Hunger Signs?

The kind of serial coincidences that are recalled in this column's head may not connect or be meaningful, but the experience of stumbling upon them is always fun. So, in that spirit, her's the most recent.

This week, within a 24-hour period, a synchronistic triptych occurred. On Thursday morning, I was watching a Layers Magazine video podcast about the Adobe website design product, Dreamweaver. Perhaps because I had not eaten breakfast, when Rafael “RC” Concepcion tossed off an aside of ‘bacon and eggs,’ it slid across the pate, then back again. “You can name your site anything you,” he said. “It doesn’t matter. Name it ‘bacon and egss,’ if you want.”

My mind made a substitution, as I preferred ‘chorizo and eggs,’ a favorite I had not subjected myself to in quite some time. By the time I returned my attention to the podcast, I needed to scroll back to where I derailed.

Ten hours later I was sitting in bleachers along an Atwater Village section of the Los Angeles River for opening night of Cornerstone Theater Company’s ‘Touch the Water,’ a play about the Rio de Los Angeles State Park Bowtie Parcel. I was reading through the bios when I heard the four musicians begin to take the stage. Apparently one was lagging behind and, after being chided by the others, made his way out, providing the first lines from the stage, an adlib’d “I needed to get my bacon and eggs scarf!” I looked up to see Marcos Najera carrying a long scarf with a couple of attached circles of fabric that looked like sunny-side-up eggs.

I smiled thinking it odd to have these first words of the evening touch back on the most memorable words of the morning.

On Friday morning, making my way back to the mountains from where I’d spent the night in West L.A., I stopped at a Trader Joe’s in Rancho Cucamonga. It was the first time I’d found this location; the first time I’d been off the 210 at this exit. But the nice clean TJ was comfortingly familiar. I joined several other morning shoppers, silently navigating our carts around the aisles. We all seemed to be shaking off drowsiness. I thought I’d see about a cup of coffee from the testing station at the rear of the store, where I'd seen columns of insulated paper cups. As I headed over, another shopper came out of another aisle. Breaking the store silence, the woman behind the counter asked the approaching shopper is she “would like to sample some chorizo and eggs?”

That was sufficient to wake me up, and I dispensed with the search for coffee and turned my cart for the check-out islands.