Apple Pie: what it means to be American.

Every year, as soon as the turkey-shaped stickies appeared in the windows, I would put on my war paint. I knew that, soon enough, they'd be telling me that the many-buckled men with the funny collars were my forefathers. And, every year, I would rebel before the pilgrims had even survived that first terrible winter. After all, my mother's family was still in France and my father's had emigrated from Latvia just a few generations ago: those corn-stealing religious refugees had nothing to do with me.

The fact is that I didn't actually make the connection until just a couple of years ago. Maybe I didn't listen well enough in school or maybe they didn't reach out to kids like me, but it wasn't until I was an adult that I realized that John Alden and his Priscilla are my ancestors. Miles Standish and the whole gang belong to my kind: they were the first wave of immigrants. I may or may not share their blood, but, with two passports and a childhood split between the United States and France, I do understand something of the choice they made to be here instead of there.

I created Apple Pie as a way of learning more about the "being American" and the "choosing to be." I had to see if other first and second generation Americans were willing to give our country's icons a facelift--to assimilate the United States as it was assimilating them. I found a few, and then I remembered that, alone, we couldn't fully represent our nation, that some people's ancestors hadn't chosen to come here. I asked an African American woman to share her story in this context and invited a Native American woman to tell of her American experience.
Once I had gathered a sizeable group around the concept, I asked each of the Apple Pie participants to respond to a simple question: what does it mean to be American? Their answers (published on this site with their portraits) complement the paintings and create a composite definition of the United States--the only kind possible.
These are just twenty slices of the American dream.