Chestnuts Smoking in a Microwave

I love Chicago. I also love New York. One of my favorite pleasures in both cities is street food – fresh mango slices dusted with chili powder, steaming hot dogs with hot peppers and slices of dill pickle on steamed poppy-seed buns, the sweet melt of coconut paletas dripping down their flat little wooden handles, raspberry Italian ice dyed bluer than anything in nature. One for my favorites, fresh chestnuts, are roasted by vendors on the streets of New York City, but alas, not on the streets of the Windy City. I love that particular blend of starchiness and creaminess specific to a properly roasted chestnut.
So I’ve been roasting my own chestnuts in my microwave. The first batch, before I learned to puncture the chestnut shells, exploded. Then, I had a good run of starchy, creamy, crunchy chestnuts. Finally, I microwaved a bowl of chestnuts for too long, and those neat little kernels transubstantiated into nutty-scented smoke bombs. Thick smoke pored out in billows from my microwave like from a toxic factory fire. I spotted, in one of the many mirrors in my apartment, the reflection of roiling dark clouds snaking across my living room, even before the acrid smell hit my nostrils. Next batch I’m roasting in the broiler.
What is the appeal of street food? Domesticity in the open air. The perfect balance of the public and the private.
The artist, curator, and writer Amalia Mesa-Bains gave a great talk at a Grantmakers in the Arts conference a number of years back about indicators of social dysfunction. Cultures don’t work, she said, that segregate and invert the public and the private. The homeless live their private lives in the public eye, public services are privatized.
Public education itself is under threat of being privatized. Free and equitable public education, even with all its warts and contradictions, is a mainstay of a functional democratic society. And to keep our public schools healthy, we need to bring their teaching practices out into the open air. Make the teaching and learning in our schools visible, and not just through test scores. The arts are one of several essential pathways for creating this visibility.
What happens to our public schools if they keep their teaching practices private? They become over-heated, and the public gets burned. God knows there’s already plenty of smoke and mirrors.

Arnold Aprill
Founding and Creative Director
Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education
www.capeweb.org