Belle Weather

by Celia Rivenbark

  No, Sugar, they get that way from eating macaroni and cheese at the Cracker Barrel five times a week and twice’t on Sunday.

  Even though The Secret smacks of hooey and hokum to most God-fearing Southerners, I’m sure there are a few who are thinking it’s worth a try if it helps them get a husband with a trust fund or a boat slip in the best marina.

  Even my best redneck friend, Dempsey, says he’s using The Secret to get a new bass boat. Face it, y’all: When rednecks embrace The Secret, that tells me that it has done gone mainstream.

  “I just sit around and picture me sitting in that bass boat,” says Dempsey, whose wife, Lo-Retta, turned him onto changing the universe with his mind after seeing Oprah on the TV at the Laundromat one fateful afternoon.

  Lo-Retta admitted that changing the universe with his mind might be ambitious for someone who has trouble remembering to change his underwear, but she’s proud of all the positive magnetism her husband is projecting.

  “My Dempsey is just eat up with positivity,” she told me one day.

  Because a big part of The Secret is being prepared for the inevitable granting of wishes and goals, Dempsey has laid in a stock of PBRs and Slim Jim beef jerky sticks to take out on the boat when it arrives.

  “You have to be ready for the fulfillment of your magnetism,” Dempsey said. “The laws of attraction are all that governs our entire universe.”

  “What does that really mean?” I asked.

  “Shit if I know,” said Dempsey.

  Somewhere, Rhonda Byrne is laughing her bony ass off.

  26

  French Women Suck at Competitive Eating

  Unlike Al Gore, we women spend an inordinate amount of time worried about our weight. Like many women, I’m a yo-yo dieter, putting it on and taking it right back off, then putting it on again and taking about half of it right back off. I know. The math isn’t good, is it?

  I have to tell you that the fastest dieting success I’ve ever had was with the fabulous and famous French Women’s Diet, where you eat tiny portions of things you love along with lots of red wine.

  I dropped twelve pounds in three months using the French Women’s Diet but the German woman within spent the next twelve months pummeling French woman into strudel and all the weight is back.

  Oh, well. I can’t say it wasn’t fun. My German/Swiss heritage leaves me most of the time not knowing whether to say “yes” to another round of brats, or simply yodel.

  I’d been inspired by the book French Women Don’t Get Fat, which stresses tiny portions of wonderful things. Inside my body, it was as if a real French woman had taken up residence. I imagined her petulant and puny, even trying desperately to get me to take up smoking again. When I was observing the French Women’s Diet, I ate like Nicole Richie sans the Vicodin buffet.

  But German woman would have none of it. As the months passed and the pounds slowly and steadily piled back on, I imagined a sort of internal SmackDown between the French woman with her long eyelashes and perpetually bored expression and the German woman, ruddy-cheeked and precious in a starched apron, simply urging me to have that second pound of hot potato salad.

  Occasionally, my Swiss heritage would remind me that it was time for yet another cup of cocoa. Yo-dee-lay-ee-o!

  “Acck! You’re not going to drink that without marshmallows, are you?” the German woman within would remind me while, I imagined, wiping her sturdy flour-dusted hands on her apron.

  “You vill die vat and unattractive,” hissed the French woman, while licking a microscopic piece of cheese.

  I can pinpoint the precise moment at which I finally kicked the French woman to the curb. It was over lunch with my friend, Nan. I was having my usual: a single leaf of romaine and a very large unsweetened tea. Nan was having a meatball sandwich and a side of fries.

  I could tell she had something on her mind. Finally, she looked me dead in the eye and said, “You’ve lost too much weight; your face is looking too old.”

  Now you might say to yourself, what kind of friend is that? And I’d say, the very best and dearest kind there is.

  You don’t need no stinkin’ intervention with a friend like Nan. I immediately summoned the waitress and ordered a huge plate of pasta with sausage and peppers. From somewhere deep inside of me, I heard a muffled squeal of horror from the French woman. It wasn’t like I’d developed twin personalities, exactly, but I’d kind of gotten to like “Gigi,” as I called her. What? Like you’ve never had an imaginary friend living inside of you?

  From that day forward, it was full-scale war. Eventually, the American woman came in to lend German woman a hand from time to time in the form of fried mushrooms with ranch dressing dip.

  And the rest, as they say, is history.

  Once I realized that it was possible to lose weight on the French Women’s Diet anytime I wanted, I toyed with the notion of competitive eating.

  It’s not as bizarre as it sounds. The winners of those contests are almost never fat. In fact, most of them are tiny, like world record holder and Polly Pocket–sized Sonya “The Black Widow” Thomas, who once devoured 432 oysters in ten minutes.

  What a woman! When I read about Sonya, let’s just say that I felt a lot less guilty about sampling all five desserts on the Golden Corral buffet that one time.

  OK, every time.

  Sonya, who weighs just 100 pounds, trains for competitions and makes tons of money when she wins. She goes to all-you-can-eat buffets to stretch her stomach.

  Competitive eating really is a sport or ESPN wouldn’t cover it, right? This brings an almost virtuous spin to the All You Can Eat concept. If you hog all the hushpuppies at Captain Gnarly’s Big Barge of Chum Buffet & Fish Camp, you can always shrug, point to your bulging midsection, and say, “In training, you know.”

  In an interview, Sonya admitted that “Probably sixty percent of the people out there think competitive eating is really stupid.” Not to quibble, hon, but I suspect it’s closer to ninety-five percent. Still, I hate to argue with a woman who can eat eleven pounds of cheesecake in nine minutes. She so rocks!

  Imagine Sonya joining my pals for our monthly Girls Night Out, where we all divide a key lime tart no bigger than a jar lid into six pieces while squealing about how full we are.

  “You disgust me,” she would say while demolishing eight pounds of margarine.

  Competitive eaters are never from France, for obvious reasons, but there are many from Asia and the United States. One of the most famous is Takeru “The Tsunami” Kobayashi, who earned $150,000 in contest winnings. To the people who say it’s not a legit sport, Takeru is laughing all the way to the bank. Puking and laughing, that is.

  Takeru ate fifty hot dogs in twelve minutes and seventeen pounds of cow brains in fifteen minutes. He trains by eating only cabbage and water before competitions and, one hopes, staying far, far away from family and friends.

  As a Southerner, though, my allegiance must remain with Carson “Collard Greens” Hughes of Tennessee, who wolfed 2.5 pounds of cooked collards in seventeen seconds. His aunt said he did it at home all the time, “never leaving nothing for the young’uns to fight over.”

  There’s even a mayonnaise-eating contest coming up, according to the competitive eating events calendar, which I subscribe to, just in case.

  If I can beat the world record of eating four quarts in eight minutes, I could earn cash and a nifty nickname like “Jiffy Lube.”

  Maybe we should all think about eating as much as we can stuff into ourselves right now because, according to scientists, millions of honeybees are dying off and if it keeps going like this, we’ll basically run out of food by the year 2012.

  Which means, you guessed it, we’ll be stuck eating Lunchables.

  Last night, I lost sleep fretting about the dwindling bee population. They’re just dropping dead and nobody knows why, not even Al Gore, who has gotten so distressed about it, he’s gained another forty-five pounds just in worry weight.

  If he doesn’t
watch out, he’s going to replace button-nosed has-been Valerie Bertinelli as Jenny Craig’s new spokesmodel. Of course, Al would be a huge downer because he’d take his little melting polar ice caps charts and graphs everywhere with him. He is so party buzz kill.

  Then again, without the bees, there won’t be any food of any kind so we’ll all pretty much look like Mischa Barton who, as my Uncle Peanut likes to point out, “hasn’t got enough fat on her ass to fry her own ears.”

  Just since I started writing this, another 40,000 bees have died. Are you worried now? You bloody well should be because scientists say that by pollinating our fruits and vegetables, bees are responsible for every third bite of food we eat. More if you’re a simple-minded bear who wears an entirely too small red shirt and no pants.

  The problem, dubbed “colony collapse disorder,” seems to be that bees go out in search of nectar and pollen just like they always have but they never come back. It’s as if a giant bee Rapture has taken place, except I’m fairly certain bees aren’t even particularly religious.

  Years ago, I was friends with a woman whose husband left for a carton of milk and never came back. Turns out he had a little extracurricular pollinating of his own to take care of. No loss there.

  But bees? They’re really important, y’all, and not just because in another five to ten years, you might actually have to buy another one of those bear-shaped plastic bottles of honey. (Why don’t they put honey in little bottles the size of nail polish? At least that way you wouldn’t be looking at that weird white crud that forms on the top of the bottle after about year four.)

  So what the hell is killing the bees? Some scientists have deduced that the problem is that they’re “stressed out,” which sounds ridiculous to me because it’s not as if they’ve ever had an adjustable rate mortgage.

  Yes, I love bees now, because I realize how hard they’ve been working for us all these years. Except for the carpenter bees. They’re still assholes.

  Maybe all this means that the bees are going to put us all on an involuntary weight-loss program called starvation. And while I’m not looking forward to it, and it’s certainly going to ruin my budding competitive eating career, it may be the only way to get those Ambien druggies to shape up.

  A study found that some people who take the sleeping pill gain more than 100 pounds because they’re eating in their sleep.

  From now on, when I gain a few pounds, I’ll just hang my head and say, “Hey, it was either get a good night’s sleep or gain a little weight. I chose sleep. Don’t judge me!”

  Perhaps the weirdest finding was that these folks aren’t simply foraging around for a banana or a cookie while dead asleep; no, no! They’re actually preparing full meals!

  I can’t even cook that great when I’m awake and these fools are, like, torching crème brûlée and braising meat while they’re asleep. WTF?

  I read an interview with a woman who had gained more than 100 pounds by cooking while asleep. Every morning, girlfriend was mystified by the dirty dishes and empty refrigerator.

  In the South, we usually just figure that the waterbugs got especially industrious overnight. Those suckers are big. It’s not a huge stretch for me to assume that, one night, they’ll just walk upstairs and ask me, in waterbug-speak, “Yo, girl, where’s the FryDaddy? Me and the kids is hawn-gry!”

  Of course Ambien doesn’t just make you cook and eat while asleep. There are documented findings that some people who take Ambien actually have sex and don’t remember it. They’re called married people.

  At this rate, anything and everything that goes wrong is being blamed on Ambien, although I’m going to miss my standard: “It’s because we have a Republican Congress.”

  Researchers have even found that, besides cooking and eating and screwing, Ambien users occasionally drive in their sleep.

  I’m so using that one the next time I get stopped for speeding. I’m going to tell the policeman that it wasn’t my fault because I’m technically sound asleep and no one can be expected to observe the rules of the road while simultaneously dreaming that they have just had a litter of kittens with Patrick Dempsey.

  Yeah. That should work.

  27

  No, Really; Why Can’t We Spay Tori Spelling?

  The woman on the other end of the phone wanted to know if I was a registered voter and, if so, would I mind answering a few questions.

  “It will only take a few moments of your time,” she chirped. “And it’s for a very important cause.”

  “Really?” I asked. “Is somebody finally going to invent a pair of gauchos that won’t make it look like I’m pregnant in my butt?”

  “Uh, no.” Nervous laughter.

  “Spaying and neutering your pets?”

  “No.”

  “Spaying and neutering Tori Spelling?”

  “Huh?”

  “Sorry, just having a little fun. Please continue.”

  “I just want to ask you a few questions that pertain to the upcoming state senate race.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Meemaw’s visiting today. Maybe you should talk to her. She hasn’t missed voting in a single election since FDR.”

  “Well,” she said, “I guess that would be OK.”

  “Oops, too late. We can’t bother her right now because the Wheel’s just come on and she thinks Pat Sajak is sending her messages through the television. Looks like you’re stuck with me.”

  “OK, then. First question: Would you describe yourself as a liberal, moderate, or conservative?”

  “Well, I don’t really like labels. Let’s just say I’m a Virgo.”

  “But, generally speaking, would you say that you are more a proponent of liberal or conservative causes?”

  “Aquarius.”

  “We can come back to that one,” she said, still remarkably perky. “How about this one? Would you be less inclined to vote for (Senator X) if you knew that she had, while working as a lawyer in private practice, once defended a murderer?”

  “What kind of boneheaded question is that? She’s a criminal defense attorney. Isn’t she just doing her part to make sure that every defendant has representation? Isn’t the right to a fair trial guaranteed by the Constitution?”

  (Smugly) “So you’re a liberal.”

  “I didn’t say that. I just said that the question is ignorant.”

  “Ooooh, a flag-burning liberal!”

  “What?!”

  “Let’s move on. Would you be more or less inclined to vote for (Senator X) if you knew that she had supported stem-cell research?”

  “More.”

  “Ooooh, a flag-burning, baby-killing liberal!”

  “What?!”

  “One more question. Would you be more or less inclined to vote for (Senator X) if you knew that she had once bitten the head off a live chicken while she was high on LSD?”

  “What?”

  “LSD. It was a very popular hallucinogen back in the 70s, which, coincidentally, is exactly when (Senator X) was a teenager.”

  “No, I know what LSD is….”

  “Of course you do.”

  “No, not like that, what I mean is I finally get it!”

  “Get what?”

  “That this is one of those polls where you say all this made-up inflammatory stuff about one candidate so people will remember it and vote for your guy right? Does anybody really ever fall for that?”

  I hung up the phone before she could answer and went to check on Meemaw, who was clucking disgustedly at a political ad for (Senator X).

  “What’s wrong with her?” I asked.

  “Have you been living with Osama under a rock, girl? Everybody knows she gets high and bites the heads off live chickens.”

  “She does not! That’s just a smear campaign. It’s what those people do all the time. They make up lies and then they tell them so many times that everybody starts believing them.”

  I was wasting my time arguing politics with Meemaw because she’s old-school. Tha
t, and how much do you really want to argue with someone who’s convinced, no matter how many times you correct her, that Vanna White used to play Elly May on The Beverly Hillbillies?

  But it seriously irked me that these “push polls” were actually working on people.

  I already knew the country was going to shit when I read that former FEMA Director Michael Brown had opened a consulting business to help clients handle large-scale emergencies.

  This, coming off his stellar Brownie-like handling of Katrina called to mind a very old joke: “I didn’t used to be able to spell disaster management specialist and now I are one.”

  Was Brownie was on the pipe? There was simply no other plausible explanation.

  Did he seriously think that anyone in his right mind would pay him money to teach them how to handle a crisis? I wouldn’t trust this guy to pick up my dry-cleaning without screwing it up.

  Not long before Brownie was finally and mercifully excommunicated from the White House, I was struck by his creepily out-of-place frat-boy demeanor. Remember how he whined to reporters that he was missing “really good Mexican food” down there in what used to be New Orleans?

  He said that just as soon as he got the OK from the big guy, he was going to go home, grab the little woman, and have himself a margarita and some chimichangas.

  Speaking as someone who has occasionally been criticized for being as sensitive as a toilet seat, even I had trouble with that one, considering he was stumbling over dead bodies at the time.

  And don’t forget he’s the same guy who fretted endlessly via e-mail with a female staffer about the style of shirt he should wear on camera. Gee, I dunno, Brownie. I liked you in the blue Oxford cloth with the nifty FEMA logo on the breast pocket. The red Polo, while earnestly casual in a Circuit City employee kind of way, just didn’t seem right. Perhaps if there could have been a shirt with the words “Dunderheaded Incompetent” stitched on the front. Ahhhh, perfect.

  But all should be forgiven because, sadly, we Americans don’t harbor a grudge nearly as long as we should. And that propensity to forgive and forget has led to Brownie announcing that he’s now an emergency expert extraordinaire.