You Don't Sweat Much for a Fat Girl

by Rivenbark, Celia

  Tiger reportedly transformed his rehab crib to the tune of $100,000 in upgrades. (You really didn’t expect him to do his “shame reduction” workshop with those drapes, now did you?) So this doesn’t sound like a man with low self-esteem to me.

  There was also buzz that when Tiger walked into a room at rehab, others were asked to leave immediately. Which must’ve made the whole group therapy a tad problematic.

  “My name is Tiger Woods and I’m a sex addict.”

  Silence.

  The “body count” last I heard was fifteen, but it could still go higher. There are still a few precincts out in the hinterlands waiting to be counted, and don’t forget, we still haven’t heard from the Broward County lunchroom ladies. He’s a playa, and shame on his married self, but addiction? I don’t think so.

  Of course, while womanizing wrongdoers John Edwards and Tiger Woods have apologized ad nauseum for their transgressions, there’s really only one way they can rehab their images. Edwards thought rebuilding houses in Haiti would do the trick, and Tiger is blathering on about his foundation do-gooding, but that sort of penance is just so very last century. No, there is clearly only one true path to redemption. I am speaking of course of Dancing With the Stars.

  Once I saw disgraced former congressman Tom DeLay bustin’ a move on the show, I realized that’s the next step for the hangdog Woods and Edwards and maybe even Elliot Spitzer and (yes, once more, give it up for … ) Mark Sanford.

  Somewhere Michael Vick’s agent must be slapping himself upside the head and wondering why he didn’t think of pitching his client to the DWTS producers. (Although they’d have to make sure that when Vick puts on the dog, he doesn’t really … well, you get the idea.)

  What better way to rehab a reeking image than to put on a zoot suit and murder the Charleston in front of God and Tom Bergeron?

  DeLay bragged that he lost twelve pounds to get in shape for the show. How ironic. All that weight loss and he remains completely full of shit.

  Opening up DWTS to famous disgraced womanizers would be a mite problematic, given the sexy costumes worn by the professional partners. Tiger, ever conscious of holding on to whatever endorsements he can, would have to announce that he resists arousal thanks to frequent meditative pauses sponsored by Cymbalta.

  Edwards, whose tryst with Hunter, a videographer, included rumors of a (ick) sex tape, would have to resist cutting the rug and asking, “Did you get that or do we need to go again? Cause, you know, I’m fine if we have to go again. Really? You got it? Are you sure?”

  On second thought, maybe DWTS should stick with its traditional assortment of plucky downwardly mobile celebs who tend to get cast: Your Jane Seymours. Your Adam Carollas. Your Harry Hamlins. I kind of like seeing the cute kid from some ’80s sitcom all grown up and fox-trotting in a game attempt to recapture the glory days of Urkel.

  At least that would’ve prevented the likes of DeLay and famezilla Kate Gosselin from joining the scripted fun. It would’ve been much more gratifying to see tubby ex-hubby, Jon, doing his dance image-rehab. Can’t you just see him shimmying in his little-boy tees while simultaneously smoking and leering at somebody’s underage daughter in the front row? It’ll be hard for Kate’s partner to convince her that she doesn’t get to lead. Kate has said she’ll do what it takes to feed her family and, by God, if that means wearing glitzy dresses and working out with the hunk of the month, well, so be it.

  She’s a giver, that one.

  And so am I, so I’m now going to share with y’all a recipe for that butter pecan cake I mentioned earlier. It’s perfect for picnics, potlucks or, yes, even the pokey.

  SUPER-EASY BUTTER-PECAN POUND CAKE

  4 eggs

  1 cup milk

  2/3 cup vegetable oil

  1 teaspoon vanilla

  1 cup chopped pecans, divided

  1 box butter pecan cake mix

  1 can coconut-pecan frosting

  Preheat oven to 350 degrees (325 for dark pans). Grease and flour a tube or Bundt pan. (Or cheat and use Baker’s Joy like I do.)

  Mix eggs, milk, oil, vanilla and half the pecans together. Add cake mix and beat well. Fold the can of frosting into the cake mixture and stir until incorporated. Pour the remaining pecans into the bottom of the pan. Pour cake batter over top. Bake 1 hour (or longer, until cake springs back when you touch it).

  Note: This cake is very rich and dense, so a little goes a long way. It has a from-scratch taste so people will think you went to a lot of trouble. Don’t tell ’em any different.

  18

  Bad Economy Waste-es My Time and Disgust-es Me

  Now comes the sad(ish) news that Reader’s Digest has declared bankruptcy, a phrase that never fails to crack me up ever since I saw Michael Scott, the wrenchingly dim boss on The Office walk around solemnly and loudly announcing “I declare bankruptcy!” thinking that was all there was to it.

  Oh, if only.

  Many teams of lawyers will be working to prop up the world’s most reliable magazine-slash-coaster to make it profitable again.

  I hope it works because it’s powerfully depressing to think that, one day in the near future, toilet tanks across this great land will sit unadorned.

  Ah, Reader’s Digest. A magazine that earned a solid following for many decades for leaving stuff out.

  It’s puzzling in the same way that decaf often costs more than regular and sugar-free muffins are always more expensive. But when it comes to the information age, we can’t get enough and maybe that’s why we should’ve realized Reader’s Digest’s days were numbered.

  (Although, it must be said that its retelling of the moldy classics in condensed book form are awesome. Here’s a synopsis of Romeo and Juliet RD-style: “Couple contends with bickering parents who oppose their romance; both die.”)

  With its comforting penchant for articles like “Seven Ways to Keep Your Bird Safer!” you have to wonder if the original article contained three other really important ways that you’ll never know about.

  Condensation may not be the best thing in all cases but I’ve got a soft spot for Reader’s Digest ever since they paid me $100 for a joke I submitted many years ago.

  I don’t remember what the joke was but I remember being giddy when the check came and I could officially add “magazine contributor” to a resume that, at the time, had “fry cook” as its most impressive entry.

  And I loved the way humor was such a large part of the magazine. Humor doesn’t get a lot of love in the magazine world. At least not the intentional kind. I still can’t stop laughing at Levi Johnston’s photo spread in Playgirl, but I don’t think that was supposed to be funny.

  And anytime I read a recipe in Bon Appetit that contains more than thirty-five ingredients, I downright guffaw. And then there are the unintentionally hilarious headlines in all those women’s magazines that are forever trying to balance naughty and nice and failing on both counts. That’s how you end up with headlines like “Ten Erotic Uses For Your Crock Pot (Think Long and Slow!)”

  Reader’s Digest can’t get enough of the kidding around with its faithful little ditties found in “Humor in Uniform,” “Life in These United States,” and so many other blurbs and funnies sprinkled throughout like fake cheese on popcorn.

  I read recently that it’s virtually impossible these days to get a humor piece accepted by the New Yorker because the head of the editorial department, Snobby McPruneface, doesn’t value humor as a genre. I got news for the New Yorker: I don’t even get half those black-and-white cartoons you’re so damn proud of.

  Reader’s Digest, on the other hand, was always the voice of the common man, the first place one could go for a quick quip that would be suitable for retelling at Rotary Club without even making the waitress blush. The headquarters is in Pleasantville, for God’s sake. How can you get any more American than that?

  Reader’s Digest thinks it may be able to revamp its loser image by going digital, but I’m not sure that’ll work since most people don
’t want to take their laptops into the bathroom. You can’t really read RD anywhere else. It just wouldn’t be right.

  For now, bless God, the little magazine is safe thanks to declaring bankruptcy (laughing again) but if all the legal team’s grand plans fail, this coffee-ringed staple of so many homes will disappear like Jell-O 1-2-3 mix and we’ll have to find somewhere else to read those somewhat hysterical articles like “Eight Medical Myths!” and “Hero Pet of the Year!”

  Call me thickheaded, but even with all the signs the economy was failing—double-digit unemployment, frozen credit, housing foreclosures in the thousands, a stock market in free-fall, I never really understood the depths of the recession until I read about Reader’s Digest and, perhaps more importantly, when Days of Our Lives fired founding couple, John Black and Dr. Marlena Evans.

  Paul Krugman’s thoughtful op-ed pieces on the economy never even fazed me. Ditto my nightly hit of Marketplace, a thoughty economy-based show on NPR. It never hit home until Salem’s wise and loving and occasionally-during-sweeps-months demon-possessed psychiatrist and her studly husband got the ax.

  As everyone knows (except, possibly, readers of the New Yorker), John and Marlena were the unrivaled first couple of soap opera land for decades.

  In a horrible injustice, the actors who portray Marlena and John were let go because they were at the top of the pay scale.

  Ever since their absence, we fans have been subjected to an exceedingly icksome parade of truly bad young actors who probably just work for weed.

  Why do I care so much about two TV stars that I don’t even know? After all, assuming they haven’t gone all crazy Fantasia and squandered their money on white sofas and no-account cousins, John and Marlena should live out their lives in financial security that the rest of us can only dream about.

  So it’s not that I’m worried that they’ll have to resort to putting on pizza-slice costumes and dance about by the side of the road to lure business. They won’t be like my poor laid-off friend, Lanny Ray, who swears he’s so poor he can’t even afford to go to the Rug Doctor.

  But to me, the loss of John and Marlena (as well as the potential loss of Reader’s Digest) are two of our most important economic indicators. When networks treat soap opera royalty like Marlena and John this way, there can be no hope whatsoever for the rest of us. We are all mere weeks away from wearing our barrel-and-suspenders recessionista look on public transportation.

  So, yes, I get it now. Thanks to these two longtime staples of my admittedly incredibly mediocre life.

  John and Marlena have demonstrated what months of NPR, CNBC, and egghead op-ed articles by Pulitzer Prizewinning economists could not. We. Are. Doomed. As Lanny Ray would say, “The whole sitchy-ation waste-es my time and disgust-es me.”

  I should’ve seen this coming. Didn’t I see all the obvious product placement tricks on DOOL over the past year? I specifically remember Sami Brady commenting rather clumsily to her current lover about the awesome dirt-busting ability of her new Swiffer and I immediately drove to the store and bought the regular and the Swiffer WetJet. Sami said they worked. And if you can’t trust a former death row inmate who posed as a man in Desert Storm and later gave birth to twins with two different fathers like a damn Labrador retriever, who can you trust?

  I thought that by now Marlena and John would be back, that the sponsors would realize that they must do what they could to retain Marlena (the divine Deirdre Hall) even if it meant that she would have to occasionally stare into the camera and say things like, “You know, ladies, when I need a smart pantsuit that won’t break the bank, I like to shop at Kohl’s. You’ll find it at the intersection of value and style.” She could wink, even. And then go right back into the waiting arms of John Black.

  Oh, cruel economy. How can there ever be DOOL without them? Even as their too-long bedroom scenes began to feel about as sexy as watching your parents make out, we still adored them through all their myriad kidnappings, lost-at-seas, brainwashings, buried alives, exorcisms, and divorces. Sometimes all within the space of a few minutes.

  The sour U.S. economy has managed to do what Days bad guy Stefano DiMeara has tried to do for more than thirty years: eliminate the Wonder Couple.

  In a world that can so casually toss aside Reader’s Digest and John and Marlena, apparently nothing is sacred.

  May God have mercy on us all.

  19

  Menopause Spurs Thoughts of Death and Turkey

  Right now, since you ask, I’m what is known as perimenopausal. “Peri,” some of you may know, is a Latin prefix meaning “SHUT YOUR FLIPPIN’ PIE HOLE.”

  There’s a huge difference between perimenopause and menopause; chiefly, during perimenopause you only think about killing your husband three to four times a day. Kidding! I meant three to four times an hour.

  Of course, many women in my situation try to learn as much as they can about this stage of life. Some even embrace and try to celebrate this phase, which can include insomnia, memory loss, night sweats, fatigue, and memory loss (ha!). I like to call these women crazy people.

  Others, like me, occasionally try to find comfort by discussing these very personal issues with trusted women friends. Who, if you must know, leave a lot to be desired lately.

  The biggest problem is that we women are competitive creatures. If you want to talk about your menopausal symptoms, your women-friends will just try to out-symptom you.

  Me: “I feel like I’m losing my mind! I have these little electric currentlike hot flashes all over my body and it happens about a dozen times a day!”

  BFF: “Oh, yeah? At least that’s better than forgetting everything like I do. The other day, I left my kid at the dry cleaners and took my husband’s shirts to see Up.

  Me: CAN’T I JUST COMPLAIN ONE TIME WITHOUT YOU TRYING TO ONE-UP ME?”

  BFF: “Shut up!”

  Me: “YOU shut up! (Cue wild mood swing out of no damn where.) I’m sorry. You’re the best friend I’ve ever had. PLEASE DON’T LEAVE ME!”

  BFF: “OK, so that’s not needy at all.”

  I can’t believe I was ever friends with Angie Romano. OK, sure I can. She’s the one who taught me how to look years younger in pictures. You know how when a bunch of women friends get together and get just a little sloppy drunk? A few of you even flirt inappropriately with the kinda cute Marine who has just asked you if you’re a veterinarian and when you say, “No, why?” he flexes his biceps and says, “Cuz my pythons are sick!”

  In the heat of the moment, feeling younger and friskier, one of the posse whips out a camera and tells the waiter to, “Take our picture!” Well, Angie taught all of us how to put our arms around each other, right at the neck, and smile. So what? So this! See, each one of us reaches just under the hairline on the back of the neck and pulls like hell on the neck skin so we all look twenty-eight years old again!

  Try it next time you’re having that ditzy, drunken photo taken. The one you’ll have to beg your teenager to e-mail your old high school classmates so they can marvel at how good your neck looks. You have to ask your teen to email it because you have no idea how to do it because you are old.

  So, really, it’s hard to hate anyone who is wise enough to figure out how to make my horrendous pelican neck fat disappear for picture time.

  Everyone my age likes to yak about menopause whenever we get together but I have a hard time talking or even thinking about my “females” because, let’s face it: That shit is gross. When my doctor told me one time that I had a uterine polyp, I threw up on his shoes.

  Maybe because he’s a lot like a nerdy nine-year-old boy, TV’s famous Dr. Oz thrives on the gross woman stuff. Remember the time he made Oprah hold up a big lacy-looking piece of intestinal fat for all of us to admire?

  “It’s called the O-mentum,” he said. And while I thought that was so like the wizard that’s Oz to try to kiss Oprah’s ass by naming an organ after her right there on the spot, turns out that’s the real name for it.

 
; I looked up “omentum,” saw a close-up picture of one, and threw up on my own shoes.

  A while back, I had a little trouble with the ol’ babymaker that led to a pretty significant case of anemia. And, no, you don’t lose weight when you’re severely anemic, which just pissed me off even more. Doesn’t blood weigh anything? It seemed that at least I’d drop a few pounds from not having any.

  Duh-hubby responded to my illness appropriately. For about two days. And then, on Day Three, I heard him trudge, very slowly upstairs to our bedroom, where I was lying, surrounded by empty bottles of Lipton Diet Green Tea and Nilla Wafers boxes.

  “I’m … sooooo … tired … ,” he managed before flopping onto my bedspace.

  Although I looked and felt as if the entire Cullen family had been over for dinner and I was the main course, I was expected to show sympathy for him?

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” I asked with way more concern than I actually felt.

  “I gave blood today and almost passed out,” he grumbled.

  Now I am not proud of how poorly I reacted to this information. While it’s unspeakably noble to donate blood, I selfishly wanted at least one of us to be running around with normal amounts of the stuff in our veins.

  “Sooooo … . tired,” he said again, pulling off his socks and pants, tossing his tie and shirt onto the floor, and crawling under the covers. My covers. My anemia-wracked covers.

  “Can you hand me the remote?”

  Christ.

  A few hours later, the NBA playoffs had worked their curative magic and Duh was feeling normal.

  Me? I was still feeling as crappy as ever. If you’ve ever had anemia, you know exactly what I mean. Of course, because I come from a long line of hypochondriacs, I’d decided that I was dying. I’d written my last smart-ass words. This was it for me.

  I told Duh that it was time to discuss my funeral, which I want to be huge and splashy, just like that one in that wonderful old movie classic, Imitation of Life, because that was the best funeral ever. Remember how there was a lavish funeral at the biggest church in New York featuring a gospel solo by Mahalia Jackson (who is, unfortunately, too dead to sing at my funeral but we could substitute Queen Latifah because after I saw her in Hairspray I knew she was up to the task). OK, so also in Imitation of Life, after the big, splashy funeral (at which you will wear a hat, assholes, this is my funeral we’re talking about, show a little respect) there is a parade in the streets with drummers drumming and pipers piping and the body rides along in a horse-drawn hearse and it proceeds through the entire city!