I had two moments yesterday that have verified my love of Prettytown:

1. The downtown fountain’s finally on!
2. While visiting the bathroom at the downtown local cafe, the little old lady exiting with me told me to have a nice day. That’s saying something, when two strangers can share a tiny, two-stall bathroom and wish each other well at the end of the experience. I’ve never had that occur anywhere else.

Something I didn’t particularly enjoy yesterday: being left in charge of a preschool class against my will. Clara Jane’s Tuesday teacher is eight months pregnant, and I totally understand that she’s going to be taking days off. No problem there. I don’t mind substitute teachers, and I appreciate the fact that it can take a certain degree of coordinating to get the teacher where she needs to be. I’m ultimately a patient person, believe it or not.

What I don’t appreciate is being the first people in the classroom, settling in to read a book to my always-distraught child, and having the other parents dump their kids in the room and leave. I am not paid to be here! And if I wanted to take care of six kids, I would have created six kids by now. For nearly 10 minutes, I read books to the kids (which started out as reading a book to my kid) while parents shoved their kids into the classroom and bailed without uttering one word to me.

It’s not that they thought I was the teacher. Every single one of the parents involved sees me dropping off and picking up my kid at least once a week. I know this is a small, relatively safe town, but I can’t imagine just leaving my kid in a classroom that doesn’t contain the person I am 100% sure is going to be her teacher for the day.

I’ll be having a word with the director at pick-up this afternoon, since I couldn’t catch her yesterday. And from now on I’m coming equipped with a lesson plan. It’s going to consist of teaching the kids to sing “Another Brick in the Wall” while reenacting the video. Or teaching them to say, “Goddamn, Mom! What the fuck’s your problem, going off and leaving me with a motherfucking stranger like that? Are you intellectually ill-equipped or just an asshole?”

Now that I have that out of my system, you probably want to hear about Alton Brown, and why he yelled at me on Sunday, don’t you?

This is going to be our Christmas card photo for 2008:

If I bothered to send Christmas cards, that is.

If you’re a food nerd, you know that’s Food TV’s Alton Brown, creator of the awesome “Good Eats” and “Feasting on Asphalt” series. Which, if you’re going to watch food-related programming, those are two of my top four recommendations (the others being “Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations” and “Tyler’s Ultimate”). Not only do Tony, Tyler and Alton make for good TV, they write really amazing books about food, travel, and traveling for food. That’s what brought Alton to St. Louis; he’s on tour to promote his new book, Feasting on Asphalt: The River Run. I’ll be writing more about the book in a few days over at Paper Palate.

I don’t know if this is the case everywhere (it probably is), but Alton draws rock star-levels of fans when he’s in St. Louis. He seems to dig us, too, what with featuring some of our locales on both seasons of “Feasting on Asphalt”. This time he managed to fill the sanctuary at the Ethical Society of St. Louis to standing room capacity with a room of overflow in the basement.

We took Clara Jane with us (obviously, if you could see the photo), since she enjoys watching “that eating show” as she called “Good Eats”. She ambled through the rumpus room one night while I was watching it last week, looked wistfully at the TV, sighed, and said, “I love pie” as she left the room. She wasn’t the only kid in the crowd, either, but I’ll get to that.

If you’ve watched Alton’s shows, you know he’s a smidge manic and larger-than-life. Turns out, he’s tuning his personality down a bit for TV. In person, he seems like he might benefit from a Klonopin, although that would certainly make it a less entertaining experience for the rest of us. While being introduced by the owner of Left Bank Books, Alton fiddled with the floral arrangements, pretended to stick gum under his chair, unplugged the owner’s microphone, tinkered on the piano, and snatched the owners camera, taking a photo of her and then a self- portrait shot of himself.

You can’t get entertainment like that in even the best of comedy clubs, People.

Alton worked without a script, giving a perfunctory introduction to the new book before opening the floor to questions. It was only fitting that the first question was a delicately-worded query about why one kind of bean causes more intestinal distress than another. “Of course you people are going to start with a fart question!”

There was a stay-at-home-dad of three who, with one of his squalling children on his hip, asked how to get kids to eat. Alton bellowed so loudly he startled my own kid, but that’s fine because she’s going to have to get used to hearing this, as it’s my new mantra: NEVER NEGOTIATE WITH TERRORISTS!!!

This bugs me, though. Stay-at-home-dad gets several rounds of applause for being a SAHD. When was the last time a SAHM got a round of applause? Now that I think about it, I wish I’d mentioned that I’m a stay-at-home/write-at-home-mom, just to see if I got any sort of pat on the back. If not, I would have whipped out my C-section scar and said, “Clap, Motherfuckers.”

Wow. I’ve been good lately about curtailing the use of my favorite word, but it’s all over the place today.

He also told us that, on his first book tour, he’d go Hall Surfing – walking through the hotel halls after room service was closed, picking food off the trays. He once scored the top tier of a wedding cake. I admire any professional cook who’s willing to admit that.

Anyway, as I was saying, I asked a question. This is huge, because I never ask questions. I could be on fire and it’s unlikely that I’d ask for the location of the nearest fire extinguisher, lest I look like a stupid person on fire. I know, dumb. Asking questions is almost as high as singing in public on the short list of the very few things that bring out shyness in me. But I figured if I could sing karaoke in the presence of the creepiest Michael Jackson impersonator in the world, I could ask Alton a question.

So I raised my hand through several cycles of questions and finally, he pointed at me and said, “Yes?” I stood, gathered my voice, uttered the first few words, only to be interrupted with, “Not you! Her!” He motioned three seats down from me. “Did you even have your hand up? I didn’t see your hand up!”

It was up! I swear! I can’t help it that I’m barely 5′3″ tall with the wingspan of a finch.

I sat, the other woman stood, and gave her question: “Is there any truth to the rumors that you’ve made cheese out of breast milk?”

“No. But I did make butter.”

Well then.

He came back to me, offered the opportunity to ask my question, to which I replied, “I’m sorry. I can’t top breast milk cheese.”

So not only did I get yelled at by Alton Brown, but I was begged to ask my question. Which really wasn’t beg-worthy. I know he was a video producer prior to going to culinary school, which is a background similar to mine. I got out of video production because I loved cooking a hell of a lot more than I loved video shit. So I asked what food interest he had prior to going to culinary school.

He learned to cook in college to get dates.

After a lively hour of questions punctuated with tons of laughter, Alton moved on to the book-signing, which was organized into groups. I was in group #6, so I had a long wait. Brian and Clara Jane went to do some much-needed amok-running while I struck up a conversation with the breast milk cheese lady.

I know her name, but I’m not sure of the spelling and it’s unusual enough that I won’t put it here for all those pesky Googlers. Lovely gal. Lactation consultant, which explains the nature of her question. And no, you can’t make cheese out of human breast milk because it’s so high in antibacterial properties, and cheese requires bacteria to be cheese. We spent the next hour talking about a mix of breastfeeding, childbirthing, and cooking.

And I learned why my epidural didn’t work when I had Clara Jane! If any of you have had the misfortune of getting me started on the sordid tale of my child’s birth, you’re privy to the fact that I had not one, but four epidurals with that child, which did nothing but leave me unable to move but feeling every little bit of puke-inducing back labor pain. Turns out, us fat girls need epidurals given in a slightly different spot, a fact that gets ignored by our treat-’em-all-the-same medical system. So if you’re fat, overweight, plus size, big and pregnant and you think you might want an epidural, make sure your caregivers know where the fuck to put the damn thing. It’s a shame to spend that much money to have something jammed into the wrong section of your spine. The headaches and crazies that come from misplacement of an epidural ain’t much fun, either.

(This information, I included specifically for Googlers because, obviously, this tidbit isn’t well-known and needs a little more publicity.)

We finally got in line to meet Alton, who stuck his hand out and introduced himself, “Hi. I’m Alton.”

No shit. Although I certainly appreciate the gesture. His manners are as genteel and southern as the seersucker suit he wore, in spite of all the fart and breast butter talk. He’d met several hundred fans before us, and to still be that friendly and gracious? My word. While it was rushed (of course), it honestly felt like he was trying to get as much quality time out of each meeting as possible.

Now I not only admire him for what he’s done for cooking and promoting local eating, but I admire him for being one hell of a nice guy.

Even though he yelled at me. But it was the best yelling-at I’ve ever gotten, so I’m not complaining.

Afterwards, in the church basement, Brian and Clara Jane met a couple with a little boy who recognized them from our regular storytime visits. Wow. Who knew that the place to meet like-minded parents who enjoy hipster doofus chefs and books would be at a booksigning by the hipster doofus chef supreme?

(Speaking of hipster doofuses writing about food, OtherRobin and I have both made recent posts at Frigidare Pair, and I’ve got a piece up at Kids Cuisine.)