The Apple Pie Statement
by Bernard Greenwald

All week my sweet wife and I had been talking about her entry into the Montgomery Place annual Apple Pie Baking Contest. We’d had a long debate about the iconographical implications of the various animal cookie cut-outs she wanted to use for the decoration on the top of the double-cruster she was preparing, and how personally revealing they might be about the two of us, our relationship, our politics and our world view in general. Elena was already making a statement about the environment and global warming by employing only organic ingredients and using only seconds to show her commitment to recycling. For the top we finally settled on a coyote howling @ the moon motif with small crescent moons cut in the crust. The crescents referred to the timeless intersecting of heavenly bodies in the cosmos; the coyote to the wild neighbors who have been repopulating our local environment.

In other communities an apple pie baking contest can be a simple, innocent event, but as I sat with the beautiful (H)Elena’s warm, delicate entrant on my lap in our Prius, like one of Agammenon’s black-hulled ships gliding silently across wine-red Red Hook in its autumn grandeur, I was reminded of another contest between competing goddesses in the ancient world, revolving around the judgment with apples that led to the disaster of the Trojan Wars, and I knew we were about to take part in something fraught with danger. Red Hook citizens, usually docile and friendly, can easily lose control around the judgment of apple pie.

We arrived at 12:30, there were already several entries on the great table, surrounded by people discussing contemporary pie baking issues. The aficionados ranged from young farmers in overalls and boots, to articulate and opinionated local matrons and Bard students in their Gracie Slick cast offs, to an 11-year-old child who feigned innocence until it was revealed she had taken two first place ribbons the year before and was a summa cum laude graduate of the Culinary Institute’s Pastry Chefs’ Program. By one o’clock the great table was covered by flaky, dusky beauties, awaiting the attention of the judges.

Tasting 28 pies is a heroically daunting task. At one point we glimpsed EMT technicians feverishly working over a female judge who lay temporarily spread eagled and insensate on the floor of the judges’ chamber. Sugar and shortening overload, apparently. Supplied with a shot of insulant depressant, she was revived and resumed her Olympian seat with her cohorts, who by that time also looked a little gastro-intestinally challenged. But they soldiered on.

Finally the winners were announced, and the assembled crowd armed with paper plates and plastic forks was allowed to Fletcherize the remaining pies. It was like being in the water when fish detritus is thrown from a boat to sharks in the sea. I contended bravely for a tiny piece of my wife’s pie and suffered only a minor laceration on my forearm. Unfortunately, Elena did not take a prize. We are committed, however, to a more thoughtful examination of our political sympathies and alliances for next year’s entry.