say cheese please

The Fondue Night for the Cooking Club (part of the GSB Partner’s Group) was a success. Well there was that ceramic fondue pot that broke into three parts while filled with hot molten cheese (but thankfully someone had grabbed it before it flooded the table). There was almost a little bit of a fire during the attempt to blow out the sterno candle, but thankfully that crisis was averted too. And I can't even talk about the sound that I heard when one of the women slipped on the ice and fell down the steps as we were leaving (thankfully she walked away with only her pride being slightly damaged).

For a cold Friday evening (did I mention there was ice on the steps outside when we left?) the turnout was pretty good. I believe about a dozen or so women showed up. The person hosting the event lives in Belmont. It is only about 5 miles from downtown but it took about 20 minutes to find parking. There were many open spaces that turned out to be fire hydrants or areas at the end of the block designated as no parking/towing zones. Thankfully we didn’t park too far away as I had to run out and put a temporary/guest parking permit on my car.

The house itself reminded me a lot of my grandmother’s home. It was a two-family with a vestibule, old-fashioned glass doors, and a wooden porch. Our host definitely had the biggest kitchen any of us had seen in Chicago. It had a giant island in the middle that housed both a stovetop and an extra sink. There were two ovens and a dishwasher plus a walk in pantry. My grandmother’s house actually had a very tiny kitchen but I miss her walk-in pantry.

We (I offered a ride to anyone in our building that was attending but only one woman took me up on it – she is from France and expecting her third child in March) arrived just as they were pouring the cheese into the ceramic pots. It actually was quite tasty. There were several kinds of cheese along with some kirsch. For dipping we had French bread, broccoli, and granny smith apples. There was also a chocolate fondue that had pound cake, strawberries, bananas, marshmallows and the apples for dipping.

Once everyone had had her full of cheese and chocolate the conversation got livelier. I forgot how noisy a gathering of women can be. I guess being at home alone most days you forget about it. It left me with a bit of a headache.

It is clear that everyone is anxious about the next where. Many of the women in attendance were partners of second years. It is still a little early, although it seems like many students received offers from the positions where they interned. Also a few of the second years are headed abroad for the winter quarter as part of the iMBA (an MBA designation that requires a quarter abroad as well as fluency in a second language). One woman knows that she and her husband are off to Germany once school is out. Another is pretty sure that Salt Lake City is where they will end up. And several will soon find themselves in the Big Apple (although most admit they will probably end up on the other side of the Hudson – when one woman described Hoboken¹ as “cute” – I about puked up the fondue.)

On the way home I took home two other women who live in my building. It seems they aren’t part of the Yahoo! group that B set up to facilitate things like car-pooling and goings-on in the building and the neighborhood, or I would have taken them as well. We had a lively discussion about how they have to stay on top of their husbands to get them to study. It seems like their husbands aren’t too overly keen on them taking an active role in their education, although they tend to be right. Thankfully I feel like B has welcomed if not encourage my participation in this process. Also I have never had to scold him for not studying.

Overall it was a fun night. Again it is always good to get out and meet new people (I would say about half of these women I had never met before) and to realize that most of us are experiencing the same feelings and anxieties as we go through this process as the partner of an MBA-student.


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¹For the record (all you Buffy fans will get this), Hoboken is about as close to the Hell mouth as you can come in real life. It a one-mile square trash heap – literally. That is where they put all the garbage. They built brownstones on top to house the poor (this is where my mother lived with her seven siblings in a one-bedroom apartment bathing in the kitchen sink and sharing the toilet in the hall with the family of eleven across the hall). Real estate moguls have come in and “renovated” the area. But all the renovation in the world won’t take away what it is – a trash heap.

background noise :: i love being here with you, peggy lee