Results tagged “elpaso”

Neal Dandade is one of my heroes. Luckily for me, unlike most people's heroes, I know mine. Quite well, actually: Neal and I go back ten years and two thousand miles to Coronado High School in El Paso, Texas. We acted together then, and now I'm lucky to get onstage once a year, but Neal is doing it professionally, performing with a number of improvisational and sketch comedy groups in the Chicago area—including the career-launching Second City. As you'll see from his interview below, improv is a natural fit for Neal, who sometimes thinks so fast it's hard to keep up. ("He was always so bright," as Mamaist put it.) You may actually have seen some of his work: know those Boost Mobile commercials with the rapping George Washington? Neal actually originated the jingle (but hasn't, as of yet, been given any credit for his work).

Yesterday's ran a rather long piece called "How Do You Prove You're a Jew?", and while it may seem an unconventional topic for a manners column, I'd like to expound a bit upon it. Have no fear: even if you don't have the time or the inclination to read the original Gershom Gorenberg essay, I'm only using it as a jumping-off point for this column, and I promise not to allude to anything that would only be understood if you did read it.

I'm going to come out and say it: I hate Valentine's Day. And no, it's not because I'm historically single when it rolls around. I'm not single now, and I'm still against the holiday.

Hey There Philly:

Wherever you stand on the “Putting Christ Back in Christmas” issue, the simple fact of the matter is that I’m a Jew who loves Christmas. I can easily chalk that up to the fact that I’ve got a [lapsed] Catholic father, but in truth, my mom probably loves Christmas more than my father does. She’s the one who taught me all the Christmas carols.

Dear Philadelphia:

Dear William Penn:

I've become friendly with local photographer JJ Tiziou since interviewing him in October. We've had sushi, we've gone to shows, and we've kept in touch, privately or through mass mailings, about all of the crazy field trips he's been on or planning lately.

It got cold last night, so I cleared some space in my kitchen with the intention of making soup, but changed my mind when I opened my fridge and saw all of the corn tortillas I've had in there for a while and really needed to get rid of. So I decided to dip into my special store of Mexican food ingredients. I bring them back from home, whenever I'm in Texas. But I have discovered that Old El Paso Red Enchilada Sauce is available at FreshGrocer (albeit the mild variety only), and once in a while I notice that Trader Joe's is peddling red enchilada sauce of their own. (Unfortunately, any time I want green sauce, I've got to get my mother to ship it.) You're not going to be able to find the good stuff, I fear (even the Mexican grocery stores don't always have it), but you can definitely make passable chilaquiles (essentially, unrolled enchiladas) with the sauces you can find around here. The amount of each ingredient is variable, depending on how much food you want to have. What's important is that the sauce coats the tortillas thoroughly, without making them too soggy. The amounts included below are approximations of what I made last night.

Dear Philadelphia:

Confession time.

I am writing this post in El Paso, Texas, from the bedroom that was exclusively mine from the ages of just-turned-thirteen to nearly-nineteen. My mom has since taken it over as sort of an office/storage space for all her teaching supplies. I can't blame her: I'm home, at best, three weeks out of the year these days.

Most of the time, these columns are intended to just remind you to be better, more polite people. Sometimes, we're downright Twenty-First Century or liberated and progressive. Once in a while, though, we get a little old-fashioned.

Hello out there, smokers – this one’s for you!

Dear Extreme Makeover: Home Edition: