Subject: Dara Strickland

• A Sneak of One's Own

  Fernando de Sousa, Wikimedia Commons Show: X-Men Origins: WolverineFood: Izumi salad, unagi crêpe, and taro milk tea with boba from BBC Asian Cafe & Bar.Difficulty: Junior-varsity -- food was poorly packed for sneaking and nearly impossible to repackage; mitigating factors included a dark plastic takeout bag and a drink in a self-sealing container.There is a jar of pickled asparagus in my purse.Sometimes I have these moments of clarity about my sneaking where I see myself as if I'm leaning

  June 1, 2009

• The Week in Gut Check

  We can't wait for movies in the courtyard this summer, either!Well, a few hours have passed, and the Map Room Fan Club has yet to take issue with my post teasing their excitement about the new Benton Park spot. Stay tuned, though: I don't think we've heard the last of them!What else found its way into Gut Check International Headquarters this week? Well, Zach Dyer argued that we should drink our coffee black, while Dara Strickland taught us the ethics of being a sneak. (Otherwise, as she points

  March 13, 2009

• The Passion of the Sneak

  Fernando de Sousa, Wikimedia Commons Dara Strickland is a leading expert on sneaking food and drink into the movies. She reports on her exploits for Gut Check (from an undisclosed location) every Monday.I come to you every week with a message, a gospel: Food's subjectivity cannot be held by the chains of its complex carbohydrates nor mired in the webs of its protein. Cooking has a spare, temporal structure, a beginning, middle and end -- it's a Hemingway story. Plating and serving food certainl

  April 20, 2009

• The Old Man and the Sneak

  Fernando de Sousa, Wikimedia Commons Dara Strickland is a leading expert on sneaking food and drink into the movies. She reports on her exploits for Gut Check (from an undisclosed location) every Monday.Show: An astonishing schedule of St. Louis' cultural high points.Food: Not a damn thing.Difficulty: Outrageous. I've reached the point in my life where it's actually easier for me to Sneak than not. At one point, I was going through such awful Sneak withdrawal that I had to sit on my hands lest m

  May 4, 2009

• Gut Check: A smorgasbord of delights awaits on Ian's blog

  May 6, 2009

• Sneako de Mayo

  Fernando de Sousa, Wikimedia Commons Dara Strickland is a leading expert on sneaking food and drink into the movies. She reports on her exploits for Gut Check (from an undisclosed location) every Monday.Let us now praise famous foods.The long skinny baguette sandwich, able to be laid across the bottom of a bag, in a particularly deep coat pocket or -- at most extreme lengths -- couched like a lance between non-ticket-buying arm and ribs beneath a concealing piece of clothing: We salute you.The

  May 11, 2009

• A Sneak at the Opera

  Fernando de Sousa, Wikimedia Commons Dara Strickland is a leading expert on sneaking food and drink into the movies. She reports on her exploits for Gut Check (from an undisclosed location) every Monday. This week, she snuck into Gut Check International Headquarters on a Wednesday with this missive...Show: La Cenerentola, the Metropolitan Opera's last show of the season, simulcast in HD from New York to the St. Louis Art Museum.Food: A brunch/Italian feast for two plundered from the Straub's de

  May 27, 2009

• The 48-Hour Sneak Project

  Fernando de Sousa, Wikimedia Commons There's an essential difference between discipline and morality, even when one is sneaking food into the movies. As I've discussed in previous posts, sneaking has its own ethics and its own style, a code less concerned with slavish devotion to rules than the currents of compassionate and appropriate behavior woven through the fabric of the situation.I consider myself, as a Sneak and a person, to be more moral than disciplined. Displays of discipline for thei

  June 15, 2009

• How to Win Sneaks and Influence People

  Fernando de Sousa, Wikimedia Commons In a previous blog post, I talked about the passionate side of sneaking -- particularly for those who seek a Sneak. But you've doubtless noticed that, while one of the things dearest to me in this life is the B-movie laboratory St. Elmo's fire that flares when I unintentionally twine my salt-studded fingers against those of The Doctor, my mysterious long-time gentleman caller, as we both reach for the wasabi peas in my coat pocket, he's far from my only sneak

  June 22, 2009

• The Land of the Midnight Sneak

  Fernando de Sousa, Wikimedia Commons I was planning on regaling you with tales of the highly appropriate rainbow-hued foods I snuck into the Pride Parade this weekend in Tower Grove Park. Alas, even Southern sneaks wilt like delicate magnolia blossoms in 100-plus degree heat, and I am no exception. I scuttled back indoors to live to sneak another day with less chance of heat stroke.Instead, I'll offer you an exercise in one of the core doctrines of sneaking food into movies: appropriateness. Ju

  June 29, 2009

• The Best of Gut Check: The Sneak

  Fernando de Sousa, Wikimedia Commons Dara Strickland is a leading expert on sneaking food and drink into the movies. She reports on her exploits for Gut Check (from an undisclosed location) every Monday. While Gut Check is on vacation this week, check out some of Dara's best work:The International vs. Jay's International (March 2, 2009): The clear winner of my group was the flan. I love flan like Heloise loved Abelard, though I doubt she ever hoisted him over her head in an international groce

  July 6, 2009

• A Separate Sneak

  Fernando de Sousa, Wikimedia Commons Show: First of a two-episode arc, "Sniper," from the fourth season of Homicide: Life on the Street.Food: Pills, booze.Difficulty: Painful. Do not try this at home. Owwww.So far I've detailed various methods of choosing sneakable foods, appropriate repackaging and wardrobe tips for aspiring sneaks without speaking truth directly to the power of sneaking food into the movies: unearthly sangfroid, the kind of confidence that makes a seventeen-year-old ticket-tea

  July 20, 2009

• Sneakeasy, Part 1: Public Enemies and Wei Hong Bakery

  Fernando de Sousa, Wikimedia Commons Show: Public Enemies, director Michael Mann's latest cinematic man-crush on tight-lipped inscrutability and sparklingly pretty violence played out against the backdrop of the Great Depression.Food: Chinese food, courtesy of Wei Hong Bakery and Restaurant: crab rangoon, shrimp dumpling lo mein, sesame chicken, rice, coconut roll.Difficulty: Above average. Like most Chinese restaurants, Wei Hong prepares portions designed for family-syle passing and sharing, no

  July 27, 2009

• Sneakeasy, Part 2: A Slice of Pizza, A Life of Crime

  Fernando de Sousa, Wikimedia Commons Show: Drinks at the Flatiron Lounge, Flatiron District, New York, NY.Food: One deliciously greasy and huge slice of New York pizza.Difficulty: Medium. Pizza is a messy food with a limited temperature range within which it is fully delicious. Thus, it requires extensive repackaging. While my sneaking tote is generally quite stylish as well as useful, this dressier occasion required a more petite evening bag.Last week, I took a look at Prohibition's impact on

  August 3, 2009

• Sneakonomics 101 - Sneakonomies of Scale

  Fernando de Sousa, Wikimedia Commons Recession. Literally, a pulling back a of a surging, forward-moving tide. The moon never considers whether the tide is a good thing or a bad thing, what its ideal point is along the sand. That's a detachment I sometimes envy when considering the other recession. I pore over the newspapers or turn up the calm radio voices, searching for the turning of the tide as fervently as any early navigator with an astrolabe and a chart with the stars delicately limned i

  August 10, 2009

• Julia Child Haunts the Sneak

  Fernando de Sousa, Wikimedia Commons Julia Child is haunting me.In full disclosure, I invited her in. I just didn't realize that beloved, deceased TV chefs followed roughly the same rules as vampires. Man, that is going to be no good for Mario Batali. That gentleman has stringent minimum garlic requirements.Here's the deal: I was going to make a delightful recipe from one of Julia Child's books to sneak into Julie & Julia, the new partial biopic about Julie Powell, a blogger (who later coll

  August 17, 2009

• Innovations in Sneaking: The Solid-State Cocktail

  Fernando de Sousa, Wikimedia Commons While I'm constantly amazed at the number of movie theaters in St. Louis that offer beer, wine and decent coffee, there still aren't many places you can enjoy a good cocktail during the show. What's a sneak to do?1. Pre-mix the cocktail and bring it in a bottle or thermos.This is all right for simple cocktails, like a screwdriver, but for something more complicated or garnished, this is a poor choice. It's also hard to get an appropriately-sized serving for

  August 24, 2009

• Sneaks Sans Frontieres

  ​Show: The Hangover, the caviar of immature-dudes-take-a-Vegas-roadtrip comedies, watched as late as possible in a theater in Vancouver's Chinatown to stay awake long enough to catch a red-eye flight back to the States.Food: Andres Baby Canadian Champagne, a British Columbian wine of low alcohol content and questionable vintage.Difficulty: Surprisingly easy. Even though the movie theater had prominently placed (and polite) signs prohibiting outside food and drink, nobody looked twice at my in

  August 31, 2009

• A Sneak in the House of Love

  ​Today, my very dear friend and sneaking companion, Madame H, got married.Pros: Nobody believes marriage will make her change her sneaky ways. Now that they are flesh of one flesh and therefore sneak of one sneak, I can probably press her husband into happy service as a second set of pockets. He was gifted by nature with something I have been striving to achieve my whole life: an innocent face.Cons: When you're well known among your friends as a sneak, suspicion that you're hiding food about

  September 14, 2009

• Out, Damned Sneak!

  Show: St. Louis Shakespeare's cunning blood-n-gore production of Macbeth, a terrific play about terrible people.Food: Globe Theatre Apple-Hazelnut Tart, baked by yours truly.Difficulty: Extreme. While the initial sneak phases of repackaging the food in aluminum foil and taking it into the theater were easy, the tart recipe had to be significantly altered to be appropriate for sneaking, and even then its deliciously crumbly crust nearly blew the whole operation. Close quarters and bright lightin

  October 5, 2009

• Sneak with a Thousand Faces

  I was raised a Christian sneak, which may have repercussions in my evangelical fervor for spreading the gospel of eating what you want, when you want. One thing that always disappointed me about the Bible as child, though, was that Moses and David and Jesus were hard to understand. I liked Jesus best because he told the best stories -- and, honestly, my parents should have known what I was to become when I was so very interested in turning water into wine or producing loaves and fishes from rar

  October 12, 2009

• The Sneak: Sneako Maki

  Dara Strickland​The virtues of sushi as a food are significant, but its value to a sneak may be as elusive as a flying bird's reflection on a rippling pond. I've crafted these handy tables for you to compare the virtues of eating sushi in a restaurant to sneaking it into a movie theater.                                   

  October 20, 2009

• Sneak of the Dead

  ​Pay attention: In the event of a zombie apocalypse, the information I'm about to give you may be the difference between having your cranium cracked open like the sugar crust on a crème brûlée and parlaying a considerable stash of vodka and ammo into living the good life with a harem somewhere in Montana.The safest place you can possibly be in the event that hell runs out of space and the dead walk the earth is in a movie theater. Let's discuss.

  October 27, 2009

• The Sneak's Google Map Guide to Sneaking Resources

  This week, in lieu of her usual sneaking exploits, Dara Strickland provides a map for the aspiring and professional Sneak alike: a guide to sneaking resources and places where you can (should?) sneak.Zoom out to see all the icons. Click on individual icons for Dara's commentary.View Sneaky Resources in a larger map

  November 3, 2009

• The Sneak vs. the St. Louis International Film Festival

  ​This weekend, I watched the Breeders' Cup from the hospitable living room of a dear friend, pizza in one hand, PBR in the other, yelling for some very fine horses to beat the spread. That's not particularly sneaky, though sneaking food into horse races is quite enjoyable. The topic of conversation kept coming around to how different the horses, crowd, and track facilities at Santa Anita were from our own dear Fairmount Park. The horses particularly are not the rib-addled, bow-legged, nearly-

  November 9, 2009

• The Sneak vs. the St. Louis International Film Festival, Round Two (Friday)

  ​Shows: Ligeia, a locally filmed, very (very) loose adaptation of the short story by Edgar Allen Poe reimagined as a Gothic thriller; Albino Farm, a slasher film that might as well be about my fears of driving to the Lake of the Ozarks.Food: The Edgar Allen Pom, a cocktail I concocted, recipe to follow.Difficulty: Easy. The St. Louis International Film Festival opened soft on Thursday with a single showing of An Education so the true opening night at the Tivoli was packed. I was also able to

  November 17, 2009

• The Sneak vs. the St. Louis International Film Festival, Round Two (Saturday)

  Screenshot: www.cinemastlouis.org​The Sneak makes a rare second appearance this week to continue her adventures at the St. Louis International Film Festival. See Tuesday's column for the first half of Round Two.Shows: Stolen Lives, the much-hyped feature film starring local boy made mad, Jon Hamm, and Terribly Happy, the Danish Fargo.Food: Some mysteriously bad beef jerky.Difficulty: Surprisingly hard. Lines were long and in the open area of Plaza Frontenac in front of the theater, and a sold

  November 19, 2009