Dinner on a Baseball Field

Chapter 2: Nice to Eat with You: Acts of Communion

          I think this chapter would have to be one of my favorite chapters in the book so far, although I’m only two chapters in, mostly because I can relate in the sense that I understand the struggle of making a communion scene a useful part of the story. The chapter elaborates on the literary affects of communion, when people eat together or drink together. When people eat together, it is a share of their space, time and attention. We don’t eat with strangers nor people whom we don’t enjoy. Eating is such an intimate occasion; we eat to nourish our bodies, to get energy. Both eating and sleeping are human necessities, we don’t eat with just anyone and we surely don’t sleep with just anybody.

          Now back to how I relate to this chapter, well in freshman year, our playwriting teacher challenged us to incorporate food into a scene. So automatically, my mind gravitated to a typical dinner table scene. I had seen plenty of these types of scenes before, the idea seemed simple; bring people together with food. It was the execution that I was questioning but nonetheless, I set off.

          I set the scene: 70s family dining room in Lansing, Michigan, middle class family, Mom, Dad, little brother (Charlie) and two evil twin sisters (Haley and Heather) all sitting around a table of pot roast, green beans, mashed potatoes and steamed carrots (little brother despises carrots). So after I set the table and the characters, the scene begins; Mom asks kids about their day, Charlie begins to talk, sisters snicker, Dad tells them to be nice and so on. Now this goes on for a good three to four pages, just pure exposition, but as I entered the fifth page, the story became dull, I mean there’s only so much exposition you can give in the situation so I decide to add conflict.

          I needed a conflict bigger than the steamed carrots, bigger than the evil sisters. Without conflict my scene would have gone endlessly into exposition abyss. So I thought, I could always reveal something about one character that the others didn't know. Maybe the sisters are dating the same boy without knowing it, maybe Charlie has a bully or maybe Mom is cheating on Dad with the Spanish pool boy who comes every Wednesday at three. Any way that I approached the conflict, it always seemed to end up with the family members hurling mashed potatoes across the table. I couldn't figure out a way to keep the scene lively yet civilized. If the family just sat, talked about their day and ate in peace, it would be an unnecessary scene with no drive or direction. If the family fought, the food would lose its power of bringing people together and the dinner is no longer a shared experience.

          Also as I was writing the scene I found it extremely difficult to keep the food in the scene. The dialogue was so heavy that it drowned out any mentions of the food. In the sentence “Haley glared at Dad while she reached for a spoonful of steamed carrots,” the “while she reached for a spoonful of steamed carrots” seems so unnecessary to me but without it you lose the dinner image. Without constantly referring to the food, I feel like you might as well just set the scene on a baseball field.