I want to share a small piece that sums up the spirit of this holiday season to me. It speaks of a moment I observed when we visited Rome.

May all your Christmases, or whatever you celebrate, be bright.

She has a crooked back bent under sundry unseen burdens, wispy and thin hair tied back in a navy blue silk scarf, not expensive silk, but bargain silk, her hands a roadmap of creases, each nook and cranny a story, every line a sentence, palms open, fingers curled, up toward the heavens, left folded over the right as if it were heavier.

She wears a simple dress, cut at the knee, sheer pantyhose, worn and faded black leather shoes that had probably carried her for miles, laces loose, ankles swollen, spilling out.

Over the dress, a black sweater, frayed, held together by threads and hope.

A prominent Romanesque nose, olive skin once smooth, dark and deeply-set eyes.

She smiles, baring more gaps than teeth.

All she wants is whatever someone is willing to give.

Phrases are spilling from her mouth, another language from my own, speaking in tongues with no interpretation. The cadence is meditative, constant, a mystical murmur, transfixing, repetition upon repetition. Standing outside of the tour exit of the Colosseum in Rome, the grand behemoth casting a shadow over her, this place of battle and blood and beasts, echoes of ancient cries hanging in the air, she remains in this posture of openness, her pleas a symphony of staccato supplication.

Tourists disregard her pleas, walking by her as if she were a hologram, there but not really, because if she were then they might be called to an account.

Yet, she persists in her mother tongue, her pleas piercing the ears of those willing to hear and bear some witness of her existence.

A woman cascades down the exit steps with a boy, maybe her son, both excitedly discussing what they had just witnessed inside, the yore of gladiators and executions and recreations of battle.

She is clad in the sort of athleisure wear that reads expensive, neon pink Nikes, clashing comfort and fashion.

Her hair is blond, pulled up in a hasty bun, wisps framing her face, lips glossed revealing brilliantly white and aligned teeth.

Her movements are confident and full of animation, her conversation with her son taking up her entire body when she regards the woman who remains pleading without ceasing.

Without pause or consideration she reaches into her pocket with a smooth and daintily manicured hand and fills it with a mix of bills and coins. She stands in front of the pleading woman, taking the crinkled and arthritic hand into her own, holding it, filling it with tangibility.

Smiles spread contagiously over both faces, smoothing wrinkles on one, creating them on the other.

The manicured woman asks the threadbarren one if she can hug her, but she doesn’t understand, so the manicure demonstrates a charade of a hug, holding her arms in the air in front of her, open-ended, squeezing someone in her imagination, her eyes plaintive for permission.

The woman in need obliges the one with means, vigorously nodding her beautiful head and widening her stance as to receive affection, touch, recognition.

Bearing witness.

The two clasp, athleisure arms wrapping around the small frame before her, their bodies touching, two broken pieces of a single human being.

Holding and being held.

The Roman’s crooked arms and hands slide up the lycra-smooth back of the American, and as one, the two sway in a motion of mutuality.

All the while, her mouth continues to proclaim some goodness that lies beyond comprehension, to sing the praise of her witness being borne in the body of another.

Athleisure and neon Nikes, headscarf and thin sweater and sheer hose and worn shoes, blond hair and gray hair, smooth and wrinkled, pale and olive, pleading and mumbling, holding, holding, holding.

A new thing.

For a moment.

They let go of one another and become what they once were, before.

The American ambles away, accompanying her son.

The Roman resumes her requests and reliance.

The American is weeping as she walks away.

I’m tempted to explain away this beauty, to find some sort of parable, some meaning, application.

Where is God?

Isn’t she God, the face of need, lying in a ditch while the Holy Haves are too busy to stop, regard, or bear her?

Isn’t she God, the face of provision, possessed by the spirit of the Samaritan deemed “good,” ceasing intentions to bear witness?

Isn’t the embrace God, the holy dance between the two?

What if none of this is God?

What if James Baldwin is right, that a human being can only be saved by another human being?

What if this is just a moment of unbridled love?

What do I not notice in this beautiful world, this painful world, if I am convinced I believe I already know?

What if that moment, singular and granular, explains every last unanswered question in my unsettled soul?

What if that were enough?

Ellen Naomi Cohen, better know as Cass Elliott, died in her sleep when she was 32.

She died in a bedroom in Harry Nilsson’s flat, the put-the-lime-in-the-coconut that everybody’s-talkin’-at guy.

Four years later, Keith Moon of The Who would die in the same bedroom at the age of 32.

Mama Cass died of a heart attack in that bedroom. The autopsy revealed no drugs in her system.

Her choking to death on a ham sandwich story was an intentional rumor in “The Hollywood Reporter” because asphyxiating on a chunk of swine was preferable to any association with drugs.

Mama Cass first rejected the pressure to produce “bubblegum music.”

She wanted to make music that really said something.

But Mama also conceded that maybe her voice wasn’t suited for heavier material.

“Make Your Own Kind of Music” at least said a little of something. The lyrics make a case for striking out and doing things on our own, a forward-thinking take on Sinatra’s “My Way,” which looked back and applauded the same spirit of living.

In other words, you can’t do it “(your) way” unless you “make your own kind of music.”

And Mama did do it her way, didn’t she?

She made her music, her own mythical explanations for unintended or undesired experiences.

John Phillips, and wife Michelle, later two members of The Mamas and The Papas, first did not allow Cass Elliot into their group at the time because of her weight.

She didn’t fit his image of what a Mama should be, especially next to a Mama like Michelle Phillips, a skinny white blond waif. Mama was a stocky Jewish girl.

John Phillips instead blamed it on the lack of Mama Cass’ lack of vocal range, claiming it too low.

So what did Mama Cass do?

She got hit on the head with a lead pipe, then claimed that the accident enabled her to reach new high notes in her vocal register.

Mama followed the other three Papas/Mama around, trying to get into the group any way that she could. Finally, John relented after understanding the vocal value she brought.

Mama Cass made her own kind of music.

“Make Your Own Kind of Music” is one of those songs that penetrates the public consciousness once every two decades or so.

Last year, it was a prominent part of a trailer for the “Barbie” movie.

Barbie, that franchise that preaches to little girls they have choices and aspirations.

There is a climactic sequence in the very beginning of the second season of LOST.

We are taken into an underground bunker of sorts, one of the island’s stations. A man wakes up to a beeping sound, gets out of bed and stumbles over to a retro-style computer and inputs a series of numbers. There is a clock counting down on the wall that resets after this input. The man then puts on a vinyl record and the velvet voice of Mama Cass fills the cavern.

He exercises, eats breakfast, then shoots himself with what appears to be a vaccine, all while Mama’s strong and earnest vocal implores him to make his own kind of music.

LOST, among a myriad of other things, is about the interplay of fate and free will, the possible existence and mirage of both. The island where the plane crash victims find themselves is full of mystery and no apparent answers. As viewers, we plug along, episode after episode, hoping for a revelation, not understanding until the end that it was a celebration of asking questions instead of answering them.

Mama’s daughter, Owen Elliot-Kugel, noticed “Make Your Own Kind of Music” was all over Tik-Tok last year, due to it’s use in “Barbie” and “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.”

Elliot-Kugel added, "And I'm loving, in particular, the context that people are using the song because it's completely accurate in the whole attitude. 'Make Your Own Kind of Music' is really about like 'f*** you. I'm gonna do whatever I want, no matter what anybody thinks.'"

I started this essay before trump’s 2.0 attack on American democracy, decency, morality, goodness, diversity, inclusion, civil rights. I thought I would shelve it in the hopes that in two years we will be in a better place and Mama’s song about making my own kind of music would make a bit more timely sense.

Nothing feels like bubblegum music right now, which is how Mama Cass labeled her own song. She compared it to Chinese food; you stuff yourself on it but you’re hungry again in an hour.

But maybe this is the best time for it.

Maybe we need bubblegum and Chinese food.

Maybe it needs to be the soundtrack to our time, where our routines might not make sense in the larger scheme of the world that is on fire, inputting a series of random numbers into a computer to stave off the specter of a looming tragedy.

John Cage also made his own kind of music.

John Cage was an American composer with great interest in the indeterminacy in music, or leaving the possibility of chance or change up to the composer in any given moment. This gives any piece the option of being performed in different ways and allows for greater interpretive ability to the one making her own music.

Here is an example:

Listen here.

(Go ahead, I’ll be here when you get back.)

What the hell was that?

If you aren’t familiar with “4’33”’ it is an entirely silent composition (on the surface). This piece was reportedly Cage’s favorite. It was inspired by his visit to Harvard’s anechoic chamber which was designed to eliminate any sound and produce exact quietude. Instead, Cage could hear the sound of his blood pulsing, his nerves afire.

No two people will ever hear 4’33” the same.

No two people could duplicate their environment, the rhythms of their own hearts.

4’33” will take on the sound of the cosmos around you.

In fact, you’ll never hear it the same anytime you give it a listen.

It is a deeply personal experience.

It is your own kind of music.

Listen, the world feels batshit crazy right now. And it’s hard to grasp onto anything firm. For Desmond, the man in the bunker in “LOST,” he found purpose in the routine, the necessity of the series of numbers every 108 minutes or the end of the world while Mama’s croons filled the space with her own kind of music.

So, the best thing I know to do right now is my routine. Walking my dog, baking the pies, writing the words, capturing the joys, feeding the people, feeling the fears. It’s fighting off the end of the world.

And all this while, I’ll keep on making my own kind of music.

It won’t be like yours - yours will be your own.

But together, it will be deafening.

The daughter of Texas Governor Ann Richards, former President of Planned Parenthood and founder of Supermajority, a champion of progressive causes, has passed away from an aggressive form of brain cancer.

What a symbolic day for that to happen.

Don McLean talked about the day the music died.

January 20, 2025 is the day a lot of things will die, too.

I’ve been wrestling against my own resignation with the political landscape. If 2016 was about resistance, the New York Times said yesterday that 2024 was about resignation. Is it because we are tired? I know I am.

I think the Bible says not to grow weary while doing good.

That helps me remember that doing good is an exhausting enterprise.

(It must be absolutely exhilarating to do bad.)

As most of you know, one of the reasons we closed the brick-and-mortar shop was so I could finish my doctoral degree and get my manuscript published. As much as it pains me to admit, I have had a very difficult time getting traction with a publisher or agent. That discouragement has been snuffing the creativity and joy from writing out of me.

But I realized something yesterday while listening to Big Star. One of my goals for 2025 is to listen to every album in Rolling Stone magazine’s Best 500 Albums of All Time. The entry for “#1 Record” reads:

“Big Star didn’t sell many records but did become a crucial inspiration to underdogs like R.E.M., the Replacements, and Elliott Smith. As Alex Chilton (band member) said later, ‘If you only press up a hundred copies of a record, then eventually it will find its way to the hundred people in the world who want it the most.”

This week I’m back at my alma mater to cook for the new Creative Writing and Public Theology cohort, the same program I graduated from this past Spring.

While serving pot pies, I reconnected with a then-prospective student visiting campus last June who attended one of our public readings. That night, I shared a piece about the King of Prussia being in the closet, a very personal narrative that took a shit ton of courage to share on a public stage.

He told me that hearing that piece solidified his decision to do this program.

And who knows where his writings and creativity will lead?

Maybe I’m a bridge.

I have to battle against the capitalistic mindset with writing that it only matters if a wide(r) audience reads it, if I have an agent, if I’m on a bestseller list, if I will a contest, if I have an ISBN number to my name and an entry in the Library of Congress.

It’s the little things we do that incrementally can alter circuitous routes.

Cecile Richards did big things.

I do little things.

We all have to do something and believe that it matters, somehow.

It’s about noon now. I know something is happening in Washington DC but I’m sitting at my laptop in Pittsburgh, taking a break from cooking, writing these words, hoping my words find their way to who wants them most.

Will I lose subscribers who are only here for pie? Who don’t want to mix pastry with politics?

No matter.

Today has been an incredibly difficult day for those of us who walked and lived through the summer of 2017 in Charlottesville.

I want to express that if you are scared, I am here beside and behind you, just like I was then.

In the days to come, the path ahead will become more and more clear.

Here are just a few thoughts for now.

Stay off of Twitter. Better yet, deactivate your account and delete the app. Stories are being shared of the conversation happening on the site in the wake of the election results. It is what we heard during A12 writ large. Given who runs the platform this is no surprise and it’s no place to be.

Tina and I spent the day in emotional fluctuation. But we have already started having conversations about how we can be of service to our community, our friends and family, and one another.

For me, that will always involve food.

Food is my first step forward out of darkness. I’ll be looking for any and every opportunity to use the power of eating and drinking and being merry as a form of resistance.

More to come -

XO.

Rachel

(“Resist” - a piece from an anonymous yarn bomber hung on a phone pole on 4th Street outside of The Pie Chest, 2017)

Rachel Pennington is a great baker, a shitty capitalist, and a memoir/food writer. She owned The Pie Chest in Charlottesville, VA, a sanctuary of comfort, delicious food, and rest for the weary soul. Her culinary work has been featured in or mentioned on The Travel Channel, USA Today, the Boston Globe, Edible Blue Ridge, Southern Living, Our Local Commons, the Southern Foodways Alliance, the Edacious Podcast, and various local publications. Her buttermilk biscuit was featured at Flavored Nation as the state dish of Virginia. Rachel’s writing has been featured in Passages Literary Magazine (Ashland University Press), Forty Voices, The Porch, and she was longlisted for Craft’s Hybrid Writing Contest in 2023. 

Rachel graduated with a Doctorate in the Creative Writing and Public Theology Program at Pittsburgh Seminary this past Spring.

She resides in Crozet, Virginia.

Publications

• The Porch - A Slow Conversation About Beautiful and Difficult Things

“Love Feast”

• CRAFT Magazine 2023 Summer Hybrid Contest - Best of the Longlist

“The Names Have Been Changed To Indict the Guilty”

My Mani-feast-o

“My Mani-feast-o: A Menu-oir” is a memoir told in the form of a 13 course meal from aperitivo to digestivo, including recipes at the end of each chapter. I’m currently going through the query process to find an agent and/or publisher. 

Here is an excerpt.

The Invitation

You are cordially invited to attend the terroir and harvest of one particular life. 

My own.

It will be my honor to have you along for this night of delicious food and remembrance.

Dress: 

Come as you are.

It doesn’t matter what you wear as long as you are here.

(Yes, that is a Martha & the Vandellas reference.)

RSVP:

Regrets only, please.

Courses:

Aperitif & Amuse-Bouches

Heirloom Tomato, Rosemary, Lemon Zest Puff Pastry Bite 

w/ Olive Oil Drizzle

Appetizer

Fig & Cherry Crispy Candied Bacon on 

Creamy Pimento Cheese Farina

Cheese

Mini Savory Goat Cheese Cake on Ritz Cracker Crust w/ 

Balsamic Roasted Peach & Mint

Palate Cleanser

A poem

Bread

Bread Basket:

Honey Cornbread & Mini Buttermilk Biscuits, w/ Granny Smith Apple Butter, Shenandoah Valley Sorghum Butter, Pimiento Cheese, & Hot Pepper Jelly

Subtlety

A clever, absurd, short story

Soup

Roasted Chicken and Buttermilk Dumplings in Savory Roux w/ Herbs

Intermezzo

Lemon-Kissed Thyme Shortbread Cube

Main

Heirloom & Vidalia Onion Tomato Pie w/ Simple Green Salad

Entrement 

A picture

Dessert

Honey-Nut Chocolate Chip Cookies -or- Sans Nuts

Mignardise

A Single Sugar-Encrusted Strawberry 

soaked in Appalachian Distillery PawPaw Moonshine

Digestif

The Secret of the Pie-verse

***

A Note:

The courses of my life’s meal are creative takes on my memories. In each case, I am concerned with nursing out flavors, combining parallel stories with sustenance. The connections are a bit abstract here and there in order to make a meal that flows well from one course to the next, but that is the joy in this pursuit. As I poured over each course, combining my distinct food memory with the techniques and flavor combinations I have learned in over a decade in the restaurant and food industry, I realized that just as I do when I remember, I also re-member - I take a bit from here and there and create something altogether alive and new.

Each course includes a subsequent recipe in the case you would like to duplicate this meal. I would be honored should you choose this. I am more concerned, however, that this collection of words, stories, and recipes gets under your culinary skin in such a way that you begin to plumb your own mind for the dishes and dinners and deliciousness that have dug deeply in your own divine moments of eating, drinking, and being merry.

Are you ready? Let’s eat.

(Chapter 1, excerpt)

Food is my most durable religion. I experience the divine in a meal’s procurement, preparation, and communal sharing. Having graduated with a Masters of Divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary and immediately baptized into the trench warfare of the restaurant industry, that unlikely connection became evident over time. 

As a baker in a nouveau “nothin’ fancy” Southern restaurant, the rustic treats I created were sugar sermons, carbohydrate calls to worship, humble homilies of hospitality: fresh buttermilk biscuits, honey butter cornbread, peach cobbler, pecan pie, strawberry rhubarb shortcake, pumpkin cake with local hard cider-glaze. 

Moments of tiny transcendences were experienced by our guests, whether that be a much-needed escape from a bad day in this non-stop shit-show world or a visitation of a holy moment, the resurrection of a memory and the retelling of a sacred story. 

Years later, after opening a pie shop on Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall, I realized the power of food to surpass the transactions of capitalistic exchange to a transsubstantive experience. 

A pie, I learned, becomes much more than a crust, filling, and top. It is a process of the work of my hands to alchemically combine flour, sugar, salt, and butter into dough, allowing it to rest, then rolling it, letting it rest again, crimping it, letting it rest, working on a filling, letting it rest, combining the layers together for baking, letting it rest, slicing and serving, sharing, and then? The soul rests. 

I’m talking about food that has the power and ability to transfix, capture, captivate. 

An escape hatch from a present moment to a past one. 

It is indeed possible, I learned, for a pie shop to be a sanctuary, the alloy aluminum chairs the pews, the table of the Lord a hand-crafted rough-hewn wood sourced from one town over, the communion of the saints surpassing Squarespace and Applepay, a small business a cloud of witness with the eucharist of espresso and crust, poured and broken. The light yellow walls of the pie shop a testament to miracles that arose over apples and chocolate and cinnamon and nectarines. Butter, that hot holy glue, binded together a newly-forged community of whosoever came into the shop and saw this food become the flesh and bones and blood of something greater. 

Yes, food is my religion, redemption, love. 

Maybe it’s that way for you, too.