12:25 a.m. Tonight, on the eve of the big eating holiday here in this country, why don't we talk about food? Food, glorious food. Food: How did the love affair begin?

First of all, have you ever fasted? If you have managed to go without food for a little while, you already know how different you start to feel. Depending on your health and how fat your mind is, you will pass through various stages of discomfort into a place where you suddenly don't feel as heavily human as you did before.

You become surprisingly lightheaded. More introspective, more mental, more ethereal. You don't feel as tied to the earth and the flesh as you did before, and your hungry little spirit feels almost as if it can float up like a Mylar kite, up ... into the thin ...

... well, it would be nice to be thin, wouldn't it? My personal best was five days without a lick or a drop or a chomp or a chew. What got me that time was the produce department at the Vons on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood.

Now, West Hollywood is the home of a sizable artistic and gay community in Los Angeles, and so the all-night Vons is a known indulgence, a demanding bazaar of sumptuous thrilling tidbits -- everything from an in-store Chinese restaurant to bins of edible violets and pansies for your salad.

The overworked orange-juice machine got me at the end of that particular fast. I nearly fainted from the aroma as the flavanoids spurted and sluiced against the clear walls of the orange waterfall machine and I once again failed at a fast and rejoined the ranks of those who live to eat.

I am no stranger to hunger. See the picture of my brother and me, above? He was and is a big, hungry boy. If I played with my food, he grabbed it. And see the second picture of the beginnings of our little nuclear family before it went into a critical phase and suffered a fatal core meltdown?

Without benefit of a magnifying glass or a session of regression hypnosis, I can tell you from memory what is on that red-checkered tablecloth. It is: spaghetti. There might be meatballs. There will be parmesan cheese and salt and pepper. My curse and my doom: spaghetti. My mother makes the best sauce in the world. Spaghetti sauce.

If my stomach is upset, a little linguini'll do me. If I'm lonely, percatelli is my friend. The first thing I ate when I knew I was pregnant was elbow macaroni, in honor of the new little elbows I was carrying. I've never met a ravioli that disappointed, nor a fusilli that failed to satisfy. Ansini pepe fills me with total, total unalloyed joy.

But the particular shape that I love the most, the shape I dream of when times get tough and the wind howls outside and all I want is my mommy's hug -- well that's when I want a rigatoni. Not penne (or what the Protestants call pencil-points) -- but big, rectangular striated and tubular rigatoni.

You can put them on your fingers. You can stick your tongue inside them. They take forever to cook. They absorb spaghetti sauce inside and out. They make a whistling noise if you suck them just right. You can cut them in half with a fork if there are people around watching you eat.

I can eat a pound of them, easy, at a sitting. And fast -- you will hardly know what happened to them from the time I've carefully pre-opened the blue box and pre-stirred the boiling water so that when they hit the water they're already swirling and there's less chance one of them will get stuck to the bottom of the pan. Stir, stir, stir. Scoop one out and lay it on a plate to test --

-- but be careful when you salt the water. Add just the right amount, or a little less. You can always add more salt when you stir in the sauce. Remember this. You can always add more salt, but you can never take salt out.

At a certain point in time my mother had two more kids sitting around that kitchen table, but no dad to take the picture. My brother was growing and growing. My sisters were crying for food. Sometimes we ran out.

Yes, we were the people who got the canned goods and a free turkey. In a box left at the back door. I knew the kids in my class knew.

But what I've never told about was the time there was only one box of rigatoni in the house for all five of us when my mother came home from work, and we knew they would be counted out and that my brother would get a little extra because he was, after all, a growing boy.

Ah, the thrill of the water come to a boil!

The mommy palm-full of salt blasted into the bubbles and the hollow clackety castanet sound of the big dry pasta exiting the box and entering the water. Stir stir stir.

A plate that is not full -- but you cut them in half, and in half again, and it will seem like more. You take the first ladylike bite, wary all the time of your brother's furtive fork. And it is ... too ... way ... too ... salty.

It was all we had. And we had to eat them. And now we all have that memory forever. That and an absolutely unquenchable hunger and a mad desire for all the rest of the rigatoni in the world.