Tell It To COACHIE

I have a lot I could say about the Oscars last night, which is surprising given how boring they were. I liked Ellen Degeneres and some of the montages, but I think it is dirty pool to move the supporting actor and actress awards away from the start of the show. While I am apparently the only person in America who enjoyed the Will Farrell song, I think those shadow people should have been sent to the showers (hot ones, with antibacterial soap) after they made the Oscar statue. The sound effects choir? Clint Eastwood (who can do no wrong in my book except for this one instance) translating from the Italian without his glasses? And isn’t this the third or fourth year in a row that Jack Palance was among the honored deceased? However, I’m going to limit this to a discussion of what annoyed me most about the Oscars - the pre-game show.

What is with the unquestioning adoration of Nicole Kidman? I admit that in the past she has looked great on the red carpet. But now, no matter what she does, everyone thinks she looks “incredible” even when she look ridiculous. And I’m not even talking about last night’s dress, although I thought it looked reminiscent of Sadaam Hussein’s last photo (at her height, if she’d bumped up against the purse hook in the bathroom stall, she could have been an Oscar tragedy). She looked like a mannequin. Maybe a person can’t be too rich or too beautiful, but she can definitely have too much Botox. And she looked like her fake eyelashes were so heavy that she couldn’t open her eyes completely. Naomi Watts (her best bud who is about the same age) looked about 10 years younger than Nicole Kidman, and her face moves when she smiles. I saw the two of them interviewed together by Ryan Seacrest (is he related to Jason Kennedy?), and while Nicole Kidman still seems to have a relatively pleasant personality, it is now firmly encased in plastic.

Speaking of Botox, Jada Pinkett Smith, back away from the needle. When a moronic red carpet interviewer kept referring to the Smiths as the “first family of Hollywood,” over and over again, as if saying it would make it so, I appreciated that the entire Smith family looked like they had no idea what he was talking about. I’ve always liked Will Smith, and honestly have never had any ill will toward Jada. But the past few times I’ve seen her, she’s had the same immobile, confused/slightly pained expression on her face, no matter what is going on. I think the less successful half of a celebrity couple owes it to herself to look engaged in the proceedings, and an important part of looking engaged is making facial expressions: the raised eyebrow, the smirk, the occasional grin. When she stands off to the side with that strange look on her face, I feel a small pang of pity. (Also, while I would never say anything critical about someone else’s child - you know, unless he/she was a huge punk - I feel that I need to suggest that the Smiths and their son keep a sharp eye on the razor thin line between the adorable smart-aleck and the precocious snot.)

Neither Nicole nor Jada is afraid to look unglamorous in the movies, so I don’t understand what distresses them so much about wrinkles (which at their ages could probably still be camouflaged by their makeup people) in real life. Aren’t they less likely to get roles if their faces are unable to “keep it real?” I like actresses that look like actual people because, right or wrong, they seem more likeable to me. If it ever happened that I somehow had the opportunity to go to a movie theater and see a non-animated, non-G-rated film, I’d rather see an idealized version of reality than a plasticized version. So let some of that Botox wear off girls, until you can move your forehead enough to look adequately puzzled and confused when Ryan Seacrest is asking you moronic questions.

Dear Jonathan Adler,
From what I can see in 15 seconds of searching the internet, you have your own mini-empire and a great gig with Target. I can understand why you would want to be on Top Design, because the additional exposure is probably turning into additional dollars as we speak. What I cannot understand is how you got roped into your exit line. Are you really going to say “See you later, decorator” week after week? I almost expect the contestant to turn around and say “After while, ’cause I got no style.” Why not go all the way with the wink and a two handed “pow pow pow” shoot-em-up?
Also, are you secretly a ventriloquist dummy?
Shannon

Dear Todd Oldham,
I like you, your shows on MTV, your couches at La-Z-Boy, and your merchandise at Target. You’ve got great style, and when you talk to the contestants on Top Design, you seem thoughtful and kind. Why do you have so much trouble with the scripted parts? You sound like a second grader in a Thanksgiving play. Is this part of the Bravo training regimen that requires all hosts to speak like robots? Ad lib a little.
Also, why are you orange?
Shannon

Dear Judge Larry Seidlin,
Can I call you Judge Ito? Get a grip, a psychiatrist, a clue, a hankie, and/or a little respect for your position.
Also, WTF?
Shannon

Dear Zsa Zsa Gabor’s Husband,
Please return to obscurity immediately. I think you’ve strayed from the proper use of adoption proceedings. Here is a hint: They are not for grown-ups to adopt other grown ups. There must be other ways for a slimeball like you to make a living in Hollywood. Ew.
Also, STAY AWAY FROM THAT BABY,
Shannon

Dear Andy Reid,
I am confused. If you are spending so much time at the Link that your children are running wild, why are the Eagles so bad? Maybe you should have been less concerned with what T.O. was doing, and a little more concerned about what was going on under your own roof. And why are adult, employed children living under your roof? Maybe if they had to pay rent and utilities they’d have less money for guns and drugs. Just a thought.
Also, SlimFast did wonders for Tommy Lasorda,
Shannon

Dear Reid Children,
Where do I begin? I lived in the Philadelphia suburbs myself, and I rarely felt like I needed a gun. The worst thing that’s likely to happen on the mean streets of Montgomery County is getting a dirty look from a Main Liner on the way to the Devon Horse Show. And what’s with all the drugs? Weren’t you raised as Mormons? I think your dad was probably counting on that to keep you on the straight and narrow. Since you are still living with your parents, and yet still “working” for the Eagles, why don’t you put some of that Eagles organization money into bribes for good press instead of drugs. At least you should stay in more and drive less.
Also, isn’t heroin more fun in the comfort of your own home?
Shannon

Dear Sean Preston and Jayden James,
Get your mom, come live at my house. The MPs will keep away the paparazzi.
Also, if you are friends with Dannielynn, bring her too,
Shannon

When the HP went to the Wawa last Saturday to get some cold cuts and rolls, he returned with this:

Yes, those are rolls, not sandwiches, each individually wrapped in a piece of butcher paper and then packaged in a plastic bag that, while cute, is so small it has few other uses than carrying six overpackaged rolls. How on earth can we reduce our dependence on foreign oil and fight global warming when we use this many resources to transport six rolls three miles?

Then on Sunday, our priest likened Lent to the Led Zeppelin song “Stairway to Heaven.” Leaving aside the fact that I find him highly irritating and that he could have just said “ladder to heaven” and avoided referencing a song that I hate, he actually gave me an idea of what to do this year. I had been trying to think of something I could do that would have a positive effect on the world, and clearly my giving up chocolate (or wine) was not going to do any good for anybody (and quite possibly could have made some people’s lives worse). So I’ve decided to build upon last year’s Lent.

Last April I wrote this treatise on my plans for Lent. I’m happy to report that almost one year later, I still rarely use paper plates and cups. I forced the kiddies to give up Pringles for Lent last year, mainly because I find them gross, but also because they are overpackaged in nonrecyclable packaging. With a much appreciated minimal amount of whining, now Pringles are relegated to occasional appearances on car trips.

In an attempt to continue my green ways, I bought these

at the beginning of the school year, and have used them to send the girls’ snacks to school everyday, rather than buying prepackaged snacks (why I stacked them like that for the photo, I have no idea, but I also have no interest in retaking the picture)*. I have also given up juice boxes completely (I still keep a package of Capri Suns around for bribing purposes, but they are usually reserved for trips or picnics). The girls buy milk at school for lunch, and they take a reusable water bottle with them every day.

I now realize that I should have waited until Lent to institute all of these changes, because now I’ve got to find other ways to conserve this year. But after much deliberation, here’s what I’ve come up with:

1. Attempting to stay out of the car as much as possible by limiting errands to Tuesdays and Saturdays and by walking Marty back and forth to school. Obviously this is a best case scenario, with the wild card resting snugly in Marty’s hands, but I am going to try to drive less. (And let me take a moment to apologize if I am making my sister Carroll jealous since she would happily stay out of her car but is never allowed to).
2. Providing my own bags when I go shopping. When I was in grade school and high school, you were always supposed to say you didn’t need a bag for things that were small. If you bought something big and asked for a bag, you were supposed to use it to carry anything else you bought that day. I don’t know when that sort of behavior fell out of favor, but I’m bringing it back. I will be the crazy lady at the store who brought her own bags. But maybe I won’t be alone for long.
3. Becoming even more obsessive about turning things off. Most nights I try to remember to shut down the computer (in Bill Bryson’s honor) and whenever I walk down the hall, I shut off any lights that I find. However, some nights when I’m really tired, I don’t bother reaching behind the TV cabinet to turn off the uplight or navigating across the toy room to shut off the closet light. For the next 40 days (and maybe more) however, I will.

And there you have my plan to improve the world over the next 40 days. It may not be a stairway to heaven, but it might be a stairway to… well, what? a Sierra Club membership? At least I can hope that the kiddies take note, so that in whatever world is left when they grow up, they will be turning out the lights and bringing their own bags.

* I bought 8 of these in September and we still have all 8, showing that miracles really do happen every day if you just take a moment to look for them.

I had forgotten about Fat Tuesday until yesterday morning, mainly because I had just completed Fat Friday, Fat Saturday, and Fat Sunday. Given the eating extravaganza of the weekend, we were still too full to go crazy on Tuesday. Also, after a long discussion on Sunday about whether fresh basil was available in the winter, I found a package in the commissary. I will eat fresh basil any time of year on any type of food. In fact, if I were a sheep, I’d probably graze on fresh basil until my wool turned green. So, in appreciation of the basil and the warmer weather we had grilled chicken rather than other typical Fat Tuesday fare.

Since I’ve never been to New Orleans and I don’t know a whole lot about Mardi Gras, I decided to look up some stuff to explain a few Fat Tuesdays in my past. Way back when I was gainfully employed, I spent a Fat Tuesday in Dearborn, Michigan, where at both the hotel and at the hazardous waste processor I was visiting, everyone was handing out some sort of Polish donut (ironic isn’t it) for what Wikipedia informs me is Paczki-Day. Another year in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, every one got some sort of similar German donut and referred to Fat Tuesday as Fauschnaut Day. I like donuts occasionally, but to me they are not the last treat I would want before Lent. Maybe it’s my lack of Eastern European blood.

Growing up, we never really had a Mardi Gras tradition, although some years we had pancakes for dinner. When I was little, pancakes for dinner seemed like a great idea, maybe as a result of my Irish blood. I would have made the kiddies pancakes for dinner, but the little punks don’t eat them the way they used to. Here’s a little bit about pancakes from the Irish-fun-facts website:

From the early Middle Ages, the Catholic Church forbade the consumption of meat, eggs and dairy produce during Lent. On Shrove Tuesday, thrifty housewives made use of the perishable eggs, milk and butter in the preparation of pancakes.

That must have been a rough 40 days of potatoes and cabbage. Here is something else I didn’t know about Fat Tuesday in Ireland:

One social aspect of the night, however, has fallen into disuse - the link between Shrove Tuesday and the romantic fortunes of the unmarried. Traditionally in Ireland, marriage was forbidden to take place during Lent, so in the weeks before Christmas and “Shrovetide,” as it’s sometimes called, matchmakers busily tried to find suitable candidates for marriage before Ash Wednesday arrived. Households left with unmarried daughters on Shrove Tuesday tried to imbue them with better luck for the coming year by allowing them to toss the first cake. Their pancake-making skills, for better or worse, were seen as an indication of their romantic chances for the next year.

My goodness. Maybe IHOP should consider this as a Mardi Gras promotion.

My in-laws always have cheese steaks on Fat Tuesday, and we’ve done that a few times too, because it seems like a perfect indulgent Mardi Gras meal. Usually however, the fat part of our Mardi Gras is dessert. One year I gave the kiddies a plate of treats, rather than making them pick just one. This made me a hero for a day, but the spent the rest of Lent annoyed that I wasn’t coming clean with the plate of treats every day. Yesterday, I let them have excessive sugar in the form of leftover birthday cake for a snack after school and as dessert after dinner, but I didn’t attempt to explain why (they had CCD, I figured their teachers would explain it and the girls would be more likely to listen to them than me).

Our big indulgence yesterday was leftover Frozen White
Chocolate and Raspberry Mousse Torte (like I said, it was a rather fat weekend). Then I indulged in three episodes of Lost (Season 1) and went to bed. Woohoo!

And that concludes one of the most boring posts of all time. Tune in tomorrow for a mind-numbing discussion of my plans for Lent.

I know you’ve all been in suspense since last week when I left you to ponder how on earth I was going to get the soup to the school. Here’s what happened:

I used a plastic pitcher to figure out how much soup the crock pot could hold (1 gallon) and then filled the plastic pitcher with one gallon of soup. I devised this brilliant packing scheme so that the soup would not fall over in the car:

The bonus of this arrangement was that suddenly I could carry the crock pot and the soup in one trip. I thought I was rather brilliant. In another happy development, I found out the soup lunch was going to be in a room directly behind the office where I had to check in, so instead of the 2 round trips I expected to make across campus, I made none.

When I walked into the luncheon room/computer room, Lauren’s class was at the computer terminals. She didn’t notice me, and when her teacher told her I was there, I barely got a nod because she was so intent on her work. I stood for a second and admired how cute she looked in those huge headphones, and then I went to set up my soup station.

Problem #1: I explained before that I was not that excited by the prospect of burning myself in transport. In addition, my mother (a graduate of many a food sanitation course) always said to keep things cold until you’re ready to use them. Therefore, my soup was cold. I arrived at school around 9:30 am, figuring the soup would have plenty of time to get hot before the teachers were ready to eat it. Unfortunately, there was nowhere in the computer room to plug in a crock pot.

Problem #2: My crock pot held a gallon of soup, as the other 6 or 7 crock pots there likely did. That is a lot of soup for one school worth of teachers. Incidentally, all of the other crock pots were warm but not plugged in, indicating that whoever brought them had transported hot soup in the crock pot. If that had been me, I’m convinced I would have stained not only the floor mats of my car but the front of my jacket, maybe my shirt and quite possibly my shoes. And I probably would have burned my hands and wrists and, if things had gone terribly wrong, my nose.

Problem #3: Cherub was nowhere to be found. Looking at the food that had been assembled so far for the luncheon, I counted two loaves of bread, one box of cookies, two ladles, 6 or 7 crock pots of rapidly cooling soup and one crock pot of quite cold soup.

My first inclination was to find a way to fix this – round up some extension cords and power strips, run to the store for more bread and ladles, bake some cupcakes. Unfortunately, I had a rather full morning planned for myself, with company on the way for the weekend. I decided I had to trust that Cherub would fix everything when she got there – after all she had pulled off the previous lunches. So I left.

Later that afternoon, when I went to pick up the girls, I found the crock pot unplugged and sitting in the same spot on the table. Fortunately, the soup inside was hot, so apparently someone had managed to warm it up. Problem #1 had been solved.

When I looked into the pot, I saw that the level of soup in my crock pot and most of the others had decreased approximately 1 inch. Clearly, a huge waste of soup was about to occur all over the county, since soup that has been cold and hot and cool and warm all in one day is not something you should save. Problem #2 was apparently not solved.

As to Problem #3, Cherub was not in the computer room in the afternoon, so I’m not sure who finally took care of the luncheon. No one seemed to have provided additional ladles, so I wonder if the teachers were using mine in all of the soup. Ew.

To make matters worse, after all my careful planning and transport machinations in the morning, I was still stuck carrying a full crock pot of warm soup through a swarm of children while trying to herd Marty and the girls back to the car in the afternoon. But as Marty and I stood in the cold waiting for the girls, with the crock pot wedged up against the wall of the school, the principal came by, looked down at the crock pot and said, “Was that the chicken soup? That was really good.” I would say that I’d earned the girls some goodwill, but they don’t need it. And even if the principal figured out who I was, he probably wouldn’t have connected me to the girls because he has repeatedly demonstrated that he can’t pronounce our name.

Epilogue

Aislinn’s teacher didn’t even go to the soup lunch. I can’t say that I blame her. When people say “It’s so cold outside, wouldn’t a bowl of soup hit the spot?” I have no idea what they are talking about. I never want soup.

I like making soup - it’s pretty,

(pre-chicken soup)

(pre-black bean soup)

and I like the soup that I make. That is it. I have no interest in trying to eat warm salty water with a spoon. I’d rather go hungry. If I were a teacher and I were invited to come to a teacher’s lunch where all they were serving was soup, I’d stay in my warm classroom with a sandwich too.