On Derechos & Cold Soups
I was on a shoot in DC yesterday that had lunch catered by Cafe Deluxe. The term catered is maybe a bit of a stretch; it was a small crew and I just phoned in an order and then went and picked everything up 45 minutes later. I am mentioning this because:
1. They didn’t fuck anything up, which is a rare thing when ordering takeout for even a small group of people, let alone 14 people.
2. They had gazpacho, which I ordered, which led me to have not one, but two conversations with two different people about gazpacho and how much I love gazpacho and how much I love cold soups in general and now I have a new goal for the summer which is to eat as many cold soups as I possibly can.
It has been beastly hot (like between 90 and 100 degrees every day) in DC/Baltimore for…pretty much as long as I can remember now (roughly 2 weeks). It has been SO hot that on Friday night we were hit by a crazy kind of storm called a derecho which was described in one NPR article I read as a land hurricane. A LAND HURRICANE!
There are trees down everywhere and lots of people have been without power for several days and it’s still very hot. All of this combined is causing people to act like it’s the freaking apocalypse; gas stations are running out of gas and it’s impossible to buy ice anywhere. (Except for at the Whole Foods in Glover Park, where I found it yesterday.) (But who knows, it could all be gone by now.) (I went to a Starbucks yesterday that had no ice but was serving its iced beverages warm.)
I think of myself as really hating cold weather, but it’s possible that I hate oppressively hot weather even more. It’s amazing what you can get used to, though. I have been working pretty much every day since this heatwave started and, really, you can get used to anything. For instance: on yesterday’s shoot, around 6:30 PM, we were standing around in “the wilderness” getting a shot of “the wilderness” and someone remarked “It seems like it’s cooled down some, what’s the temperature right now?” It was 99 degrees out.
But my point here, really, is cold soups. More cold soups. It’s already July, for God’s sake.
