And that’s why I love TV. Because if you’re a girl who thrives on a challenge, excels under pressure, and likes to have someone else do her hair and makeup … there’s really nothing like it.
I had to pick blondies for this chapter—the thematic linkage is just too perfect. When I first started working on TV, something very important about me changed: my hair color. I became blonder and blonder. But there was a method to this madness. I realized very quickly that my naturally dirty-blond hair didn’t read well on TV. It looked brown or reddish brown, and not in a good way—this was in more of a dull-as-dishwater way. So I looked around and noticed that a lot of the women around me were very, very blond. So I took a cue from them, and the lighter I went with my hair color, the better I looked on TV, too. Unfortunately, after a few years of this, my hair was a fried mess, and I eventually found a wonderful hairdresser who got my hair back to its natural shade. Hopefully all those years of peroxide didn’t kill too many of my brain cells. It’s a good thing this recipe is so easy.
BLONDIES
¾ cup (1½ sticks) unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 cup light brown sugar
½ cup sugar
2 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla
1½ cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
¾ cup butterscotch chips
½ cup semisweet chocolate chips
9 x 13–inch pan lined with parchment paper, overhanging on the short ends
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Cream butter and sugars until fluffy. Add eggs and vanilla and beat thoroughly.
In a small bowl, mix together flour and baking powder, then add to the butter mixture until there are no white streaks. Now mix in all the chips. Spread evenly in the prepared pan.
Bake 25 to 30 minutes, until edges turn a little golden brown.
Makes 32 one-and-a-half-inch squares.
CHAPTER 12
BAKER’S RACK
You can tell yourself that your brain is the most important thing about you—or your soul, if you’re spiritual. But realistically, it’s our bodies that we carry around the world with us for all to see. It’s our bodies that everyone judges on first meeting (whether they think they’re the judgmental type or not). And for most women, it’s how that body of ours looks in the morning that tells us whether it’s going to be a good day or not.
If you ask everyone you know to tell you one physical characteristic that has defined them, you’re going to hear a bunch of different answers. Height, weight, the size of their noses, whatever. And for a lot of people, that characteristic was something that emerged suddenly, crazily, even aggressively, in adolescence (gazelle one year, giraffe the next; Taylor Swift one year, Barbra Streisand the next). For women across the board though, I would argue that nothing affects our physical self-image more than the size of our boobs.
Guys may worry about how they measure up, too, but unless the man in question is Michael Fassbender, that information is rarely made public. I’m sure there’s some comparison shopping done at urinals, despite the fact that men insist that they don’t look. (Do you believe them? I don’t.) And we all know that guys love to brag about the size of their packages. But that’s not the same thing as entering a room, fully clothed, and having everyone be able to make an approximate guess as to what bra size you wear and whether they’re real or not.
Speaking of real versus augmented, I’ve often noticed that the women who come into their boobs early on tend to spend a lot of years hiding them. Maybe later on they learn to flaunt what they’ve got, but if you were the only girl in your sixth-grade class wearing a support brassiere, you were probably also wearing a lot of turtlenecks and hunching your shoulders. The girls who spent some portion of their lives flat chested and who sprouted later—either for free or bought and paid for—tend to be prouder about showing off their cleavage.
I definitely fell into the former category. My mom was slender and willowy, and my sisters were the same. But somehow I ended up inheriting my grandmother’s eastern European zaftig gene. I swear I saw one of my grandmothers pull a full-sized change purse out of her brassiere. She kept everything in there—spare tissues, you name it. She would have slaughtered the competition on Let’s Make a Deal. There’s not a thing Monty Hall could ask for that she couldn’t have pulled out of her bra. Both my grandmothers wore bras with complex engineering to rival the George Washington Bridge. So there I was with a small build like my mother, but these boobs like my grandmothers’, and I had no idea what to do with them. My mother didn’t know what to do with them either. She actually gave me my older sister’s hand-me-down training bra. Besides the fact that my sister and I were built completely differently, I would argue that your first bra is something that you want to be able to cut the tags off of yourself. Hand-me-down coats I understand, but a hand-me-down bra? Not so special.
Me and Andrea with my grandmother Fanny.
Me with my grandmother Muzzy.
I swear my boobs sprouted overnight, like someone gave me a pill and, boom, there they were. I was like those boys who start high school at four feet tall and when they graduate they’re six foot three. In high school I’d hide my boobs behind my books. By the time I got to college I was a 32C, and my tactic changed. At my work-study job in the office of the communications department, I’d make sure I positioned myself so that the typewriter was in front of me. That way I figured I wouldn’t look like a head attached to two boobs, which is how I felt.
The boobs-with-a-head look was a-okay with the guys I dated, but the practical problem was that I couldn’t find 32C bras in those days. Bras were either big and wide all around, or dainty and lacy and nonsupportive. There was nothing in between, at least not in the stores where I shopped. Maybe if I went to some high-end boutique on Madison Avenue I would have found something, but that wasn’t my speed in those days. So either I didn’t wear a bra at all, which was really uncomfortable, or I had to try to customize the wrong-sized bras I had.
This was when I turned into an amateur seamstress. Very amateur. I’d buy 34B bras, and I’d perform major surgery on them, all by hand. I’d cut and resew the strap so it fit me better around the rib cage, but then there would be buckles and bulges everywhere else. Not pretty. Trying to find clothes that fit was also a trial. Everything was small on the top or too big on the bottom. Forget trying to find a dress. I had to buy two-piece everything so that I could get the tops in a larger size than the bottoms. I think that’s one of the reasons I was so excited when I found my magic purple jumpsuit—a one-piece article of clothing that fit me was the fashion equivalent of Ahab’s white whale.
It wasn’t until years later when I went to Paris for the first time that I realized I had discovered bra nirvana. There were 32C bras everywhere—hanging in the grocery store right next to the toothpaste. I couldn’t believe it. The laciest, most beautiful bras were lined up at checkout, and Frenchwomen could buy them in the same place they got their milk and laundry detergent. This, to me, is why Frenchwomen are different. It’s not the red wine and cheese diet. It’s that they never have to cut up and resew their bras. No wonder they’re so disgustingly confident.
I’m not complaining about having big boobs. I loved that guys were excited by my surprise reveal when I took my clothes off. I remember when one boyfriend saw me naked the first time, he looked at my boobs and said, “Holy shit, Lisa, where have you been hiding those?” I had to laugh, because it’s true that I spent most of the time keeping my boobs under wraps. I felt like Wizard of Oz–era Judy Garland, when the studio chiefs insisted she bind her breasts with tape so she’d look younger and more innocent. I did my own version of breast-taping (unfortunately, none of my old outfits will be sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars the way Dorothy’s dress was). Radio was a really male-dominated field, and I wanted to be taken seriously. I didn’t want the lecherous old station manager leering at me or staring down my shirt. And I definitely didn’t want people
in the business to think that my looks were more important than what came out of my mouth. In general, I felt like I had an uphill battle in trying to be taken seriously, and my boobs were just one factor. Men of a certain generation did the hiring, and they tended to favor other men, and they figured that a nice, pretty, Jewish girl like me from the suburbs of Long Island wasn’t exactly a force to be reckoned with. So I wore a lot of turtlenecks.
PHOTO BY HOWARD STERN.
Flash forward a few years, and I went for a bra fitting at one of those fancy lingerie boutiques that I didn’t even know existed when I was back in college. The salesperson was a full-figured middle-aged woman with sure hands and a tape measure, and she told me with definitive authority that I’m not a 32C at all. I’m a 30D. Put this in the category of: learn something new every day.
Now I don’t hide my boobs as much as I did back in the day, but I’m still not one to advertise them. When my bra size comes up in conversation (and I have to tell you, it’s surprising how often this happens), people have a hard time believing that I’m a 30D. They think that with those measurements I should look like a porn star. So this picture is my little gift to all the naysayers. Or just call it an “I told you so.”
This is the type of recipe you can pass on to your girlfriends. Unlike a training bra, this cookie is definitely one size fits all. I’ve never met anyone who didn’t love it. It just busts out with flavor (get it?). And it’s endlessly customizable, so feel free to substitute dried cherries, raisins, and flavored chips for the last two ingredients.
DOUBLE D-LICIOUS OATMEAL COOKIES
1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, at room temperature
¾ cup granulated sugar
¾ cup light brown sugar
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1½ cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1½ cups oatmeal (not instant)
¾ cup dried cranberries (I use Craisins)
1 cup white chocolate chips
Parchment-lined cookie sheets
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Cream butter and sugars until fluffy. Add egg and vanilla until incorporated. In a small bowl, mix together flour and baking soda, then combine with butter mixture.
Fold in oatmeal until fully incorporated, then dried fruit and chips.
Using a ⅜-ounce ice cream scoop, scoop out balls of dough onto parchment-lined cookie sheets, spacing 2 inches apart. Push down on cookies slightly.
Bake 10 to 12 minutes, or until cookies start to turn a pale golden brown at the edges. Do not overcook! Cool on a rack.
Makes approximately 43 cookies.
Chapter 13
WHY CAN’T YOU GET A JOB LIKE EVERYONE ELSE?
I met Andrew at the gym. I’d first noticed him on Fire Island on summer weekends, so when I ran into him at the Vertical Club, he looked familiar to me already. Meanwhile, I want you to know that we were definitely not the only ones looking for love among the fitness machines. That gym was like a nightclub with marginally more Lycra.
A friend introduced us in the lobby, and we hit it off right away. It helped that I thought Andrew was adorable. He had a tennis racket under his arm at the time, and he was built like a tennis player, which I loved. I’d had romantic notions about tennis players ever since summer camp. He had a great smile, and he showed it a lot because we spent a good portion of that first conversation laughing. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d clicked with someone like that—it was chemical, definitely, but it was more than that. He seemed like the kind of guy who wouldn’t be a lot of work and drama. He seemed easy—in a good way.
We became serious pretty quickly, and I remember that he introduced me to his family really fast. He worked in their very successful real estate business, and we spent a lot of time at their beautiful house in New Jersey. I loved the house and I was impressed by how close-knit his family was, but at the same time I couldn’t imagine my family being so tied up with my work life. It seemed … suffocating.
They all ate, drank, and slept the family business, and they went to the country club together, and they were always networking with other wealthy, high-powered people. They were all blond, too, which was kind of amazing. They were like the poster family for Ralph Lauren, which is perfect because they were Jews trying to look like WASPs, and they associated with other similarly attractive family dynasties. They really didn’t stray far from their comfort zone, and to his family—especially his mother—I was a big step outside.
We had a lovely time together—for a while—but after a certain point, our different outlooks started to cause friction. I considered myself self-made at work, so I don’t think I was as supportive of Andrew’s work as I could have been. Being in a family business has its own special set of daily stresses, but I had a hard time sympathizing. It seemed to me like he had it pretty easy, and I suspect I didn’t hide that too well. Meanwhile, his family couldn’t understand my career and my unusual hours. To Andrew’s mother I probably seemed one cut above an exotic dancer. During a family dinner, she turned to me and said, “Why can’t you get a job like everyone else?”
I was so hurt. I’d worked so hard to get where I was. She seemed to think that just because my hours were strange and my job was to sound happy and entertaining, I wasn’t actually working. What was really underlying her question, though, was a judgment about how important my career was to me. That’s not what she wanted for her son. She wanted him to have a wife who would always put him first. I couldn’t really blame her, but that wasn’t me. What upset me more than Andrew’s mother’s comment was the fact that Andrew hadn’t stuck up for me.
Our relationship was already unraveling when Andrew and I decided to go to Hawaii. There’s nothing like a romantic vacation to either cement or destroy a relationship. For us, it was definitely the nail in the coffin. We were in this beautiful place, and it only served to shed harsh light on how unhappy our relationship was. We looked around us at other well-matched couples enjoying the sand and pristine water, and it was so obvious that we weren’t like them. The whole time we were there I was miserable, and I’m sure he was, too. Even when we had sex, it was unsatisfying. It was breakup sex without the sexy part. I just wanted to leave paradise, get on a plane, and go home. When we got back to town, we broke up. He said that I wasn’t “the one.” I couldn’t disagree with him.
And I guess I wasn’t surprised when I found out that six months later he met the woman he’d marry. She looked kind of similar to me, which somehow made it harder, and she quit her job soon after the wedding. Career wasn’t even in the running for the most important thing in her life.
Unhappy in Hawaii.
I knew that Andrew and I weren’t right for each other, but this breakup hit me hard—harder than any I’d ever had before. I think in many ways it was my first truly grown-up relationship. It was the first time I’d tried to really blend in with another person’s life. And despite the fact that I was thinking of ending it myself, having him end it was awful. I was terribly unhappy with him, and yet I wasn’t self-assured enough to listen to my own inner voice. For some reason, I hadn’t had the strength to walk away, and that flattened me. How could he leave me, when I was supposed to be the one to leave him?
Meanwhile, I still ran into him at the gym all the time, which is enough to make anyone give up on exercise. I had always prided myself on being able to fall asleep the moment my head hit the pillow—it’s a side effect of being constantly sleep deprived—but suddenly I couldn’t sleep at night, and I was jittery and lost my appetite during the day because I was so upset. One night before I was supposed to do a live broadcast from Asbury Park I took a Benadryl (the poor man’s Ambien) to help me sleep, and I ended up being so groggy the next day that I could barely string sentences together. Somehow I managed to pull it off. But no more Benadryl for me the night before a broadcast.
I wasn’t just sad during this time, I was confused. On the one hand, I loved And
rew and I could imagine how nice it could be to make a life with him. On the other hand, I realized that I’d always felt on edge with him. Once our initial honeymoon period was over, I could never really be myself, I was always playing a part, like I was acting out lines in a play. I’d spent most of our relationship trying to prove myself to him and his family, and trying to prove that I was worthy. Now I knew that I needed to be true to myself in order to be happy, but I wasn’t entirely sure what being true to myself meant.
ONE THING THAT I wasn’t in conflict about during that time was having kids. Even when I was feeling deeply sad about Andrew, I never once woke up and thought, Hurry up! When I told my gynecologist that I’d just broken up with Andrew, she asked me if I wanted to freeze some eggs for a rainy day. There I was, in the most vulnerable position possible—knees splayed, feet in stirrups, cold instrument you know where—and I stared up at the ceiling feeling nothing. Other women in my situation might have cried. Other women had lain in that same position and been happy they were pregnant, or sad that they weren’t, but they all felt something. I couldn’t conjure a single emotion, though—all I could imagine were the feelings that other women might have. Meanwhile I was a completely blank slate.
So I said no to my gynecologist’s question, just as simple as that, no more thought required. It might as well have been an SAT question that I knew by rote. It had never occurred to me to be worried about my fertility, or my ticking clock. Once I was out for drinks with a few friends and one told me about someone who’d just gotten married at age forty-two, and “Wasn’t she lucky that it wasn’t too late to have a family?” I didn’t even know how to respond. My younger sister had always wanted kids—from the time we were little—and I’d always say, “You’ve got to be kidding me—coming from the family we did?” I don’t know where she got her maternal instinct from, but clearly it wasn’t passed on to me. Now I’m the first person to coo over a new baby, and I think children are incredibly precious and I really see how much joy they bring their parents. But I think my lack of emotion back then was a defense mechanism. I knew I wasn’t ready for children and that I wouldn’t have been a good parent at that point in my life, so I stopped myself from going there emotionally or even looking at my feelings about not having them.
Sex, Lies, and Cookies: An Unrated Memoir Page 12