Dear son:

You have my solemn word, my promise, my blood oath, that you and I will get through this. This turbulent time will end...maybe only to be traded for a new turmoil, but it will end. You and I will come through this. Your extreme emotional vulnerability will become a strength and you will learn to harness it, if I have anything to do with it. And I do. I have everything to do with it. I am not giving up and I will not let you down. You are the locus of my heart and the linchpin of my existence and we -- you and I -- will kick this thing's ass and send it cowering back into the darkness. My son I swear this. Hang on to me, because I am going in there swinging.

A New Project

I've got a new project and it is tied to a possible book that might end up seeing the light of day. I have a minor obsession with British Literature from the 19th century and the myriad (!!) BBC adaptations that have sprouted from these beloved books. My new blog explores this on a few different, scattered, unconstructed, freeform, totally undisciplined and chaotic levels. While I am certainly keeping this blog, I invite you to visit me at my second residence:

www.whatwouldlizziebennetdo.com

I'm really loving having two different places to spread out. Come over. It'll be fun.

Halloweenie

I have always been a little nuts about Halloween. Making a costume and dressing up and running around at night seemed like the ultimate fun thing as a kid, and I really got into it even when I was little. And when I grew up and added beer and vandalism to the mix, well, I was just a pig in shit. I keed. About the vandalism, I mean. Unless you count toilet paper. IN which case I was a pro. And fire extinguishers. Sometimes it threatened to rain on Halloween night. My dad knew it was THE BFD of my life so he would go to mass and pray for it not to rain. What a cool daddy-o he was. As a teenager, there was always the Oingo Boingo Halloween concert to crash. Danny Elfman (for President!) gets Halloween. He's special. I have a forever crush on him, the delicious little freak.

As a grown-up(ish), I still really really really love Halloween. I made my nephew pee his pants one year because I was so completely committed to my MacBeth Witch costume/character. Then when I had kids, well I just went off the hook with the costumes and the haunted house stuff.

While I appreciate Martha Stewart and her Yankee Can-Do attitude, I think she has sort of prettified Halloween. Here is (the point of my ramble) a website of a guy who gets Halloween and what fun it is for grownups and kids, too. He even ended up turning his Web site into a book. Good for him! I have a crush on this guy.

www.extremepumpkins.com

It's great.

Ever try dressing your beer in a Halloween costume?

A Quick, Heartbreaking Thought

In the car on the way to school, I was playing Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb" at high volume. My two kids gazing out the window. Halfway through the song, my 8-year-old son's face in the rearview...tearstained and angst-ridden.

"Mom, can you please play another song? This one is so beautiful and so sad. Please."

What the fuck just happened there?

Sometimes I feel like I am free-falling through my life and only my children are there to catch me.

Rat Bastard





The house I grew up in was built in the 1930s. It was on a wide, palm-lined avenue in the sprawling community at the base of the Hollywood Hills. The Hollywood sign was completely visible from the middle of my street, and we used the letters as focus points when giving directions. Many movie and TV studios were within walking distance, and it was an everyday occurrence to see movie crews set up on someone’s sweeping lawn or at a sleepy intersection, filming a movie or TV show.

The houses were old and beautiful. Most of them were old and beautiful and had rats. Big rats the size of cats. Rats that could probably drag a small cat. The Western Exterminator truck, with its 4-foot-tall icon of a top-hatted man with a huge hammer on the back was frequently parked on our block. He visited our house many times during my childhood. You see, you could set traps for these rats, but they always came back. They predated us. Their ratty ancestors had lived there since my parents were children. Maybe before. Rat royalty. The Divine Right of King Rats.

We could hear them in the attic. Once, late at night while sitting on the back porch sneaking a joint, my sister and I saw a huge brown one slinking along a power line between our attic and the MacLatchey’s attic. Another night, babysitting the Millers in their immense house, I was harassed by rats. Sitting on the four-poster bed in the master bedroom in front of the television, I watched in growing horror and incredulity as one, then three, then more rats scurried past me, under the bed, out the door toward the staircase. Rats racing back and forth in the bedroom, down the halls, on the landing. Mr. And Mrs. Miller came home to find me shipwrecked in the center of the bed, with my mouth open, and a huge case of The Creeps.

“Oh, the rats,” Mrs. Miller said, with a dismissive wave of her manicured hand. “Isn’t it awful? We’ll have to have the exterminator back again.”

I am sure there is some entirely Freudian reason why I have had rats as pets since I was 13 years old, I just don’t really care to explore it. So would you just lay off the analysis and let me tell my story. We had two rats until very recently. Brisbane was gray and white and had some sort of a stroke. She became less and less able to walk or move. I did not realize how bad she had gotten until I realized that I was literally carrying her from room to room, and feeding her by hand. My husband finally called my sister the vet and had Brisbane taken away to be put to sleep.

So it’s time to get a new rat. Last week, I brought home a tiny little rat with a cream-colored hood and strip over a white body. Perfectly darling. We named her Lizzie and put her in the high-rise, three-story cage with the lonely and bereft Beatrice. Shhh, kids. Let’s leave them alone to get to know each other.

Fucking little Houdini rat spawn from hell.

Lizzie stayed in the cage for exactly 6 minutes before she found some space in the bars and exploited it to make her escape. So now a tiny rat is loose in the house. This was a maddening week. Lizzie would make an appearance and we’d all caper around trying to catch her and put her back. At night, Lizzie would make a mockery of our sleep. She’d claw her way up the quilt and have a little rat disco party on the bed. Racing back and forth across my face, sniffing my ear. More than once I hears my daughter crying out in the night, “Lizzie, NO!” as she tried to sleep while the rat played NASCAR all over her bed. She eluded us for a week. We would find “evidence” under the couch, in the corners of the living room. I reached the very end of my frazzled nerves when I saw that she had somehow gotten into the pantry and had nibbled her way into a box of mostaccioli. OK, now I am foot-stompingly, hands-on-hips, stridently pissed. I hate that little rat. Hate her.

Yesterday, I was simmering. Lizzie had kept us all up through the night. Chacha set traps for her. This consisted of taking a single bite out of each of 9 apples and positioning the bitten apples at various points throughout the house. The bites, according to Chacha, were supposed to convince the renegade rodent that the apples were delicious and worth breaking cover for. Yes, I just ended that sentence with a preposition. I am going to have to live with that for the rest of my life. Like I care. Honey, I have rat problems.

Operation Apple worked. I put that demon rat in a box and took her back to the store. “She’s a biter,” I pronounced officiously to the clerk. “I want a new one.”

See how I said that? Like I am a badass rat owner. I demand recompense for my suffering, and I want it now.

So I lied about a rat. I am not sorry. I don’t even care that my daughter heard me lie. I hate that little rat. As if I am going to tolerate a little beast that never interacts with me except to eat food and leave its mess all over the place. I’ll have a teenager soon enough. Until then, the rat goes back.

Solitude Part II: She's The One That I Want

I’ve had Cha-cha (daughter Jane) to myself for a couple of days now, while the boys are off backpacking. One child, as opposed to the usual two, in my care is a poignant illustration of "The whole being greater than the sum of the parts." Having her alone is relaxing and exhausting.

Relaxing in that I am not constantly trailing after her, picking up, wiping up, breaking up high-pitched fisticuffs. She is relatively tidy, and strives for self-sufficiency, so I am not endlessly preparing and cleaning up after snacks, meals, special orders,

Exhausting in that she is talkative, engaging, curious, flirtatious, and adoring. Questions, what-ifs, infinite observations, running commentaries, frequent importunate requests to play “pretend” games that are all minor variations of the “One day you found an orphan girl (homeless kitty, stray hungry puppy, starving baby ratty) on your front doorstep…” theme. She never stops talking, petting my arm, cuddling up into the circle of my lap.

Cha-cha Alone has the same effect on me as a very dry martini: The straight shot of icy cold vodka undiluted by even the barest mist of vermouth. Jane Alone gets me high and renders me legless and incapable.

But I found a way to get some down time. Thank you, John Travolta. Thank you, iPod. I can slither back between the pages of a book and Cha-cha is blissfully occupied, thanks to the Grease soundtrack, downloaded the day before, and currently plugged into her head. My book and I -- alone at last.

She stands in front of the mirror in my bedroom, in a black velveteen catsuit leftover from Halloween and a pair of beat up black cowboy boots prancing through “You’re the One That I Want,” warbling at top volume with absolutely no regard to pitch or key. Pick a note, Cha-cha. After watching this movie about 6 times in one week, she decided she was Sandy – no wait, she’s Rizzo, no! She’s Kenicky! (Like her mother, she does not restrict her heroes based on gender. In her imagination she can be anyone or anything she wants to be.)

I want to read, but I am enchanted, watching her. Immersed in her tableau, she has forgotten I am even there. My vain little daughter, slithering and prancing in front of the mirror. She knows all the words, all the steps.

If someone asked me what the best thing we did all summer was, I’d have to answer, Family Movie Night Under The Stars. Jane had been in the middle of her Grease bender when we noticed a poster at the public library advertising Grease played on an outdoor screen at a nearby park. The event was sponsored by the parks and rec department and looked endearingly low budget and homegrown. So on the appointed night, we packed a picnic and some folding chairs and set out for the park.

Jane had done her homework. The event included a Sandy and Danny Lookalike Contest. She dragged out the catsuit and foraged for the pair of castoff boots. I curled and ratted her hair and applied lipstick sparingly. In front of the mirror, Jane regarded her reflection with satisfaction. Cocked her hip, threw her shoulders back and smiled flirtatiously, teetering to the car, trying to strut on the unfamiliar heels. Call me Sandy, Mama.

The park was decked out for the event with carnival games, crafts, a lemonade stand and a pizza stand. A DJ was setting up at one end of the park. A huge movie screen stretched the width of the park at the other end. The parking lot was crowded with vintage cars from the ‘50s. T Birds, Corvairs, Corvettes, and Chevy Bel-Airs. In the lingering light of the early-evening, families were trailing into the park, spreading blankets, setting up picnics. Zorro set up in a prime spot right in front of the movie screen and the evening unfolded.

Within 13 seconds of opening my first cold beer, the DJ fired into high volume, doing a frenzied 50s-radio shtick . He never broke character all night. Games! He announced a hula-hoop contest, narrating round after round. A hopscotch contest, which I won. Obstacle courses! Hand-jive contests! Trivia contest! Kids and their parents participated enthusiastically and – after a few hours and rounds of beer – maniacally and loudly.

Finally came the Danny and Sandy Lookalike contests. Jane had been strutting and dancing front and center of the DJ booth all evening. She was the only Sandy contestant not dressed in a poodle skirt and a sweater set. Round after round, Jane won by thunderous applause. She stood there, smiling like Sandy, hand on skinny little hip, perpetually in character. For the last round, some simpering parent hoisted her still-in-diapers daughter, dressed in a bunched up, broke-ass poodle skirt, and set her down in the lineup. Cheap shot. The baby Sandy won.

The judges gave my Cha-cha a prize anyway. Jane was totally cool with it, but I was a bitter stage mother. Jane was robbed. We’ll sure as shit be back next year. Trust.

Where was I? Yes. Alone with Jane. Watching as she warbles, off-key, to her reflection.

“Summer lovin’
Had me a blast
Summer loving
Happened so fast”

Screw my book. I may not get this kind of special performance again. I’m hopelessly devoted to Jane.

Solitude, Part I

All my life all I ever wanted was a family: husband, children, brothers and sisters all around me. I got that. I adore them. I would cease to exist if something happened to them. Dust.

However.

I adore being alone almost as much. Alone, alone alone with my thoughts, independent pursuits, my own agenda, a book. Every birthday and Mothers' Day I ask only for the luxury of the whole day to myself.

Every now and again a fluke happens in my life such as the one I am currently enjoying: My family is gone for the weekend. Zorro and T-Rex backpacking. The Cha-Cha spending some time with Scary Mary.

I poked a cold beer into each pocket of my jacket and walked to the movies and saw:

Becoming Jane

No secret that I love Austen. I know a fair amount about her, and I re-read her books in an endless loop all the year round. Snippets of chapters here and there. Sometimes I wish I could superimpose my constant rumination of her characters over my real life, making my own version of a book-club analysis of my family and friends. Drawing parallels...Scary Mary as a hybrid Lady Catherine DeBourgh and Colonel Brandon. My daughter as Marianne Dashwood. My sister as Elinor Dashwood crossed with Charlotte Collins. Myself as an unflattering but realistic mishmash of Mary Musgrove, Henry Crawford, Emma Woodhouse and Mr. Palmer.

I had no strong feeling about a fictionalized movie being made of her life. I had no expectations. No innate scorn to overcome. Honest.

I am so glad I was alone in the theater because I was gorked out and embarrassed by everything in this movie. I still am. It was Cringe-Fest '07. I think it was the ham-handed writing. The un-finesse-y way pieces of her books were wedged into the plot. The awkward overt verbal ripostes. The lovely girl who played Jane was a real beauty, and I have liked her in some other movies I have seen with my little daughter, but in this she was unsubtle, twitchy, and overdone. I am all squinched up thinking about some of the forced tete-a-tete in this movie.

The sets and costumes were beautiful and detailed. The actor who played the Tom LeFroy character was good....so much better than the Jane character. I remember him being the very best thing about The Last King of Scotland, too.

I looked at my watch a few times. Bummer.

On the upside, I spent the rest of the day cleaning the house. Can't wait for my family to get back and mess it up.

I sort of miss my bookclub sometimes. I have belonged to two. The first was a bookclub that I was invited to join by a friend. The other members all knew each other from their (Episcopal) church. Everything was cool. We read some good ones and some not-so. Kate Chopin's The Awakening failed to keep me awakened. There was one member who was bossy and dominated every discussion, convinced of her superiority because she was a lit professor at the local junior college. The night we gathered to discuss the book I chose (Animal Dreams by Barbara Kingsolver), she showed up and declared that she did not finish the book.

"I just couldn't get through it," she declared. "It was almost as bad as a Harlequin romance."

OK, well, to each her own, but I was a little wounded, especially because everyone else seemed to like it. But, OK, right? When it was her turn to recommend a book she chose The Brothers Karamazov. Please. Spare me. This thing is 1000 pages and one of the most complex books ever written (I exaggerate...you get the idea). But the nail in the coffin was when someone chose Angela's Ashes (which I could take or leave). In the discussion this same member commented about one of the many arduous challenges recounted in the Irish family's life -- "Well what do you expect? I mean these people were Catholics, and we all know that does not exactly mean they are Christian."

So yeah, I stopped coming to the book club meetings after that. Three Strike rule.

Chili Cookoff Report (Now with photos!)

The brother in the codpiece
I seen him on the TV
I think he likes his ladies
all sweet and sugary
now I'm partial to a pudding
but that's for second course.
the main meal and the hors d'oeuvres
must be smothered in hot sauce.



It’s kind of like a race report, but with food, and no running at all.

My house is a complete wreck. The CPG Family Annual Patrick’s Birthday Chili Cookoff is over for another year. My head hurts and my eyes feel like sandpaper. Total success.

Five years ago I was a simple home cook with a simple dream. A dream of a family party in the middle of summer that would command the attention and the effort of all my family members, celebrate our massive collective ego, and give one of us a chance to be even more smug than usual. My brother Patrick’s birthday is in July. It’s hot as hell here anyway, so why not put the summer into high gear and get the kitchen nice and hot? The idea of a cookoff appealed to everyone, and even the less-enthusiastic cooks in the family could get behind a pot of chili.

The ground rules were simple. It must have meat and it must have beans. No real reason, except we knew that the playing field had to be level. Patrick is the sole judge. It’s his birthday and he does not feel like cooking on his birthday. So. There you have it.

The first two years, I won the cookoff. Of course I did. Smug me. Swaggering around with the championship crown with my Mona Lisa smile, looking with faint pity on the also-rans. Offering condescending, middling and insincere praise as I tasted these “others.” The prizes those first few years were bookstore gift certificates, and I remember my sister took a Brussels sprouts stalk and made it into a Miss America-style bouquet for the winner. Wave, CPG. Wave like the Queen. Thenk you. Thenk you. Oh, thenk you.

The entries that first year were all over the map: Scary Mary with her recipe gleaned from the Samuel Adams website. Desdemona and her surprising black-bean-and-chorizo version (KILLER). Ophelia’s misguided, corn-kernal-heavy edition. Ophelia’s husband, my brother-in-law Galahad's version, which uses cubed sirloin and a LOT of tomatoes, Lucrezia’s Bonfire of Humanity (it’s 9th Ring of Hell hot) version. Others of funk extraction. We were all over the place.

Last year, my brother Mick won. Just…inexplicably. Out of the blue. Mick. Single dad, in whose pantry is a lone box of Minute Rice. He absolutely freaked. This year, he knew he had to defend his title. So he’s calling me at 6 am telling me about the mincing, the chopping, the little dance steps he is doing all over the kitchen. He calls me again at 10 am telling me he is practicing his victory dance. I am getting calls all morning from contenders, comparing notes, trying to worm secrets out of me, attempting to intimidate me. My own version is pretty standard. I gave it my best shot and after an hour of simmering, I had to admit it lacked that certain something, and was destined to be an also-ran. I was tempted to mess around with it, but that just screws it up even further. Usually. So I just mentally walked away.

As the day wore on and I awaited the competitors and guests (I was the host this year), I worked myself up to a fever pitch of anticipation. Why (I wonder in retrospect) do we clean our houses to surgical-theater cleanliness when a herd of hungry, snorting, snarfing, shrieking, tipsy water buffalos are going to trample through that evening? Why? I should just get that frontal lobotomy and be done with it.

So in they trample. Crock pots all over the counter. Kids streaming in. Speakers blaring. Grocery bags. Salad greens. Corn bread. In about 3 minutes there are at least 8 empty beer bottles littering the counter, stove, etc. I lost control of the situation in about 10 minutes and I just gave up and joined my own party.

Time for The Main Event. Patrick was out back, chasing the kids and the chickens around the yards in a few warm-up laps. He was looking in good chili-tasting form…doing a few neck rolls, cracking his jaw, choosing exactly the right spoon, opening a cold beer and a stack of saltines as palate cleansers. As a judge, Patrick is fairly eccentric. He insists on drinking (wait for it) a Coors out of a can…and he brings his own supply for the occasion. He must have saltines. He refuses a blindfold, as he asserts that it messes with his sense of smell.





Have you noticed that recently when there is a BFD boxing match on pay-per-view, they spend 6 weeks working up to the event and then the fight is over in 13 seconds? Last year’s competition had been a veritable Lennox Lewis-Mike Tyson slog-fest. Patrick went back in that tasting ring for round after grueling round of qualifying tastes before he had to award the title to Mick. What a gladiator. His taste buds took a beating in that one, let me tell you. But this time, it was more like Tyson-Spinks. Bang. Mick emerged the victor in one round.





The rest of us stood there -- agape --as Mick paraded around the house, arms in the air, singing the Notre Dame fight song. Over and over and over. Bastard was so smug. Makes my lip curl.

I had to admit…all of us had to admit…his was the best. He claims no secret ingredients. He claims only that he has a superior intuition about seasoning. He is delusional in the extreme and if I don’t see him again for a few weeks that can only be a good thing. I kid. He’s a peach.

Some notes: We have had other cook offs in my family, but this is the favorite and the most enduring. Next year we are opening it up to aunts, uncles, cousins, too. We plan on issuing T shirts to competitors and a medal for the winner. We also plan on having sports drink at each mile marker and a Lynyrd Skynyrd cover band doing "Freebird."

As for me, I clearly need to do more specific training for this event, as my laurels -- lovely as they are --are insufficient.