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Foodie Friday: Winner, Winner! Chicken Dinner!

Henrietta w Opal PeachyThis week on Foodie Friday, guest author Ronald Holden takes time from his Call Center duties to write about a hot ticket in Seattle that combines food and theater.

Dinner theater, that staple of summer resorts, gets a bad rap: tired scripts, bland food, performers of modest talent. But Seattle audiences have an admirable exception: a zany company of performers known as Cafe Nordo, whose twice-a-year dinner shows combine more-than-decent food (from pop-up kitchens) with pointed, topical satire.

It started four years ago, when Terry Podgorski and Erin Brindley, alums of a successful variety show known as Circus Contraption, created the persona of a fictional martinet, Chef Nordo Lefeszki. Their first production, in Fremont, brought together a cast of semi-professional entertainers for a show called The Modern American Chicken. The tuxedoed and feathered cast performed the saga of a hapless, happy hen named Henrietta.

“A hen is the egg’s way of making another egg,” said one character, energetically whipping egg whites. “And what makes a good egg? A good hen.”

From Fremont to Pioneer Square, from the International District to Washington Hall on the fringe of the CD, the Cafe Nordo players have found novel ways to tell their stories. A tribute to the Twin Peaks TV series; a nostalgic look at air travel; a parody of Gunsmoke-era westerns. The satire is always pointed squarely at big business, big government, big agriculture, easy targets for Podgorski’s sharp pen.
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Hyperglobal blog, Seattle Globalist Launch Party this Saturday!

The Seattle Globalist is a new “hyperglobal” blog celebrating the Seattle region’s international community and its many connections to the rest of the world. The Globalist offers an unexpected take on international travel, culture, development, and Seattle’s global-local connection.

Seattle has been named a “hyper-diverse city” by the Migration Policy Institute — we have more than 250,000 foreign-born residents, representing every region in the world, and no one country of origin makes up more than a quarter of that group.

The Globalist is a hub for the many people in our region who identify internationally in some way: immigrants, international NGO workers, foodies, travellers — anyone who feels a strong connection to the world outside of our borders. It covers everything from international foods (like Japanese Fusion Hot Dogs and the best Pakistani food on the east side) and bands (like these five international bands coming to Seattle) to Seattleites’ reflections on travelling in the Middle East as an Iranian Jew or in Las Vegas as a Jordanian-American. The Globalist has done stories about St. Patrick’s Day, folk music, and human rights in Burma. The site features a community calendar with international events from cooking classes to film screenings, and writers are drawn from Seattle’s tech, non-profit and journalism communities.

The Globalist is published by the Common Language Project, a nonprofit journalism organization dedicated to covering under-reported international news through multimedia, which is based at the University of Washington.


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