You Can’t Drink All Day if You Don’t Start in the Morning

by Celia Rivenbark

  MICHELLE’S BELLY-BUSTIN’ SUPER SUPPER

  This is a nice way to sober up quickly if you have overindulged in the aforementioned Firefly vodka during the cocktail hour. Listen, y’all: Run, do not stagger, to your local likker store and ask if they’ve got Firefly yet. If not, demand that they look into it, and yesterday. This unspeakably delicious hooch is going to replace the mint julep as the Southerner’s “getcher drunk on” beverage of choice; just watch. Drink it on the rocks, if you’re brave, but I prefer it mixed with two parts spring water, lemonade, or orangeade. Garnish with mint or lemon and orange wedges if you’re feeling show-offy. Simply the best, I do declare.

  1 can corn

  1 can kidney beans

  1 can black beans

  1 can diced tomatoes

  1 can refried beans

  2 cups water

  1 envelope ranch dressing mix

  1 envelope taco seasoning

  Don’t drain any of the canned stuff; just pour all the ingredients into a big pot and heat through. If you want to get “faincy,” you can garnish with shredded cheese and sour cream and serve it with a big ol’ bag of blue-corn tortilla chips.

  21

  Checkerboard Dreams: Shaggin’ with the (Sorta) Stars

  When they asked me to participate in a Dancing with the Stars shag competition in Myrtle Beach, I was flattered but exceedingly nervous.

  Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, to those of you who haven’t ventured this far south, is the shag capital of the world, possibly the universe. If they shag on Neptune, we’d kick their two-headed asses, those of us who have danced on the red-and-white checkerboard floor of Studebaker’s, the holy shrine of the serious shagger. Shag, you see, is the official dance of the Carolinas. With its history rooted in jitterbug and jump blues, shag is always danced to R&B–flavored songs, with the legs and feet doing all the fancy moves. It’s spectacular to watch and terrifying to master.

  That said, being asked to compete in a shag contest in Myrtle Beach is like being asked if you’d like to take a little spin behind the wheel at Talladega or hang out on the balcony at the Vatican.

  My bigheaded moment was short-lived, however, after I giddily told a girlfriend that I’d been asked to compete.

  “You’re in Dancing with the Stars?” Pearl asked, acting way too surprised for my taste. “Which star do you get to dance with?”

  “What? No! I’m the star!” I corrected her.

  “Damn,” said Pearl. “They must’ve exhausted the B-, C-, and D-list celebs. Couldn’t they get Debby Boone or Tiffany or somebody?”

  Come to think of it, Pearl and I really aren’t all that close.

  It took a while for me to explain to Pearl that this wasn’t the Dancing with the Stars with Tom Bergeron and that pretty woman with the man-voice, but rather a charity fund-raiser with the same format. Still, the stakes were high because it was Myrtle Beach. This wasn’t some little talent contest at the Moose Lodge; this was the big leagues.

  I would be paired with a champion shag dancer by the name of Brad, or as I prefer to call him, the most patient man on earth.

  I was terrified but Brad, who had a wall full of trophies but didn’t act like it, put me at ease. He was sweet and kind and looked exactly like a grown-up Opie Taylor. We hit it off immediately.

  I told Brad that I had never shagged in my life, which was incredibly embarrassing since I was raised just an hour from Carolina Beach, North Carolina, the true birthplace of shag.

  Brad, ever the optimist, said he’d much rather work with a clean slate because “that way, there won’t be any bad habits ingrained.”

  Not to worry there. My slate wasn’t just clean; it was boiled and bleached and shrink-wrapped. Brad had a huge task ahead of him.

  It took about two minutes into our first lesson for me to realize that eighteen months of ballroom dance lessons with hubby weren’t going to help at all.

  Shag is its own art form. You can’t compare it to anything else. Just because you’ve managed to learn a decent waltz, fox-trot, and rumba doesn’t mean anything.

  Great shag dancers barely move their torsos throughout the dance; the real action is below the hips, with lots of convoluted kicks and impossible footwork.

  Anywho, just learning the basic step took the entire first hour of our lessons. How did Jane Seymour learn to samba in five days? How did God make the world in seven?

  I took back all those nasty things I’d said about Jerry Springer’s cha-cha. I was even ashamed of saying that woman had a man-voice.

  For three months, Brad and I met once or twice a week in the finished room over his garage. We were joined by Sam Cooke, the Temptations, the Reverend Al Green, and Brad’s huge yellow lab dog, Jeb, who regarded my pitiful efforts with a baleful look punctuated by the occasional fart, which was pretty much the same reaction I expected from the judges.

  Brad demonstrated classic shag moves like the “boogie walk,” where your legs go all noodley, and the pivot, a full-speed twirly thing that’s scarier than the words “President Jeb Bush.”

  Because it’s actually a judged competition with me and a few other “stars” going for a trophy, I was plenty nervous and had already figured that if things got too bad, I could always faint like Marie Osmond.

  Incidentally, if you’re talking about participating in a “shag” contest with someone from Great Britain, they might look at you funny because, as anyone who watched Austin Powers movies knows, that’s the word they use for doing the nasty. So you should try to avoid saying things like, “I told my husband that I was too tired for sex after I’d just spent two hours shagging with Brad in his garage.”

  See? It just wouldn’t sound right.

  After all that practice, Brad had come to realize that I would never, ever be able to master the boogie walk and a few other truly tricky maneuvers that would have wowed the judges. The pivot? Nailed it. But the rest of the moves were tougher’n woodpecker lips and I depended on Brad to distract the judges with fancy moves while I would just work the basic step and make sure I didn’t move my torso.

  Driving down to Myrtle Beach on the afternoon of the contest’s date, I was nervous as a hen on a hot griddle. After weeks of listening and debating, Brad and I agreed that “our song” would be that fabulous classic, “Gone Fishin’ ” by General Johnson and the Chairmen of the Board. Brad was, naturally, too kind to say it, but I knew that one reason he liked it was because it was relatively slow and mercifully brief.

  I’ve danced to “Black Coffee in Bed” before and it’s the longest six minutes and twelve seconds of your life.

  The good news was that I finally made an actual contribution to the choreography by adding a little twist at the end where I pretended to “reel” Brad toward me with an imaginary fishing pole and he boogie-walked toward me. We took to naming every step something special, and this one was “the crowd pleaser.” We might blow up like a squirrel in a microwave out there on the dance floor, but at least everybody would remember our reelin’-in finale. I hoped.

  I arrived an hour early and saw Brad dancing on the floor with another one of the championship winners, and my jaw dropped. When he was in his element, on this historic checkerboard floor with a proper partner, he wasn’t just a nice guy: He was a rock star.

  It was Dirty Dancing and he was Patrick Swayze, Saturday Night Fever and he was John Travolta.

  He saw me and motioned to me to come over so we could practice on the famous floor and dance out the jitters.

  It didn’t work.

  We practiced again, out of sight of the judges, on a little upstairs dance floor between some pool tables. We were wearing coordinating black outfits and I had borrowed Brad’s fiancée’s fabulously expensive shag shoes.

  I have never been more nervous in my life than when the judges called us together to announce the dance order, decided by simply picking names out of a hat.

  For months, Brad had told me he always managed to land the first dance position; it was
positively eerie how it happened. I was hoping his streak would hold because it’s much less intimidating to go first.

  I wilted a little as names were called out and we were in the next-to-last spot. It was going to be a long night. I began to hate charity.

  Brad and I would follow a “star” who had just been named South Carolina Coach of the Year. He was a huge, charismatic bear of a guy who had been in the hospital for a virus the week before and had loudly announced that he hadn’t eaten solid foods in a week.

  Suh-weet.

  As we watched the coach dance from our balcony practice nook, I contemplated giving up eating altogether. If this was what happened after seven days in the hospital on an IV, I’d hate to see this guy with a few T-bones in him.

  “Look at him! He’s not sick at all!”

  “Don’t worry,” Brad said, steady as always. “You’re gonna do great; just relax.”

  I was working on a slight case of bitter because I’d watched another couple dance earlier and realized that nobody else in the competition was a total novice like me. One “star” had held the title of Miss Sun Fun, which defines true royalty in Myrtle Beach. She was sensational and there wasn’t a doubt in my mind that she’d been shagging for most of her life.

  At this point, reality sank in. Expectations were lowered. I knew we wouldn’t take home the trophy, but I’d just try not to embarrass Brad. Truthfully, my money was on the twinkle-toed coach of the year.

  The announcer called our names and Brad and I walked onto the checkerboard floor, hand in hand. He leaned over and whispered “Just have a good time” in my ear.

  But it was terrifying. I heard the music, the spotlight found us, and it became sickeningly obvious that we weren’t in Brad’s room over the garage anymore. Jeb was nowhere to be seen, just sweet duh-hubby and my friends Shirley and Jean Lee heading a small but vocal cheering section.

  There was a huge TV screen so the audience could see us no matter where they were sitting. I was fairly certain I was going to throw up on the checkerboards.

  “This is worse than childbirth,” I whispered back to Brad, who smiled his big, most winning Opie Taylor smile for the judges and said through his teeth: “You’re gonna be great.”

  The rest, as they say, is a blur. I remember nailing the first pivot, forgetting the next two moves we’d choreographed and having Brad pull me closer to whisper me back onto the right count. (“One and two, three and four, five-six . . .”) Through it all, I smiled nonstop because someone had told me that, when in doubt, try to look like you’re having a good time.

  And then, somehow, two-and-a-half minutes later, it was over. Duh was clapping like crazy and I loved him for that.

  The judges were kind and didn’t fart even once. Still, I’m a competitive sort and I knew that we weren’t in the top three. I didn’t want to let Brad down; he’d worked so hard. We finished, I’d say, about seventh out of ten dancers, although nobody really kept score beyond the top three.

  I headed back to my cheering section, hugged hubby, and downed a whiskey sour pretty much in one gulp.

  They called us all back onto the floor and presented us with very cool black etched trophies shaped like stars.

  The Coach of the Year won the big trophy and bragging rights, to nobody’s real surprise.

  Walking back to our hotel room, which had a great oceanfront view that was pretty even on a freezing January night, Duh told me that he couldn’t believe I’d danced at the “shrine” in front of hundreds of people. It was so not like me to do anything so completely out of my comfort zone.

  Duh and I go way back, twenty-four years to be exact, and during those years, he’s seen me shrink from all sorts of things just because I couldn’t stand the thought of risking failure or embarrassment.

  Now I had risked both, suffered a little bit of both, survived it all and even, in a crazy sort of way, enjoyed it.

  “Would you do it again?” hubby asked, expecting a completely different answer.

  I looked him dead in the eye.

  “Oh, hell yeah.”

  22

  Get Yer Wassail On; It’s Carolin’ Time

  This year I really wanted to do the homemade Christmas cookie thing. I’ve been shamed by the fit young mom down the street who bakes from scratch and is always outside stringing lights and decorating with her kids this time of year. The rest of the year, you see her building forts with them or goofing around on a tire swing. When you ask her what she’s up to, she just says, “We’re making memories!”

  All this time, I just thought her cable wasn’t working. Turns out she does all this stuff on purpose.

  In a distant chamber inside my coal-black heart, I’ve always wanted to do some of that corny holiday stuff; I just lack the natural ability. I pictured myself as Martha Stewart’s shorter, fatter sister—the one she would’ve called “Stumpy” with that refined throaty Connecticut accent of hers.

  “Oh, look, everyone! Stumpy is here to show us how to dip pretzels in a bowl of microwaved chocolate. Wow! What will she think of next?”

  This year, I decided that Sophie and I would use her Christmas break to make homemade treats from our very own kitchen. I mean, if thousands of meth addicts can do it, why can’t we?

  I giddily purchased my version of homemade Christmas cookies—rolls of refrigerated cookie dough prestamped with wreaths, Santas, and reindeer heads.

  These cookies so rock, y’all. Anyone can make them. The instructions on the package prove it: “Remove presliced cookies from roll. Do not slice them. They are presliced. Idiot. Continue to breathe in and out. Place presliced cookies on rectangular pan.”

  Like a Christmas miracle, in nine to twelve minutes, you’ve got genuine home-baked Christmas cookies. I say “home-baked” because I believe in truth in advertising. I love the TV commercial that shows the happy mom and daughter preparing “place-and-bake” cookies that are packaged one cookie to a slot, a relief for the lobotomized Christmas revelers who find the whole presliced thing too complicated.

  After we baked the cookies and let them cool a little as the package directed “because if you eat hot cookies, it could hurt your stupid throat,” Soph and I considered doing something else traditional. This year we’d join the memory-making mom, who was, once again, organizing the entire neighborhood to go caroling and “a-wassailing.”

  “A-what?” I asked her.

  “Wassailing! It’s an authentic colonial punch! I’m going to make it from scratch and the boys are going to help me.”

  The notion of eating or drinking anything that had been prepared, even in part, by “the boys” was terrifying to me as I had once seen both of them happily share queso dip from a bowl with the dog.

  Pass.

  “We’ll come over in time to sing,” I said.

  “Okeydoke,” she said, chipper as always. “Whatever floats yer boat! And speaking of boats, the boys and I are going to decorate our sailboat for the holiday flotilla. Would you all like to join us? I’ve already used a jigsaw to cut out a manger scene and we just have to paint it and wire it. Making memories!”

  “Making me sick!” I said under my breath, but she had moved on.

  Believe it or not, I’m a huge fan of caroling. If you’re a terrible singer or if you have a hard time remembering the words to your favorite Christmas carols, it’s important to make up for these two shortcomings by singing very loudly.

  Admit it: Past a certain age, we mortals are incapable of remembering whether Frosty’s hat was made of felt or silk or if that incredibly annoying little drummer boy’s drum goes “rah-pum-pa-pa-bum” or “ma ma se, ma ma sa, ma mah coo sa” or something else all together.

  In the end, all that matters when caroling is that you sing lustily, filled with the joy of the season and perhaps a few pomegranate martinis if you’re the shy type.

  The truth is, almost no one gets the lyrics to holiday songs right. It’s OK when you’re trying to fake “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus”; less so w
hen you’re supposed to be giving reverent attention to “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear.”

  I’ve butchered that last one pretty badly.

  It came upon a midnight clear

  That glorious night of old

  With angels bending near the earth

  To touch their harps of gold

  Peace Out! They said from their, er, holy homes . . .

  And it just got worse from there.

  Ditto “Away in a Manger,” which always stumps me with its mention of cattle “lowing,” whatever that means. I find it useful to toss in random “nigh’s” when in doubt: “Bless all the dear children in Thy tender care/And nigh and far and nigh, nigh, nigh.”

  Trust me. No one will notice.

  One of my very favorite Christmas carols is “What Child Is This?”, but I’ve long forgotten the words. Which is why I knew that when we sang carols with Miss Thang and the Dog Tongue Twins, it would end up sounding like this:

  What child is this

  Who lays in bed

  While shepherds wa-atch, uh, a little TV . . .

  Singing in public tip: Usually, if you can just hang on until the chorus, things will click back into a safe zone. This is why you must sing the chorus extraloud, because you’re now in familiar territory.

  This! This! Is Christ the king,

  Whom angels love and leopards ring!”

  See how easy?

  What you don’t want to do is mix your sacred and your Rudolph because, like believing that Santa wraps, this is just plain wrong.

  O holy night, the stars are brightly shining

  It is the night on the roof, reindeer pause . . .

  It makes sense that we’d botch lyrics to songs we only enjoy once a year. Face it; there are still a lot of people who sing, “I’m the God of Velveeta, honey.”

  Fortunately, Christmas is the season of forgiveness. As long as you remember the names of Rudolph’s pals—Donner, Blitzen, Vixen, Cupid, Comet, Dasher, Prancer, and Craig, you’ll be fine.