Bless Your Heart, Tramp

by Celia Rivenbark

  Praise for We’re Just Like You, Only Prettier

  “Warm, witty, and wise, rather like reading dispatches from a friend who uses e-mail and still writes letters, in ink, on good paper.”

  —St. Petersburg Times

  “A collection of essays by a woman working in her element…Rivenbark writes with that breezy, irreverent…allure that makes so many of these belles legendary.”

  —Blue Ridge Business Journal

  “What starts as a wry little snicker will grow into guffaws…. This book is not just for Southerners.”

  —The News of Orange County (North Carolina)

  “Laugh-out-loud funny.”

  —The Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “Even die-hard Yankees will appreciate this wickedly funny collection…an amusing and refreshingly honest look at family life on this side of the Mason-Dixon line.”

  —The Dallas Morning News

  “Will give you a case of the giggles.”

  —New York Daily News

  “Indulge in a heaping helping of female fabulousness…a hilarious look at the world.”

  —Complete Woman

  “An edgy Erma, an Erma dipped in corn-bread batter, wrapped in collard greens, and drawling that she was speeding because ‘my uterus told me to.’”

  —The Tennessean

  “A hoot and a holler.”

  —Boston Herald

  “North Carolina doesn’t have a post for a ‘humorist laureate,’ but it should invent one and install Celia Rivenbark…. But Rivenbark’s interests go beyond the regional—and that’s to her credit.”

  —News & Record (Greensboro, NC)

  “I thought I was Southern until I read Celia Rivenbark’s book…. What a funny, smart, and irreverent writer she is!”

  —Lee Smith, author of The Last Girls

  “I laughed so hard reading this book I began snorting in an unbecoming fashion…. I’ll be sending copies to everyone, especially my baby’s daddy.”

  —Haven Kimmel, author of A Girl Named Zippy and She Got Up Off the Couch

  “Celia’s book rocks; everyone is going to love it.”

  —Laurie Notaro, author of The Idiot Girls’ Action-Adventure Club

  “She is one of our greatest domestic anthropologists, digging up and airing all those things we like to think others don’t know…. I don’t know when I have laughed so loud and so long.”

  —Jill McCorkle, author of Creatures of Habit

  “A funny, no-holds-barred look at today’s South.”

  —Haywood Smith, author of The Red Hat Club

  For Sophie

  Contents

  Preface

  PART ONE—AT HOME

  A Mom Looks at Forty

  Happy-Meal Hostage

  Fifties Home Economics Advice

  Home-Depot Blues

  Mama Celia’s Marriage Tips

  Lady Viagra

  If He’s So Sick, Why Am I So Tired?

  Revenge of the Amish Friendship Bread

  Total Woman This

  Lazy Men

  A Caveman Weekend

  Fighting Still Bad for Relationships

  Fad Diets—Great ’Til You Explode

  The High School Reunion

  Fleeing Floyd

  Big Fake Breasts

  When Did Redbook Get Trashy?

  Working at Home—Sort Of

  House Painting: “If You Want It Done Right”

  I Can Quit Anytime I Like

  Cat Toothbrushing or Me-oww!!

  Box Queen

  Time to Reclaim My Funny Skin?

  PART TWO—THE SOUTH

  Bless Your Heart, Tramp

  Where Men Are Men—and Sometimes Women

  That’s Mizzeriz to You, Kiddo!

  Southerners vs. Snow

  Southern Measurements: A Dab or a Teense?

  Liddy Dole Doesn’t Snort

  Hurricane Forecasting for Fun and Hysteria

  Lard Is Good, Lard Is Great

  Tales of the Redneck Woman

  The Grits Gonna Rise Again

  This Beer Was Made for Wearin’

  Bridal Moms from Hell

  Obituary Madness

  Dear Losers: A Christmas Letter from Myra Sue

  Carlos and Ruby

  PART THREE—AND EVERYWHERE ELSE

  Fake Dog Testicles

  Mozart Means Absolutely Nuthin’

  How to Marry a Multimillionaire (Doofus)

  ATM Silliness Revealed

  Mars Lander Woes

  Fools for Fashion

  I’ve Scanned, So Where’s My Check?

  Tofu Shrinks Your Brain

  Designer Kitty Litter

  Clams, Flying, Batman, and Me

  Card Shopping for My Gay Friend’s Dog

  Congestion in the Cold Aisle

  Fun with Realtors

  Home-shopping Blues

  Drowning in the Jury Pool

  Stupid Bumper Stickers

  Wrestlemania

  Who’s Hinckley Gonna Visit?

  A History Quiz for Our Young

  Subarus and Lesbians

  Commercial Appeal?

  Barbie the Telemarketer

  Negativity in the Workplace

  Calling Mom from the Train Tracks

  Al Gore in Campaign 2000: Too Sexy for Himself?

  Fashion Takes a Holiday

  Is That a Penis in the Petunias?

  Acknowledgments

  Preface

  Every now and again, a non-native will ask me what’s so special about being a Southerner.

  Well, just everything is all.

  We’re a colorful lot. Southerners don’t just eat a biscuit, they eat a cathead biscuit and loudly remind you that when they were growing up they were so poor their mama would hold up a ham and tell them to sop the shadow.

  Southerners are obsessed with large reptiles, quality pine straw, and oddly shaped vegetables.

  When I worked at my hometown newspaper in my twenties, I became an expert at photographing bell peppers shaped like Mickey Mouse and, one memorable time, a tomato shaped like “male genny-talia” according to the old farmer who brought it in. These, and photos of four-foot-long rattlesnakes always made the front page. It beat the heck out of a picture of the publisher posing in his Shriner’s fez. Again.

  Southern men believe that if you shoot something, anything, you must “strop” it to the hood of the car and parade it around town. You call that disgusting, we call it supper.

  Southern women live by a simple set of rules that keeps the chaos at bay:

  Never wear sweatpants in public—or private.

  Always keep a “funeral casserole” in the freezer.

  Always say “The” Kmart out of respect.

  Never use a toothpick in the K&W parking lot because, sure as you do, somebody’s going to remember you were the yam queen back in ’75 and they’ll talk about how you’ve just let yourself go.

  Always make sure to have a burial plot in the “good” section of the cemetery or have the good sense to lie about it and say you do.

  Always wear “big har” for important, life-changing events such as attending ACC Tournament games or when the Southern Living cooking school comes to town.

  Avoid using “party” as a verb unless cousins from South Carolina are visiting, in which case it’s okay to say “par-tay.”

  Southerners may move away from their homeland, but a Southern man will always call his father “deddy,” no matter if he’s a big-shot Co-cola executive who has given up grits for polenta and shad roe for sushi.

  I don’t care how much a transplanted Southerner thinks he’s left that foot-washing, fire-baptized, collard-eating world behind, if “S
weet Home Alabama” comes on the radio, he will growl “turn it up” and wonder out loud for the umpteenth time why “Free Bird” isn’t the national anthem.

  Which, now that I think about it, is a mighty good question.

  Over the past few years, I’ve grown to appreciate what it means to be a Southerner. We’re proud and quirky and stubborn and funny. We don’t just say we like collard greens, we say that we’ve eaten so many we have to wear kerosene rags on our ankles just to keep the cutworms off.

  We don’t just say we’ve caught a big fish, we say it was so big we had to use a hoe to clean it and then we sold the scales for dinner plates at the flea market.

  We are most fond of saying that if we had two homes—one in the North and the other in hell—we’d rent out the one up North and live in hell.

  We never turn the TV off, unless a body is lying in state in our living room—a more frequent occurrence than you might think—and we understand that y’all is nature’s most perfect—and versatile—contraction. As in: “Do y’all want to keep y’alls’ forks for y’allses’ peach cobbler?”

  We’re proud to be from the land of kudzu and honeysuckle and lightnin’ bugs and tent revivals and Junior Cotillions and sugar-shocked iced tea.

  I hope y’all like these tales, true and imagined, from a Southern woman’s point of view.

  Shine, yes, I do.

  Part One

  At Home

  A Mom Looks at Forty

  Having a baby at age forty, or any age for that matter, is a whopping life-changer. We went from impetuous, “What? A new martini and cigar lounge opens tonight? We are there!” kinda folks to the couple who spends Saturday night at K&W begging our twenty-month-old to please stop spitting creamed corn on our sweatpants.

  You go from buying pricey bags of mesclun greens to eating iceberg because it’s thirty-nine cents a head this week with your VIC card. Fish sticks find their way into your freezer although nobody, including the kid, can stand them.

  I spent twenty-two years writing for newspapers, but my palms never got soggy and my heart never beat too fast when I was interviewing folks like Jay Leno, Nick Nolte, or Jimmy Carter. You don’t know nervous until you’re sitting in a pediatrician’s office wondering why you have to wait your stupid turn behind the football physicals when your toddler’s fever is so high she’s speaking in tongues and thinks everybody else in the room is Franklin the turtle.

  You go from wearing little chocolate-colored business suits to wearing chocolate. You now wear your Regulation Issue Mommy Uniform, the one they hand you in the delivery room: leggings that are pilly on the inner thighs and whichever of your husband’s T-shirts just came out of the dryer and—hooray!—is still long enough to cover your ass.

  You trade in your briefcase for a diaper bag, but because you’re what my obstetrician once called “a geriatric mom” (notice he only said that once), you do manage to take back the ten or so you got at the shower with lambs and dancing lollipops on them, and you use the cash to buy a nice, understated one from L.L. Bean. It has your monogram on it, but the letters don’t look right because, for now and maybe always, the only thing you’ll be known as is M.O.M.

  And that is just fine.

  You feel stupid times infinity for all the things you used to tell your friends who had children. “I’d NEVER let my children eat french fries or drink soda!” Right. That little rule got broken after the first screaming-so-loud-they’re-going-to-call-Child-Protective-Services hissy fit at Target.

  Hons, I was cramming Mr. Pibb and Pringles into that baby faster than you could say “redneck mom with Sun Drop in the bottle on Aisle 7.”

  And of course there was the laughably naive statement I made to a new mom friend of mine a few years ago: “I’d NEVER let my baby sleep in the bed with my husband and me.”

  Technically, that still holds true around here. She doesn’t sleep in the bed with us because, by four A.M., having grown tired of being kicked in the McNuggets for hours, my husband is usually snoozing peacefully in the spare bedroom.

  I used to think that nothing could beat the adrenaline rush that comes with beating the competition on a big news story.

  Wrong again. A fireside chat with Saddam or Fidel couldn’t top being the first mommy in the play group to announce successful potty training.

  The fresh-faced mom at the playground (who wore the Mommy Uniform favored by the twentysomethings—Gap khakis and a white T-shirt topped with an oversized Banana Republic sweater) told me that her son, Ian or Liam or Ethan, I forget which, was potty-trained at eighteen months!

  I threw her perky little body to the ground and planted my knee in her chest ’til she cried for mercy.

  Okay, so that only happened in one of my Ally McEat-something fantasies, but it could happen. Anything could happen. That’s the point. There aren’t any headlines or scoops anymore, and happy hour is the one when Dad comes through that front door and I can finally pee, but this is the best assignment I’ve ever had.

  Honest.

  Happy-Meal Hostage

  I realized things had gone too far the other day when I yelled at the woman at the Burger King drive-thru. She is working for royalty, after all.

  I’d spent too long screeching into a tinny speaker while rain poured into my car about how I didn’t want the Rugrats kids’ meal. I wanted the Teletubby kids’ meal and if they didn’t have Tinky Winky, well, Lord have mercy, what’s the point of living anyway?

  I thought we had the whole thing straight so I drove up as instructed. (At least I think that’s what she said. Actually it sounded like “That will be five dollars and sixty-nine cents. Muffaluffa moongoo.”)

  I drove up, paid her, looked in the bag, and (arrrghhh!) discovered a horrid Rugrat staring back at me.

  Now being a savvy veteran of the Drive-Thru Screw-Up, I know better than to leave the window before checking the bag. I check because of something no one warns new parents about in those books: the dreaded Toddler Happy-Meal Extortion Syndrome.

  Strawberry Brazelton and the rest of the earthy-crunchy, soft-voiced, less-is-more, buy-low, sell-high parenting coaches never tell you that if you fail to secure the right toy with your kids’ meal, your toddler’s head is going to spin all the way around and she’s going to need a flat-out exorcism before you can say, “Wanna make that a Biggie Mega Upsize?” (Like I NEED a 64-ounce drink and enough fries for a family of eight. Of course, I always say yes so as not to be rude.)

  “I said I wanted Tinky Winky,” I hollered into the unsympathetic face at the drive-thru. “I NEED Tinky Winky. I promised my daughter Tinky Winky. For the past two hours, the only way I’ve gotten her to do anything has been to promise that we’d get Tinky Winky today with her kids’ meal.”

  Oh, sue me. It’s not like we’re Amish.

  My toddler, meanwhile, sat sullenly in her car seat fashioning a small hangman’s noose from a shoelace.

  The Burger queen glared at me. “I don’t have any more. Come back Monday. Now muffaluffa moongoo.”

  “But that’s five days from now,” I screamed. “I’ll never make it. Look at her!”

  “Whoa. How does she get her head to do that?”

  You’re probably wondering just exactly how shallow and superficial it is to believe that you have to have the latest toy that some greedy corporation determines you must in order to make your kid happy.

  That’s easy. Extremely shallow and superficial.

  I wasn’t always like this. One minute I’m sitting at a baby shower smiling smugly and saying my child will never eat fast food because I plan to grind fresh vegetables from my organic garden for her every meal. (Ha! The closest we came to organic gardening was when the cat sprayed the azalea bushes.)

  Fast-forward two years and I’m a banshee at a drive-thru explaining that my whole parental future is in danger if I don’t get that stupid purple finger puppet because it’s the only way I was able to get my toddler dressed that morning.

  A friend, who is childl
ess, watched the rodeo event that is Dressing a Toddler For the Day when she came over for International Coffee the other morning (and got warm apple juice instead).

  Dressing the “strong-willed child” is tougher than steer roping. You basically wrestle her to the floor and hold her feet together under your armpit until you get something, anything over her head. It should be on pay-per-view.

  “Hmmm,” my friend said, looking at this sight curiously and picking imaginary lint off her fabulous new capri pants, a style I couldn’t fit into with a crowbar after child-birth. “Why don’t you just let her pick out what she wants to wear? That way she won’t fight so hard.”

  Now why didn’t I think of that? Could it be that because, if I did, she would wear the same fake-fur-trimmed red velvet Mrs. Santa suit she wants to wear every day, even in ninty-degree heat?

  “Do me a favor,” I said sweetly. “Do you mind taking the princess to Burger King and getting one of those, oh, what do you call them? Telly something stuffed animals?”

  “I think I can handle that,” she said, a trifle sarcastically.

  Idiot. Skinny, great-looking in capri pants, well-meaning, childless idiot.