Later on, Cute Couple blocked my car with their cart while they took turns hopping on the back of it and pretending to steer one another on a sled. It was so cute, so joyous, so young-and-in-love. It really pissed me off.
“Hey, Mork and Mindy,” I sniped, “get a room!”
I’ve become the Hallmark crone. And I like it. Can washing the Chinet really be far behind?
4
MAMA AND THEM,
Precious and Dahlin’
Why The Sopranos Could Never Survive Down South
To someone from up North, the expression “Mama and them” is an oddity, guaranteed to earn the exact same look I got after asking the nice man at Bergdorf’s to “mash nine” when I was on vacation in New York.
Who is “them,” the Yankee wonders whilst fingering his gold chains or meditatively spinning his pinkie diamond.
In the South, “them” is Daddy, usually, but it can also encompass every bony-ribbed yard cat that might be hanging around at the time or whatever siblings and assorted Aunt Ola Mays or Pee Paws or Mee Maws might be found rocking on the porch now and again.
To the newcomer to the South, hearing that a coworker plans a weekend visit to “Mama and them’s” (the correct plural possessive, don’tchaknow), might make him think that Mama has been left alone either through an act of scoundreldom involving the town’s resident hoochie-mama (an altogether different kind of mama) or Daddy’s untimely demise.
Not so. That’s “and them’s” truck out front and “and them” is busily working in the cucumber patch or repairing a dresser drawer when you arrive for a visit, just like he always is.
“And them’s” very first words to you are always the same: “Your mama’s in the house.” It is said with love, of course. If there were any other response, your visit to the Southern homeplace would be completely cattywumpus, as crazy as if you’d come in to find the whole family, including Uncle Snookie, sitting at the kitchen table sprinkling sugar on their grits.
I adore “Mama and them.” The day it disappears from the Southern lexicon is the day we will find ourselves giving cash money for wedding presents instead of going to the Belk bridal registry like God intended and trying to explain—again—that “all you gotta do, Gee-mama, is just touch the screen!”
To assume that “Mama and them” is a dissing of Daddy would be as wrongheaded as watching Wheel of Fortune when you know the Billy Graham crusade is on another channel at the very same time.
It’s intensely Southern to feel guilty when Billy’s on and you’re not watching. And now we gotta worry about Franklin, too, with his good-looking self.
But you know what Franklin Graham says when he’s planning to visit his famous folks for the weekend? “Let’s go to Mama and them’s.”
I guarantee it, hons.
In general, Yankees are perpetually amused and confused by Southernspeak and Southern ways.
The other night, while watching The Sopranos, it hit me like a truck of stolen Sonys: TV’s favorite mobster family would wither on the vine like an overripe muskmelon if they lived down South.
For starters, there’s no way they’d be allowed to talk “ugly,” as my great-aunt Raylene would say. Plus, there’s no way they’d fit in around here wearing those silk shirts and shiny pompadours.
Weekly “waste-management” staff meetings at The Cracker Barrel instead of beloved turnpike strip joint Bada Bing? I don’t think so, paisan.
Oh, and the Sopranos would hate the food down here.
They’re always gushing about traditional Italian fare, stuff like “ree-coat” pie and “can-oh-lees.” They always tank up on enormous messy meals like mussels marinara right before a hit. Chicken and pastry, Southern-style, just wouldn’t cut it. You can’t shoot a guy full of holes on okra and tomatoes and spoon bread. No, you eat Southern food and you just want to hug your mama and take a nap on the divan, a baseball game turned down low in the background.
On The Sopranos, the Yankee men kiss each other’s cheeks all the time. They arrive to play golf together, they kiss; they go for a stroll on the boardwalk and an egg cream (?), they kiss. I get that it’s because they’re “family,” less Waltons than Manson to be sure, but it still looks “quair” as they say in the South, and would earn some unpleasant stares at Bubba’s Brew ’n’ Cue.
Carmela Soprano would never fit in at the monthly DAR meetings, what with her fell-off-the-back-of-a-truck diamond, department store sterling, painted-on capris, and tacky-ass teased upsweep.
Their names aren’t Southern, either. Bonpensiero, Altieri, Aprile, Dante, Cifaretto, Moltisanti…not a single Ravenel or Pinckney or Blanchard among ’em.
No, the Sopranos wouldn’t last long down here, offering “thirty large” for a stolen Lexus and swilling Chianti on the corner with the other “made” guys. Around here, we buy American and we drink Cheerwine with our checkers.
The accents would pose a problem, too, for Sopranos down South.
In the South, you see, everything is “just precious and dahlin’.” The designation of “just the most precious thing” is frequently used to describe everything from an attentive and dutiful daughter-in-law to a particularly memorable roasted chicken purchased at the Piggly Wiggly deli.
Certainly, we could offer remedial courses for the many transplants we have welcomed from Sopranoland.
In fact, according a recent survey, a Southern accent is actually better than a New Jersey one if you’re applying for a job. While the study found that Southerners were passed over for top-level jobs, they did get hired for midlevel jobs, while Jerseyites were most likely to find only low-level employment.
At long last, we have common ground. I would have bet the ’baccy farm that Southerners would finish dead last in a survey like that. For years we have been portrayed in the media as several pickles shy of a quart, all because of our slow, melodious drawl. But now, we discover that Gomer and Goober would get the job quicker than Tony and Paulie Walnuts. Oy!
Not to worry. New Jersey folk can improve their chances of getting a better-paying job by pretending to be Southern. May I suggest Southern speech classes filled with Yankees dutifully chanting phrases such as “It’s so dry, the trees are a-bribin’ the dawgs!”
(Pop quiz question: “What phrase is almost always the last thing a redneck good ol’ boy says before he dies?” Answer: “Hey, y’all! Watch this!”)
For extra credit, you could go outside and either fry a turkey or fire off a tater gun with a can of Aqua Net.
Despite classes, though, Tony Soprano and Co. would never understand the mind and soul of the good ol’ boy. Just recently, I read the sad-but-true story of a GOB who choked to death on a live perch after grabbing it from the water and dropping it headfirst into his mouth.
While I have the utmost respect for a man who can catch fish with his bare hands, I wish he’d just dredged it in cornmeal and fried it like he was supposed to. Authorities concluded that the man had been drinking all afternoon and alcohol may have played a role in the fishy fatality.
Everybody say duh-huh.
The mob wives wouldn’t fit in any better than their murdering husbands. While Carmela Soprano and her tacky gal-pals tend to go to spinning class and get seaweed wraps between baking “mani-cote” and such, Southern women are, frankly, harder working. We are obsessively devoted to horticulture and far more aware of natural beauty. We aren’t ashamed to have dirt from the garden embedded in the prongs of our 3-carat diamond engagement rings.
The profoundly Southern woman will slam on the brakes of her Grand Cherokee to point out a particularly magnificent pink dogwood or mourn evidence of blight.
A Yankee friend of mine once remarked that the one thing she couldn’t understand was why so many Southern women mow their own grass.
Well, of course we do. We are precious and dahlin’ in our straw mowing hats. And don’t you forget it, sugah.
5
HERE COMES
the Bride
Let’s Just G
et ’Em Hitched Sometime Before We See the Head
Is it small wonder that hurricane season and wedding season are one and the same? As a former bridal-page editor, I can honestly say that I’ve seen some category 5 wedding disasters.
Take the bride whose write-up included the delectable morsel that “She entered the church on the arm of her father while singing an a cappella rendition of ‘All of Me’ dedicated to her groom.”
And then there was the infamous friend of a friend of mine who hired some silky singers to croon “Once, Twice, Three Times a Lady” as the processional for her third wedding.
I adore weddings. The families, the emotion, the beautiful gowns, the sacredness, the little honey-sesame chicken wings…
I fulfilled a lifelong dream a while back—directing a wedding—when a friend looked desperately into my eyes, and said, “I don’t have a lot of money to waste on this so will you do it for free?” I was touched.
Because weddings make me bawl (in one friend’s video, the only sounds you can hear are my wailing and the sound of the groom’s ninety-year-old mom’s oxygen tank clicking away), I was a little hesitant. Only one thing would cure my jitters: power “har.”
On the morning of the wedding, I had my har teased so high in front I looked like Jimmy Swaggert in a blue crepe sheath (which I suspect he owns and trots out just for “special friends”).
With big har, you don’t snivel and bawl, you say things one time and everyone scurries to do your bidding. It’s fabulously empowering. (“Hey! Move that candelabrum two inches to the left. No? Do you see my hair? That’s better, asshole.”)
When the groom’s mother, a ferocious-looking woman with big har of her own, arrived a full forty-five minutes late (and wearing one of those god-awful glassy-eyed mink stoles where the little minks are chasing themselves around your throat), I was calm but firm.
“Hon,” I said sweetly, “since we’ve already heard every song your thirteen-year-old nephew knows on the piano, including ‘The Ballad of the Green Beret’ and ‘Drop Kick Me, Jesus (Through the Goalposts of Life),’ what say you move your minks right on down the aisle and we’ll get these two hitched sometime before we see the head.”
Well, I didn’t say she was a classy friend, now, did I?
No one has asked me to direct a wedding since and I place the blame squarely on the taxidermied shoulders of the mother of the groom.
Or perhaps it’s because couples aren’t taking marriage as seriously as they used to.
Just the other day, I read about the trend of the “starter marriage.” That’s the catchy label for marriages that last less than five years, take place in your twenties or early thirties, and end with no kids and little regret.
Starter marriages are all the rage these days, partly because you don’t have to give back any of the wedding gifts. You stuck out holy matrimony for sixty months, for heaven’s sake. Think of it as a typical car-payment coupon book and now you can, ahem, trade up.
Sure, you may have married a metaphorical drunk bike the first time, but a Lexus could be just around the corner, complete with global positioning system technology. Oh, I’m getting misty here!
According to the experts, the breakup of the typical starter marriage should be amicable. Aside from some predictable squabbling about who’s going to get the Krups retro toaster, everybody usually stays friends.
And that, hons, is where it gets weird, if you ask me. The amicable divorce is an urban legend. You believe there’s such a thing? Then you also believe that some loser really did find an entire fried chicken head in his KFC snack pak.
Simply stated: Thou shalt not be friends with thy ex. It’s, well, icky.
I know people who claim to be friends with their ex-spouses and I always tell ’em that I’d rather eat my own eyeballs than be friends with my ex. It’s nothing personal, it’s just that you can’t buddy up with somebody who has seen you slough the dead skin off your heels. In bed.
While there’s certainly no need to be mean to an ex-spouse, there’s also no need to invite them to your parties in some misguided attempt to show everybody how danged civilized you are.
Freak: “Oh, look, there’s Joel! Yoo-hoo! Jo-el! I’m so glad you could make it tonight! And who’s your friend? She’s absolutely stunning!”
Normal Person: “Oh, look, there’s Joel. That lying sack of shit. Who’s the cheap Christmas trash hanging all over him? Wait a minute. I’ll just go say hello. Hi, Joel. Have you told Lil’ Kim here that you still wet the bed?”
Allow me to remind you that we’re not talking about people with children here. If you’ve made babies with somebody, you have to at least be civil during those McDonald’s drop-offs for the sake of the lil puddins who didn’t ask to be brought into any of your midlife angst crap.
But if you’re both free and clear, I say move on and don’t look back.
On a gut level, the whole starter marriage concept is a bit offensive, particularly to an aspiring professional wedding directress like me.
After all, you’re supposed to be entering a sacred union with your partner for life. Getting married shouldn’t be like checking another item off your postcollege to-do list like taking up yoga or switching to decaf.
Marriage has been on my mind a lot lately because Paul McCartney just got remarried to a small child.
Okay, not really; she’s thirty-four and he’s sixty, but I’m still somewhat over it.
Paul’s kids, who are roughly the same age as his new bride, dutifully attended the wedding but they looked like they’d been sucking on lemons, perhaps pondering the wisdom of dad marrying a woman who posed nude for a fund-raising calendar. Strangely, the bride’s family looked joyous.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with marrying your soul mate number two, and if she happens to be young and gorgeous, so much the better! Statistically speaking, it’s almost impossible for billionaires to discover that their soulmates are fifty-five and restocking the shampoo end caps at Kmart.
Besides, there are countless examples of these May-December romances working out. Anna Nicole Smith, who married a very wealthy fossil, won the right to keep some of her (very) hard-earned millions despite protests from the fossil’s seventy-something tot who claimed she only married dad for the money. The cad!
I don’t have anything against Paul’s new bride. After all, she’s going to have to live with a man who, while unspeakably rich and still cute, actually fires employees if he finds out they’re meat eaters.
I always thought it was Linda, bless her heart, who had the whole family living off nuts and berries like a bunch of sunken-cheeked Unabombers. To tell you the truth, when Linda died, I figured Paul would return to his senses and go straight from the funeral home to the Wendy’s drive-thru, where he’d order a triple with cheese, licking his fingers and dancing about like a madman. My bad. As it turns out, the worker bees who had to erect the tents and so forth for Paul’s $3.2 million wedding to Heather Mills were fired if they so much as smuggled in a ham sandwich in their lunch pails.
Paul is so antimeat that only a vegetarian reception was allowed. Fortunately, he did this at a remote Irish castle instead of here in the South. Just try having a wedding reception around here without a sausage ball or those little cocktail weenies in chili sauce and grape jelly and see how quickly you get bad-mouthed.
Sure, she’s young, smart, and beautiful, and has married one of the richest men in the world but when Heather gets a hankerin’ for pot roast and gravy, she’s going to have to hide out in the loo. Plus, Paul is responsible for that horrible “We’re So Sorry, Uncle Albert” song (“little, little gypsy girdle, get around!”). Nope, life isn’t going to be a bed of McCartney roses for Miss Heather, so let’s wish ’em luck, mates.
Celebrities have a hard time making marriage work. Remember how everybody wondered if Bill and Hillary would get a divorce?
While everybody else thought their problems were rooted in Bill’s penchant for “traishy” women who wore too
much makeup and could shoot pool with their toes, I knew there was something else wrong: too many houseguests.
In fourteen months, the Clintons had 404 overnight guests. Now, as someone who believes in the adage that fish and houseguests should be tossed out after three days, I can see that this could ruin any marriage.
The good news was that the guests donated some $625,000 to Hillary’s Senate campaign. Hey, I consider myself lucky if any of my deadbeat overnight guests show up with a box of Krispy Kremes for breakfast.
It’s easy to see how having 404 overnight guests could strain a marriage. When my husband’s middle-aged, unmarried cousin (think Randy Quaid’s character in National Lampoon’s Vacation) showed up to stay with us recently, it was the longest fourteen hours of my life. (“I’ve got just a little laundry here. No rush, just when you’ve got the time.”)
Sure, the Clintons lived in a big house but you’re never quite yourself when there’s a strange person flushing and unwrapping those little presidential-seal toothbrushes down the hall. It’s unlikely that Bill and Hillary could have any time for amorous pursuits knowing that Steven Spielberg and the missus were in the next room probably making their bazillioneth kid together.
Money, along with overnight guests, is what trips up most marriages. The trouble can start as early as when the blissed-out couple goes to pick out the engagement ring.
Remember, gentlemen? After a nice spiel from the salesman about the four C’s of diamond buying, she went straight for the much pricier emerald cuts where you realized you were about to get acquainted with the one B of diamond buying: bankruptcy.
So keeping in mind that, to a diamond salesman, the only real C that’s important is “commission,” you discreetly managed to inform him that you rent your furniture.
Crisis averted; return to the seven-chip clusters, which are “making a comeback!”
We’re Just Like You, Only Prettier Page 3