From The Paris Review:
“This is like Top Chef,” I muttered. I was standing with my boyfriend, Fred, in the D’Agostino’s on Hudson Street, with exactly three hours on the clock until we were due to arrive at David Byrne’s office in Soho bearing a turkey-shaped comestible made by me. I was a participant in the annual Todo Mundo Turkey Competition held by Danielle Spencer, Byrne’s art director, and I had no idea what I was doing. Turkey competition? Let me explain. A few years back, Spencer ordered this mold off the Internet. “It comes with this recipe,” she explained to me last year, “where you can make it look realistic. You make peach Jell-O and add a little green food coloring and condensed milk, and it mixes into a sickly fleshlike substance. It’s absolutely revolting. The only person who would touch it was David.”
Sign me up, I remember telling her. I’ll totally come next year. I have a billion ideas. Whether or not Danielle believed me, my mold arrived in the mail in October. I was confident I’d come up with the perfect molded turkey—the winning molded turkey.
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