#31 Lay Off the Cinnamon
May 19th, 2008 by doing better
In my most recent play, an 18th-century comedy, one of the older actors played a rakish lord who takes snuff. He showed me his snuff, which came with a tobacco warning on the tin. It was a brown powder that looked like cinnamon but smelled disgusting.
“What does it do?” I asked.
“Personally, I don’t feel any buzz from the tobacco,” he said, “but in the old days it was a better smell to have in your nose than open sewers and streets strewn with rotting garbage.”
Hmm, I thought. I can do better than that. It looks like cinnamon, but it smells terrible. Why not just snuff cinnamon? In fact, if one were really keen, one could use a cinnamon stick itself to snort cinnamon powder.
That night, one of the actors got his finger run through with a nail that was sticking out of the scenery. He managed not to scream in the middle of the scene, but he came offstage looking very pale, with blood running down his hand.
“I don’t know how I’ll get through the next two acts,” he said.
I had cinnamon on the brain. I proposed its well-known cousin as a pick-me-up.
“What a good idea,” agreed another actor. “Let’s run around in our frilly costumes, knocking on doors and saying ‘I beg your pardon, do you have any cocaine? My colleague has run a nail through his finger but he still has to tell his bride’s family that they have been secretly married for four months before they make her marry someone else.’”
The next day I could hardly wait to try out my new snuffing plan. Before breakfast I poured a little cinnamon on a white plate, put a pinch in each nostril and inhaled sharply.
My ears tingled. I coughed, sneezed and blew my nose. I peeked in the tissue to see how much cinnamon had been deposited. I blew it all out and had to snuff again. It was a more intense cinnamon experience than I was accustomed to, as if someone had inserted a Christmas cookie into my brain.
As I sat at my desk, I snuffed more and more cinnamon. It gave me a sharp, bitter, earthy tingle (dare I say, a “buzz”?). I wondered if there was something wrong with me, that I should be snuffing cinnamon alone at eight the morning. Finally I decided to stop and eat breakfast – which, to my dismay, contained cinnamon.
My nose did not feel right for the rest of the day. I kept checking in the mirror to make sure no unsightly brown crumbs had emerged. I was blowing out cinnamon for hours. Everything I ate and everywhere I went were tinged with cinnamon. It was a bit much, really. Aromatherapy is all very well, but you don’t want to spend the whole day immersed in associations for a holiday season that is still seven months away.
I never thought of myself as the sort of person who would be keen to put any kind of powder up her nose. I remembered a hostel receptionist I met in Amsterdam, a beautiful girl whose nose had been eaten away, I suspected, by the use of just such a powder.
But cinnamon is so wholesome, so innocuous, so German! One thinks of gingerbread men, of Hansel and Gretel. Snuffing cinnamon is the kind of thing Santa Claus would do. Next Christmas Eve, I shall remember to leave out a special snuffbox beside the milk and cookies. I think I’ll get a little something extra in my stocking.