Super Target.  Several people have recently sent me that list known as the “dirty dozen” –fruits and vegetables whose pesticide content remains dangerously high, even after they are washed. So I went first to the organic produce counter.  What was there was small and mean looking, and expensive.  Most of it had been flown in from Mexico or South America.  I found organic chocolate, but none of it was fair trade.  There was organic, fair trade, whole bean coffee, but Eight-o-Clock was two dollars a pound cheaper.  And who was I trying to kid by paying a premium for “cruelty-free” meat?  Did the certification process include an interview with the Meat? 

After forty-five minutes of hemming and hawing, trying to determine the least damaging, most ethical and economical way of feeding myself, I finally said to hell with it, threw in my cart whatever looked good, and vowed to do better next time.

Not everyone has the luxury of being able to do this.  Lane McKiernan is one of those people.  A chemical exposure has made him allergic to a number of foods that you and I can still find nourishing – or at least nontoxic.  Finding foods that do not sicken him – learning to cook without gluten or wheat, avoiding the ubiquitous high fructose corn syrup - has been a difficult process, made even harder by periods of unemployment.  At one food shelf, when he tries to return things he knows he cannot eat so that someone else can benefit from them, the worker takes everything back.  “If you were really in need you would eat what we gave you.”  Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink.  When your body itself becomes the albatross, what then do you do? 

Lane is not only chemically sensitive but transgender, and weaves this reality into the story with a refreshing matter-of-factness.  There are no identity politics here:  only a real person, with real needs.  He tells his story quietly, without rancor.  I have never heard anyone speak of working in a minimum wage, food service industry job with such obvious pleasure, even vocation; his description of early mornings at the bakery reminded me of Brother Lawrence, practicing the Presence of God.  Had you asked Brother Lawrence whether he thought gluten necessary for this, I think you would have gotten the answer such a question deserves.

You might think that Lane's show would be a preachy, uncomfortable experience.  Instead it is full of beautiful moments, both in the interludes of music and juggling by Walken Schweigert and Katie Burgess, and in the narrative itself.  There are kind people as well as the insensitive, unskilled in withholding judgment.  Lane presents them without comment.  That is life.  And this is advocacy at its finest, a call for justice which draws people in rather than shuts them out.  Anger is reserved for a system that fails the poor and the disabled, and for the elected officials who balance the budget on the backs of those least able to make their voices heard. 

And even anger with the system, and those who represent it, is tempered with humor.  When a social services bureaucrat accuses Lane of trying to get benefits with a fake ID because the gender on it is wrong, his bewildered response -  “I didn’t know whether to be upset at the accusation of fraud or pleased that I finally passed.”-  gently ushers me into his world and gives me a hook to hang my hat on.  It is the courage to laugh at such experiences that saves a person from despair – and feeds a community’s capacity for compassion.   Because in the end, we must all give.  And take.  And eat.