I first met Liz Sawyer almost twenty years ago, at a party thrown by our mutual pal Nick. While our circle of then-friends was a mostly unctuous group of raucous twenty-somethings, Liz and I bonded almost immediately, primarily through our mixed-race backgrounds, our love of ghastly Italian horror and, of course, our insatiable love of Latino food.
Sadly, I hadn’t talked to her over the past few years—with the exception of a supremely strange sighting at a Kraftwerk reunion concert in Denver—but, like most former friends who had recently heard about my life-threatening health problems after the fact, she messaged me wanting to reconnect and, possibly, reconvene over a well-cooked Guatemalan meal that she was, in fact, buying.