“Hey, look at that,” I say to Fiona Apple.
Fiona Apple looks in and shakes her head. “This machine,” she says. And then reaches over and turns it off with a key. “I hate fixing this thing.”
“Hey...”
“This is my family’s restaurant. Didn’t I tell you?”
Later, we have sat down at a table with her family and she is passing out pieces of a large calzone to everyone while talking about growing up. “Everything was great until my dad left and my mom remarried. And that’s when I learned what it means to have a monster in the house.”
A young girl takes a piece of calzone from Fiona Apple. “He was awful.”
I look down at the calzone. No one has told me what is in it so I’m not eating. “So what did you do?”
“The only way to fight a monster is to become a monster.”
Suddenly a fact of her past becomes clear
to me. She had made money back in
high school doing design work for video
games. And her breakout character work on Dark Stalkers was all about
transforming monsters who battle each other. “That makes sense,”
I say.