WALDORF SALAD, PART TWO

So I wanted to mow the lawn, to have the freedom of a “boy” chore. This did not mean, of course, that I would get out of my “girl” chores. I still had to wash the dishes every night, even though I often succeeded in diminishing this task by escaping right after dinner to the bathroom, where I would dawdle and daydream and explore my reflection in the mirror. I thought the “call of nature” was a foolproof delay tactic, until one evening my older sister — dish towel in hand, scowl on face — bitterly accosted me with the truth: “You’re not pooping; you’re just being lazy.”

Mortified, I flew into a fit of denial: “I AM TOO POOPING!”

It was an argument too absurd — and too gross — for my mom to intervene in. So my sister was left to feel the injustice of my chore-shirking, and I was left to sit in the bathroom and feel the injustice of having to do dishes every night while my brother, visible through the kitchen window, played kickball or occasionally mowed the lawn with his bare chest gleaming in the sun.

I was fascinated by his tanned, lean torso, the beginnings of a well-muscled, athletic physique, and by his ability to take off his shirt anywhere. His shirtlessness and the freedom it represented to me — and thus the unfairness — was really the dawning of my feminist consciousness: a sense that male and female bodies were different and that males had way more freedom with theirs. This sense would be heightened for me when my mom told me I had to start wearing a bra (when I really didn’t need to); when I felt peer-pressured to shave the peach fuzz off my legs and armpits; when I noticed my brother could belch and spit and pass gas and otherwise make his body more comfortable — when the same behavior in me or my sister would be chastised as “unladylike”; when I learned that boys’ sexual explorations were winked at and girls’ were kept in check by the ever-present fear of being deemed “slutty." (My brother started sleeping with girls when he was 13. I know this because he confessed in the blank pages of a Bible he kept in his closet: “Angie and me have done it.” My parents’ reaction was what are you going to do? He’s a boy. By contrast, when they caught my 17-year-old sister rolling around the green shag carpet of our rec room with her boyfriend, she was punished and cautioned to be more mindful of her reputation.)

It’s not that I wanted to take off my shirt. I just wanted the freedom it represented. My parents’ concession to my “tomboy” leanings was that I could mow the lawn. I still had to do the dishes, and my brother now had one less chore, making the sexual division of labor in our household even more unfair — but it seemed like a victory nonetheless.

After a tedious lecture on lawn-mower safety — complete with a few horror stories about “surefire ways” to lose your hand or get your toes mangled or even get killed — my stepdad started the engine and showed me how to push the mower in straight lines. He took great pride in the appearance of his yard and home — and, for that matter, his wife, who unfailingly made up her face right before he walked in the door each night ("I don't want Dad to catch me looking like a wildwoman," my mom would say). The object in cutting the grass wasn’t just to keep it manageable; it was to make it pretty. The front lawn was mowed on the diagonal for maximum attractiveness, and the back lawn was simply mowed in straight lines (presumably because no one really saw it but us). A few times we won our small town's “best yard” award, which was a homemade sign that said “best yard” in stenciled letters. It would stand in the middle of the lawn until some yard judge took it away to some homeowner who had outdone us.

I could only mow the back lawn. If I did a good job with that, I could move up to the front lawn.

Alas, that was not to be. After mowing the yard for the better part of a summer, I realized that it was not a victory; it was a chore like any other. Boy chore or girl chore, it was still a chore — and not one you could get out of by pretending to use the bathroom. Worse, I would see my brother playing catch with his friends and grow bitter as I trudged up and down in straight lines. He should be mowing the damn lawn, not me! This is cutting into my before-the-sun-goes-down playtime! When my friend Susie interrupted my mowing to ask me to come play, I grew impatient. I told her I’d meet her at her house, then began running with the lawn mower to make quick work of my once-coveted task. Probably my stepdad thought a warning against running with a mower was a safety measure too obvious to mention. In any case, at some point he looked out the kitchen window and saw me sprinting, sometimes backward, up and down the lawn with this deadly, whirring blade. I know he had visions of me tripping and being shredded as he rushed out of the house screaming “TURN IT OFF!”

I didn’t get to play with Susie that night. I had to go straight to bed instead — while the sun was still up and I could hear my brother and the neighborhood boys chattering on the patio and bouncing a basketball. It was definitely a defeat for me, but it was also a victory: Next week at this time he would be back behind the mower — shirtless, sure, but I could live with that.

WALDORF SALAD, PART ONE

The other day I made my first Waldorf Salad, a simple concoction of apples and walnuts and celery and mayonnaise.

This is significant.

Waldorf Salad was a staple of my childhood. My grandma, and sometimes my mom, would make it whenever there was a potluck-type family gathering. I don’t ever remember having it for an everyday meal. It was special.

I didn’t eat it. I don’t remember disliking it per se. It just seemed like adult fare to me, like filet mignon or a cocktail.

But I loved watching it being made. My grandma would stand at the counter, half dressed for the event — usually in her hose and slip. It seems like her skirt was always somewhere being pressed. If no men were around, she’d walk around the kitchen in her bra — some super lacy D-cup contraption that really played up her cleavage. Her Tabu perfume would mingle with the smells of roasting turkey or freshly baked dinner rolls.

The Waldorf Salad involved a lot of chopping. She would line up several stalks of celery and with machinelike precision cut them into hundreds of tiny, remarkably uniform, pieces. Then she would work on the apples. I was completely amazed that she could peel an apple in one long, unbroken red spiral — which I would admire and play with for several minutes before devouring. My other grandma, who was more likely to don a plaid shirt than a lacy bra, could also perform this remarkable peeling feat, but in her case it was complicated by having to squint over the smoke of a Benson and Hedges cigarette dangling from her lips. As the peel of her apple got longer and longer, so did the ash on her cigarette. Sometimes I’d tell her the ash was about to drop, but she never seemed concerned. When the apple was bare, she’d hold it in one hand and ash her cigarette with the other. Then she’d take a big drag and wink at me.

Both my grandmas used to say the peel was the best part. They also said this about carrots and potatoes, and I remember being really confused that the best part was always being thrown away. The same was true of the fat from meats and the crust from bread. This still confuses me.

After all the chopping was done, my grandma would find some pretty glass bowl and assemble all the ingredients. Then she would stick it in the fridge and go finish getting dressed. It always happened in the same order. Usually I would go watch her complete her toilette. I’d sit on the commode and rummage through her giant bag of costume jewelry, making bold fashion suggestions as she finished her makeup and doused her jet black hairdo with a can of Aquanet.

Once we were at the event, the men and women would inevitably segregate — the former to watch a sporting event on TV, the latter to chatter in the kitchen. I loved these all-women groupings as a kid. I would usually sit quietly near my mom or on her lap and just take it all in — a crazy klatsch of recipe sharing and mothering tips and soap opera gossip and husband complaints. It was magical.

As I got older, though, I grew to dislike the segregation by sex. As I started to notice male privilege everywhere, the charms of those gatherings wore off. Why do the women have to do all the cooking, all the cleaning, all the nourishing, all the child-rearing while the men sit on their asses in the living room? my 13-year-old self began to wonder. Why did I have to do "girl" chores and my brother "boy" chores? How did taking out the trash once a week compare with dusting the whole house? How did occasionally mowing the lawn shirtless on a beautiful summer evening compare with washing and drying a sink full of dirty dishes every single night? How could these beautiful women who could peel an apple in one stroke tolerate this injustice? How could my mother ask me to clean the bathroom while my brother lazily tinkered with his erector set? She wants me to polish the toilet so he can pee all over it without so much as a thank-you?

The beautiful women had started to seem like enemies.

MORE FROM THE WHITE GIRL

Molly laughs at her own jokes. And she expects you to do the same.

WELL-REGULATED STUPIDITY

Some gun wackos in south-central Kansas, and I'm sure elsewhere, are now actually boycotting stores and other establishments that hang those little red signs that prohibit guns. Out of 140 storefronts in one town, only 14 had the signs, and those were mainly financial institutions and medical practices — places, I admit, where the need for armed self-defense could arise at any second.

One wacko spokesman said, "What that sign is telling the majority of us, myself in particular, is that (store) is against the Constitution of the United States, which gives us the right to bear arms."

Yeah.

I'm sure the framers foresaw well-regulated militias forming at The Gap.

Hello, dude. Stores and doctors' offices and the like are a little something called PRIVATE PROPERTY. Maybe you've heard of it? You're always invoking its defense as a reason to arm yourself.

Your constitutional rights are against the government, not private individuals. You can't burn a flag in my living room or insult my mother or practice misogynistic, homophobic, fundamentalist voodoo — and claim your constitutional rights have been violated when I kick your ass to the curb.

Stores are private property, too, just like my house — with the exception that they engage in interstate commerce and are hence subject to more regulation. They can't, for example, deny someone service because he is black or because he is in a wheelchair. I'm sure you know this already because you were no doubt at the forefront of the civil rights movement. (Gun folk, I have noticed, are always championing Constitutional liberties — wasn't it a well-armed militia that got women the right to vote? I'm pretty sure all those broads were packing. And wasn't it gun folk who rallied to desegregate public schools and give women reproductive choice and criminal suspects the right to not have a confession tortured out of them? And wasn't it gun folk who convinced the Supreme Court that police can't come into your house and arrest you for making love with someone of the same sex? I'd have to re-read my history, but I'm 99 percent sure that all the great champions of the Constitution were well-armed militiamen and militia-gals.)

Nonetheless. As big a supporter as you are of the Constitution — always going to bat for fellow Americans in need — you should understand its parameters — and just live with the fact that you can't bring a deadly weapon into my store if I say you can't.

CONCEAL THE SIGNS!

Concealed guns are now legal in Kansas. I don't know which is worse, the idea of all these wackjobs walking around armed or the marring of our public spaces with these hideous no-gun signs.

I'm guessing the wackjobs were secretly packing before it even became legal, so I'll go with the signs.

The first time I saw one was while I was visiting Ben and Erin. I was walking Mabel near the county health department, and I noticed an ugly, off-putting sign on the front door. I asked Erin what was with the awful clip art on a government building — I'm a big believer that government buildings should be aesthetically pleasing, awe-inspiring even; their construction should not go to the lowest bidder, but to the best builder, and their entryways should not be littered with homemade clutter — and she informed me that the clip art, far from being the handiwork of an unimaginative health department clerk, was in fact the official government sign.

So, not only do we have to put up with wackjobs armed to the teeth, we have to hang big ugly signs on the halls of government and commerce and learning and worship to tell the wackjobs they're not welcome. AND, the signs have to be infantile and conspicuous because the wackjobs are illiterate rednecks who only understand big symbols, especially if they are circular and red and look vaguely like a target.

The other day I was walking to campus and was struck by a big metal sign showing said symbol with a bit of text about how guns are forbidden on university property. I literally stopped in my tracks. Of course they are forbidden! I shouted to myself. Of course they are! This is a Goddamn university! Some things go without saying. It would be like posting a sign at the entrance to campus saying it's forbidden to stick your bare ass out your car window or have a kegger on the chancellor's lawn or fart out loud in the library. Of course it's forbidden — morally, aesthetically, cosmically, ontologically. "Legally" is the least of it.

And what do the wackjobs do when they encounter such a sign? Do they disarm on the spot? Do they capitulate to their liberal overlords and leave the guns in the car, thereby exposing themselves and possibly their innocent families to the untold dangers of walking down a street in a quiet Midwestern town? Do they risk life and limb in this fashion because some left-wing pussies think guns are inappropriate in certain places? Don't those egghead pansies know that a wild-eyed minority crackhead can jump out of the bushes at any moment to deprive us of our property and ravage our womenfolk?

Or do they engage in civil disobedience — that beautiful legacy of peace-lovers Thoreau and Gandhi and King — and keep packing?

LOW ART

From my diary, on Jan. 17, 2007

I have finally given up.

No more "L-Word." Ever.

My relationship with this lame, lousy, lazy, lusterless and inexplicably long-running excuse for a television program is lost. I'm logging off, letting go.

Come 9 o'clock Sunday I'll be reading a book, not sitting in front of the TV hoping this week the show will miraculously redeem itself.

How many hours of my life have I wasted on this banal and bothersome show? And what has it given me besides an obsessive-compulsive disorder to describe things with a string of alliterative adjectives, in the style of its grating and grotesque theme song, which was evidently penned by some pubescent "poet"?

Girls in tight dresses
Who drag with mustaches
Chicks drivin' fast
Ingenues with long lashes
Women who long, love, lust
Women who give
This is the way
It’s the way that we live

Talking, laughing, loving, breathing,
fighting, fucking, crying, drinking,
riding, winning, losing, cheating,
kissing, thinking, dreaming.

This is the way
It’s the way that we live
It’s the way that we live
And love

Jesus Christ. I could have been spending those hours online trying to meet an actual "L-person." (I mean, I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that the "L" in the title stands for "lesbian," but I admit I can't be sure. The show is so subtle.)

Listen to me. Off on some tired tirade. I always tell my students to make their points with concrete details, not vague generalities. I can see why they ignore me; generalities are so much more satisfying. However, for the sake of not being a hypocrite, I should touch on some specifics.

This show is bad because:

1. It's not good.

OK, that's another generality. What isn't good about it? Let's see. The writing, for one. The sex, for two, and the acting, for three. When the show started a few years ago, I thought it was mediocre at best, but I stuck with it because (a) it's a lesbian show, which I'd like to support and (b) it was a nice break from the steady stream of STRAIGHT FARE EVERYFUCKINGWHERE. I'm not a heterophobe, but sometimes, especially when you live in Kansas, it's refreshing to see people like yourself (not that I'm like ANYONE on the "L-Word," except for the liking girls part, but that's a big part). I'm sure you heteros would agree if EVERYTHING around you were gay that it would be nice to see a show with a few straight people, even if it were something asinine like "Everybody Loves Raymond." And (c) the show had some interesting characters and situations, at least in the beginnning, that showed some promise. That went to hell when inexplicable TV-world things started happening, like when the unemployed blonde with no aptitude for filmmaking suddenly became a hip studio exec, or when the anorexic n'er-do-well got a hot job as a hairstylist at a trendy skateboard store, or when the rich heiress got cut off by mommy and had to apply for receptionist jobs. It's just crap.

2. It's a lifestyle commercial. Increasingly the show became about how the characters looked, what they were wearing, the houses they lived in, the cars they drove, the art they liked, the "product" in their hair. In a recent, especially shameful product placement, the fallen heiress comes home exhausted from her job search and pulls a bottle of Kahlua out of a bag. She doesn't drink it or anything; she just sets it conspicuously on the table, as if to say "Choosey femmes choose Kahlua." There's even an "L-Word" clothing line. I know, I know. This shit started with straight TV, but, fuck it, I expect better from family.

3. It starts with the goal of gay drama rather than good drama. They oughta be ashamed. They have a forum to make a high-profile, well-produced, revolutionary, one-of-a-kind show about gay women, and this is what they churn out? Lipstick lesbian fashion ads? Do they think the gayness redeems the lack of goodness? Or do they really think this is good? Why didn't the producers hire first-rate writers, "Sopranos"-caliber writers, "Six Feet Under"-caliber writers?

4. It employs every gay cliche in the book. All gay people go to bars every night. Bars and trendy coffee shops are the center of a gay person's world. Gay women mainly sit around talking about synonyms for the vulva and vagina. Gay people move from relationship to relationship; long-term mating is bound to fail. Gay people are principally concerned about appearance and style. Sometimes they talk about art or consumer choices, but mainly they are obsessed with relationships and scoring and gossiping about other gay people.

5. It wants to shock for the sake of shocking, even though it really isn't shocking at all; it's just stupid. It's not revolutionary to show a dildo or bondage gear or "obscene" art or role playing; what would be revolutionary is to show two women — to have at least two women out of this many-charactered menage — who love each other and provide for each other and have good sex without a suitcase full of penis substitutes.

6. It's not REALLY gay. Please. It's mere lesbian chic, especially with all these straight actresses doing guest spots. The show's slogan could be "We're here, we're not really queer, but we hope you buy a lot of shit from us."

From my diary, on Feb. 4, 2007:

Cybill Shepherd has really spiced up this show! I can't wait until next week. Amy's a big fan, too. Maybe if she's in town we can mix up some White Russians and watch it together.