La Chat qui Rit:

About tasting my BMW motorcycle:

That bike wasn't my first flavored motorcycle!

I used to work at WGBH, a public broacasting television station in Boston. Not having any other vehicle and having an an aversion to public transportation which in Boston was sporadic and unreliable (remember Charlie on the MTA?), I rode my motorcycle to work every day. Boston winters are not what most people would call Motorcycle Weather. Sometimes the weather would drop to fifteen or ten degrees. One day it was below zero.

This kind of weather is not only uncomfortable, it is tough on the bike. Eleven o'clock in the parking lot on a winter night after a long day in the studio as a stagehand and then trying to get a coldly reluctant bike to start, is quite unpleasant but I found an alternative.

In the front of the studio building there was an air exhaust. It blew sixty-five degree air out of the building through a duct located at street level only a few yards from the main entrance. The outlet had the added advantage of being underneath a portico. I could pull the bike under there, keep it out of sleet and snow, and have it bathed in a constant flow of 60-65 degree air. It was so easy to start the bike when it had been warmed all day in this river of air.

One of our shows was "The French Chef" with Julia Child. Julia spent one day a week rehearsing with her producer, Ruth Lockwood. They would try recipes, time them and figure out such things as how many stages they will need to show all aspects of the process of cooking the featured dish. Often they would have five versions of the same dish in different stages of preparation. During that day, the studio would be filled with the rich smells of shallots, garlic, wine sauces, fines herbes and the like. The same was true of the production days. They were filled with the same wonderful smells.

Have you guessed what happened? The fragrant air would be sucked out of Studio A and expelled through that exhaust under the portico near the main entrance. Two days a week, my motorcycle would be immersed in Julia's flavors. After a while, I noticed that when I was away from the station and I started my bike, as it warmed up, that my friends were delighting in pointing out that a complex set of odors was rising from it. It was Julia's delightful, appetizing, kitchen smells mixed with 10/30 oil, gasoline and warm rubber. Strange to say, not everyone enjoyed it.

Sourdough