BLEHHGH

My new rice cooker looks to me like it has a face saying BLEHHGH. The eyes are the appliance’s Cook and Warm lights; the mouth and tongue are the on switch and its casing. The face kind of reminds me of Alfred Jarry’s drawing of Père Ubu.

My husband, Frank, however, thinks the rice cooker looks more like an eyeless pig, with the handles resembling ears and the Cook and Warm lights calling to mind nostrils on a snout. Reinforcing his interpretation is the swinish pink of the device.

I am willing to accept both visions or any other, for I am a creative thinker, according to the tests administered by my elementary school’s G.T. teacher in 1988. G.T. is what we called the gifted-and-talented program, presumably because G&T was already taken.

In my recollection, a big portion of the testing for getting into G.T. involved Miss Foley showing you pictures and then you’d make up stuff about them—like, Oh, this one looks like the Apostle Paul chastising a harlot or whatever (I went to a Christian school). And for some reason that meant you got taken out of class a few days a week to do extra math.

I liked G.T. better when we got to undertake the occasional independent research project. I remember doing one about the Broadway musical (naturally) in fourth or fifth grade, though I don’t remember what form the final product took—a historical essay? A presentation to the class? Who knows.

From my research, I have retained across the decades precisely one piece of trivia: The Tony Awards were named after Antoinette Perry. Though all but forgotten now, she was an actor and producer who was born in 1888 and died in 1946. I only retained the name, however; I got the biographical data from looking her up just now.

I hope my G.T. project found time to reflect on the ephemeral nature of theatrical work. At least ol’ Antoinette’s name lives on, albeit uselessly, in my memory, just as her nickname lives on in the name of the Tony Awards. Fame is fleeting; branding is forever.

Speaking of naming things after theater people, I had initially planned to call my rice cooker Hedy Rice in honor of Hedy Weiss, erstwhile theater and dance critic for the Chicago Sun-Times. But that now feels like a rude thing to do, given that I just got finished telling you the rice cooker looks like Père Ubu or possibly a pig.

Maybe I’ll just call it BLEHHGH.

I bought BLEHHGH in the first place because I was trying to make Filipino garlic rice and, plus, I figured having a rice cooker could come in handy going forward.

Not that I do a lot of rice cooking, mind you. Or any kind of cooking, really. That’s neither a gift nor a talent I possess. I find all that chopping and measuring to be tedious. And then at the end when I taste whatever I made, I’ll invariably think, Well, that hardly justifies the mess in the kitchen.

My garlic rice, for example, came out way too garlicky. Which, come to think of it, is another reason why the cooker’s name should be BLEHHGH. That’s exactly what I said after tasting the dish.