DEDICATION
To my family, with love
FYI
Just so you know, names, identities, job descriptions, and any number of physical details of my numerous ex-boyfriends have been changed to protect the innocent. Or the not-so-innocent. If you are one of my ex-boyfriends and you think you recognize yourself in this book—don’t be so sure that’s you. Also, you should be flattered. Finally, I have smushed together some chronologies and changed the order of certain events just to keep things interesting. Believe me, it’s better this way.
CONTENTS
Dedication
FYI
Introduction
Chapter 1: Hello, This Is Lisa Glasberg
Slice-and-Bake Chocolate Chip Cookies
Chapter 2: Confessions of a Type A Virgin
Losing My Cherry Cookies
Chapter 3: Aunt Nina’s Cookbook
Meringue Kisses
Chapter 4: On-Air
Chocolate Snowballs
Chapter 5: Married and Unavailable
Gingerbread Men
Chapter 6: Sleepless in Manhattan
Lisa Goes Nuts Brownies
Chapter 7: Fake ’n’ Bake
How-to-Get-a-Man Chocolate Chip Cheesecake Squares
Chapter 8: Cereal Monogamy
Fruity Pebbles Cookies
Chapter 9: Love at First Sight
Black-and-White Cookies
Chapter 10: If You Bake It, They Will Come
Big Apple (Pie) Cookies
Photo Section
Chapter 11: What I Learned from TV
Blondies
Chapter 12: Baker’s Rack
Double D-licious Oatmeal Cookies
Chapter 13: Why Can’t You Get a Job Like Everyone Else?
Linzer Broken-Heart Cookies
Chapter 14: In Case of Emergency, Break Glass
Chocolate Therapy Chunk Cookies
Chapter 15: Late Bloomer
Lemons-into-Lemonade Bars
Chapter 16: Getting Lucky
Chocolate Chip Biscotti
Chapter 17: Perfect Is Boring
Sugar Cookies
Epilogue (or, How You Too Can Be a Cookie-Party-Throwing Goddess)
Mini Apple Pies
Plain-as-Butter Cookies
Peppermint Bark Cookies
Chocolate Sandwich Cookies with Vanilla Crème
Thankful Cookies
Green Tea Shortbread Cookies
Diva Doodles (a.k.a. Snickerdoodles)
Peanut Butter Cookies
Chocolate Chow Mein Noodle Cookies
Mudslides
New Age Black-and-White Cookies
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
INTRODUCTION
I’ve had my heart crushed a few times. There’s nothing like a man to reduce a strong woman to tears. But when I found true love—the kind of love that really breaks your heart—it wasn’t in a relationship. It was in a job. That love was for real, and I cried when it was over the way I had never cried over a man.
I’ve wanted to be on the radio ever since I was old enough to turn the dial. I would lie in bed at night listening to the crackling voices floating out of the AM radio, dreaming of adding my voice to theirs—to have someone listen to me with the same kind of interest.
Maybe it’s because I’m a middle child. We’re attention seekers by nature. None of us believes we received as much notice as our older and younger siblings. Scratch a middle child and you’ll find a well of insecurity. And I am pretty much a textbook example. I recently read there’s even a psychiatric disorder called “Middle Child syndrome” that can actually result in psychotic behavior.
Just to answer two obvious questions you may now have:
1. No, I’m not psychotic.
2. Yes, I’ve checked with a professional.
Now you may wonder, why the radio? Why not move to Hollywood, like so many other wannabe starlets? First of all, I never had the kind of confidence in my own skin that I think most performers have. Not to mention, this was my idea of fashion:
That’s right, my favorite outfit for many of my formative years was a very large pair of denim overalls. I wore them to death.
If I’d really wanted to be an actress, I suppose a good stylist could have addressed my fashion ineptitude. But showing myself off on-screen wasn’t my interest. My three shining seasons performing with the Hewlett, Long Island, high school musicals were spent playing violin in the orchestra pit. I didn’t want to be seen—that was my perfect older sister’s job (she was always the Marsha Brady to my Jan). No, I wanted to be heard. My voice—as Long Island Jewish as you could get—would be my fortune.
The nice thing about having people love you for your voice is that you don’t have to be anywhere near them while they’re listening to you. You can be far, far away. And that’s how I liked it. Unfortunately, I carried that fear of intimacy into my personal life. I loved men, and I loved sex with men, but that whole relationship give-and-take thing? I wasn’t such a fan of that. My idea of a giving relationship with a man was to bake him cookies and take them over to his apartment while wearing a fur coat and nothing underneath. And that’s not giving—that’s giving it away.
I made a lot of cookies during my days of romantic flailing around. And I had a lot of boyfriends, but none of them stuck. It took me a long time to figure out why: I’d spent my childhood compromising my wishes and feeling like I always came last. So as an adult I’d gone to the opposite extreme. To be happy, I thought that I had to come first, and I had to be heard all the time. Over time, I became so focused on being heard that I really didn’t know how to listen.
My relationships suffered as a result, but hey, work was great! And that’s nothing to sniff at. Men get rewarded for going after their careers single-mindedly. And if they get married at age forty-eight, and their wife happens to be fifteen years younger (so she’s conveniently still well within her baby-making years), no one even raises an eyebrow. But if a woman spends decades on her career, doesn’t get married, doesn’t have kids … well, I don’t need to tell you the kind of reaction that gets.
But I never felt like I’d missed out by following a less traditional route. I had a different dream, and I put my heart into achieving it. Then one day I realized that my dream had come true, but I needed something else—something more. And that something wasn’t going to come from a guy or a job or anything else that I could chase or scratch off a list. That something had to come from inside of me—a place that I had been ignoring while I was so busy grasping for the brass ring in front of me.
Some people are born knowing the secret to happiness. The rest of us take a little longer, and we do a lot of living on our way to figuring things out. Call us the late bloomers. And this book is for us. We don’t necessarily operate on the usual schedule or follow anyone else’s tried-and-true formula. But what’s the big hurry, anyway? Why is everyone in such a rush? If you have life all figured out by age twenty … or thirty … or even forty, what are you going to spend the rest of your life doing—knitting? Watching TV? Personally, I think trial and error is a lot more interesting than knowing how your life is going to look before you’ve even lived it yet. Some of the best cookie recipes I’ve ever invented were the result of a few massive failures on the way to figuring out the right formula. We late bloomers are like that. And we’re worth the wait—and the trial and error. Because once we hit on that magic combination of ingredients, we’re delicious.
CHAPTER 1
HELLO, THIS IS LISA GLASBERG
My parents have three daughters—my older sister, Bonnie; middle child, me; and my younger sister, Andrea—and they love all of us. But my parents, who didn’t divorce until I was already out of the house, definitely did not love each other. As a result, my whole childhood and young adulthood were colored by their bickering. Our home was not a happy one. So it’s no wonder I never wanted to get married. When my friends would fantasize about their eventual wedding day, I would look at them like they were crazy. I couldn’t even compute the desire to get married—based on what I knew of marriage, why would anyone want that?
Because my home wasn’t a place of comfort for me, I sought distraction elsewhere. I spent most of my time outside, burning off my endless amounts of nervous energy. I spent a lot of time at my friend Jeanie’s house, becoming like a fourth daughter in her family. And I threw myself into a multitude of activities at school, from clubs to sports to Girl Scouts. Most of all, I loved the violin.
My music teachers gave me the positive feedback I craved. They seemed to really get me. They didn’t judge me by how I looked or fit in with their preconceived expectations. They judged me for my work, period. And with hard work, they told me, I could accomplish something amazing. To this day, this is one of the biggest things I love about music, and why I think it’s so important for kids to have music in their lives. Positive results in music are all about practice and persistence—it doesn’t matter what anyone thinks of you in any other context. If you work hard at your instrument, you get better—it’s as easy and honest as that. So I worked hard. I treasured my violin, and I practiced, and I performed in concerts. By high school I was in our orchestra’s first section, and I made second violin in the All-State Orchestra.
The violin was something I did for my own enjoyment—it was all my own. And that was really important to me, especially since I felt like an alien species in my own home. Of course the world is at least 50 percent populated by people who felt like freaks growing up, but that doesn’t make it any less painful when you’re going through it yourself. My father and I didn’t communicate well when I was younger—now things have changed, and as an adult I’ve grown to appreciate him for who he is, and vice versa. He’s become a really great listener, and I’ve grown more thankful for how well he always took care of us. But back then, it felt different. A former marine (yes, a Jewish marine), he dealt with his household full of females—even our dogs and cats were girls—by receding or laying down the law. If you take a look at pictures of my intimidatingly fit father then and now, you’ll not only understand why I didn’t lose my virginity until college, you might also wonder how I ever managed to lose it at all.
My dad, age 20.
My dad, age 84.
courtesy of William J. McShane, Jr.
Meanwhile my mother and my older sister, Bonnie, were a twosome. The two of them spoke the same language, and I was a foreigner with no glossary or clue to the underlying meanings. They even had the same fashion sense. Right or wrong, I felt like Bonnie was the golden girl and I was the weird ugly duckling. I couldn’t help feeling that my mother would love me more if only I were more like my sister.
I remember one time when my mother asked each of us girls what special thing we might like from the grocery store. Bonnie asked for blackout cake, which happened to be my mother’s favorite as well. I asked for slice-and-bake cookies. I’m not sure what Andrea asked for, but that’s her story to tell. Inevitably, my mother came back from the store with blackout cake and no slice-and-bake cookies. She brushed the oversight aside and said she just forgot. But I couldn’t even hide my disappointment. How could she forget something so simple, and after she’d made a point of asking me what I wanted? It was a small thing, and I know my mother didn’t mean to hurt my feelings, but the memory has stuck with me. Then and always the message came through to me loud and clear: I could speak, but no one was listening. Is it any wonder that I went into radio?
MY DAD GREW UP outside of Boston, a six-foot-three football player with thick dark hair and blue eyes. He met my mother on a blind date. She was just as irresistible in her own way—five foot seven, she modeled and acted in college and had a gamine Audrey Hepburn look. This was just one more way that my mother and I were completely different from each other. I would end up taking after my busty grandmothers and I barely hit five feet, three inches (I suspect this is because in every picture I’ve ever seen of my mom pregnant, she’s holding a glass of wine in one hand and a cigarette in the other just like a character out of Mad Men, but it’s just a theory).
As gorgeous as my parents were as a couple, emotionally they were a disaster together. And they knew it, too. I look back on it now, and as miserable as it often was to grow up in that household, I feel genuinely bad for them. They must have felt so trapped in their misery. I found out years later that they wanted to separate after my older sister, Bonnie, was born, but all four of their parents laid down the law and insisted that they stay together. And that’s how an already-unhappy couple brings two more children into the world. I know they were glad to have all of us, but it couldn’t have been easy for either of them.
It must have been especially overwhelming for my mother to have three kids in short succession, and to be stuck in a loveless marriage. My dad was a good breadwinner, but the money came with steel strings attached—he paid the bills, so he expected to set the rules. I think that’s why I always wanted to pay my own bills as an adult—I never wanted any man to make the rules for me or feel that his contribution to my fiscal well-being meant that I owed him in some way. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
My dad hugely expanded his family’s import business, which meant that he traveled all the time and also worked long hours in the city. While he was away on his trips, things were relatively calm at home. Not necessarily happy, but calm. The tension would gradually build when he was expected home, though. We’d all wonder when the screaming would start up again. Would it be right as he walked through the door, or would something tick him off later? Would my mother say something cutting, or would he criticize her? My sisters and I tiptoed around them or fled to our rooms to wait out the storm when it hit. We very rarely ate together as a family, even at dinnertime. Who could stomach it?
I think that’s why my high school yearbook entry looked like this:
“No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.”
Yearbook 9–12; Editor in Chief 12
Cheerleading 9; Captain 10, 11; Co-Captain 12
Student Council 9, 10; Class VP 11, 12
Tennis team 10–12
Orchestra 9–12
Student Faculty Rapport 10–11
Play 9–11
Carnival 10–12
Ambition: To be able to say “Hello, this is Lisa Glasberg, WLIR FM, 92.7.”
It kills me now to look back on how busy I was. I grabbed any excuse to get out of the house, to distract myself with people and activity. How did I have time to eat or sleep? That pattern of overworking (and overplaying) wouldn’t let up for years. It was no coincidence that I eventually chose a profession with crazy hours and little downtime. I was never good at being quiet and contemplative. In fact, the only time I was truly still was when I was listening to the radio.
When I was thirteen and my parents finished our attic, I took it as my bedroom—because I couldn’t get farther away than that without moving out. It was hot and stuffy up there, but I painted the walls yellow and I loved it. In my own private space, I could press my ear to my little AM radio and lose myself. Late at night in my bedroom, when the rest of the house was asleep, was when I could get the best signals from faraway radio stations. Hearing a radio station all the way from Buffalo was as exciting to me as a trip to Europe would be for a normal person. The radio was my first love, and other than the violin, it was my only true, passionate love.
Radio made everything bearable. When my dad woke us all up at 4 A.M. on a freezing, pitch-black Saturday morning to go skiing with him, the car radio was what I looked
forward to. These ski trips were nonnegotiable, no matter how bitterly miserable we were. I still remember how my father would simultaneously knock and open the doors to our bedrooms, booming, “Time to get up! Let’s go!” We’d groan and throw the covers over our heads, but he wouldn’t take whining for an answer. We’d be out the door in five minutes, and I was the fastest because I’d always lay out all my clothes the night before—a habit I kept up when I started working in morning radio.
Once we were in the car, my dad would immediately tune the radio to talk or news, and I’d start begging for music instead. (Please, Dad, can’t we listen to the Beatles?) Finally we came up with a compromise. He could listen to talk radio on the way there, but then on the way back he’d let me listen to WABC with Cousin Brucie and Dan Ingram. I soaked it up like a sponge, and for a little while I could have been anywhere—definitely not in the backseat of my parents’ car crammed next to my sisters.
I truly think radio saved my life, because it gave me a path to get to a life of my own. My high school had a work-study program for seniors, and I vividly remember the day the guest speaker was a DJ from WLIR. I made a beeline for him once his talk was over, and I asked if they had an internship program. He handed me the program director’s card, and I raced home to call him for an interview.
The WLIR studio was in Garden City, Long Island, so I drove there (newly licensed) in the big clunk of an Oldsmobile I’d inherited from my grandparents. That car looked like a boat, it sounded like a boat, and even then it was old. But it had an AM radio that I’d jury-rigged with an FM radio that hung from the dashboard by a wire, and that was all that mattered to me. My chosen interview outfit was a polyester Huckapoo shirt and high-waisted bell-bottoms. Despite my fashion sense, Ken Cole, the station director, hired me on the spot.
Sex, Lies, and Cookies: An Unrated Memoir Page 1