We cannot truly wear the clothes of the famous. We cannot throw on Jackie Kennedy’s famous pink Chanel suit (It is under lock and key in the National Archives.) Oscar Wilde’s clothes are not available for retail at Forever 21 or able to be scrounged up at Buffalo Exchange or Goodwill. The closest we could get is to make it ourselves, but even then they will not be laden with his scent paired with his Penhaligon's Hamam Bouquet. Cologne that gave him a primal and rose paired scent. We can only get close but not quite there. Replicas are simply not the same.

We cannot have sex with the by gone famous either. When Rita Moreno tells us that Marlon Brando had a more leonine sex drive than Elvis, we can do nothing but believe her. (And the bolder of us may entertain fantasies of being with either men via our imaginations or fan fiction- but I digress).

We cannot live in their homes. We cannot truly go and live with Truman Capote in Spain or Italy. We cannot visit the house in Havana, Cuba that Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gelhorn lived, fought, and wrote in. We can visit the ghost of it, we can visit the building, but the house will never feature Gelhorn at her typewriter or Hemingway mixing daiquiris near the pool. Their houses we can visit, the home is lost to time. 

Food though, this continues on as a quintessential sensual experience that is accessible. Food is the sustenance that keeps everyone alive, from the demigods to the ‘normal’, we all have to eat. Eating good food can be akin to a spiritual experience. It brings us closer to our families, and to those we will never meet. Especially our idols. Any given google search can bring you to the eating and exercise habits of any person you like. Maybe you could look like Robin Wright if you gave up shell nuts and refined sugar. Maybe the body, and subsequently the life, of those we admire is really only one cup of cooked brown rice away from us.

Those who are susceptible to idol worship and creative personalities take this one further step: what if the secret to fame and creative immortality is in the food that the admired ate. What if there are signs there? What can we glean from Daniel Handler’s admission that  "I write longhand on legal pads, about half at home and half in cafés. I drink a lot of water and eat a lot of raw carrots." Agatha Christie likes apples, maybe I should like apples. Is there anything we can learn from the preferred foods of those we admire, and then ingesting that same substance?

Joan Didion

Joan Didion was known for drinking ice cold Coca Cola from a glass bottle in the mornings in lieu of the coffee most of us have in the morning and chasing them down with salted almonds her mother sent her from California.

               Why does this seem so quintessentially American? Forgoing the pure speed of coffee for something sweeter, a classic logo and shape along with it more convenient to store and retain its fizzy integrity. It was like her writing in a way. It makes you wonder what habits are revealed in an authors eating habits, if anything.

The coolness and the sweetness of the Coca Cola sizzled in my mouth, I cheated and ate salt and vinegar almonds. I found them to be a better call back to her writing, at least how it rattled around in my mind. The bitterness of the flavor, the substance and protein of the almond (not even aware that you were getting anything good from this) the sweetness and bubble of the style. It makes me feel close to this woman I will never meet. That she too was a human who ate, who enjoyed, and who needed. We like to think of artists as impervious to need, to things that us mere mortals may have to ask for in order to survive.

Andy Warhol

Discipline, drive, hard work. Things that seem easy to do on the surface. Things that within my own arrogance I think I can access. He would have approved most likely, of my stream lined approach to life in this way. His artistic have was called ‘The Factory,’ bringing to mind ideas of mass marketing and production.

So I make the lunch that he had often as a child, the one that his mother would make for him. Cheese sandwich on white bread, with a bowl of Campbell's tomato soup.

Dryness to the sandwich, and the soup was more watery than I normally would have cared for. I prefer Trader Joe's tomato soup if I am honest. I wonder what Andy Warhol would have made of our manufactured personalities based on our purchases. Mac vs PC. Trader Joes vs Whole Foods. Luly Lemon vs Torid. Religious vs. Secular.

Maybe he would have loved it. In a world where he never was able to fit in as straight or gay, an artist or a fake, a man or a mask, maybe a label would have helped him. We know he loved labels. The Campbells empty soup can stare at me now, daring me to define and be deterred by it. Daring me for comparisons. It stumps me. This red background and white lettering. An icon to consumerism. An echo of the Byzantine religious art of his childhood that stared down at him during mass.

Simplicity. That's what I felt with this sandwich and soup. Something that was so simple it made me feel silly for not capturing this myself, that it had to be pointed out to me as a valid combination. Did you feel that way when you saw your first Andy Warhol portrait? That it seemed so simple that you wondered why you had not created it yourself? Streamlined consciousness of art. I wonder at Andy Warhol’s wish to be a computer. He was known for loving hot fudge sundaes, even if he never finished them but took only three bites. There is nothing divine in this combination, and while I do not feel betrayed, I feel as though I tricked myself. If Warhol’s being shot by Valerie Solanas in 1968 proves anything it’s that artists are mortal and  no matter how much they may want to be computers the blood proves otherwise.

Sylvia Plath

Every young Western literary woman has to bow down at the feet of one of the immortal goddesses who has come before us. Some of us choose Maya Angelou, some pick Octavia E Butler, the bitter and witty may choose Dorthy Parker or Susan Sontag.

One of these becomes our mentor, our work mother in a way, someone who we know/hope would have mentored us if we had been together in the same place and had been a little more talented.

As a woman obsessed with Americana (one could argue that she paved the road for creators such as Taylor Swift, herself another blond strong writer), femininity, mental illness, writing, the desire to ‘have it all’ and to live a wild ridiculous life- I choose Plath for a time. I saw her as a million things. I saw her as tragic. I saw her as interesting. I saw her as brilliant. I saw her as a feminist icon and opponent. I saw my mother in her, I had lost my mother to suicide. My mother had also been a writer, so I looked for signs of her in Plath’s life.

               We are warned by men like C.S Lewis and G.K Chesterton to be wary of those who are ‘symbol hunters’ who look for signs in prose and poetry, and dismantle it to the point of unenjoyment. Life can be this way too, for it is the overthinkers who can be stopped from doing anything and I myself am overthinking this culinary pursuit. I am not a great baker, I have no desire to mix together french dressing

As someone who was such an advocate for feminine pleasure, I think I should drink.

               She, like many women, enjoyed drinking gin martinis. Gin martinis are my favorite, though it seems like she enjoyed hers as a classic balanced martini. I decide to put on a black dress with a deep neckline.  I make one in my little makeshift bar, and I stir it because I do not trust myself to shake it. I serve it with olives. It burns going down. Such as much of her poetry which seems trite but burns acerbic in the brain afterwards.  

I wonder how many woman are drinking martinis right now, in dark dresses, across the country. She also enjoyed sherry, but I cannot stand the sweetness myself.

It is a stereotype of Sylvia Plath’s work that she is a refuge for the emotional teenage girl. She is the default for the bookish gal in the way that David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen are for the ‘deep’ young man.

               Maybe that is alright though. Maybe it is a badge of honor to be united in our tastes across the world rather than be ‘basic.’

               This martini, classically done with my lipstick stain on it, feels the perfect image to lift up in smoke to the heavens (or wherever it is that famous writers reside after they die). To look for anything, any meaning within her death, or life, is to take away from the choices she made. She is not a mystery to be discovered for our edification to find meaning in our own. She was a woman. Someone who was loved, someone who loved, and someone who loved to eat. She also suffered. I drink and I read her words, and I come across this, ‘I may never be happy, but tonight I am content. Nothing more than an empty house, the warm hazy weariness from a day spent setting strawberry runners in the sun, a glass of cool sweet milk, and a shallow dish of blueberries bathed in cream. When one is so tired at the end of a day one must sleep, and at the next dawn there are more strawberry runners to set, and so one goes on living, near the earth. At times like this I'd call myself a fool to ask for more.’

Well said Ms. Plath, well said.

That we think of the artist as above us, knowing what they ate brings them back down.

Artists are not the miracle performing Christ in the desert not eating, or the religious recipients of the holy word of God on the mountain. There is a place where the miracle workers and the artists work though.  The miracle workers multiply food, but they never partake. They give.  Like artists are the ones who take the ordinary, and make us believe in miracles again, we are reminded. Creatives take words, colors, things that everyone has access to in theory but that there is a blessing that alludes to us. It slips through our fingers.

We try to access this heavenly plane of theirs by eating what they did. A practical route. As an American born child, there is something comforting to me in the practical, that there is something that I can do to divine the heavenly blessing of looming words. There isn’t though, and even if there were it would be unsatisfying to find that the only distance between you and success in life is a grapefruit in the morning. Success, what that looks like, and creative success varies from writer, to painter, to teacher, to person. As it should. Life is not given to us for us to follow exactly what another does down to the letter, and we cannot.

Even when we have access to the same food, it will taste different.

I think? Eat what you want. Do not try to emulate someone else's ecstasy or pleasures, know what yours are. As Dolly Parton said, ‘Figure out who you are and do it on purpose.’ I say, figure out what you like to eat and then eat it on purpose. Those who are dead and gone envy our life and our senses. Truly honoring those who have given spark to our lives is to live, live and have whatever you may want in your coffee. Or no coffee. Who knows, someone may try to figure out what your favorite breakfast was to emulate you.

Joan Dantes lives in New Mexico and writes literary fiction. She has been featured as an author in Quillkeeper’s Press and Sandstorm Literary Magazine, she has been featured as a reader for Kitchen Table Quarterly, and Sepia Quarterly.