Sheri's Blog

A Weird Valentine's Day This Year

It’s Valentine’s Day and I’m in a weird place.

 

Matt, our Marketing Director here at the Link, asked me to write something Valentine-ish for this issue.  It could be about anything, he said.  It could be about your kids or romance or lack of romance.  You know, anything.  Something fun. 

 

I gave it some thought.  Maybe I could write about my 7 year-old daughter Olivia, and how she’s been getting the most adorable little love letters from a boy in her class.   Or, maybe I should write about my friends Nancie and Ed, whose annual Valentine’s Day Bring-A-Poem dinner party is far more romantic than dinner at even the swankiest restaurant.  Or about the 6^th grade, when Michael Jenkins gave me the single most beautiful handmade Valentine I’ll probably ever receive.

 

The problem is, no matter what I choose to write about, it feels weird.  Mostly because I’m just hesitant to be forthcoming about what’s happening in my life.  My husband and I have been separated now for more than a year.  Slowly, we’re both moving on.  Anyone who’s been in this situation knows the challenges, knows how surreal it all can feel from one moment to the next.  It’s almost like waking up one morning to discover that everything you once knew has to be entirely relearned.  Whatever else it is, it’s not an easy time.  It helps to have friends to talk to, to lean on, to ask, “Am I crazy?”

 

And that’s the part that gets weird for me.  If I talk frankly about my separation – whether it’s the reasons why, or the logistics of raising the kids, dividing the stuff, whatever – I rob my ex of his privacy.  There’s just no way around it.  And worse, if I say the wrong thing, I risk hurting his feelings.  No matter how angry or frustrated or miserable I may feel in the moment, I truly don’t want to be nasty.  (I don’t always succeed at this, by the way, and I know it.)

 

A few sentences ago, I mentioned that we’re both moving on.  Dating, after being in any long-term relationship, can be freaky.  No matter who initiates the breakup, seeing your ex with someone new is, well, weird.  It just is.  It was true when we were 16, and it’s still true now that we’re all grown up.  When my daughters talk about “Daddy’s friend Miss ___”, it’s a little bizarre.  It is!  I bet he feels the same way when they mention the man I’ve been seeing.  It’s new terrain to navigate, and from what I can tell, it sure helps to have a sense of humor.  Still, it’s tough.

 

Which brings me to Valentine’s Day.  If you’re lucky and blessed enough to have real love in your life, celebrate that.  I didn’t, and it was lonelier than being alone.  That’s been a hard truth to come to grips with.  But facing it has been a gift worth more than all the chocolates and flowers you can carry.  Which is why this Valentine’s Day, for the first time in a long time, I have something real to celebrate.  Hopefully, so do you.   

Rudolph's Pajamas

I blatantly stole my favorite holiday tradition from one of my favorite people in the whole world: my sister-in-law Nancy.  Nancy is very creative, and a great multi-tasker – valuable skills when you’re raising five kids on a tight budget.  She approached Christmas like a general strategizing a war.  Money was squirreled away all year long in a Christmas club.  Newspaper circulars were combed for bargains to be purchased and hidden, often months and months in advance of the holiday.  She baked and froze cookies, made pounds of the best homemade fudge ever, and somehow managed to decorate the inside and outside of her house, seemingly without breaking a sweat.  Don’t ask me how, but she also managed to throw a family party on Christmas Eve and whip up an unbelievable Christmas dinner, too.  I’m worn out just thinking about it.  And all of this without even a trace of Martha Stewart-esque smugness.  Seriously, she’s wonderful.

 

Which brings me to my favorite holiday tradition.  Every Christmas Eve, shortly before bedtime, as my nieces and nephews tore around the house, there would be a sudden thump or clatter of noise on the front porch.  There might even be the sound of sleigh bells jingling in the night.  The kids would tumble out the front door into the cold dark and there, in front of them, would be five sets of beautiful, brand-new Christmas pajamas.  Dropped there by Rudolph, as Santa passed overhead to make the first of his many deliveries, these were the pajamas destined to star in that year’s Christmas morning photos.  The kids, thrilled and awestruck, couldn’t wait to put them on.  Rudolph’s pajamas were proof of Santa, proof that Christmas was almost here at last.

 

I played helper a few times during college.  I’d park my noisy old VW bug a block or so away, and sneak up to the house on foot.  The pajamas would be tucked in a bag beneath some shrubs, along with a few carrots for the reindeer, and a string of bells.  I’d carefully and arrange the pjs on the porch, take a few big bites out of the carrots before strewing them about and then, grabbing up all the evidence, shake the bells like crazy and run for a hiding spot in a neighboring yard.

 

There I’d watch the scene unfold: the wonder on their faces, the delighted smiles of my older brother and his wife.  Then the door would close, and though I could still see them through the picture window, their shouts and giggles couldn’t be heard.   I vividly remember the last year I did Christmas pajamas for Nancy.   I knew I‘d be moving away soon, and stood in the freezing dark for a long time watching my brother’s house.  Seeing his family joyful and snug amid the twinkling lights and colorful chaos of Christmas, I got a lump in my throat.  I was happy for my brother - he’d made for himself the kind of family and home we’d never known.  And yet sad at the same time, sad in ways I couldn’t articulate then.  The scene in front of me was humble and unremarkable, and all the more precious for it.  And, like most precious things, terribly fragile. 

 

Now that I have children of my own, Rudolph comes to our house every Christmas Eve, right on schedule.  It’s as thrilling for Olivia and Caramia as it was for their now-grown cousins.  I’ve added a few touches of my own, like glitter sprinkled over the entire scene for an extra bit of dazzle.  Lacking a reliable helper nearby, I’ve had to improvise and just sort of pretend to “hear” something outside before the sending the girls to investigate.  But that doesn’t matter.  If I had a million years, I could never grow tired of the amazed expression on Caramia’s face, or of the way Olivia declares, “I knew it!  I just knew Rudolph would remember us!”  It’s funny, because like Nancy, I now do the tree and the decorations and the dinner and by golly, even the cookies – sometimes.  But those few minutes spent shivering on the front porch are what transform an otherwise typical winter evening into something more.  Nightgowns, a few carrots, a handful of glitter…who could have imagined that such simple things might possess such enormous Christmas magic?

Pedro's South of the Border

Anyone who’s driven I-95 through South Carolina knows Pedro – or Pedro’s billboards, at any rate. For miles and miles, Pedro teases drivers with puns and double entendres in lurid, day-glo colors (“Pedro’s fireworks! Does yours?” “Keep America Green – Bring Money!” etc. The billboards are impossible to miss. I don’t know what Pedro’s monthly outdoor advertising tab is, but holy cow, it’s got to be keeping some billboard company afloat.) Anticipation builds – how could it not? Just when you think, oh this South of the Border thing has to be a put-on, there in the distance it looms: Pedro’s Giant Sombrero. About the size and height of a water tower, the Sombrero has a glass elevator that ferries tourists nearly 200 feet in the air (cost: a surprisingly fair $1) to take in the view of Dillon, SC. And as soon as they return to earth, Pedro is waiting with a cluster of shops, restaurants, a hotel, a campground, mini golf, and even, unbelievably, a small amusement park. And all of it garish and loud and campy and tacky and culturally insensitive at best. South of the Border seemed to be the very alpha and omega of tourist traps, a quintessentially American place, embodying the very spirit of our vast, hungry, ever-consuming and easily disposable popular culture. Yet for all of Pedro’s leering at our bulging wallets, there was a kind of innocence about the place, too. An unspoken agreement on all parts that getting taken was part of the fun, part of the whole vacation experience, and besides, who doesn’t love a coconut painted to look like a shrunken pirate head? At South of the Border, everyone is in on the joke.

Can you see why I wanted to go? Can you understand the allure? It had been a long while since I’d driven that stretch of I-95, but a recent road trip from Hilton Head to Philadelphia reminded me that Pedro was still there, just waiting for me to get off my high horse and pay a visit. So, this past weekend, I did. I called first, just to be sure, and to ask a few questions. The man who answered the phone sounded both really busy and totally clueless. No problem. Many businesses in America have seemingly adopted that exact approach to incoming calls, so, like everyone else, I’m used to it. Here’s how that conversation went:

Me: Is South of the Border open?

Him: Yes.

Me: Is it true that the Honeymoon Suite has a taco-shaped bed?

Him: It’s a clam.

Me: A clam-shaped bed?

Him: Like on the beach. That kind of clam. (Note: are there other kinds of clams? Must investigate.)

Me: Awesome. How much?

Him: I don’t know. It’s not available. We only have one. It’s always booked.

Way to encourage the customer! Still, Pedro was open for business, and that’s all I needed to know. Arriving on a cool, overcast day, I immediately noticed two things: first, there were hardly any people there, and second, Pedro’s empire is clearly in a state of decay. I guess the former handily explains the latter. Maybe you could blame the high price of gasoline, but the kind of decline I saw takes longer than a single summer to happen. But I’m getting ahead of myself. When you leave I-95 and cruise into Pedroland, prepare to be dazzled by the quantity and variety of cast concrete animals. It’s like a refuge for escapees from Goonie Golf. Bulls, elephants, giraffes, apes, wolves, tortoises, dinosaurs, dolphins, you name it. These creatures are everywhere at Pedroland and God bless the management because you are actually permitted - no, encouraged - to climb, sit, and be photographed atop them. Don’t you just hate places that have, like, a full-size lavender-painted cement hippo and then yell at your kids when they try to hoist themselves onto its back? Me too. You won’t find that kind of nannying at South of the Border, mi jefe. You want to risk perching your baby on the head of a 7 foot long, 5 foot tall wiener dog? Have at it and bienvenidos.

The next thing you’ll notice are the shops. There’s Pedro’s Trading Post, Pedro’s Western Shop, Pedro’s Africa, Pedro’s Mexican Shop, Pedro’s Candy Store, Pedro’s Myrtle Beach Shop, and Hat World. And probably half a dozen more, believe it or not. Pedro tries hard to hold to the theme of each store, with mixed results. The Western Shop predictably leans heavily toward cowboy knickknacks and Native American tchotkes (think mandalas and drums. Also, peace pipes. I watched one elderly gentleman in a trucker’s hat pick up a peace pipe off of the counter, take a meditative draw on it, then put it back down as his wife shook her head in loving disapproval. I couldn’t help wondering how many other folks saliva had dried on that thing. Oh my God I need some Listerine just thinking about it.) The Africa Shop boasts some interesting carvings and a rack of brightly-colored traditional African garments. The Mexican Shop features lots of blankets, maracas, sombreros, and even a magnet memorializing Pope John Paul II. Pedro’s Myrtle Beach is home to a giant Great White shark and a coffee table made from a lobster trap. It’s also where you’ll find the most mystifying trinket in all of Pedroland: a glass bottle filled with buff-colored plastic beads of no discernible value, interest, or aesthetic appeal. Cost: $6.50. I guess people really will buy anything. Hat World was a delight, and I’ll probably forever regret not purchasing the giant yellow spider hat. The 8 dangling legs really framed my face in a surprisingly flattering way. And strangely enough, there was virtually no candy at Pedro’s Candy Store. Por que, Pedro, por que?

What all of the shops had in common was a dizzying array of the cheap, the ultra tacky - just mind-blowing acres of crap. And no matter the theme of the shop, crap made its way in. And in the midst of so much merchandising and shelving, there are bound to be all sorts of serendipitous and hilarious collisions.  My personal favorite: the Grim Reaper statue (ghoulish, full-color, 12 inches high, $17.50), displayed atop a decorative disk featuring the yin and yang symbols (6 inches in diameter, sturdy resin, $6.50), shelved next to the lounging and laughing Buddha porcelain (also $17.50), all directly beneath the aforementioned Pope John Paul II magnet.  And directly across the aisle from plastic statues of Pedro himself, wide-eyed and grinning and so raucously stereotypically “Mexican” that it frankly bordered on racism if not outright crossing the line. I’m sorry, but you’ve got to love it. I sure did.

There are multiple restaurants in Pedroland. I can only comment on one, however, and in that one, the burrito we ordered came out looking and acting suspiciously like a taco. Maybe it was unreasonable to assume that Pedro’s South of the Border could adequately dish up some Mexican food?

Head deeper into South of the Border and you’ll come to Golf of Mexico – Pedro does love a pun – and the amusement park, which is just north of Pedro’s Convention Center. (How the National Association of Broadcasters missed this location, I’ll never know.) Here’s where it started getting sad for real. The Sombrero ride was rusty and abandoned. The carrousel was still. The Ferris wheel was spinning unattended, at a speed faster than seemed sensible. The bumper cars worked, but what fun are bumper cars if you’re the only driver? The big draw, a relatively new rollercoaster, squatted next to the interstate riderless and silent. Most poignant of all was the shuttered building that once housed an attraction called “Pedro’s Reality Ride”. I couldn’t figure out what on earth that might have been, but looking around at the weeds growing through cracks in the asphalt, at the chipped and fading paint, the empty buildings, I could see that Pedro was taking another kind of reality ride, and it wasn’t pretty.   

Places like South of the Border are nostalgic from the moment they open. Was there ever an America so wide-eyed, such a cornfed rube, that Pedro wasn’t a winking irony? No, not really. But it’s pleasant to think so. To think of families, cruising toward sun-kissed beaches in sprawling station wagons, luggage tied to the roof, pulling into South of the Border for a bit of good-natured hoodwinking. Automobile culture, nuclear families, good, clean fun – the American dream, doled out with a big, gooey side of blatant capitalism. Not to mention explosives, girlie mags, tobacco, and beer. Did Pedro’s ever truly reflect who we were? Or has it always been an outrageously exaggerated tip of the hat to the more innocent past we like to imagine was ours? After all, ours is a new country, populated by folks who all come from someplace else. Maybe it’s in our collective dna to rush to fill all the empty spaces with symbols and memories, with an instant shared history, a harmless, fun sort of history that we can all fondly agree upon. Those famous good old days, right?

South of the Border is fading. Next time you’re racing up I-95, you might want to slow down and pull in. Your kids, distracted by Gameboys and i-Pods and Zunes, may not beg for the privilege quite as much as you once did.  And frankly, kids now are so hip and cool and post-ironic themselves that a trip to Pedro’s might result in their temporary blindness due to extreme eye-rolling. So what. Do it anyway. Because when South of the Border closes, as someday it inevitably will, it’ll be replaced by a clean, modern travel plaza. Sbarro, Starbucks, Burger King, an Exxon station. No herd of Technicolor cement dinosaurs, no faux-coconut bras, no rulers emblazoned with the words, “Peter Meter”.  Just another oasis on the highway, one you pull into in the middle of the night, bleary and hyper from too much caffeine, pissed off at the price of gas. Under the fluorescent light, surrounded by familiar logos, you could be anywhere. That feeling of dislocation - call it strip mall vertigo - that’s the new America.  Say what you want about Pedro. Laugh at how tacky and ridiculous and lame it all is. But when you park your car in the shade of the giant sombrero, at least you know where you are, amigo. You’re at South of the Border. As Pedro says, you never sausage a place.

 

Hey Facebook members! Visit Pedro’s South of the Border, a fan site I’ve created to celebrate the wonders of Pedroland. See photos, add photos, share your own Pedro memories, and make new friends – the kind of friends who know how to appreciate a well-executed Horny Hillbilly figurine.

A Letter To Your Younger Self

A week or so ago Parade magazine ran a feature by Jeanne Wolf called Advice to the Young Me, in which a handful of celebrities pondered what it is they wished they’d known sooner.  In a fluffy and taboid-y way, it reminded me of the excellent book, I Wish I’d Known Then: Women in Their 20’s and 30’s Write Letters to Their Younger Selves by Ellen Spragins.  Wise and charming and often powerfully moving, this collection of 35 essays by women in diverse fields – including stars, writers, activists, and athletes – is a revealing peek at the hopes and wishes, fears and doubts, that all of us share. I was particularly touched by Atoosa Rubenstein, the founder of CosmoGirl magazine, writing about an agonizing adolescence marked by bullying and ostracism. Of her adoring and handsome husband, the once-awkward, tormented girl, now a successful businesswoman and entrepreneur writes, “had I known you were waiting for me, I wouldn’t have worried so much.” It’s a sweet moment, and a validation that love is as worthy an ambition as any other.

It got me to thinking about what I might say to my younger self, today, at this very moment. Because of course the advice changes as you go, life being a continually unwinding spool and not a static portrait. And at what age would I like to grab myself for a good talking-to? I settled on 14, one year after my parents’ catastrophic divorce, one year into what would become nearly a decade and a half of grieving for my absent mother. Age 14, the age at which I decided that if I did everything exactly right, then everything would turn out okay. Age 14: the birth of my perfectionism and co-dependency. That was the year I erected my own personal Berlin Wall, not understanding that when you try so hard to protect yourself from the bad things, you unwittingly lock out the good things as well.

Dear Sheri,

It’s okay to cry, you know. You may be 14 now, but you’re a little girl, so young for your age – you were still playing with dolls not so very long ago. You miss your mom. That’s normal. You’re supposed to miss your mom. Missing her doesn’t mean you don’t love your brothers or your grandmother, or even your father, though that relationship is one you’ll have to fight to keep from being poisoned by. It’s not disloyal to grieve. And it’s okay to be angry. You should be angry. You are angry.  Here’s the good news: this anger is going to do wonderful things for you for a long time. It’s going to motivate you, drive you to push yourself far past what you’ll be told is permitted.  This anger is like a rocket booster, and it’s going to propel you into an amazing life. But a time will come when all of the good fuel in that anger is spent, and you’ll need to jettison the weight. Try not to wait as long as I did, okay? Let it fall away, and trust you’ll fly higher without it.

Hate to tell you this next thing, but you might as well hear it from me. You’re not going to be lucky in love – at least, not for a long time. Oh, don’t feel sorry for yourself!  You’re going to learn an awful lot along the way, and the biggest lesson for you is: don’t merely allow yourself to be chosen. Do the choosing. Here’s a riddle for you to puzzle over for the next several decades: the unbreakable heart is the one most broken. Doesn’t make sense right now, does it? It will, and at a high cost. But not so high you can’t pay it.  And I promise, while there’s both more and less time than you think to figure it out, you will figure it out. And when you do, wow. You are going to have so much fun. You – fun! Imagine that. I can’t wait for you to get there.

From what I can see here in 2008, you’re going to live what amounts to two lives. And I’m not talking about job changes or relationship changes or moving to new places, either. Confusing, huh? It will be, until the month of August, in the year 2007. (Freaky to even think about that far-off future isn’t it?) In August 2007, something spectacular and amazing is going to happen to you. It will radically and completely change you. I want to tell you more, tell you everything, but I love you too much to let you peek under the wrapping of what is going to be the most glorious gift you will ever receive. In fact, forget I even mentioned it, okay?  

Speaking of gifts, don’t fret over having children.  You will. They’ll be everything you wish for, everything. No, I will not tell you how many! They’re waiting for you somewhere right now, waiting for their moment to come.  Trust that it will, and don’t waste time with questions or regrets. That probably sounds impossible, I know. I know how you are.  Such the little planner! Always living in the future! You’ll get over that, believe it or not. Your babies have a lot to teach you. And stop worrying about whether or not you can ever be a good mother. What happened to you is just something happened to you; it’s not who you are.  Start telling yourself that now, today. Practice saying it over and over until you believe it. It’s the truth. 

The last important thing I want to tell you is that what you’re learning right now is going to be the very thing that gives your life wings. It may feel now that you are all alone, that it all depends on you, and that where others seem to have shortcuts or cheats, you have only a steep uphill path to climb. That’s true for you, but it’s also your classic blessing in disguise, Sher. You’re learning now that it takes work to move forward, and belief in yourself, and a refusal to quit. Wait till you sit down to write your first book – oops! I gave that one away, didn’t I? You do grow up to be a writer, among other things, and that’s got precious little to do with talent, and lots to do with just sitting down and doing the work, one word, one sentence, one paragraph at a time. No shortcuts. Having this knowledge now is the single luckiest thing that’s ever come your way, believe it or not.     

Just for fun: you’re allergic to milk. You were born allergic, you stay allergic, and no matter what anyone in your crazy family thinks, do yourself a favor and stop eating dairy. Also, you have curly hair. Accept that now and save yourself aggravation and time. And you are going to be totally right about stirrup pants, by the way – they’re horrid on everyone but pro jockeys.  Try to have more first kisses, even if it seems kind of gross to you right now. (Oh my gosh, you are so innocent at 14!) Kissing is something you are going to absolutely love and one of the sad truths of being a grown-up is this: you don’t always get all the kisses you want in this world. Why not? Who knows? People are so weird and walled-off. You will be too, but not for always.

I’ll leave you with this last message from your future, knowing it will seem as vague and as cryptic as the horoscopes you will always be so fond of reading:  trust that wherever you are, you are exactly where you are meant to be. 

Love,

Sheri  - June, 2008

Books - The Other Boleyn Girl & Wicked

I grew up in a family where the women catered endlessly to the men. Not out of respect, mind you, nor even affection. No, their wooing and appeasement of the various husbands, fathers, uncles, and brothers in their orbit was a much more political endeavor. Like courtiers in the service of a childish and truculent king, they fawned and flattered the man in question, soothing his temper and his ego for the sake of a little peace and quiet. As a child I was struck by how effortlessly my aunts and grandmothers slid from gossiping about what a pain in the ass so-and-so was, to showering the man himself with compliments and praise the instant he materialized in the kitchen. My mother wasn’t very good at this game, mostly because she resented having to play it. And after all, as any good courtier knows, even the sweetest words fall flat if the delivery doesn’t convince. Not surprisingly, I take after my mom.

I hadn’t thought about the kitchen table gender diplomacy of my female relatives for a long time. Then I read Phillipa Gregory’s novel The Other Boleyn Girl. If you haven’t read it or seen the movie, (critically panned, stars Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johannsson) it tells the story of Mary Boleyn, sister of Anne Boleyn, the ill-fated second wife of Henry VIII. Married at 12 to a nobleman, pushed into an affair with the king by her scheming, socially ambitious family, Mary was schooled in the arts of flattery and seduction from earliest childhood. It’s a terrific book, by the way – the literary version of a juicy beach read. The similarities between the powerless women in King Henry’s court, and the powerless women in my grandmother’s kitchen were staggering. In both places, youth and beauty were prized commodities and if played properly, tickets to security. In both places, every effort was directed toward the continual comfort and amusement of the monarch, regardless of how exhausting or irrational that effort might be. Like the king, the men in my family saw such service and coddling as a birthright. And like the Boleyn sisters, I think the women in my family viewed their own financial dependency as a fact of birth, too. After all, as my grandmother once pointed out, there’s no point arguing with the world. All you can do is use what you’ve got to get what you need. 

Another book I read recently that I just loved is Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire. It’s the novel that the very different (and utterly fabulous in its own right) Broadway musical of the same name is based upon. Wicked is the story of how the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz became the legendary bad girl on a broom. She wasn’t always a witch. Her name was Elphaba. She was a strange child, frightening to her parents, both of whom were too distracted - her mother by boredom and disappointment, her father by religious mania – to properly care for any child, much less one who bit, and resisted their embraces, and who was such an awfully vivid and unnatural shade of green.  From these difficult beginnings the seeds of wickedness are sown, right? Perhaps, or perhaps not. It’s an easy conclusion to jump to, but Elphaba’s story is far more complicated. And, I so want you to read the book that I won’t give away any more details, or spoil any of the wonderful surprises in Maguire’s rich, imaginative story. But I can’t resist quoting my favorite sentence in the whole book:

“Or is it just that the world unwraps itself to you, again and again, as soon as you are ready to see it anew?”

Boy, is that ever the truth.

Alright already! Here's the infamous spaghetti pie!

Bob’s been after me to make him a spaghetti pie for coming up on three years now. It’s a very simple dish, and I would have gotten around to it sooner if it weren’t for the kids, the job, the house under construction, the personal melodrama. You know - the usual things that make it easy to put off whipping up a spaghetti pie on demand.

Like a lot of the really good Italian food I grew up eating, this is a terrific example of poverty cuisine: amazing food from the simplest, and often cheapest, ingredients. In this case, pasta, eggs, a bit of meat, and some cheese. As with most simple Italian dishes, the quality of ingredients is super important. While you could probably throw this together using Velveeta and cocktail weenies, it wouldn’t be nearly as good and not a bit Italian. So, since the recipe only calls for 4 ounces of meat, get the best quality you can find. Ditto for the cheese. And please, oh please, do not use that nasty sprinkle cheese in the green can. Real Pecorino Romano or Reggiano cheese has an incredible nutty, earthy, slightly tangy-sweet richness that makes the powdered imposter “parmesan” taste like an old sock. 

You can serve this as an entrée, with a green salad. Or, as a great side dish with a roasted meat. And if you like cold pizza, wait till you try this.

Here’s the recipe Bob insists on, reprinted here with zero permission from the publisher. 

 

Spaghetti Pie

 

8 large eggs

½ cup freshly grated Pecorino Romano or Parmigiano-Reggiano

Freshly ground pepper

1 lb spaghetti or bucatini, cooked al dente and drained

2 oz sliced Genoa salami or soppressata, chopped

2 oz sliced prosiutto or boiled ham, chopped

2 tbsp olive oil

4 oz provolone, chopped

 

In a large bowl, beat the eggs, grated cheese, and pepper to taste. You will not need salt, because the meats and cheeses are salty. Add the spaghetti, salami, and prosciutto to the bowl and toss well.

Heat the oil in a 10” nonstick skillet over medium heat. Pour half of the pasta into the skillet. Scatter the provolone on top. Pour on the remaining spaghetti mixture.

Turn the heat to medium-low. Cover the pan and cook 5 minutes. Slide a spatula under the pie and lift it gently around the edges to allow some of the uncooked eggs to slide underneath. Cover and cook 10 minutes, or until the eggs are almost set and the bottom is golden.

Meanwhile, preheat the broiler.

Place the skillet under the broiler to brown the top and finish cooking the eggs, about 3-5 minutes more.

Run a spatula under the pie to loosen it. Lift the handle of the pan and slip the pie out onto a serving platter. Cut into wedges. Serve warm, or at room temperature. Serves 8.

From Entertaining with the Sopranos Warner Books 2006

 

Broken Phone Booth

…And if I die before I learn to speak
Can money pay for all the days I lived awake
But half asleep…

from Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth With Money in My Hand

Primitive Radio Gods

I was in Philadelphia on business a few months ago, staying in a hotel at Penn’s Landing, just a few blocks from my old neighborhood. Instead of going to bed, I went for a walk through Olde City and up South Street. There’d been a lot of changes in the years since I moved away, and even finding my old apartment was harder than I’d expected. I used to live across the street from a legendary bar called J.C. Dobbs. It has a different name now. A tattoo parlor has replaced the antiques store that was a few doors down, but the funky hat store, the gourmet grocery, and many of the restaurants are still the same. It was mid-August, but the city was in the middle of a freakish cold snap. The people on the streets were bundled in hoodies and jackets, hands stuffed in pockets, heads down against the wind. Despite the crowds, there wasn’t much noise. Walking along those streets I once knew so well I felt oddly invisible. It could easily have been a dream; familiar and yet not, blurry around the edges, like an image out of register.  When I tried to explain it to the man who drove me to the airport the next day, he was aghast. “You did what? Are you out of your mind? You coulda been f---ing killed! You know the murder rate in this city? Don’t you ever do that again.” In typical Philly fashion, this lecture (from a total stranger) continued on for another five minutes or so, complete with colorful language and repeated invocations of the Lord’s name. This, by the way, is how a Philly guy shows he cares. No place like home, right?

When I left Philly, I didn’t mean to stay gone. I thought I was leaving for six months, a year at the most. The plan was to take a break from grad school, get some real work experience under my belt, earn some cash. I had a life there, and a lot of unfinished business. I could never have known that leaving would set my real life, the one I was meant to have, in motion. And I wouldn’t trade it now; I think I’m where I belong. But the weight of all that I left behind hit me that night, and it was hard to not regret some of those choices. In leaving that city, I threw away love, a potential career, and even to some degree, my family. You’re careless like that at 22, and even more so if you’re an emotionally shattered child stumbling around in an adult body. But that’s not something you understand at the time. That’s something you figure out later, usually after it’s too late to set it right. That’s when the wondering, or the doubting, or the regret sets in. Did I do the right thing? Did I make the right choice? Would it be amazing or tragic if, at the end of your life, you learned where all those paths not taken might have led? 

Imagine if that’s what hell was: the utter loss of God, and of love and hope, and the sure knowledge that it was you who destroyed whatever good might have been yours. That it all could have been different, if only you had been less selfish or less cowardly, if only you had been a more grateful, more loving human being. To know that it was you all along and no one else, not the people you punished or blamed or pushed away. Total responsibility: yours. All second chances: gone. You’d almost rather spend eternity as a pitchfork target – at least then you could hang on to the meager pleasure of thinking yourself a victim. 

The writer Joan Didion said it best: everything counts. But who can possibly live like that? Other than Buddha, I mean. To be so fully and completely in the moment, every moment, to understand and even embrace the idea that everything counts? I’ve been trying to celebrate the moment, and it’s tricky. For example, I had a dentist appointment this afternoon. Try making that a mindfully meaningful experience. Or is it a meaningfully mindful experience? People, it’s an x-ray. You hold still, you bite down. I stayed in the moment, tasting the hard plastic in my mouth, hearing the whirring noise of the x-ray machine, feeling the tile floor beneath my sneakers. And then, my mind wandered to concerns over irradiating my brain with yet another dental x-ray. Not to mention the radiation from my cell phone. And the various towers and relays and satellite dishes at work beaming God-knows-what at me. I went from mindfully aware back to seriously neurotic in less than twenty seconds. Which actually represents growth; before, I would have skipped the mindfulness exercise and just shown up at the dentist’s office already a panicky mess. 

If everything counts, than perhaps there’s another way of looking at the problem. Instead of seeing your life as a whole, maybe it’s better to break it into episodes. Since you’re not the same person you were ten or fifteen or twenty years ago, you ought to cut yourself some slack. What we think of as mistakes now surely seemed like reasonably good ideas to the people we once were. Some of those mistakes even felt like inevitabilities, didn’t they? Also, it’s a painful fact that many of us can’t fathom the cost of our actions until it’s past time to pay for them. So what are you going to do? Wallow in the past and wish for another try? Daydream about the future when things will finally be the way they’re supposed to be? Or face up to the reality that everything counts, and this moment, the one that’s slipping away half-noticed is the only one that matters. There’s no point chasing the ghosts of our former selves. What could we possibly say that would make any sense? We did what we did, and here we are, powerless to change even one single second. That’s the sting of regret: the knowledge of what needs to be put right, the impossibility to make it so. Kind of like standing outside a broken phone booth with money in your hand.

What A Feeling

A few weeks ago, in a hotel room in another time zone, wired on caffeine and unable to sleep, I stumbled across the movie Flashdance playing on CMT. I remember liking it well enough back in the day, though I can’t recall actually seeing it in a theater. I must have been in my brooding and/or weird foreign film phase, refusing to pay to see popcorn movies like Flashdance or Top Gun, while secretly inhaling them on cable. (Good golly was I ever a pain in the ass in those days.)  But anyway, there we were, Flashdance and me, floating in a sea of pillows on the Heavenly Bed, pumped full of Starbucks, all jacked up and no place to go. Might as well watch, right? 

In case you’ve forgotten, Flashdance tells the story of Alex, a beautiful young woman who works as a welder in a Pittsburgh steel mill by day, but dreams of being a dancer. To that end, she moonlights as a performer at a blue collar hangout called Mawby’s Bar. Mawby’s looks like the kind of place you’d head to drink beer, shoot pool, and maybe find some greasy chow heavy on the fat and carbs. If told that Mawby’s also featured dancers, you couldn’t be faulted for expecting to see some topless women twirling listlessly around a pole to either an old Motley Crue or Billy Squiers tune. It’s that kind of place.

But in Flashdance, the exotic dancing is of an entirely different sort. The bored, barely dressed Bada Bing girl is nowhere in sight. Instead, Mawby’s Bar features almost fully dressed women doing what might best be described as performance art, for an audience of apparently awestruck steelworkers. There’s one scene in which Alex, done up in kabuki makeup, towering wig, and enormous kimono, executes a rageful little number in front of a television set, as floor-level floodlights distort her features and cast giant shadows on the wall behind her. I don’t know what the intended message was – screw you Sony for alienating the human spirit with your might electro-techno fist? Then, Alex rips off the kimono and wig, revealing royal blue spandex bike shorts and a white t-shirt, and proceeds to fling her body against the walls. Message? That’s anyone's guess. But here’s something to think about: in the movie, men in the bar are shown nodding appreciatively into their beers as if to say, “After a long day in the mill, there’s nothing like watching a samurai dance in front of a strobe light to help you unwind.” In real life, there’d be a whole pack of guys yelling, “Show us your tits!” 

That’s sad, isn’t it? 1983, the year Flashdance was released, wasn’t so very long ago chronologically. But it might as well be an eon. A movie like Flashdance wouldn’t get made today. Who’d buy an exotic dancer who keeps her clothes on? Our world, a mere 24 years later, is one in which housewives take pole-dancing classes, college girls bare their breasts on spring break for roving camera crews , and kids in at least one middle school in this country are being handed contraceptives. This summer’s big date movie spun an unlikely love story out of a one-night stand between two people so painfully mismatched that only a barrel of booze and an unused condom could have ever brought them together. Even the movies we market to kids now are cynical and knowing, jam-packed with innuendo and leering references aimed at the ticket-buying adults in the audience.  God forbid we let kids be kids. What, and leave them to drift through their early days oblivious to the typhoon of branding and marketing that starts battering them before they’ve even learned to write their own names?  Let’s face it: our culture is sick and depraved, awash in empty sex, toxic foods, too-easy credit, and cheap platitudes that sit like Band-aids on bullet holes. The scariest thing is how quickly we got here.

Alex, with her welder's torch and her ballerina dreams, lives in a far more innocent place.  (And who could possibly have imagined that the greedy 80's might ever look so naive or unsullied?)  She wowed the faculty at the fictional Pittsburgh Dance Conservatory with a spectacularly unorthodox audition, proving that guts and moxie trump the system every time.  That's how it goes in Hollywood, the place where Julia Roberts' starry-eyed streetwalking Cinderella bagged a charming prince of a john in Pretty Woman.  If Flashdance were made today, Alex would be a stripper at Scores, and her big break would come in the form of a homemade porno video going viral on the internet.  There'd be a lot more frontal nudity, and a whole lot fewer cutaway shots of books about ballerinas.  Alex, in short, would show us her tits.  What a feeling, huh?

   

 

It's October - Time to Think Pink

My mother’s mother died of embarrassment.

Okay, so maybe it wasn’t exactly the embarrassment that killed her. It was the cancer. Specifically, the lump she found one day in her breast. She was too embarrassed to tell anyone about it, much less see a doctor. So the lump grew and grew, and the cancer spread and spread, until it was too late for embarrassment. And then it was too late for her.

October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. You’re going to be seeing a lot of pink, hearing a lot of talk about self-exams and mammograms. Don’t tune it out. When it comes to beating breast cancer, early detection is the critical factor. That means actually doing the monthly self-exam. It takes a few minutes in the shower. It’s not difficult, it doesn’t hurt, and there’s nothing embarrassing about it. Mammograms have gotten a bad rap for being painful. They’re really not. Yeah, your boob gets smooshed between two glass plates for a couple of seconds. Big deal. Anyone who’s ever been a teenager with an overenthusiastic boyfriend (and you know exactly what I’m talking about so don’t pretend you don’t), nursed a baby, or worn certain styles of Wonderbra, has probably been through worse. A mammogram is so quick and easy that you’ll spend more time filling out the insurance paperwork beforehand than you will in the imaging room. If you’re 40, it’s time for your first baseline mammogram. If you’re like me, with a family history of breast cancer (on both sides – like it’s not enough that my relatives are all nuts, is it?) talk to your doctor or your ob/gyn. I know several women who had their first mammogram at age 30; my own cousin was significantly younger than that. Her mother, who nearly died of breast cancer, was only 34 when she was diagnosed. 

Encourage your friends to do their self-exams, or to schedule their mammograms. Nag your sisters, and your mom, and your grandmother if you’re lucky enough to have one.  If you’ve never participated in Race for the Cure, or the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer, or BMW’s Drive for the Cure, or any of a dozen or more other fantastic events in communities all across the country, make this the year you check one out. They’re incredible, life-affirming experiences. I ran in my first Race for the Cure event six years ago, pregnant with Olivia, and nearly doubled over with morning sickness. I didn’t win. Not even close. In fact, the only reason I didn’t come in dead last was because an elderly woman in an over-sized pink cowboy hat let me pass her on the last turn. She was a 17-plus year survivor. And that, not being the fastest runner or the sleekest athlete, is what Race for the Cure is all about.

Check out www.komen.org. And tell a friend.

Physics & Favorites

Bob is one of those people who need to rank things. He’s got to have favorites: favorite movies, favorite songs, favorite TV shows, a favorite whatever. I have a hard time choosing a favorite anything, which drives him crazy. It took my entire childhood for me to finally settle on green as my favorite color, and I still feel bad for poor second-place purple. The biggest, the best, the nicest, the worst – it doesn’t matter what it is. I’m just no good at choosing a favorite.

Not too long ago, I read a fascinating article about quantum physics and the problem of choice. As I read it, I understood it. Five minutes later, I was completely confused. Ever have that happen? You feel like you’re following along just fine, but then it all gets so muddled in your head that there’s no way on earth you could ever repeat it back and have it come out right? So anyway, this article was describing the instant just before a decision is made. In that instant, you have a universe of possibilities spread before you, all equally probable. As soon as you make your choice, however, every single one of those possibilities winks out of existence, and along with them, the paths they represent. And you’re left with the one you’ve chosen, for better or for worse. That’s vastly, hugely simplified, but it’s the best this liberal arts major can manage.

All those possibilities – here one second, vanished the next. It makes you stop and think about all of the choices and decisions you’ve made in your life that brought you right up to this very moment. Scary. I’ve got a pretty detailed list of do-overs I’d like a shot at. Not necessarily the big things, but I do wonder how my life might have unfolded differently if I had been a whole lot braver where other people were concerned. Or maybe more reckless is a better way to put it. Like Nicholas Cage says in Moonstruck: we’re here to fall in love and break our hearts and just ruin ourselves. (Or something along those lines. That scene makes me cry so much that I can never quite remember the dialogue exactly.) I admire people who take Nicholas Cage’s advice to heart. It always looked so risky and messy to me. But that was the message, wasn’t it? Don’t live your own life at arm’s length. Get in there and play rough, full contact, no pads. So you might get banged up; so what? That’s the point of it all. It’s one thing to think about living your life on that kind of emotional edge, but it’s another thing altogether to actively choose to do it. It’s sad to say, but many of us don’t really make any choice at all about our lives; we let circumstances and other people choose for us. I guess that passivity is a choice in itself, which would qualify it as one of those infinite probabilities. But no one likes to think of his or her own life as a thing that just happened; we want to believe that it’s something we created.

Back to the problem of favorites. I’ve thought about it a lot, and it just seems that choosing a favorite signals an end to the whole process of sampling. It shuts down all those other lovely and mysterious possibilities. Why would anyone want that? That’s why I can’t fathom having a favorite book. There are so many to read. And as much as looks like banana ice cream might be my all-time favorite, I know there are lots more flavors still to try. Perhaps if a thing is reasonably finite, like types of sandwiches, it might be possible to choose a favorite. All-natural peanut butter and blackberry jam on whole wheat would be an excellent front-runner. And I’m pretty sure that my favorite Pink Floyd song is “Wish You Were Here”. (Though why I have a favorite Pink Floyd song in the first place, I can’t say.) The only other favorite thing I’ve been able to think of is a favorite place to run: the mountain bike trails at a nearby county park. Have you ever tried trail running? It’s the best. You have to concentrate so hard on the terrain that you forget all your crazy troubles and even your fatigue. It’s Zen. Until you trip over a root and wipe out, of course. I’d blaze through those woods like a slightly paranoid Pocahonatas: one eye on the ground, the other scanning for serial killers lurking in the trees. Now that I think of it, suspecting innocent strangers of being deranged killers should probably count as my favorite hobby, I do it so often.

If you mixed together the physics of choice with Nicholas Cage’s excellent advice, and then added Pink Floyd, and put it all into a computer and asked it to tell you one important thing about life, I think you’d get an answer. It’d be right out of “Wish You Were Here”:

did you exchange
A walk on part in the war
For a lead role in a cage?

Better the war, and the ruin, and all of that risky, heart-breaking mess. Better the choice you make, than the one made for you. And better still, the possibility of all those infinite paths, glimmering in the darkness, waiting, like stars, to be wished upon.