I Didn’t Know What I Really Wanted Until Chef Brent Made Those Fruit Sculptures

By Woodlawn Resident

April 27, 2013

I’ve been expressing strong desires for a number of things recently. I said I’d like the University to acquire and develop less than one hundred percent of the real estate south of 43rd Street. I said I’d like a trauma center to prevent my death from wounds I sustain as a result of my regular life. I said I wanted a beautiful sculpture of a swan, made of melons and strawberries. Actually, I didn’t say that, because I didn’t know that was what I wanted, and everything I wanted, until Chef Brent gave it to me.

Chef Brent didn’t ask me what I wanted. The University probably did in some public forum, but it knew I didn’t really want what I said I wanted. What I wanted was what I needed, and I needed a beak made of a banana on top of a goose with melon wings and a lettuce bed. He sleeps in his little lettuce bed, closing his little eyes, which are grapes. It’s the answer to the prayers I didn’t know I could pray.

I expected that the millions of dollars in research funding the Crime Lab and the Lab School would produce the object of my desire, a cure for the systemic discrimination and intergenerational poverty which plagues my neighborhood. But that was not the object of my desire, a fact that wasn’t apparent to me until the lustrous plumage made of oranges spilled off the the fruit duck’s back into a pond of cherries and cherry stems. What is the object of my desire? It isn’t Chef Brent, but it is related to him. It’s his creation, the sculpture so perishable it could disappear within the fortnight, a rotted remains of so pure a masterwork.