The barbecued bananas were excellent. You grill a whole banana about five minutes until the skin turns black and the juice starts running out. Then carefully peel back the skin and lace the hot fruit with cinnamon and lots of whipped cream. It’s kind of like banana cream pie but not as chunky and without any crust.
I’ve read you can lower your blood pressure with lots of fruit and vegetables in your diet.
I examine the blackened banana peels as if they were chicken innards. They appear at first to have some form of writing on the inner surface and perhaps a miraculous Elvis head image. One peel says 11111011100, which is 2012 in decimal. The other has a perfect Elvis head image. I remain skeptical about banana peels even though the Mayans (who used base 20 numbering) thought the world would end in 2012. What does a banana peel know? And why would it use binary? It all resolves into randomness from the cooking process. Than it comes to me where I've seen blackened peels like this before.
It’s 1966 in San Francisco. Mrs. Phred and I are visiting an apartment to see her friends. It’s the weekend and I’ve driven down from Navigator school in Sacramento to be with her.
Some of the people have painted their faces blue on one side and green on the other for some reason. There are lots of mattresses on the floor so that it appears that lots of people live here. The conversations seem weirdly disjointed. The talk is about the teenyboppers that are moving into the district and ruining the ambiance.
Jimmy is a friend of Mrs. Phred. He opens the apartment’s little gas oven and shows me hundreds of blackened banana peels that he is drying on trays. Word is circulating that you can get very high smoking dried banana peels.
It seemed unlikely to me. I remember hoping that they had eaten the bananas first. This became known as the Great Banana Peel Hoax of 1966. If you do the barbecued banana thing, tell me what the inside of the peel reveals.
The Hoax started when Jerry Garcia and gang were preparing for so SF fun, etc. They were dropping LSD and somehow got the idea that you could dry and smoke bannanna peels. They worked feverishly for the new high and at about the same time the LSD finally kicked in. Needless to say --- many people thought it was the bannannas as they completely forgot about the ingested LSD........so the Hoax goes?
ReplyDelete