Tip It!

by Maggie Griffin

  To the best of my knowledge, the Supreme Court has been whittled down to one member, and thank God it’s a woman. Her name is Supreme Court Justice Judith. You may know her as Judge Judy.

  I love that Judge Judy Sheindlin. She’s so tiny, and cute, and sooo feisty! Tough as nails, she is, and I love it. Sometimes I think her show is the best on television. [Just a reminder, reader: There’s another show on television called Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List. In case you ever want to see the second-best show.] It’s certainly the best of all the judge shows. She gets the most respect of any of them in her courtroom. She will not stand for any nonsense, and isn’t that the way a judge should operate?

  “Real cases, real people,” the show’s announcer says. Real entertaining, I say.

  When she says her trademark lines—“I didn’t talk to you, don’t talk to me until I talk to you” or “I’m speaking!” or “Baloney!”—I get so excited. [Judge Kathy’s version is “Suck it, court is in session.”] She talks to people like they’ve never been talked to before, probably, and lets us all know it’s how somebody should have been talking to them all along. These are the dregs of society we’re talking about. [My whole life my mother has talked about “the dregs of society.” I still don’t know exactly who these people are, but I kind of think they’re my peeps. I’m talking to you, cast of Jersey Shore.]

  Someone told me once that Judge Wapner from The People’s Court griped about Judy that she was too rude, and not like how a judge should be. If I were a lawyer, that’s when I’d stand up and say “Objection!” [She makes it sound as if judges have feuds like rappers do.]

  I don’t know if I could ever be a judge, though. I could never be impartial like she is. Some of these guys who appear on Judge Judy, they look so mean, and they look like such slobs, I couldn’t give them a win if it killed me. [“Win”? Mom really loses me when she uses that legal jargon.] But Judge Judy sees through how they look. She may not want to find in favor of a creepy-looking guy, but she’ll say, “I wish I didn’t have to give you the win here, but in this case, it’s the law, and I have to follow the law.” You’ve got to admire somebody like that. [I’ve never had more admiration for law-followers. They really are the earth’s winners.]

  Also, even though I’m a lot older than her, we’re kind of the same generation. Especially when it comes to things like dealing with computers. She doesn’t get those machines, she doesn’t want them, and I love that about her. [And why did phones have to go all portable??? Grrr.]

  I think she and I would have great lunches together. She’s very funny. But would I want to go up against that Judge Judy in court? Probably not! [Mom, should I be worried? Are you involved in a conspiracy to abduct Angela Lansbury? Why are you even spending one minute worrying about your court date? I’m watching you.]

  She’s great at every kind of case, really, but she’s especially good where kids are concerned. She made her name in New York as a judge in family court, and boy does she get furious with parents when they pull this silly stuff where the mom won’t let a dad see his own kid, or a dad isn’t paying what he owes in child support. She just lays ’em low, and I get such a kick. [You’ll have to pardon my mother when she starts to use phrases from the Great War like “lays ’em low.”] At the same time, though, I can’t believe some of these people can’t figure out their problems together in private without going on television in front of a judge! If they had a brain cell between them, they could save tons of money and keep their kids from being so unhappy—can you imagine having to watch your parents bark at each other and air their garbage [You mean what I do for a living, Mom? What bought your condo?]—and it would be so much better all the way around. You can hate somebody’s guts and still deal with them civilly. [Try telling that to Ryan Seacrest, Judge Maggie.]

  Then again, we wouldn’t have this great television show. I tell ya, if you ever want to make your own life look like the steadiest, most rock-solid kind of life ever lived, just watch one of those judge shows.

  I listen to Dr. Laura Schlessinger, too, for kind of the same reason. [Oh Jesus, there go my gay ticket sales. Reader, you’re gonna have to take it from here. The minute I saw the word “Schlessinger,” which is basically the “n word” for gay people, I checked out. Good luck. I’ll see you post-Schlessinger.] She’s smart, and she has a wonderful laugh, although she doesn’t laugh so much anymore. Now, she’s not deciding cases like Judy, but she gets tough on people who come to her with their personal problems. Sometimes too tough, in my opinion. Some of these people really need to be yelled at, because they admit to committing the same mistakes over and over and over again. These girls who keep going back to guys who keep beating them up, it’s hard to listen to. But my mother used to say how some people should be more pitied than scorned. They’re poor dumb souls, is what it is. It’s kinda sad they don’t smarten up, and I know Dr. Laura is hard on them because she’s hoping they’ll eventually see the light, but I listen sometimes and go “Ooooh, come on now,” and flinch. It’s not the same as watching my dear Judge Judy notice a guy getting all sneery and cocky and thinking they can get away with smirking, and her just giving them what’s what.

  I could watch that every day. I certainly try to! [Is the Laura Schlessinger part over yet? Okay good. Sorry, gays and minorities.]

  There’s a lot of reality television I think is just too depressing. [You think?]

  I can’t watch too much of that show Celebrity Rehab. All those drug-addicted famous people acting like that, it makes you wonder why anybody would ever go on a show when you’re in that condition. Making a total fool of yourself. For what? A couple hundred dollars? [Oh, so now I have to pay Mom a couple hundred dollars? I see where this is going.] Why would a family allow that kind of behavior to be shown? See, you’ve got to protect some people sometimes.

  I watch shows like that, or Jerry Springer, and think, “Oh gee, humanity is just going downhill.” I don’t want that to be America! [She wants it to be Istanbul?]

  I like Keeping Up with the Kardashians, though. [Is my mom smoking crack? Is this why she should go on Celebrity Rehab herself?] When I first started to watch it, I couldn’t believe Kim, Khloé, and Kourtney were so uninhibited. I initially thought, “Oh, this is too much for me.” Oh my God, nothing is sacred in that family! They talk about anything and everything. They’re real open about sexual things, even stuff they’re doing themselves! [By “real open,” I guess she’s referring to Kim’s sex tape. That’ll make you real open real fast.] They just don’t mind that they’re appearing in Playboy, any of that. It’s like they all talk to one another and the mom like they’re girlfriends.

  But I developed a real fascination for them. [Maggie Griffin, anthropologist.] They do love the celebrity life. And you know what? They’re a close-knit family. They fight a lot, and they certainly say whatever they want to one another, but they really stick up for one another against outsiders. [By outsiders, I have to assume she means the non-Armenian community.] So even though there’s a lot of bickering, they love one another, and have a real attachment to one another. And I love that. [Dialing Dr. Drew now.]

  Kim, especially, seems to have a lot of common sense. [Yes. When I think Kim Kardashian, I think arbiter of common sense. “Judge Kim” can’t be far behind.] She seems to have matured a bit as she’s gotten more into the business. [Don’t you mean “the biz,” Mom?] I think the paparazzi treat Kim with more respect than they do her sister Khloé, who’s more upfront and says what she thinks more often. And hey, I admire Khloé for that, too. Plus, I think the mom is great. She’s very pretty, and I think she’s a good mom in her own way. Did you see the one when the kids bought her a pole for her birthday? I know they did it for fun, but I think the mom really uses it!

  I can’t imagine what I’d do if my kids got me one of those things. I just can’t see me with a pole. [Don’t call my father that name.] That really wouldn’t be very interesting. But for those Kardashians? It seemed just fine.

&
nbsp; Maggie’s Kitchen

  When it comes to food, hon . . . Wait, I know in these PC times, you’re not supposed to call people “hon.” But at a restaurant, when I want something, I can’t help it. I say, “Hon, can I have a little more wine?” I know I’m not supposed to, but I’m old-fashioned. So sue me.

  Anyway, back to what I was saying. When it comes to food, I like all kinds. Italian, Mexican, Polish, Chinese. [Polish?]

  The number of foods my dad mostly ate, though, you could count on one hand: beef, potatoes, bread, cabbage, and turnips. Steak on Sunday. [Grandpa has six fingers now, Mom.] My mom was a good cook, but because my dad was a very basic eater, she was a pretty basic cook. He wouldn’t eat turkey, pork, or chicken. Nothing green, no vegetables. If my mother wanted to make something like salmon croquettes for us, he wouldn’t touch that, so aside from the croquettes she’d have to make a pot roast just for him. If she made a beef stew, she’d make a separate one for us that had carrots and peas. For someone who made simple food, it could get a little complicated.

  Me in the kitchen, stumped over a recipe. Will it turn out?

  Hey look, my dad worked like a horse, and he wanted the stick-to-the-ribs meal he liked. I loved watching him eat his beloved boiled potatoes. Mom would put them in a bowl, and he’d chop them up, slather butter all over them, and then top it off with salt and pepper. It always looked so good! He lived to be ninety, so that tells you what a good eater he was. But he never changed his tune. After my mom died, I got a taste of what she had to do on the days I’d have my dad come to dinner. If it was Thanksgiving, there’d be turkey for me, Johnny, and the kids, and a little pot roast for him.

  There were some things my mom made very well. She could bake a rich, hearty Irish bread with thick crust that went down so well with a lot of butter and jam on it. Add a nice cup of hot tea and you felt like you’d had a meal. Her pancakes were wonderful, too.

  But when it came to trying other kinds of food, we had to go to other people’s houses. My girlfriend Rae was Italian, and when I’d be over there, her mom would feed us when we were hungry. That’s where I had spaghetti for the first time, and it’s become my favorite dish. As my sisters and I learned about more kinds of foods, we’d occasionally say to Mom, “Can we cook tonight? Let us try something different?”

  She’d say, “As long as the old man’s taken care of, that’s fine by me.”

  Then we’d set to work, making Jell-O salads, or sprucing up candied potatoes with marshmallows on top. Mom thought we were such good cooks because we were making fancier stuff. Our brothers, though, took after my dad with a lot of our experiments, and flat out wouldn’t eat what we made.

  When I got married, my poor husband suffered some, because Johnny’s mother was a good cook. He was used to seeing different kinds of meals. So when I was learning how to put food on the table—taking tips from my mom, my sisters, and my friends—he endured his share of experiments. The great thing was, he’d never say, “Mag, this is terrible!” I might be the one complaining that something had no taste, but all Johnny would say was “Mag, don’t bother to make this again.” I thought that was very gallant. And I knew that was the end of that dish.

  One time during the war when we were living in Spokane, Washington, in a little studio apartment in a big house, Johnny, who was in the army at that time, said he was going to bring some soldiers home for dinner. Now, these were guys who if you gave them bologna sandwiches, they’d think it was wonderful. They were just happy to be away from the base! So I was going to make the usual simple thing, spaghetti or hot dogs, but for a special treat, I thought I’d make a cake from a recipe I cut out of the newspaper. I hadn’t had a lot of luck making cakes from scratch, and this was a special type of cake, so who knows what I was thinking trying something new when I was just starting out as a home cook.

  Well, of course, at a certain point the older woman who ran the house we lived in said, “Gee, it should be rising by now.” Oh boy, what a farce this turned out to be. The cake came out, and each layer was only a half-inch thick! It was also as heavy as a rock. Don’t ask me what happened. I did everything I was supposed to do. I probably didn’t have the right ingredients. I was just crestfallen. I really wanted this to be a surprise for the guys, you know? Well, this woman’s grandson was there, a kid about twelve years old, and he started making fun of the cake. He kept saying, “Mrs. Griffin, you know what? You’ve found synthetic rubber!”

  Ha ha ha. I was ready to kill that kid! [I hear you, kid, wherever you are.]

  I got better as a cook, though. When I started having kids, I learned how to make hamburgers, pork chops, turkey, roasts. I could turn out a nice beef stew. When it came to vegetables, my kids weren’t eating cabbage and turnips like I grew up with, so I had to learn how to cook carrots and green beans. I will admit for a long time I used the canned stuff, but then you get a little better, and you say, “Let me try some fresh things.” That said, the children weren’t really vegetable eaters. I would fix whatever and hope they’d eat it. You push the better food, of course, but kids are foxy. Hide spinach in the potatoes and they’ll notice.

  And if they didn’t want something, they had their ways of making it look somewhat eaten, usually by pushing carrots and green beans to the edges of the plate, or scattering them around.

  My cakes improved, too. I used to make lots of cakes and pies. I was a great cake maker. I made a wonderful chocolate cake with white frosting, a nice white or yellow cake with chocolate frosting. Chocolate chip cake was another of my specialties. And my lemon butter bars, which I made from scratch, were always a hit. My brownies, too.

  I Did Cook!

  KATHY: Whoa, whoa, whoa, Mom. Are you really trying to convince everyone that you cooked?

  MAGGIE: I did cook. Who else did? You?

  K: Because I’d really like to know what you thought were your best dishes. Hamburger Helper Beef Stroganoff, perhaps?

  M: No, no, no, that came later, after you guys were older.

  K: What, then?

  M: You loved the sloppy joes.

  K: That’s a can of Manwich and a pound of ground beef, Mom. Don’t act like you were cutting tomatoes.

  M: I had my own special little touches. But it’s a family secret.

  K: What else?

  M: Dad said I made very good Italian spaghetti for an Irish girl.

  K: That’s not exactly a compliment.

  M: Well, what about my . . .

  K: McDonald’s?

  M: Oh, you kids love making it sound as if McDonald’s was all I ever fed you.

  K: Maybe because one of your “recipes” was throwing cash at us to go down to the McDonald’s. Remember? You’d come home from work . . .

  M: Well, that’s true . . .

  K:. . . and lie down on the olive green couch and say, “Here’s a dollar.”

  M: Occasionally that would happen. If you remember, Kathy, that was a treat for you guys. You loved it when that McDonald’s opened up down the street.

  K: And then everything changed. Fess up, Mom. Tell everyone about Fridays. Why it was “Thank God it’s Friday” for you before there were T.G.I. Friday’s.

  M: On Friday nights, when I worked at the hospital, I’d wait for your dad to come home from the store, and then after I left to go to work, he and one of you kids would go down to McDonald’s and he’d get their fish sandwiches for everyone.

  K: What was it? The Sabbath? Is that what Friday was?

  M: Oh, the fish.

  K: What the hell is that fake Catholic holiday?

  M: It wasn’t a holiday, Kathy. It was a religious observance. On Friday you didn’t eat meat.

  K: But that doesn’t make it appropriate or acceptable to send your children down the street for McDonald’s.

  M: Well, I thought it was okay. Look, when you became the last one in the house with us, I didn’t want to cook much anymore. All right? You were such a pain anyway, so picky. All you’d ever eat as a kid was grilled cheese sandw
iches and pizza. That was it. Honest to God . . .

  K: I was vegan! Did you ever think about that? Or thanks to McDonald’s, a pescatarian.

  M: You did like pancakes.

  K: That’s why I didn’t take a crap until I was fifteen, Mom. Because I ate grilled cheese sandwiches, McDonald’s, and pancakes.

  M: You didn’t even like hamburgers.

  K: Was that part of your “cooking”?

  M: That’s my cuisine.

  K: And really, Mom, how many cakes have you ever made from scratch?

  M: I’m not going to talk about that. Look, my cakes from the box were better than my scratch. But they became very good, and even my friends who would always bake from scratch went to the cake mix boxes.

  Me with a cake I baked myself. Take that, Kathleen!

  Okay, when boxed cakes came along, they were great. But I learned ways to enhance them and make them better. Maybe you’d put an egg in when they didn’t recommend it. Or I’d use a little more vegetable oil. Maybe if I was making a white cake, I might add orange juice to give it a little tang. With something like banana bread, I might put a little bit of applesauce in. It doesn’t hurt the taste and it keeps them nice and moist. I just hate dry cake.

  Of course, today I can’t handle rich desserts like I used to. Where before I might be able to eat a whole dessert, I can’t anymore. I have to tone it down. [Kirstie Alley will pick up the slack, don’t worry.] Same with some of the heavier meals I always loved, like clam sauce with spaghetti. I almost feel sick afterward. And as much as I adore Mexican food, I have to beware of the spicy dishes. I like them, but they don’t like me.

  It’s a different world now with food than when I was growing up. For one thing, there’s more access to cuisines from around the world. Salads are everywhere, and not just in summer. We never got lettuce or tomatoes or cucumbers in the winter when I was younger. Winter was cabbage and turnips. Food was truly seasonal. Now you can get strawberries and blueberries all year round. They might come from Argentina, when it’s their summer and our winter, and you might pay more for them, but to get them whenever you want them is just wonderful. Plus, food has so much more flavor now. Take what people do with vegetables. In my day you put butter on vegetables. Now you might have different herbs on them, and put olive oil over them instead of butter. And hey, they’re just as delicious that way! But every once in a while I’ll grab that pat of butter, especially for something like baked potatoes. I should never have baked potatoes. Between the butter I put on them, the sour cream, and the chives, they’re a whole meal.