Wild Ducks Flying Backward by Tom Robbins

Mac’d it. It could have been an omniscient computer that provided this land with its prevailing ambiance, it might have been an irresistible new weapons system, a political revolution, an art movement, or some gene-altering drug. Isn’t it just a little bit wonderful that it was a hamburger?
    For a hamburger is warm and fragrant and juicy. A hamburger is soft and non-threatening. It personifies the Great Mother herself, who has nourished us from the beginning.
    A hamburger is an icon of layered circles, the circle being at once the most spiritual and most sensual of shapes. A hamburger is companionable and faintly erotic: the nipple of the Goddess, the bountiful belly-ball of Eve. You are what you think you eat.
    Best of all, a hamburger doesn’t take itself seriously. Thus, it embodies that generous sense of humor that persists in America even as our bacon burns and our cookies crumble. McDonald’s has served forty-five billion burgers, and every single one of them has had a smile on its face.
    So, to Ray Kroc grant a pardon for his crimes against cows, stay his sentence for having ambushed our individuality at Standardization Gulch, order him to perform no more than, say, fifty thousand hours of community service for turning us into a waddling race of lard-assed chubs. Yes, he has changed our habits, undeniably for the worse, but a man who can say of himself, as Kroc did, that “it requires a certain kind of mind to see beauty in a hamburger bun” is a man who can cut the mustard.
     
    Esquire,
1983

Jennifer Jason Leigh
    I want to tell you about the Lizard Queen, I want to tell you about the Shape Changer, I want to tell you about a cuter chimera and a darker rose, I want to tell you about the triple aspects of the Universal Goddess—maiden, mother, and crone; or waif, whore, and witch—as manifest in a single petite young actress from Southern California, whose name you might recognize yet whose looks you would be hard put to describe because she is so dramatically different from movie to movie that you would swear she is not one woman but an encyclopedia of women, a feminine panoply: the three thousand faces of Eve.
    I want to tell you that she is a truth-seeking missile, that when developing a role she goes directly for the character’s soul and then fills in around it with disturbingly accurate minutiae. Her triumph is her willingness to descend into the green ooze at the bottom of the psyche, down among the rats and black beetles, only to emerge clutching something gracious, something good, some stained and dented emotional equivalent of the Holy Grail.
    And I ought to tell you that while she may be quietly incandescent on both the screen and the set, should you encounter her between films you would find her unassumedly running the most humdrum of daily errands and greeting your questions about her art with a giggle so musical and shy that Marilyn Monroe could have gargled with it. A lack of pretension enhances her power to pretend.
    Finally, regarding her paradoxical persona—fly and spider, sunbeam and twister, custard spoon and skinning knife—allow me to report that Alan Rudolph, who directed her marrow-piercing performance in
Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle,
once said, “When I first met her, I wanted to protect her. After I got to know her, I wanted her to protect me.”
    Her name is Jennifer Jason Leigh. Let’s take her little hand in ours. Then let’s ask her to guard us, too, against the brutal shadows that she, with incongruous innocence, seems to understand so well.
     
    Esquire,
1994

Leonard Cohen
    H e was rowed down from the north in a leather skiff manned by a crew of trolls. His fur cape was caked with candle wax, his frown stained blue by wine—though the latter was seldom noticed due to the fox mask he wore at all times. A quill in his teeth, a solitary teardrop a-squirm in his palm, he was the young poet prince of Montreal, handsome, immaculate, searching for sturdier doors to nail