the musical fruit: movement #16.
song: "mango woman," ween
fruit: mango
ween! before i knew a damn thing about the craziness that is ween, my only point of reference for them was that in the record stores, they were the band stocked next to weezer. eventually, a friend who introduced me to a lot of music introduced me to them. a year earlier, he & a friend had tried to interview them for a zine they were working on & as he explained it, "we were going to interview them, but they were all coked up & punching holes in the wall backstage, so we left." good times. the first two albums he gave me were from the early nineties--chocolate & cheese and pure guava. i hated them at the time, but with the latter of those albums, realized that ween was the band responsible for the song "push th' little daisies," which came out as a single, with an mtv video & everything. i liked that.
i didn't come across it until a few weeks ago, when a friend suggested it for this here column, but the "push th' little daisies" single included a song called "mango woman." ween's a master of jumping between musical genres. this one's all reggaelike & features lyrics like "hey mon, where you come from? uh, i come from uh, new hope. you smoke spliff? y-yeah i smoke spliff. ya oy! uh." it's a real head bopper & along the way, they make sure to name check babylon, mount zion & the rastaman whilst singing about this "mangoey woman." i can only assume that, given her mangolike qualities, said woman is sweet on the inside but ultimately intimidating.
i say this because mangoes are totally sweet but definitely intimidating. for starters, on a lunch break about a few weeks back, i picked one up at a food emporium in the city. i paid three & change for it, only to walk past fruit cart after fruit cart on my way back to the office & realize that i could of got one for way cheaper. on top of that, since i can't recall ever purchasing a mango, i wasn't sure how to know when one's ripe. when i got back to work, i turned to a few co-workers for guidance. one told me that when the skin had a good amount of redness to it, it was ready to eat. another told me that it was all about the firmness. if you squeezed it & it gave a bit, it was good to go. based on their theories, it appeared that my mango had a day or two to go before reaching peak form, so i brought it home & left it to ripen. after a day, it still didn't seem ready. the following morn, i woke up & checked on it only to find that overnight, one specific area had become so soft that i almost stuck my finger through the skin. the rest still felt firm. awesome. in the end, i tossed that pricey mango.
on friday, i went for take #2. this time, i went to my local produce market & made sure to ask the woman there to confirm the ripeness before i purchased it. since she loves me, she hooked me up with "a good one...a very, very good one." that afternoon, i decided that fruit time was nigh, so i took my mango to the kitchen for some slicing & dicing, an activity that turned out to be quite daunting. i didn't realize that, given the hard center of a mango, there's a certain way you need to cut it to get the maximum fruit. as a result, from that entire mango, i probably got about eight or nine slices of fruit. i guess in the end it was worth it, since there aren't many fruits better than a fresh, awesomely sweet mango. i just wish that my path to that deliciousness wasn't filled with so much imagined drama. darn womany mango.
parowpyro 
