Your Chef

Chef Christine Nunn’s career as a chef is nearly as old as she is.

A child prodigy in the kitchen, Christine was given her first Easy-Bake Oven before her second birthday. Although her parents didn’t give her the oven’s light bulb for several more years, she was undaunted and actually made the cake for her second birthday party — a messy but tasty gooey yellow concoction whose stains remained on the playroom walls for months.

Christine learned well from early efforts such as this, and by the time she entered kindergarten, she and her Easy-Bake Oven were catering school events as well as private parties in Radburn and surrounding communities. She was also working two nights a week as a short-order cook at a diner on Route 4, and pulled occasional shifts as a relief cook in her school cafeteria, always bringing her trusty Easy-Bake Oven in a red wagon she pulled behind her, except in the snow when she carried it on her Flexible Flyer sled. Her skills, notoriety, and the wattage of her oven’s light bulb all increased as she went through school, to the point where she almost had to miss her eighth grade graduation because she was catering a dinner at Drumthwacket, the New Jersey governor’s mansion, for the retirement of the state senate majority leader. Upon hearing of her conflict, the senator postponed his retirement for a week so that Christine could attend her graduation.

It was a fateful decision, for it was at the school’s graduation dance that Christine was spotted by a dance scout. That summer, she took the competitive dance world by storm. By the time the holidays hit, she was forced to put her cooking and catering career on hold, as she was in demand both on Broadway and in Hollywood to teach stars the new steps she had devised. Her routines quickly became staples of the dance repertoire and were popularized by the music videos that shot performers such as Michael Jackson and Paula Abdul to fame.

Before her complex and athletic style could fully mature, however, Christine was injured in a freakish tango accident. While she and her partner were performing an extraordinary spin of her own devising in which their outer extremities actually break the sound barrier, her partner’s elbow encountered some turbulence and threw off the pair’s balance. Christine’s foot hit the floor hard, and the impact caused all the cartilage in her left little toe to spontaneously burst into flame. The fire was contained and no further injury sustained, but she would never again be able to dance at the same level.

Following the accident, she retreated to the solitude of her family’s compound in Bar Harbor, Maine to heal and reflect. Although only in high school, her dance career was already over, and her catering career was also on the skids, as changing culinary trends had left behind her Easy-Bake style of cooking. More alarming, she found herself almost without friends. The fickle celebrity friends of her dance career left with her last spin on the floor, while many of her classmates, envious of her successes, had abandoned her earlier than that. Orphaned in childhood and raised by nuns — in whose honor she adopted the surname “Nunn” — she was now alone.

Thinking that some travel might raise her spirits, she embarked on a voyage around the world. But the trip was uneventful, save for two nights in a Turkish prison, and being set adrift in a life raft in the South Pacific for a month following the capsizing of her ship in a typhoon.

Depressed and directionless, Christine returned to Maine and found solace in a bottle. Literally. Following the instructions in a contortionist’s manual she stumbled upon in an antiquarian book store, she learned to squeeze herself into a 5-gallon plastic water jug (drained, of course!), wherein she discovered a Zen-like inner peace and contentment she hadn’t known before. For 18 months, while touring with a traveling carnival, she performed this feat four times daily, sometimes remaining in the bottle for an hour or more. It was the perfect therapy for her, and allowed her to sort out her life and “get her head straight” (of course, that’s a figure of speech; in order to get in and out of the bottle, she had to twist her head to the left and back). Upon leaving the carnival, her teary-eyed carnie friends (most of whom remain close to her to this day), sharing her recognition that she was ready at last to resume her education and career, presented her with a brand new Easy-Bake Oven and an assortment of high-intensity light bulbs.

Since leaving the carnival, Christine’s life has been a series of implausible and fantastical events culminating in Picnic, the Restaurant.

[Is this true?]