Sex, Lies, and Cookies: An Unrated Memoir
Page 4
But back to the food. Nina was the one who made me realize that food could be wonderful, and it could also make you feel wonderful. Her recipes all came from her synagogue’s cookbook that she and the other women had compiled as a fund-raising venture. I remember that the recipe pages she loved and used most were also the most food stained (the same way mine are now). And I remember my excitement when we first arrived for a visit, and I couldn’t wait to find out what she was making. Out of that book came a seemingly endless series of delicious dishes—I especially loved a vanilla confection called blintz soufflé, not to mention beef Wellington (wrapped in crescent rolls, of course—everything’s better wrapped in a crescent roll).
My aunt knew that I was her biggest admirer, so when she found out that I was moving out on my own she had a little gift for me—my own copy of her synagogue’s cookbook. Now that’s love. And that’s one possession that I will never, ever give up. That’s love, too.
This was the first “Jewish” dessert recipe I ever attempted. I can’t remember a single holiday growing up when there wasn’t a plate of these somewhere in the house. I’ve updated them a bit with the addition of toffee pieces. They’re optional, but whether you were bat mitzvahed or not you should really give them a try because they make the recipe much more delicious. These cookies really are a taste and texture explosion in your mouth—they have a thin, crunchy outside layer, then they’re sweet and chewy on the inside, with the added yum of the bits of chocolate and toffee. One boyfriend actually told me that they were like sex on his tongue. (If my aunt Nina’s synagogue sisters only knew.) This is one powerful cookie. One final encouragement: this recipe is so easy and never-fail that if you’re Jewish and you can’t make it, then you might want to think about converting.
MERINGUE KISSES
2 egg whites
1 teaspoon vanilla
¾ cup granulated sugar
½ cup mini chocolate chips
¼ cup crushed toffee pieces
Parchment-lined cookie sheets
Preheat oven to 300 degrees.
Beat egg whites until they form soft peaks. Slowly add vanilla and sugar so as not to deflate the whites, then beat until stiff.
Fold in chips and toffee pieces.
Drop onto the cookie sheets in teaspoon-sized dollops about 2 inches apart. Bake about 25 minutes. You’ll know they’re done when they’ve puffed up a little bit and they’re no longer shiny.
Cool completely and store in an airtight container.
Makes about 22 cookies.
CHAPTER 4
ON-AIR
When I left Long Island for Chicago, I had a couple of clear goals in mind:
1. Find my on-air voice.
2. Locate a boyfriend before it snowed.
I was starting my first big radio job, so you’d think goal number one would be foremost on my mind. But in some ways I figured goal number two was more urgent. I’d been warned about the cold. (It’s the cliché of living in Chicago. Someone hears that you’re moving there and what’s the first thing they say? “Cold winters!”) I’d also been warned about the snow, and I thought I’d better find a casual boyfriend before all the eligible men were buried under drifts.
The casual part of the boyfriend equation was key. I wasn’t looking to fall in love, I just wanted a little romance. And as great and exciting a city as Chicago is, that was the same attitude I had toward it as a place to live. I wasn’t aiming for marriage—my one true love (New York radio) was still waiting for me back home. Chicago would be a lovely interlude, a huge learning experience, and my first real job as an on-air personality. But it wasn’t destined to be a forever kind of love.
Although I didn’t hesitate for a second when the program director offered me the job, it wasn’t an easy decision to make. On the one hand, I knew it was the right thing to do. On the other hand, I was genuinely terrified. As I prepared to leave home, I would be smacked with sudden, stomach-gripping bouts of panic and think, Oh my God, what am I doing? But I knew that if I wanted to end up on-air in New York, I needed to get some real major-market experience under my belt. So I packed my suitcase and I went.
This was back in the days long, long before Craigslist, so it wasn’t as if I could find an apartment before I arrived. I couldn’t google “where do nice single girls live in Chicago?” I flew into town on a Friday, knowing less than nothing, and I picked up a copy of the Chicago Reader. I ran my finger down the apartment listings and that very weekend I found myself a furnished alcove studio apartment with a view of Lake Michigan and wall-to-wall shag carpeting. Hadn’t I told Barry that I’d have shag carpeting when I made it to the big time? And here I was.
I still remember the sight of the sun rising over the water—and the sound of the wind rattling against the windows. I could stand next to my bed and watch storms rise over the lake and slowly engulf the city. My first storm there was magical and frightening all at once—I couldn’t believe how loud it was. I actually called a friend and held the receiver out the window so she could hear. Probably my fondest memories of Chicago revolve around that lake. It had its own climate and personality, and I loved the way Chicagoans spent so much of their lives on the beach—Rollerblading, biking, and festivals every summer weekend. In the summer Chicagoans didn’t leave town on the weekends the way New Yorkers often do. They went to the lake.
That first night in my new apartment, I unpacked my clothes, and I shoved my one box of possessions into a closet. I never did unpack that box—it stayed right there until I moved back to New York a year and a half later. And three days after I arrived, I started my new job as the afternoon newsperson at WMET. I was all alone, just twenty-three years old, but the second I walked through those doors, the staff at WMET became my second family. There was such a sense of camaraderie. Everyone was young and ambitious, and we were all there for the same purpose. I’ve always found radio people welcoming, but the people at WMET were especially friendly. I don’t know if was their midwestern charm, or if it was some instinctive urge on their part to huddle together against the approaching winter. Either way, they accepted me with open arms.
I decided to return the favor by making sure I didn’t sound like an idiot out-of-towner. I studied the map of Chicago like my life depended on it. I learned how to pronounce Goethe Street correctly. I memorized landmarks. I never—not once—referred to Soldier Field as Soldier’s Field, which any Chicagoan will tell you is an offense worse than putting catsup on a brat. I even learned to say gym shoes instead of sneakers, and pop instead of soda. Before long, I sounded like a local, which is the sign of a true radio personality. We’re all a bunch of chameleons. And of course that kind of flexibility is also the foremost trait of a middle child like me—if you’re going to survive, you’ve got to adapt. I could always adapt to a fault.
WMET was the new kid on the block in Chicago rock radio. There was a progressive station that had its little niche, and then there was our biggest competition, the Goliath to our David—WLUP, a.k.a. “the Loop.” They had a massive marketing budget and billboards all over town. They could even afford TV ads with a sexy blond babe in a tight T-shirt that said THE LOOP in script right across her boobs. That blonde had nothing whatsoever to do with the station, but she looked hot (and totally braless) in the T-shirt. In one of the ads, the camera focused in tight on just her red-glossed lips while she lip-synched to the camera. Another ad ended with her spinning in front of the camera, and when she stopped she said, “Rock on, Chicago … Pow.” Then she made a finger gun that she shot at the viewer, pointed up at her lips, and slowly, insinuatingly blew on. They might as well have run the tagline, “Listen to the Loop and think about this woman having sex with you.”
Meanwhile, I was trying to master talking like a local, while also sounding completely at ease on-air, as if the DJ and I had known each other for years and we were just hanging out over a couple of beers. Our time on-air was about being fun, easy, and light. Listeners were supposed to want to be friends wit
h us—to think that we really would be their friends if we ever found ourselves in the same room together. And I was really, really good at that. This was when I learned something important about myself: I came alive at the microphone. I never thought anyone would look twice at me if they walked past me on the street. I didn’t walk into a party and expect all eyes to look my way. I never felt pretty. But when I got behind the microphone and put on my headphones, all my self-consciousness fell away. Sure, thousands of people were listening to me, but I didn’t worry about making a mistake or saying anything wrong. I was fearless. I had no problem teasing the DJ, cracking jokes, and taking chances. We’d banter about the city, and what was happening in popular culture and the news. Basically, I got paid for what most people do at cocktail parties for free.
Of course that was just a version of me—the on-air version. I could pretend that I was revealing the real me, but I was protected by that microphone. The relationship between me and the listeners was simultaneously close and distant, just the perfect thing for a girl with a whole host of intimacy issues that she didn’t even know about yet. I’ve always said that radio is where you can forget who you are or who you’re supposed to be in real life, and you can just enjoy the moment. Behind that microphone was the only place I felt like that. To this day, being on the radio quiets all the other noise in my head. When the on-air light goes on, suddenly I’m in the moment in a way that’s really hard for me otherwise. Some people need a cocktail to slow down—I just need a microphone and a set of headphones. It’s no wonder my headphones became my constant companion over the years—wherever I went, they went. Some people pack up photos and tchotchkes when they change jobs or move offices—I just grab my headphones and I’m ready.
In a weird way it helped that WMET was the number two station in town. It gave me a public persona, but I didn’t feel like a celebrity by any stretch. And we didn’t feel insane pressure to be number one, which is something I can only really appreciate now. It was a different era, when a new radio format was given a little time to find its audience. That would never happen now. Radio stations come and go in less than a year if they don’t make their mark, and everyone in the media feels a constant panic to survive. People are hired and fired in what seems like a heartbeat (just ask Ann Curry). It’s crazy. Back then, we had a little room to breathe.
In time, little Lisa Glasberg became incredibly self-possessed behind the microphone, and I let my ambition drive me outside the studio too. When the Rolling Stones came to town, I decided that was my chance to scoop the Loop. As the number one station in town, staff there had all the advantages—exclusive ticket giveaways and much better positioning for broadcasting their show outside the stadium the night of the concert. We had none of that. So any little tidbit that I could find out about the band—any tiny factoid that the Loop didn’t have—would be a huge coup. This was in the days before TMZ—there were no gossips going through celebrities’ trash and tracking their every footstep the way they do now. So when I decided to sneak into the Stones’ hotel and find out what they ordered from room service, it was considered a pretty big deal. People really wanted to know what Mick Jagger ate for breakfast, and I delivered, even if it meant sneaking onto their floor and digging through discarded trays of food scraps.
Then I decided to push the envelope even further, and I snuck onto their stage, which was supposed to be on total top-secret lockdown before the show. Mick’s bacon and eggs turned out to be more exciting news, though. After all the hoops I had to climb through to get onto that stage to see their set design, all I found there was an empty stage and a cleaning lady with a mop and a bucket of Spic and Span. While I was standing there shaking my head at the totally anticlimactic scene, two security guards for the Stones discovered me. They each put a hand under one of my armpits and carried me off the stage and gently dumped me into the cinder-block hall.
Not long after, the newsperson for the morning show was sick and the general manager asked me if I’d ever done morning radio before. I said I hadn’t, and he said, “Well, now you are.” This was a huge break for me. The morning shift was way more prestigious than the afternoon, because that’s when there was a larger audience and therefore bigger ad dollars that made more money for the station. I should have been intimidated at the prospect, but I remember feeling completely at ease. The DJ for the morning shift was a lovely guy named John Fisher, and he and I hit it off immediately. We were both silly and funny, and the general manager must have liked our rapport, because the next day he asked me to take the job permanently. I jumped at the chance. Morning radio was the big time.
Things continued to go well, and the radio station higher-ups finally decided that they would spring for one big billboard ad for our morning show. Our competitor had that sexy blonde in its ads, but I guess WMET couldn’t afford a photo shoot, so our billboard just featured the station’s blue-and-yellow logo. And the only location they could swing was way out on the expressway that led to O’Hare airport. Then they got the bright idea that it would be fun if we did our show live by remote, in front of the billboard. Bear in mind that this ad was on the top of a building, and we were doing a morning show. Even in the summer you could freeze your butt off at 6 A.M., so they practically had to chain us to that rooftop to keep us from being carried off by a strong gust of wind. It was like an episode right out of that old sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati. Did the station really think we were going to get one more listener by broadcasting in the middle of nowhere? Who had the time to look up at us while they were rushing to or from O’Hare airport? And where was my sexy T-shirt and finger gun?
Meanwhile, my days of normal working hours were over for good, and I didn’t know what hit me. My very civilized noon-to-seven shift was a thing of the past and now I was getting up at 4 A.M., walking to the station in the dark, finding the one open place to get my coffee and doughnut on the way. Sometimes I was convinced a strong wind would not just bowl me over, but blow me away. The last anyone would see of me would be a blip on the horizon above Lake Michigan. I seriously considered putting weights in my shoes.
Soon after I started the new shift, a friend of mine from New York visited, and of course he wanted to go out in the evenings. I dutifully went along, and it was like the most extreme form of torture just to hold my eyes open. I felt physically ill. All I wanted to do—for the rest of my life—was sleep. Deep down in my bones I craved a nap.
I had officially become a sleep junkie, as all morning radio people are. We’re forever looking to catch up somewhere, anywhere, as if an extra hour of sleep here or a quick snooze there will finally satisfy us. But the truth is that we’ll never be satisfied, we’ll always crave that next bump. Around this time I caught a look at myself in the mirror and I saw a stranger staring back at me with massive, unfamiliar bags under her eyes. I remember thinking, Oh, I do not know if I am cut out for looking old before my time. But that’s the trade-off—if it was a choice between morning radio and my looks, then morning radio would win every time. So I got used to being tired.
I also got used to goose down. My big investment of the new job was to buy myself a Michelin-man-sized hooded down coat that went all the way to the ground. Sexy it was not, but warm it was. Luckily, I’d already found a boyfriend by then. Scratch off goal number two. Time to make a new list.
What better confection to symbolize the climate of my new (albeit temporary) home than snowballs? The chocolate batter means that the snow looks more like a dusting once they’re baked, but I guarantee that no one you serve them to will complain.
CHOCOLATE SNOWBALLS
½ cup all-purpose flour
½ cup sugar
¼ cup unsweetened Dutch-process cocoa
½ teaspoon baking powder
2 tablespoons unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 large egg
Parchment-lined cookie sheets
For coating the snowballs, in separate small bowls
½ cup granulated sugar
½ cup confectioners’ sugar
Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
In a metal or freezer-safe bowl mix flour, sugar, cocoa, and baking powder. One at a time mix in butter and egg until well blended. Chill in the freezer for 10 minutes, or until the batter is firm.
Using a small ice cream scoop, scoop out dough, and use your hands to roll each scoop into a ball. Then roll each ball in granulated sugar first, followed by confectioners’ sugar, until completely coated.
Place balls on cookie sheets about 1½ inches apart. Be careful when loading your filled trays into the oven, so your little dough balls don’t decide to roll off and make a break for it.
Bake 8 to 10 minutes, until cookies are set (they will appear crackled on the outside).
Cool on racks.
Makes 24 cookies.
CHAPTER 5
MARRIED AND UNAVAILABLE
When you play a part for a living, it can be hard for people to figure out where you end and where your public persona begins. Truthfully, for many years after I first started in radio, I often didn’t know where the dividing line was myself. I carried my on-air personality around with me like a candy coating. Was I the happy-go-lucky girl I played on the radio, or was I someone else? Did it really matter? After all, I could be whoever I needed to be.
Just recently I found an old promotional interview WMET did for all its radio personalities, and I had to laugh at mine.
Born to Run may actually have been my favorite album at the time, but there’s no way my fantasy was “to fall in love and hear bells.” It was a good sound bite, though, so that’s what I said to the interviewer. To me it didn’t even feel like a lie. I was just being entertaining, which is what everyone wanted from me—and what I wanted from myself. If I’d been answering truthfully, though, I would have said that my job was the only long-term relationship I was looking for.
It’s a good thing that marriage and children weren’t even slightly on my mind at that point in life, because a career in radio is not conducive to settling down. The hours were just one downside—even men who thought they could be flexible eventually got tired of dating someone who needed to be in bed by nine. But even more challenging than the schedule was the all-consuming nature of being on the radio. Compared to the thrill of my work life, a quiet dinner and a movie with a nine-to-five kind of guy seemed … boring. My work was a constant buzz, and it was hard to come down from that into the reality of the day to day. I had a really hard time faking interest in a boyfriend’s ups and downs at the office while I was hanging out with rock stars. (“Really, honey? Tell me more about that memo you wrote.”) At that point in life, my sole focus was on myself and my career. And that became a habit it would take a very long time to break.