named jan, one of many jans, but this one was at times my “best” friend at the beginning of college.  i believe she’s in oregon now, the last i heard from m.  she’s written plays for kids and things, i think i found her on amazon.  at any rate, our freshman year she was my best friend, i know.  and she introduced me to beignets!

i didn’t know it until just recently, when i began making them at home myself, but that’s just what they were, beignets!  we were at her house, i don’t remember going there often, but we were at her house, her dad’s house, one afternoon and she said haven’t you ever made donuts? and she opened one of those pop tubes of premade biscuit dough like my mom was so fond of and plopped them in hot oil.  beignets!  she must have put sugar on them.  i thought, how strange, never heard of them before or after.  until now.  i wonder if there was some louisiana connections in her somewhere, in addition to the truncated california kids we all were.  i wouldn’t know. and I haven’t seen her, really, since we moved to LA 30-odd years ago--m would know how odd, i don’t. no, wait, we went to OSFA together, that would have been a couple of years later, when i was fixing to leave LA again.  but not much since then?  at least not since i moved to LA the second time, in ‘76.  we were in theatre together, where neither of us have been for a long time, i guess.

and here jan was making beignets in 1972.  i wonder how i might locate her now?