The Cooking Show

Food television network programs have grown by leaps and bounds in recent years and the cooks on these shows have acquired celebrity status. Viewers have been turning to the cooking channels in droves to find interesting meals, recipes and most often just for the entertainment of it all. Cooking, once, was just a matter of putting a nourishing meal on the table, but today it has become an art form and the chef a demi-god. And, like a revered leader, when the chef speaks the disciples will follow. Mario is a retired teacher who has become a 'famous' chef on the food network (Mario’s Marvelous Meals) after years of taking cooking classes, part time. He has converted his home recreation room into a TV kitchen and hires a cameraman to record his shows for weekly airings on the Food Network. Betty, Mario’s wife of almost 30 years, has little regard for his cooking show and has taken a dislike to his haughty attitude since he became a TV star. Worst of all, Betty is convinced that her husband has become unfaithful, a conviction reinforced when she gets to meet his new and very sexy ‘sous-chef’, Jessica. Betty also doesn’t approve of what and how Mario cooks. She thinks his meals are unhealthy and riddled with too much salt, sugar and fats. It turns out that Betty is right, for Mario learns that his health is failing and he needs to take immediate corrective action or face the consequences. He decides to take Betty on a relaxing trip to the home of fine food, France, where he secretly hopes to join with the experts on French cooking. But their journey quickly becomes frantic as Mario’s ego gets the best of him. The couple start their trip with a visit to the oldest inn in France, the one where Julia Child first experienced the joy of French cooking many years earlier. Mario ignites a confrontation with the maitre d’, complaining that his food is inadequately seasoned, and ends up being tossed out on his ear. The couple head back to Paris, tired and hungry, and arrive in their hotel stuck out in a suburb of Paris, to Betty’s disapproval. Betty just wants to settle down for the night with room service but Mario has a pre-arranged liaison in the Latin Quarter with his sexy sous-chef and leaves his wife in mid-sentence. The faithless Mario returns to his hotel room in the early hours of the morning and wakes his sleeping and unhappy spouse, whom he inflames further by blaming her for the lack of attention to his needs, which has fueled his philandering. To break the tension, Betty comforts him to sleep with a specially concocted hot chocolate. Mario goes down for a very long sleep and Betty returns to Toronto to replace him as host of his show, which she renames Betty’s Bread Basket. “Mario was a victim of his own cooking. You should be arresting Mr. Sifto Salt,” she tells the police officer who is taking her in for questioning regarding his suspicious death. This delightfully funny one-act play ends with a high note as Betty is wheeled off leaving her own sexy sous-chef, Randy, scrambling to figure what to do without his mentor and with the meal that is still in the oven.