RJ, MJ, The RLA and I are off to the SoBe Wine & Food Festival. There will be no posts, no comments approved, no e-mail read until sometime Sunday night. I will be too full of yummy food to care. I promise to take pictures and tell tales.
An astute new (and presumably very young) reader accosted me in my comments this morning with the following question, which I quote in its entirety, and exactly as she typed it (in all caps, shouting at me first thing in the morning… sigh)
“WHAT GIVES YOU THE RIGHT TO JUDGE PEOPLE ...SO WHAT IF THEY WANT TO HANG THEIR BACKPACKS ON THEIR CHEST…ECT ECT.”
First of all, sweetiedarling, the correct abbreviation for which you are searching, is ETC, as in etcetera. Not ecksettra, or however you are pronouncing it in your head.
Secondly, what gives me the right to judge people is this: I am the self-appointed arbiter of taste for the universe and it would be a much more attractive place if people would just take my advice.
Thirdly, what gives me the right to be arbiter of taste for the universe is that I have exquisite taste, and if I ever did make a fashion mistake, there is no film hanging around to prove it.
Finally, regarding your final statement, the one in which you opine about the frequency of my sex life versus the number of pairs of shoes you own… what, exactly, was the point you were attempting to make? I came of age in the 70s, child, and I’ve been married to the Hottie Renowned Local Artist for 15 years, so I hope you have a spare room or two to house all those pairs of shoes you claim to own. And I hope you keep them all polished, stored neatly in boxes, with tissue stuffed in the toes to keep their shape. I also hope that you make sure the heels are always in good repair.
I don’t even know where to begin this essay. Anna Nicole Smith’s body is decaying and the vultures and parasites are fighting over the remains. There are three men (at least) who claim to be the father of her child. One was with her, one used to be her lover, and the third is a fame whore who may or may not have had a relationship with her at the time of the child’s conception.
The estranged mother is blaming drugs and the boyfriend for her daughter’s estrangement from her, the boyfriend for the drug abuse. The ex-lover is blaming the boyfriend and drugs for his loss of his ex-girlfriend. The boyfriend/lawyer is just lamenting his loss and trying to bury her next to her son, and keeping his(?) daughter safe. Which is not to say that I believe him, have sympathy for him or find him to be less of an opportunistic leech than the rest of the parties involved.
And then we have this article, which talks about how so many Playboy Playmates have died tragically young. From murder or drug overdose primarily, it seems. Toss in a few car wrecks and plane crashes and you have quite the list. But the people quoted are all like: Oh, the tragedy of being beautiful.
Oh, the tragedy of being objectified, I say. Would Dorothy Stratton have been murdered by her jealous ex if she weren’t the centerfold? Another questionable source claims that ANS wanted her tiny little baby to be slightly underfed so that she would be “sexy”. At three months old.
Which brings us back to her own mother, she who is blaming the world for the estrangement, drugs, etc. of her daughter’s short and overblown life. Well, sweetiedarlings, we can all ask nature or nurture and we can ask it all we like, but there has to be some sort of responsibility somewhere from the cradle to point at which she left home.
Honestly, I don’t know where to end this essay, either. It all seems to me to be a terrible indictment of American pop culture, American values, the ridiculous scramble after money and the obscene desire for fame above all.* Fame without merit. Paris Hilton kind of fame, not Chuck Yeager kind of fame.
Finally, though, in the middle of all this circus, there is one person with whom I am personally familiar. This morning’s Miami Herald announced that the court-appointed attorney for the infant Danielynn is Richard Millstein. Richard was the lawyer for the Antichrist when we got divorced. He flayed my lawyer. He left me with little, he managed for me (the poor artist) to split my art collection with the rich lawyer I was divorcing, and even give my old car to the same rich lawyer so he could give it to his new girlfriend’s kid. And even though I will never forgive the Antichrist, Richard was just doing his job.
Richard and I sat on the board of the local AIDS organization together a few years later, and I can, in all honesty, say that I have never met a more sincere and caring gentleman. He is, year after year, the top fund raiser for CareResource. He is courteous and mild mannered (outside of the courtroom). In all of this mess, I know in my heart that Richard will see past the bullshit and make sure that the best of all possible outcomes is secured for this little girl.
At least until she goes home to live with one or another of the people who made her mother what she was.
* My dear dead Grandma used to say that fool’s names and fool’s faces oft appear in public places. She also used to refer to persons who were “all dressed up like Astor’s pet horse.” Which is amusing enough, but Grandma lived in Newport back in the day and so probably actually SAW Mrs. Astor’s pet horse decked out in its finery.
Marcia, over at The Pink Shoe wrote a little story about a cooking event that culminated in The Firemen coming over and evacuating her apartment building. It was funny, and rather than tell this story in her comments, I’m using her tale as a springboard to tell you all about The Night The Firemen Came To My Dinner Party.
It was long ago, and not so far away, and I was living in a wreck of an old house in Coconut Grove. It had peeling, cracking walls, and wooden floors and an old, beat up stove with a short and one melted burner (that is another story altogether) in a tiny galley kitchen.
I was separated from the Antichrist, and my girlfriend Rocky was living with me until she got the tickets to move to LA. It was late in December and I was hosting my annual goose dinner; the first without the Antichrist (and it was him and his raised-by-wolves family that prompted me to begin holding annual goose dinners, but that is yet another story for another time). In celebration of my liberation, the guest list had grown to where I needed to roast two geese. And there began my problems.
I didn’t have a roasting pan large enough to hold two geese, but I’m a resourceful girl, and made one out of two disposable foil pans, using tin snips, tin foil and some foil pan origami. Side by side, they filled my little oven completely.
Have you ever cooked a goose? They are Very Fatty, and need constant attention so that they don’t cook up greasy. This attention takes the form of repeated poking with a sharp object to drain the fat from the skin. This rendered fat, by the way, is a most excellent cooking fat, and adds a subtle flavor to things like soups, when you use it to saute the onions or vegetables before adding them to the stock. Using a tablespoon of goose fat also makes for the world’s best matzoh balls. But I digress.
So there is soup, there is home made bread, there are vegetables and desserts all cooked. The table is set, the ice bucket is full. Rocky is showered and dressed, and I’m about to go and do the same. I poke the geese a few more times for good luck. Which does not come. No. What comes is very bad luck, in the form of the sharp object going through the bottom of the thin foil roasting pan. Which then proceeds to drip goose fat onto the heating elements. Which then proceeds to burst into flames.
Well. I am on that issue like white on rice. I slam all the doors to the kitchen shut, open all the kitchen windows and the back screen door and start yelling at Rocky to bring me every fan in the house, and point them out the windows, blowing the smoke out of the house and away from the fire alarms.
She does that, but she also (and I’m sorry to say this Rocky) panics. I, on the other hand, am remembering everything I ever learned about cooking fires in home ec. Here is what is going though my mind:
Do not open the oven door. That will only cause the fire to flare up and burn off your eyebrows and eyelashes. (And the geese, which cost a fucking fortune.)
If you are foolish enough to open the oven door, you have to throw baking soda on the fire to put it out, because it is a grease fire. (And if you miss, you will throw baking soda all over the geese, which cost a fucking fortune, so you really don’t want to do that.)
Turn off the oven, and don’t open the door. The fire will (eventually) run out of oxygen (in theory, because I’m not sure how good the seals are on this old wreck) and the heating elements will cool enough that the grease will not continue to burn. This is my best option, because the geese are almost done, and they will continue to coast on the retained heat.
Ergo: do nothing except turn off the stove and wait. Except. Remember I said that Rocky had panicked? She’d called the fire department and was now trying to tell them where I lived. I grabbed the phone from her and started negotiations with the fire department.
“Yeah. A grease fire. No, it’s almost pretty much close to being out.”
“Yeah. Wooden floors.”
“No. I won’t give you my address. Not unless you promise that you won’t send a truck. I’m having a dinner party and the guests are due any minute and having a fire truck in the driveway just Will Not Do.”
“No. No truck. No lights. No sirens. No guys in raincoats.”
“Look, if you insist on coming over, just send a single guy on his way home. There’s room at the table.”
Well, I go off and shower and dress, and the guests, in fact, do start arriving, and every time there is a knock at the door, I say, “O, that must be the firemen.” and everybody chuckles. Until there is a knock on the door, and there in my driveway is an entirely too large red fire truck, with its lights flashing and about six guys in rubber coats in my front door. “YOU LIED!” I shriek.
In they come, I pretend to be Noel Coward, and sashay through the living room, trailing a string of firemen behind me like baby ducks in their yellow rubber coats. “Firemen,” I say, “these are my guests. Everybody? These are the firemen.”
They follow me into the kitchen where they allow as yes, I have had a grease fire which is now entirely out, and the geese are entirely gorgeous and maybe they need to take them (or at least one of them) back to the station for evidence of said fire. I tell them over my dead body, and at that moment, the last pair of guests arrive, pounding up the back steps and into the kitchen in a panic because the entire driveway is filled with a red fire truck flashing its lights. “See?” I say to the firemen, “this is EXACTLY what I did NOT want.”
Well, the firemen left (without the geese, but with a little something to tide them over), and more martinis were poured, and good times were had by all and my friend the Chuckster to this day says those were the Best Geese Ever, and could I figure out how to replicate that smoked flavor without burning up my kitchen?
Regular readers of this column know several things about me. 1) I love fashion, and blame it on a genetic predisposition due to my descent from tailors, dress makers and owners of clothing stores. 2) I read the style page in the Miami Herald despite the fact that style is so loosely defined by their editors as being any old rag on any old hag. 3) I am not shy about sharing my (superior) taste and opinions with you, my readers, or the editors of the aforementioned Herald style page.
Yesterday’s featured… featured what? I am at a loss for words beyond skank-ho, appalling, mutton-dressed-as-lamb and a few others that even I won’t use here. Be warned, the photo is not work or retina safe.
Yeah. Where do I begin? At the top, with the obvious and ratty weave? With her age (43) which means she’s old enough to know better (something both RJ and a few others mentioned to me)? With the fact that she’s wearing and admitting to wearing (which may even be worse) a perfume that smells like cotton candy?
How about at the bottom, with her boots, which look, even allowing for bad newsprint, filthy and in need of a good cleaning/polishing?
In fact, I would go so far as to say that Ms. Auerbach herself looks in need of a good scrubbing. The RLA, upon seeing this on the dining room table and watching me spew coffee, said merely: Hmm, plastic surgery is THAT girl’s friend.
In the interest of full disclosure, I have to say that Auerbach was my maiden name, and I was ready to put my head in the oven in shame over her. But this morning I did my Google homework and found that she married into the name, and so is of no concern to the integrity of my family line. I also found out that she claims not to drink, that she’s a body builder, and the divorced mother of two teenagers. They must be very proud of her today.
But wait, there is more to this than meets the scarred retina. I actually read her “hot Valentine’s Day tips.” I quote, and then I opine:
“Wear sexy red lingerie under your outfit just in case someone special wins your heart; put on a pair of sizzling red stilettos with pencil-leg jeans; carry a designer red tote bag big enough to fill with devilishly delicious chocolate truffles, scented candles and massage oil.”
Another thing that readers of this blog know about me is that I am passionate about AIDS education, research and social assistance, and that I served for almost ten years on the board of directors of a local AIDS service organization. So when I say that I almost popped a vein after reading her tips, you know where I’m going next.
Who, in 2007—twenty-odd years after the start of the AIDS crisis, can offer the suggestion of being ready for spontaneous sex with some random person who floats your boat on Valentine’s day without loading that designer red whore’s bag of tricks with condoms? Who would even think of preparing in the morning for a chance encounter that night? And this woman has two teenagers. What is she teaching them?
And where is the journalistic responsibility of the Miami Herald? Oh, yeah. Oxymoron. Herald and journalism or Herald and integrity… The whole enterprise appalled me, and I fired off one of my more scathing letters to the editor. I’m certain it went straight to the digital circular file. Still, would it have killed an editor to rewrite her tip so that it at least pretended to be suggesting you do all this for someone you are already in a relationship with? Or to include condoms in the “be prepared” list? Or even to have chosen someone who looked a little less likely to be found on the side of the road up around 79th Street?
Again, in the interest of full disclosure, I also found that Ms. Auerbach claims to be a writer, one who specializes in writing for the Neighbors section of… The Miami Herald. Can you say circle jerk?
Once again, I find myself shaking my head and asking why I even bother.
Well, the Westminster show turned out better than I expected after the first night. I always feel somehow cheated out of a dog or two when the poodles win in multiple groups, and Monday night the miniature won in the toy group and the standard in the non-sporting group. And they were both white, so it was like, a double denial.
But then last night the surprises! The upsets! The drama!
It was great.
The RLA, the doggies and I were settled in for the viewing, but The Noble Dog Nails wasn’t too keen, because the Jack Russell hadn’t even placed in the terrier group. And besides, we’re JRT purists around these parts, and voted against joining the AKC. In fact, the JRT Club of America voted as a group against standardizing the breed and registering with the AKC, which is why the AKC has Parson Russell Terriers and there is still the separate breed of the Jack Russell Terrier.*
But first the sporting group delivered up their top dog, the English Springer Spaniel. That was followed by the upset in the Hound Group, as a little PBGV girl took top honors, beating out the favorites (and surprising me, because I was sure the judge was in love with the Viszla, and rightly so, because that was a magnificent pup). JoJo and I danced around the living room, and gave each other high-fives.**
Finally, the working dogs took center ring. There was a wonderful pair of Corgis, and a handsome German Shepherd, and the big, bouncy, goofy Bouvier des Flandres, another (ahem) underdog who ended up with the ribbon and the chance at Best in Show. This caused almost as much excitement here in the Casa Des Zapatas, because JoJo’s bestest doggie friend is (or was, until they moved to Texas) P-Roo’s goofy, bouncy, big ole Bouv, the lovely Myka.***
All in all, a terrific show for the home breeds.****
The tension in the Garden was palpable as the seven doggies took turns in the spotlight, each taking once-around on the green carpet. Then, even though the Dandy Dinmont was favored to win, and the Akita was truly magnificent, and the crowd favorite was my beloved PBGV, the surprise winner of the purple and gold was the English Springer. Which is fine, I suppose, because he is a handsome fellow, and selfishly for me*****, a therapy dog. But still, a Springer. Ho-hum. Could it have been more cliche than that? I suppose a pointer could have won. Or one of those stupid poodles.
*Splitters!
** Or high fours, since she only has four toes. In any event, except for shedding, eating and pooping, high fives are JoJo’s only trick. And stealing TND Nails’ food.
***Myka is a licensed assistance dog, and can go anywhere.
**** I used to have a Viszla. And we have a doggie friend who is a Corgi. Barks to Oliver!!!!
***** I convinced my boss to buy advertising on the Animal Planet reruns of the Westminster Show. We’ll be running our Pet Therapy ad exclusively in our Florida markets. Serendipity is good.