muffin tins

 I have always liked cornbread.  Well who wouldn't?  Always a friendly sidekick to whatever is on the main plate, bright yellow, preferably piping hot,  but even warm will do just fine, and soft to the bite, melting into a celestial joy and announcing corn is here, corn the blessing of the American gods is filling your mouth.

Something like that.  And then when I moved to Austin and met jalapeno corn bread, oh happy day.

Corn has always fascinated me, that green gold sea on either side of the road driving down to Champaign and driving up from it, and on all those beautiful murals in Pilsen.

I did maybe a couple dozen of paintings of corn so when I was thinking of what to feed my admirers at my show corn muffins, smaller bite-sized bits of corn bread, sprang to mind

Didn't have no muffin tins at the time.  Well who needs them?.  I just spooned the dough into their little paper things on a disposable baking tins, and shoved them into the seldom-used oven and fifteen minutes later, golden brown, a miracle.

I thought they were quite tasty, and so did my friends, or maybe that is just what they said to be nice, but many of them were eaten and there were no reports of anybody being rushed to the hospital.

But they looked like shit.  They lumbered in that thin muffin paper and came out gnarly, looking a lot like what I sieved out of the catbox.

My sister gave me a proper muffin tin and that made all the difference in the world, they looked fine in the oven, and seeing them standing up straight and at attention rather than like the mob at some rowdy bar at closing time, I could better judge their color and fewer of them came out with what I liked to think of as a fetching patch of dark brown, though not all shared that opinion,

But those muffin papers.  They were hard to come by, sometimes they were there by the cornbread fixings and sometimes they just weren't and nobody seemed to care if or when they would ever be back again.

And then I remembered all of these commercials I must have seen without paying attention to them at the time.  Pam.  Had a sort of girlfriend named Pam long ago who knew how to fly an airplane but that kind of a girlfriend relationship didn't last long enough that I was able to ride in her passenger seat.  But here I speak of that spray.  From what little I remembered of those commercials you just sprayed it on the tin and spooned in the muffin stuff and stuffed it into the oven and sis boom bah, there was a muffin tin that you just had to give a light doink to and out sprang the muffins.

So that's what I will be serving up early June if all goes well, along with chips and salsa, and a bunch of stuff from the five dollar sweet nothings table just in front of the cash register at the Jewel.  

Eight of the paintings will be of bugs, from the dreaded murder hornet to the hated stinkbug, and the eight others will mostly be reworking stuff from my archive.  Just a short amble from the Geezer Chateau.  A much longer trek from America's new sweetheart town, but there will be photos.

And now I have to get to the next to the last painting for that show.