Bea My Eggplant

After all the excitement of being a newsy (for approximately 20 glorious minutes before my stack of S.F. Panorama's disappeared into eager hands; all 1,500 of the $5 street copies sold out in a heartbeat on Tuesday) and of admiring a whole page of the most lovely weird vegetables, I needed to find something else to keep up the high. Enter Bea, the scrumptious offspring of my friends Kathy and Drew. Here, she merges an overwhelming number of my favorite things: anthropomorphic vegetables, velour, crafts (mama made the costume! Oops! Correction: mommie didn't make the eggplant, but she did craft the other two below), the color purple, the color green, funny jester hats, epaulettes, pantaloons, cuteness with an attitude à la Yoshitomo Nara's fierce kiddies.

Lil' Bea can claim both Japanese and Korean before the hyphen to American, and so for the past three years, her parents have amused themselves and their child's fawning public by dressing her up for Halloween as variations on a theme in Bea that traverses the borders of language and food. Most recently, above, we have NasuBea, or nasubi, which is Japanese for eggplant.

Last year, she sizzled as E-Bea Furai, or ebi furai (Japanese fried shrimp):



And she was just a wee giggling bay-Bea when she made mouths water as Gal-Bea, better known as galbee (or galbi or kalbi), a marinated Korean short rib.


I know I'm supposed to be a vegetable person, but I must admit that Bea's getup makes me nostalgic for walking out of Brothers BBQ (officially Brothers Restaurant, and Brothers II) on Geary Boulevard with my hair smelling like smoke and my belly stretched tight. Still, I hope that her mother will consider sticking with the vegetable theme next year, perhaps spicing it up with Wasa-Bea?