"So I Think This Is The Best Costume For Today..."

First of all, for this to make a lick of sense, you have to have seen one of my all-time favorites, Grey Gardens. (If you haven't seen it, put it in your Netflix queue right this second and thank me next week.) Here's a quick synopsis:

The unbelievable but true story of Mrs. Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter Edie, the aunt and first cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Mother and daughter live in a world of their own behind the towering privets that surround their decaying 28-room East Hampton mansion known as "Grey Gardens," a place so far gone that the local authorities once threatened to evict them for violating building and sanitation codes. Mrs. Beale, a.k.a. "Big Edie," was born an aristocrat, sister of "Black Jack" Bouvier, Jackie O's father. "Little Edie" was an aspiring actress of striking beauty who put her New York life on hold to care for her mother--and never left her side again. Together they descended into a strange life of dependence and eccentricity that none had ever shared until the Maysles Brothers arrived with their camera and tape recorder in hand.

So throughout the film, Little Edie fashions all these wonderful, batty outfits with scarves, swimming suits, costume brooches, turbans made from knit sweaters or towels, pantyhose, shabby fur coats, and white leather pumps. Here she is describing the logic of her sartorial choices. Sometimes, when Ellie and I play with the dress-up clothes, I can't resist styling my child a la Edie. And she loves it, the little nut.

(Sadly there were no live raccoons available for these shots.)











You know, should something unfortunate befall my husband, Ellie and I could potentially end up like Little Edie and Big Edie, a couple of lovable weirdos, holed up in a crumbling house, belting show tunes and nagging each another and snacking on ice cream and cat food "pate." Because A) we like show tunes and costumes B) Ellie is a staunch woman and has been know to eat some cat food in her time and C) we potentially have the whole hoarding-and-living-in-squalor thing knocking around in our genes, lying in wait, like a messy DNA time bomb. But thaaaat's a story for another time.

If you know and love Grey Gardens, tell me all about it. Why do you love it? Favorite line? Moment? Revolutionary costume? Also, do you think it qualifies as child abuse to dress my child like this for Halloween? Discuss.

Salad Days

It was hot--over ninety degrees!--this weekend, the flowers were exploding, the skies were clear, and the wading pool made its triumphant return to the backyard. Looking at these pictures, I feel downright giddy about Summer, like the heady beginning of a new love affair, when everything is perfect and promising and tingly, and it seems impossible that, in just a few weeks, Summer's bone-dry, soul-sucking heat will be riding my last nerve. All too soon, I will be cursing Summer's name, avoiding Summer's calls, and eventually just trying to skip town with that sexy, cool Autumn guy.

But, for the moment, Summer and I are likethis. Ah, young love.

Alive With Fish, Dying Inside

Last week, Veronica of Toddled Dredge wrote a succinct list of things that creep her out and then asked that I do the same. O, would that it could be a succinct list! So here is the first part in a series I like to call The Top Ten Very Specific Embarrassing Things That Give Me The Serious Creeps, Thanks For Asking (Although Only One Of You Asked, And The Rest Must Suffer.)

First up: swimming in the open ocean, or more specifically, swimming above all the stuff in the open ocean. Lucky for you and my future psychotherapists, I can pinpoint the exact origin of this fear and, like so many things in my childhood, it came from a book.



The book, an illustrated nature book for children, contains a certain page, a page I pored over a thousand times, a page I studied until I had goosebumps and chills and shortness of breath. This is the page:

Go ahead. Click to enlarge. I dare you. And please be sure to enjoy this single paragraph of copy:



I suppose the phrase "alive with fish" should have intrigued me, piqued my interest, filled me with childlike wonderment, et cetera, et cetera, but it only filled me with primal, white-hot, fishy-scented terror. Perhaps if the fish in question had been, say, beautiful, colorful tropical fish, or fish with friendly little fish faces, or basically anything but this:



Or this:



Or sweet mother of mercy this:



I'm no marine biologist, but do some of these fish even exist? (If I Google "giant swallower" I only get Native American mythology and porn.) Are these De-Bunked Mythical Fish of The Seventies or something?

And surely you've noticed the serious scale issues with this illustration. Check out the size of those prawns vis-a-vis the giant squid. And doesn't it look like all that stuff is just right there, like five feet from the beach? As far as I could tell, swimming out into the ocean a few yards was going to go something like this:



A murky, teeming mess of teeth, tentacles, scales, and stingers mere inches from my tender, pasty toes? Sharks and hatchet fish and gulper eel and viper fish and something called the freaking giant swallower? Count me out, suckers.

And the saddest part is this: my encounters with the actual ocean were limited to the very occasional family trip to California or Hawaii. Living in land-locked Idaho, I really should have spent my spare time worrying about mountain lions, white supremacists, and Larry Craig. Still, we did go to the lake every summer and don't fool yourself, lakes have their own set of problems.



At any rate, please don't let this put a damper on any of your upcoming vacation plans, OK? I don't want you to think about this story or that illustration or any of my rambling nonsense when you wade into the (briny, dark, vast, unknowable) sea.

But don't take it from me, take it from Ol' Squiddy here:

A Short List Of Things I Want To Write About, Should I Get My Act Together

• Giant squid, fear of
• Toilets, fear of
• Top Chef, addiction to
• Padma Lakshmi, annoyance with speech patterns of
• Baby boy, rapturous love affair with
  

So much to say, so little ability to type a coherent sentence. It's been a crazy-busy week, but you know how it goes...

Fear Me, Kathie Lee

I just watched Heather Armstrong on The Today Show explaining "mom blogs" to Kathie Lee Gifford, which resulted in Kathie Lee politely expressing her mixed emotions about the whole thing and general fear of computers and, I hate to say it, but I'm extremely proud to be doing something, anything, that frightens and confuses Kathie Lee Gifford.

This one's for you, K.L. You've been scaring and confusing me for years, girlfriend.

(Edited to add a link to the video.)

Cakery

You know, when your great-grandpa is turning ninety (that's thirty times older than you!) you might want to make him a cake.



We'll make the cake together. You pour the oil (which does look like apple juice, but sure doesn't taste like it) and count the eggs before they crack and turn the mixer on low then medium then wow! that's fast! You decide that it should be a dinosaur cake and you, of course, don't mean this to be a joke about age, you're just sure everyone loves dinosaurs. And why wouldn't they? The cake: chocolate with green buttercream. The dinosaurs will love it.



My mama always used homemade buttercream frosting (butter, sugar, vanilla, splash of milk) and there is nothing like it. Buttercream is sweet and feels good in your mouth and gets a perfect, crystalline, feather-light crunch at room temperature. It is also very good piped onto a finger and licked clean, just like that. And a little will go a long way; try not to ruin your dinner.



Grandpa loves his cake, but I think more than anything he loves you. You help him blow out his candles and he is very appreciative. You blow out the candles in your underwear because there is so much fresh garden soil in Nan's yard, boxes and boxes of it, and you're only human, right?



It's good to be ninety, but I can tell there is nothing like being three.

Warning: Gratuitous Messy Baby Photos Ahead

If you have a delicate constitution and are easily grossed out by babies covered in pasta sauce, you might want to move along. Moreover, if you're bored by lazy blog posts with nothing but shameless baby photos, you may want to join the others over there. Please accept my apologies. Perhaps tomorrow I will dazzle you with searing social commentary or insightful life lessons.


Or perhaps not.

Special Roll Of Gummi And Twinkie With Spicy OCD

This is how I spent my Wednesday afternoon:







Over a year ago, I first spied cute trompe-l'œil dessert sushi at the delightful Not Martha and I've wanted to make some ever since. I finally seized the opportunity when called upon to make a snack for the church youth group, because here's what I know about youth:

1) They like crap, particularly processed crap.

2) They like to eat candy that is super hot or super sour or generally unpleasant and punishment-oriented.

3) They will eat anything sweet, even if that sweet is basically a wad of Twinkie, green apple fruit roll, and gummi worms.



I used a basic batch of Rice Krispie treats, one box of Twinkies, lots of green apple natural fruit rolls, all manner of freaky gummi candy, and some orange sanding sugar. And, though shopping for all the junky, junky crap I never buy was really fun, it looked pretty horrifying heaped on the grocery conveyor belt. I actually felt compelled put it in its own pile, segregated from my bananas, organic milk, lettuce, and bread, just so the nosy woman behind me, the one with the JUDGING eyes, might lay off the judging.

I wanted to turn around and say, "Listen, lady, this stuff if for the children. The children, OK? Because I believe the children are our future, even if that future might involve juvenile diabetes as a direct result of this snack."



At any rate, I cannot even tell you how much fun it was making the sushi. The process was surprisingly easy, yet deliciously nit-picky. This would be a great project to do with kids, unless those kids are ages three and one and would consider killing their own mother to get at all that candy. Ellie hovered and lurked while I was taking pictures, saying things like, "It's OK, Mom. I just smelling one. I just smelling, OK? Mmmmm. It smells like GOOD."

Much like their confectionery predecessors, the sushi were heavily, excessively photographed. (I actually thought they looked better in pictures than in person.) And the kids reportedly loved them and ate every piece in a matter of minutes, but don't consider that a flavor endorsement. Bless their hearts, but those kids eat like they have hollow legs, or possibly tapeworms, or possibly hollow legs filled with tapeworms.

And on that note, bon appetit!