First prepare the soup of your choice and pour it into a bowl. Then, take the bowl and quickly turn it upside down on the cookie tray. Lift the bowl ever so gently so that the soup retains the shape of the bowl. Gently is the key word here. Then, with the knife cut the soup down the middle into halves, then quarters, and gently reassemble the soup into a cube. Some of the soup will run off into the cookie tray. Lift this soup up by the corners and fold slowly into a cylindrical soup staff. Place the packet in your purse or inside coat pocket, and pack off to work.
STEVE MARTIN
American actor, comedian, author, producer, and musician
1945—
Cruel Shoes
Excerpted from Ian Makay’s Food for Thought: The Pleasures of the Table: Primi Piatti.
Steve Martin—Beyond the Bio Brief
Certainly, the complete credits of Steve Martin’s career go far beyond the bio brief above.
Most know him as a star of stand-up comedy, television, and movies. However, his resume also includes novelist, screenwriter, playwright, and more.
Author! Author!
While Cruel Shoes (his first book) is a collection of humorous short stories and essays, he also wrote about his professional life in two subsequent titles.
In his memoir, Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life, Martin explains how his career in entertainment began at the age of ten. However, it’s not what you’d expect. He was selling guidebooks at Disneyland when it first opened in 1955.
More recently, Martin wrote about his life in the movies in Number One Is Walking: My Life in the Movies and Other Diversions. It’s not only a great read but amusingly illustrated by New Yorker cartoonist Harry Bliss.
A Multigenerational Talent
Given his longevity as an entertainer, Martin has become a true multigenerational talent!
Baby boomers likely remember his early stand-up days, interspersing jokes and playing the banjo with a fake, rubber arrow jutting across his head. Martin’s comedy albums from that period won him two Grammy Awards. His work on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour also garnered him an Emmy Award for writing.
Meanwhile, Gen X fans and millennials likely think of Steve Martin’s movie roles. From L.A. Story and Roxanne (for which Martin also wrote the screenplays), to Parenthood, the Father of the Bride franchise, and It’s Complicated, the actor has won numerous critics’ awards. Furthermore, this list of roles is far from complete. Martin has appeared in over fifty films over his career.
And Gen Z knows all about his acting and comedy chops, too. Martin currently stars in Hulu’s critically acclaimed Only Murders in the Building alongside Martin Short and Selena Gomez.
But Wait—There’s More!
That aforementioned banjo isn’t just a comedy prop. In other words, Martin can play that thing! And he plays it so well that his albums of bluegrass music have also garnered awards. So much so that the International Bluegrass Music Association awarded him Entertainer of the Year in 2011.
True. No one would be surprised that Steve Martin won the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in 2005. However, the total breadth of his talent probably may be news to some of his fans.
Given the scope of his work, Martin has been a Kennedy Center Honors recipient. In addition, he received the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award in 2015. Martin even has an Honorary Academy Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. (That’s right—the Oscars!)
In short, whatever your age, chances are that you’ve come to know and love Steve Martin as a comic, an actor, a writer, or a musician. Perhaps, all the above.
However, there is that Soup to Go recipe which started us out. So it begs the question: Should we add “chef” to Martin’s resume?
How About YOU!
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2 Responses
He’s an amazing talent. He’s still popular, obviously, but he was unbelievably popular a few decades ago. I remember when he sold out The Spectrum, a 20,000-seat arena in Philadelphia. This happened in the 1970s, I think.
That timeframe sounds about right. The 60s and the 70s were when his comedy albums were bestsellers and Martin became a regular feature on The Smothers Brothers show.