Journal

If passive-aggressive behavior is your thing (and at this time of year isn’t it everybody’s?) then we would all do well to look into those special holiday gift possibilities that subtly remind the recipient of their perceived shortcomings. Figuratively speaking, it’s just a little twisting jab of two fingers into a vulnerable back area just below the rib cage.

Books make wonderful gifts because collectively they cover so much territory on every conceivable subject. It does take some malice aforethought to be effective in this endeavor, but a couple of late evenings on the internet and a few quick trips to your local bookstore will make the giving truly worthwhile, not to mention amusing and playfully evil.

Here’s one: Your sister and the creep she married have just completed remodeling their kitchen. Why not scour the DIY Home section and find a title like Think Twice about Colors for Your New Kitchen. Believe me, they won’t begin to know how to thank you.

If there’s a cook in the family who takes inordinate pride in his or her ability to cook in the French tradition and who mentions Escoffier in a way that would suggest they were close friends, then any French cookbook that has the words “bistro” and “easy” in its title will be spot-on perfect. If there’s a whole chapter on haricots verts amandine, so much the better.

For any relatives who happen to be Trumpers and therefore are not invited to this year’s Christmas gathering, the Psychology section of any quality bookstore should have the latest edition of How to Recognize Cognitive Dissonance in Yourself and Others.

Of course, be sure to inscribe each book so the gift keeps giving.

The gift of music can be magical. A snare drum for a favorite nephew whose parents you don’t like, is always a big hit. And remember that kazoos and Jew’s harps make wonderful little stocking stuffers that annoy almost as greatly as an accordion at a mere fraction of the price. And since nobody has ever sounded good playing a clarinet within the first two years, you can pick one up cheap at almost any reputable pawn shop to bring great joy into someone else’s house.

And while we’re thinking about music, wouldn’t this be the perfect time to introduce Uncle Ralph to a little heavy-metal to contrast his usual jam of pre-war Glenn Miller? And for Tiny, the dope hipster in the family who now insists on being called Lil’ Tiny, how about some Barbershop quartets?

For reasons that escape me and probably others, tools are always on sale at Christmas. Especially expensive power tools and other, powerless tool sets for which most people will have a single use during the course of an entire lifetime. By giving everybody on your list a 121-piece socket-wrench set, for instance, you’ll be gently pointing out their mechanical ineptitude while suggesting that they perhaps do something about it.

For your Facebook friends, wall posters are available that gently point out the proper usage of “there, they’re and their.”

A gift box of personal hygiene products presented to a co-worker can be both suggestive and remedial, but always provocative. If it’s a Secret Santa situation, only include deodorants.

And if you’d like to challenge an elderly relative’s mental standing, such as it were, simply give him/her exactly what he/she gave you last year and watch them drift into a confused reverie of thought.

Most people do care deeply about the welfare and well-being of their families. Or not. But nothing suggests such concern as gifting your adorably pudgy cousin Sofia and her not so adorable husband, with a gym membership or a piece of outrageously expensive exercise equipment that doubles as a coat rack when not in use, which is most of the time after its initial three days.

In an ever-so-subtle way, both are gifts that say, “Yo Sofia, Bert! Y’all gonna die if you don’t shed some pounds! Dude!” Or something like that. I don’t know. I’m tired. I don’t do youth-speak.

One might have thought that by now anybody who was going to invest in a home gym would have done so. But there’s always a new generation willing to prove themselves fit by investing heavily in gym equipment. Buy a stationary bike, a set of barbells, maybe a jump rope or a full-length mirror to monitor the progress you’re making sculpting your body and you’re in business. The reality is, or course, that a StepFaster, even with the optional television, is boring, and the progress you made in those first three days wasn’t satisfactory. By now, of course, it’s been a coat rack for at least two years.

So you buy something else to replace it. Except you keep the StepFaster, not for sentimental reasons or any notion that you might using it again, but for the simple fact that there is no market for used exercise equipment, much like there is no market for used pick-up trucks in Beverly Hills.

That’s why there is always a treadmill next to any public dumpster.

I have a friend who, over the past three decades, has purchased every piece of exercise equipment known to man. A large part of his house looks like a gym, except that cobwebs have taken up residence over each piece of equipment like tinsel on a Christmas tree. It is an eerie sight. It also smells like a locker room.

January is the busiest month for fitness centers. Bolstered by New Year’s resolutions to get in shape, lose those extra pounds and trim whatever it is that needs trimming, people pay the initiation fee, the first six months of dues, find a locker currently under rent control, and become friends with a 20-year-old trainer who looks like Adonis with acne and sounds like a drill sergeant.

After a single session of being screamed at by Sgt. Adonis while your eyes fill up with so much sweat that you can’t read the pithy signs that decorate the spaces among enough mirrors to make it seem like there are at least eight of you (No Pain, No Gain; Use It or Lose It; Do or Die; Exit), you mutter some unmentionables in front of your locker as you plop your weary and sweat-soaked butt onto the bench. Briefly striking a pose worthy of Rodin, albeit less sculpted, you stuff your gear into the $300 gym bag you recently bought, walk to your Porsche and gently make an obscene gesture at the gym as you drive off.

Unless the fitness club has a bar. Then you stay long enough for one vodka-and-beet-juice cocktail on ice.

Six months later, you decide you’d better get in shape for the summer beach season, so you return to the gym, pay for another six months and meet your new trainer, a Venus di Milo with arms who also has a voice like a drill sergeant, but an octave higher.

Then you go to the bar for a gin-and-carrot juice-cocktail, neat, but with three anchovy-stuffed olives.

Geri and I are, perhaps to your surprise, fitness freaks. Seriously. We have a staircase in our house that we travel up and down at least two, sometimes as many as three or four times a day. We have a pair of 3-pound barbells for all the obvious reasons, and we have a box full of wide stretchy rubber strips in a rainbow of colors that we’re not sure how to use, except as not-very-effective weaponry.

And of course, there’s the pièce de résistance of our fitness world: the stationary bike.

It hasn’t moved in years.

Photography by Courtney A. Liska

Eggnog
A traditional yule-time drink dating back hundreds (maybe even thousands) of years, eggnog is made with eggs (hence the name) and, of course, nog (hence the rest of the name). Based on having had it once, I found it to be moderately disgusting and a not-so-nice thing to do to perfectly good alcohol. Then again, it isn’t as bad as your run-of-the-mill $35 fruitcake, which 40 percent of all Americans use as doorstops.

6 egg yolks
3/4 cup sugar
2 cups milk
2 whole cloves
Pinch of cinnamon
1 cup heavy cream
1 tsp. freshly grated nutmeg
1-1/2 tsp. vanilla extract
2 Tbsp. each of bourbon and rum, or brandy to taste
4 egg whites (optional)

In a large bowl, use an electric mixer to beat egg yolks until light in color. Continue beating and slowly add the sugar. Beat at high speed until fluffy.
Combine the milk, cloves, and cinnamon in a thick-bottomed saucepan. Slowly heat on medium heat until the milk mixture is steamy hot, but not boiling. (God forbid you should curdle this stuff and make it worse.)
Slowly add half of the hot milk mixture into the eggs, whisking constantly. Pour the mixture back into the saucepan.
Cook the eggnog on medium heat, stirring constantly with a wooden spoon, until the mixture begins to thicken slightly. Again: Do not allow the mixture to boil. Remove from heat and stir in the cream.
Strain the mixture through a mesh strainer and allow to cool for an hour.
Stir in vanilla extract, nutmeg, and alcohol. Chill.
If contracting salmonella poisoning doesn’t bother you, beat egg whites with an electric mixer until they peak. Add a teaspoon of sugar and continue to beat until they reach stiff peaks. Gently fold into eggnog. Dispose of properly.

With barely 11 months to go before we’re asked to go to the polls and vote our conscience, our pocketbook or whatever our sense of what the lesser of two evils might be, it’s time to take seriously the options being paraded by us.

On the incumbent’s side, we have the President, who this past week seemed most concerned about how many times Americans have to flush their toilets. Many of the Washington pundits view this as a diversionary tactic from the more important question of leaky faucets. Either way, we’re using too much water.

The Democrats currently have somewhere between five and 103 candidates trying to define their party in an effort to win the nomination. It doesn’t seem to be going well.

The candidates seem not to have noticed that Will Rogers, who died in an airplane crash in 1935, defined the party by answering a reporter’s question if he belonged to an organized political party. “No sir,” Rogers said proudly, “I’m a Democrat.”

It’s understandable, of course, that no reference is generally made of Rogers since no Democrat candidate has shown any sense of humor except for Amy Klobuchar, whose dating life seems both humorous and noteworthy.

It seems that every other day or so, somebody drops out and a couple more enter the race. Each of them endorses the modern equivalent of Herbert Hoover’s promise of a “chicken in every pot,” without regard to payment for said chicken or what a suitable substitute might be for vegans. It’s important to note that Hoover made that promise in 1928, before there were any vegans. He also said that if elected he would make sure there was a “car in every garage.”

Since everybody wanted both a chicken and a car—especially the car, provided it had power steering and four-wheel-drive—the Republican Hoover beat Alfred Smith in a landslide. Less than a year later, Wall Street operatives were leaping out of their windows as the nation entered into what became known as the Great Depression. Hoover, a Prohibitionist, was a man who clearly needed a drink just to unwind enough to not seem like Calvin Coolidge’s body double. In 1932, Hoover, who was the scion to the vacuum cleaner family (motto: “We Suck”), handed over the election to FDR with the caveat that the electorate “isn’t very nice.”

As far as I can determine, no Broadway musical was ever based on Hoover’s life, although two minor planets, 932 Hooveria and 1363 Herberta, are named in his honor.

I am a big fan of Broadway musicals.

I co-wrote an adaptation of one that might have bombed in New Haven had it even gotten that far. Commissioned by Cleveland State University, the show was the first theatrical presentation at the Kennedy Center and enjoyed a record-breaking run at the Cleveland Playhouse. We even got “optioned” for Broadway. The night before we were trying to entice investors at a backer’s audition at a Greek restaurant in midtown to give us about half a million dollars, Melina Mercouri opened in Lysistrata and destroyed our chances of becoming the next “big thing” because her show was a flop in the making. Clive Barnes added insult to injury by telling his New York Times readers that Aristophanes could never be adapted to the modern stage.

The show I was involved with was a rock ‘n’ roll treatment of Aristophanes’ The Birds.

The Birds was a political/social satire that took place in Cloud Cuckooland, which is synonymous with the Kingdom of Heaven. Or something like that. Our version took place inside of what looked like a giant birdcage, with the actors all dressed like birds with glittering feathers. There was a lot of cawing and singing, and enough slapstick to embarrass Soupy Sales. The show was much better than I could ever describe. Take my word for it. But we were dead in the water because in 1971 whatever Clive Barnes said was gospel.

The Broadway theater, whose distinction has little to do with the Great White Way and everything to do with seating capacity, has been the setting for many shows and musicals based on classic literature.

Man of La Mancha jumps to mind. Based on the writings of Miguel de Cervantes, the musical version of Don Quixote was an international hit in the sixties.

The Producers, though not strictly based on the works of Franz Kafka, the Bohemian writer whose world view was just to the left of cheery, nonetheless conjured imagery from The Metamorphosis that had a lead character wake up as a giant cockroach.

Camelot, a big hit with Kennedy Democrats, was based on the King Arthur legend as adapted from the T. H. White novel The Once and Future King. Godspell was based on the Book of St. Matthew, the first book of the New Testament. And Annie was fashioned from the panels of the Little Orphan Annie comic strip. OK, so that last one isn’t really literature. Then again, name another Broadway hit based on a comic strip.

Clearly, Neil Simon was influenced by significant works of literature. During the Great Depression, Simon, a young Jewish boy from The Bronx, was grappling with notions of God, free will, morality and patricide as he worked his way through Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Inspired by the dynamic established by the author between Dmitri and Ivan (there was a third brother who is best not mentioned here), Simon, whose real name was Simon, created Oscar and Felix and lightened things up enough to create The Odd Couple.

The movie, by the way, was better than the play which was better than the television show.

As an aside to the subject at hand, Kurt Vonnegut once said that if “there is one book that can teach you everything you need to know about life…it’s The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, but that’s not enough anymore.”

And then along came Pickwick, a musical based on The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens, the British author best known for Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, A Tale of Two Cities, and countless other books none of us have ever bothered to read because they’re really long and mostly boring.

Pickwick had a pretty good run in London, but only lasted for 58 performances on Broadway. All of that was in the mid-sixties.

Although dated, Pickwick carries a message that should be considered as we move into the next phase of American democracy. Leslie Bricusse, the lyricist of Pickwick, I believe encompassed what is important in that effort. Although dead and British, I would nonetheless vote for him based solely on his vision as expressed in “If I Ruled the World.”

However naïve and wistful, his words are what I’ll choose to believe as we move forward.

If I ruled the world,
Every day would be the first day of spring,
Every heart would have a new song to sing,
And we’d sing of the joy every morning would bring.

If I ruled the world,
Every man would be as free as a bird,
Every voice would be a voice to be heard,
Take my word we would treasure each day that occurred.

My world would be a beautiful place,
Where we would weave such wonderful dreams.
My world would wear a smile on its face,
Like the man in the moon has when the moon beams.

If I ruled the world,
Every man would say the world was his friend,
There’d be happiness that no man could end,
No my friend, not if I ruled the world.

Every head would be held up high,
There’d be sunshine in everyone’s sky,
If the day ever dawned when I ruled the world.

Photography by Courtney A. Liska

Chicken Stock

To me, a chicken in every pot translates to chicken stock.

3½ – 4 pound chicken
2 leeks, coarsely chopped
2 carrots, coarsely chopped
1 onion, peeled and chopped
2 stalks celery, coarsely chopped
2 cloves garlic, unpeeled
8 whole peppercorns
4-5 sprigs of parsley
2 sprigs of fresh thyme
1 bay leaf

Place all of the ingredients in a stockpot and cover with four quarts of cold water.

Bring to a boil and simmer, partially covered, for about 3 hours. Be sure to skim the fat and foam.

Strain through a fine sieve and let cool. Remove all of the fat that rises to the surface.

Though hardly an authority on any religion of any stripe, I do have a few ideas about the connection between the birth of Christ and Black Friday.

Jesus, rest his soul, was a man who found religion a tad repugnant and would probably have passed on the idea of a religious movement, replete with the traditional tyranny and wars, that used his surname. He would probably have guessed that his teachings would be twisted around by some to fit their own agenda.

As the bumper sticker informs us, Jesus was a Jewish carpenter, which was a tough business in those days before power tools and multiple listings. He also had a decidedly Puerto Rican name, which seems a bit suspect. The religion he found a tad repugnant was his own. As a follower of that ancient and somewhat archaic faith myself, I can understand much of his displeasure—especially with all the rules in Leviticus which includes a ban on bacon.

But all of that is purely from a theological sense.

He, of course, didn’t have access to Woody Allen movies, the Catskills, Philip Roth novels, or the thousands of Jewish comedians who have woven a rich tapestry of the secular Jewish life to tell head-scratching goyim. He hadn’t seen Fiddler On the Roof or heard Barbra Streisand sing. He, God bless him, did not know the pleasures of pastrami-on-rye, bagels with a schmear, or chicken soup with matzoh balls because he died before the Steiner family had opened a branch of the Carnegie Deli at the Ben Gurion Airport.

Secularly speaking, he was barely a Jew.

We’re fast-approaching the day that about 33 percent of the world’s population celebrates the birth of Christ. There is also significant number of non-believers who celebrate Christmas because they think having a dead tree in the living room is festive. Statistically, non-believers spend more money on consumer electronics during the holiday shopping season than do believers. Actually, that’s just my guess.

My knowledge of the particulars of Christianity is limited to information I’ve received from several Episcopal priests (and one Catholic Monsignor) I’ve known in the course of my life. They were all scotch drinkers which, along with the little white collars and erudition, makes them inordinately trustworthy.

But my truest expertise comes from my having been a drummer in the musical, Godspell, which was a rock ‘n’ roll version of the Gospel of Saint Matthew. By that same reckoning, I can answer most of your questions about the outlaw James Gang from my tenure playing drums in the first country & western musical, Jesse James, which ran for what seemed an eternity in an off-off-Broadway theater on 4th and Bowery. Prior to that, I learned all about the pre-War Berlin theater scene when I played Cabaret in summer stock.

And while we’re on the subject of amusement and knowledge being interchangeable, you can learn an awful lot about insects from watching the documentary-like story of apocalyptic prophecy in The Hellstrom Chronicle.

The Book of Matthew contains more than the simple beauty and wisdom expressed in the Beatitudes; it also tells of the three Magi—aka the Three Kings or the Three Wise Men—who brought gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh to the Christ child.

There is some controversy and a lot of confusion about this story that appears only in Matthew.

First of all, is Magi pronounced with a soft or hard “g”? What is a baby supposed to do with those gifts? And there might have been up to twelve Wise Men in the collective Magi. I’ve done considerable research on this subject and have come to believe the theory that there were actually four Kings: Balthasar, the King of Arabia; Melchior, the King of Persia; Gaspar, the King of India; and, Sherwin, the King of Retail, whose gift to the Baby Jesus was a dreidel from Dreidels “R” Us, his flagship toy store in nearby Lod, a town whose Aramaic name translates to “go away.”

Sherwin’s retail empire included a jewelry store that sold gold, frankincense and myrrh, as well as hand-drawn postcards of King Solomon’s temple; a textile outlet that made and sold yarmulkes, prayer shawls and hair shirts; a traveling caravan that sold wooden mallets (it later became Snap-On Tools); and, three vegan falafel stands that, according to Yelp, served the best baba ghanoush in the Middle East.

He also owned an inn that had never had a vacancy, due mostly to the French toast with imported yak butter they served at breakfast.

The advent of the internet was nothing Sherwin could have foreseen, and it hurt his businesses; except for the falafel stands which, with the menu addition of meatless shawarma, have proven themselves as recession-proof.

Desperate, Sherwin decided that to honor the newly born King of Kings he would encourage people to buy stuff to give to each other. To accomplish his mission, he hired a Mad Ave team of PR and marketing specialists, and thousands of people to create and build all this new stuff that would be of little use or value but could be sold for a lot of money.

Given the limited skills of his employees—the only jobs they had held were in construction, textiles and hospitality—most of the new products were made of wood, wool or garbanzo beans. Dreidels “R” Us expanded its toy line to include Pegos, little blocks of wood that snapped together to make stuff that would help kids forget that they had no video games. Since nobody wore shoes in those days, Pegos caused a lot of foot injuries.

His textile firm, Schmatta, introduced the cardigan sweater. Sherwin also started a foot ware outlet, Rubber Soles, that made sandals from garbanzo beans.

And then one fateful day—a Thursday actually, though nobody knew that since Pope Gregory had yet to be born—everybody decided to be thankful for what they already had and call it good. Except for the falafel stands, Sherwin’s businesses tanked. Bankruptcy attorneys started flocking to his side. Creditors refused payment in Pegos; for good reason, kids had lost interest in dreidels. Anybody who prayed already had a shawl.

After waiting for what might have been a year—it was anybody’s guess—the whole thankful schtick came up again. A little light bulb went off in Sherwin’s head, which was a deeply disturbing vision since Edison had yet to be born, and he envisioned a new store he called Lot O’ Crap, where he could dump all of his inventory at half-price after first doubling the price.

“Brilliant!” he exclaimed. His bean counters cheered, “Ole! Ole!”

People bought into it, this new event he named שוואַרץ פרייַטיק, and they started camping in front of Sherwin’s store to be at the front of the line to buy as much crap as they could. People were hurt, run over by chariots in the crowded parking lots, or stomped to death by fellow shoppers eager to get their hands on Insta Cookers, flat-screen TVs and World Cup memorabilia.

And on that first Black Friday, Sherwin took his rightful place as King of Retail.

Photo illustration by Courtney A. Liska

Falafel
1 16 oz. can of garbanzo beans
1 large onion (chopped)
2 cloves garlic (chopped)
3 tablespoons fresh parsley (chopped)
1 teaspoon coriander
1 teaspoon cumin
2 tablespoons flour
1 teaspoon salt
Pepper (to taste)
Safflower oil for frying

Drain garbanzo beans, place in a pan with water and bring to a boil.
Allow to boil for 5 minutes, then let simmer for an hour.
Drain and cool.
Combine beans, garlic, onion, coriander, cumin, salt, and pepper in a bowl. Add flour.
Mash mixture into a thick paste.
Form into small balls, about the size of a ping pong ball. Slightly flatten into thick patties.
Fry in 2 inches of oil at 350 F until golden brown (5 to 7 minutes).

While not subject to rites of passage that need commemoration with such tribalistic traditions as scarification and branding, we in the western world do have at least one ritual that is noteworthy. That, of course, is the matriculation from the kids’ table to a seat at the table where the adults celebrate Thanksgiving.

Children are generally stupid little creatures who don’t know a good thing when they see one. This is especially true when it comes to holiday seating arrangements, which always include as many degrees of separation from grown-ups as are possible in any enclosed area. Children are seated at folding card tables that have been erected over thick sheets of plastic drop cloths. Food—from a kid-tested and kid-friendly menu that includes both hot dogs and SpaghettiOs®—is distributed on paper plates. Plastic cutlery is provided, as are spill-proof cups for the sparkling apple juice that is considered festive by those who have never tasted it.

At the kids’ table, there is little fuss about etiquette. Napkins, though needed, are optional and rarely used. The conversation is typically limited to whatever it might take to make cousin Laura cry. There is a lot of farting—both real and imitated using either mouth or armpit—and usually a burping contest that cousin Laura finds amusing enough to stop crying.

God only knows why any kid would aspire to the adults’ table when there is so much pure, unadulterated joy to be had squishing cranberry sauce between one’s toes and recreating John Belushi’s inspired mashed-potato scene from Animal House.

But we all do. And we live to rue the day.

I can’t quite remember how old I was when I was given a place of honor at the adults’ table. But I do remember that my “place of honor” was sitting between Aunt Bernice, whose mustache was the envy of most men, and Uncle Earl, whose eyebrows reached up toward what had once been a hairline. Each year Uncle Earl amazed everybody by eating an entire meal without ever closing his mouth, stopping talking, or removing the cigar from the corner of his mouth.

He called his beloved cigars “she-rootz,” which had a decidedly vulgar tone.

It is abundantly clear that Uncle Earl belonged at the kids’ table. While the adults found Uncle Earl’s table manners enough to make them wretch, we kids were at once wide-eyed and spellbound by his oral agility. Plus, he used words we weren’t allowed to say.

Sitting next to him at the grown-ups table was a different story.

Nobody knows for sure how Uncle Earl came to be part of our Thanksgiving festivities. We’ve always assumed he was related to our family, but nobody quite remembers how. It’s more likely that nobody wanted to lay claim to him.

For many years Uncle Earl just showed up on Thanksgiving to eat and drink more than his share. Before he left, he would manage to create at least one incident that would result in somebody’s emotional meltdown.

To say that Uncle Earl was unpleasant is to say that rain is wet. An egomaniacal drunk, he was sexist, misogynistic and spiteful, with political views unrecognizable on any political spectrum known to man. He had a crude nickname for just about everybody, especially politicians and children. He could wax idiotic on any subject. He believed that professional wrestling was real. He wondered aloud once if Idi Amin had ever dined with the Donner party.

Uncle Earl was rotund in build, to say the least. To say the most, he was remarkably obese. In fact, he wore his belt buckle on the side of his waistband so he could at least have a fighting chance at reaching it should some need arise.

Sitting next to Uncle Earl that first year of my joining the adults was when I finally grasped the full meaning of the descriptive noun “putz.” It was also the occasion when, because I was at the adults’ table, I introduced a new word to my vocabulary. That didn’t turn out as I had planned.

Memories of Uncle Earl notwithstanding, I like Thanksgiving. The cause of the celebration is repugnant, but I enjoy the fact that it is a holiday based on an entirely predictable menu of comfort food whose inclusions can reveal where you grew up. Seriously. I read a story some thirty years ago in the Los Angeles Times about some guy who could do that within 50 miles. For instance, if you had tamales…well, you get the picture.

Geri and I are on our forty-second year of having the same Thanksgiving dinner she designed—bland, pale in color, enough starch to require that a cardiologist be present, processed vegetables with little onion rings or marshmallows on top. It is a meal usually served at least an hour late, at room temperature; it is mostly admired for its vast quantities. Oh, boy. (Just for fun, I’m thinking of making a risotto with sun-dried apricots, capers and minced lamb’s tongue with a mole sauce. Don’t tell Geri.)

Turkey is, of course, the meal’s main attraction. (I’d like to institute a holiday that requires you serve a standing rib roast.) But back to what could have been our national symbol, had Ben Franklin had his way. The Bird. Uncle Tom. The President’s pardon. Memories of the “WKRP Thanksgiving Turkey Drop,” the funniest two minutes in television history. Where was I? Oh yeah. The turkey—dried-out breasts, under-cooked thighs, tendon-filled legs, and skin charred black. And to think we place this almost-recognizable creature in the middle of the table to admire for just enough time to convince us it’s not made from tofu. That’s a good thing. Nobody likes tofu. It’s bad for you, and it tastes like liquid cardboard seasoned with bleach and rubber cement.

If, by the way, your turkey weighs in the neighborhood of 24 pounds and it’s not yet properly thawing, you’re screwed. You’ll be having Thanksgiving dinner sometime after Black Friday. Or, you can sculpt a turkey out of the aforementioned tofu.

Before we met, Geri cooked a turkey for Thanksgiving. She hadn’t thawed it because that step was not specified in a recipe she found for turkey that promised to remind one and all of Depression-era Kansas provided you ate if off of tin pie plates while sitting on the running boards of a ’27 Chrysler. Anyway, her guests were arriving in less than six hours. Always the clever one, Geri hung the 24-pound frozen turkey carcass over the shower head by the little wire doo-hickey thingy that keeps the turkey’s legs modestly closed and turned on the hot water. Nobody died. It was reportedly very moist. Everybody sang several choruses of “(Somewhere) Over the Rainbow” while banging together pie plates. Another Thanksgiving success!

And that, of course, is why many people pray before dinner. (Stay with me; I’m almost done.)

In France, nobody says grace because the French know how to cook. In Italy, everybody knows how to cook too, but they are the most religious people on the face of the earth, so they pray between bites, which is why dinner in Italy takes no less than three hours, unless you’re having more than one course. In Ireland they pray that the potatoes didn’t overcook or take on any flavor during the process. “Ah, sure Jesus, Mary and Joseph, these potatoes have salt! Feckin Eejit!”

Those three countries don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, by the way, although Italy might still celebrate Columbus Day. They don’t know the joy of sitting slumped over worn furniture like tryptophan junkies on the verge of death in an episode of Chicago P.D., currently my favorite police drama…a show that celebrates good guys doing really horrible things to bad guys without any interference from the courts.

Speaking of which, did everybody enjoy the Impeachment Hearings?

I’m guessing that by now Uncle Earl has gone on to meet his maker, whoever that might have been. We don’t expect his presence at this year’s Feast of Genocide against the people who were nice enough to teach us how to grow corn—an indigestible food with no nutritional value that is no longer served at Thanksgiving. Look who’s laughing now.

But I’m not taking any chances. On Thursday, I’m sitting at the kids’ table. Please pass the SpaghettiOs®. And the ketchup. Brrrp!

Photography by Courtney A. Liska

Mashed Potatoes

The directions for most Thanksgiving entrees and sides are typically printed on the packaging. Not so with the mashed potatoes. This is my favorite.

3 pounds Yukon Gold potatoes, peeled
Kosher salt
1 1/2 cups whole milk
6 Tbs. unsalted butter
1/2 cup sour cream
1/2 tsp. freshly ground black pepper

Cut the potatoes into 1-inch cubes and place them in a large pot. Cover the potatoes with cold water and add a tablespoon of salt. Bring to a boil; lower the heat and simmer, uncovered, for about 10 to 12 minutes, until the potatoes fall apart easily when pierced with a fork or other sharp utensil.

Meanwhile, warm the milk and butter in a small saucepan, making sure it doesn’t boil. Set aside.

When the potatoes are tender, drain them in a colander. Using a food mill or ricer, process the potatoes into a glass bowl. As soon as the potatoes are mashed, slowly whisk in enough of the hot milk/butter mixture to make the potatoes very creamy (not soupy). Add 2 teaspoons of salt, the pepper and the sour cream. Whisk to combine. Taste for seasoning and serve hot. Serves 4-6.

There must be a special school where politicians go to learn how to run for office, a place that features such courses as Baby-Kissing and Hand-Shaking as entry level offerings; intermediate studies in Saying-Exactly-What-You-Think-the-Voter-Wants-to-Hear; and, advanced seminars in identifying Hot-Button Issues and Trend-Setting Developments as they appear on the political horizon.

I assume there are also lectures and demonstrations on how to speak, dress and style your hair in ways that do not remind constituents of Bella Abzug.

The reason I believe such a place exists is because the candidates all tend to sound about the same—give or take. They speak of the same issues using the same buzz words and offer the same solutions. The only differences are in the netherworld of financial impact and the projected date of accomplishment (“within the first 100 days” or, “before the end of my second term”).

One candidate can get us Universal Health Care for $800 a year in increased taxes; another acknowledges that while the actual cost will be close to $8,000 a month, it doesn’t matter because Bill Gates and three of his richest friends will pick up the tab for everything except vaccinations and acupuncture.

While missing the irony, they embrace the late Senator Everett Dirksen’s shoulder-shrugging commentary on a spendthrift Congress. “A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon, you’re talking real money,” noted the Illinois Republican.

Besides its ardent desire to dump Trump at any cost, the Democrats are speaking at an alarmist volume about jobs, the economy, health care, college education, military spending and the environment. So, too, are the Republicans, just from the other side. However warranted that volume is, there are other key issues that get little attention from the candidates.

Although I do other things than sit around listening to political rhetoric, I’ve yet to hear any candidate weigh in very much on agriculture, housing, or the impending economic crisis that we, as a nation, will face as we grow older and leave a workforce without a corresponding number of replacements.

It’s been estimated that in the next ten years, 30 percent of the current workforce will be retiring. Fewer and fewer of those retirees will enjoy their so-called Golden Years as they once imagined them. More and more of them are working longer than they had hoped and many will be forced to look for part-time employment as Walmart greeters and school crossing guards to make ends meet. Their houses may have gained value, but not enough to parlay into a down-sizing move with anything much left over. Upkeep and taxes will continue to rise faster than Social Security benefits. Many pension plans have been devalued or have disappeared altogether due to mismanagement and malfeasance.

The impending housing crisis alone begs for concerted attention that will have to come from the government. And that attention will have to be accompanied by investment without regard to return. There is a reason, a friend once observed, why poverty-law attorneys drive 16-year-old Volvos.

For all his babble about revolution, Bernie Sanders has given short shrift to the one thing that will change the world most decidedly and effectively. Perhaps it’s because of his urban heritage, but I’ve yet to hear Bernie talk about agriculture, unless it’s in concord with the environment or in reference to the farmers and ranchers going bankrupt.

He’s missing the boat. And he’s sitting at the dock with the rest of the 300 or so who’d like to lead our nation. (If he’s ever given a chance to be heard, I suspect that Steve Bullock would address agricultural concerns.)

Unlike the rest of the slate of candidates who have toiled in law, academia and industry, Bernie is kind of well, an old hippie, a grass-roots politico who specialized in community organizing that would end a war, redistribute wealth and guarantee civil rights. As did I, he inhaled while listening to Joni Mitchell exhort our generation to return to the garden—a place of sunshine, peace and earthly promise.

If ever there is a rock ‘n’ roll theme park, Woodstock—that garden of song—will be a vast muddy acreage of tribalistic youth whose primary bond is LSD and a tolerance for 90 minutes of the Grateful Dead riffing on “St. Stephen.” It was not the garden Ms. Mitchell had in mind.

But the garden is, in fact, the place to which we would be wise to return—with or without a rock ‘n’ roll soundtrack. Although the back-to-the-earth movement that coincided with the birth of Woodstock Nation was off-putting in the way veganism might be today, growing our own food would have almost-unimaginable effects on our world.

A few rows of lettuces, beans, carrots and tomatoes brings great satisfaction to the grower. It feels good to root around in the dirt for an hour or so in the early morning, and the flavors of those home-grown foods render the mass-produced as barely edible. A few chickens provide eggs and meat whose quality cannot be found at the local Kroger’s.

Over time, of course, such exposure changes the way one thinks about food in the way that many think of subsistence hunting and fishing. It develops respect for what shows up on our plates by thinking about food’s origins and sources, and gratitude for those whose labors provide it, especially if those labors are one’s own.

In 2015 Americans spent $29.1 billion on lawn care, not including water. Imagine the environmental impact and dollar costs of fuel consumption just to power the lawnmowers, leaf blowers and weed-eaters that intrude on the weekend’s silence. I cannot think of a single expenditure of private or public funds that is more useless or wasteful.

Other than in public spaces like urban parks, athletic fields and, perhaps, golf courses, there is no reason for the vast lawns that stretch across suburbia. Even golf, in its ancestral home, is not played on manicured lawns but on wind-swept terrains with native grasses.

One study I read recently found that 75 percent of the respondents found their front yards to be a “reflection of [their] personality.” That’s about as pathetic as seeking an identity in the car one drives.

So ingrained in our psyche are lawns that it is common for some communities to restrict front yards to specific kinds of ornamental greenery. Lawsuits have had to have been brought to allow vegetables to be grown on private property. The decisions regarding property covenants have not been unanimous.

For many, Monsanto has become synonymous with an evil whose purity is without peer. The multi-national company has created and vigorously marketed products that at the very least threaten the health of people and the planet we call home. There is a recognition of that to the extent that Bayer, the German-based multi-billion-dollar company that bought Monsanto, is no longer using its acquired name and is sponsoring a rigorous campaign on social media to suggest that the company is hosting welcoming parties for honeybees.

Maybe it is trying to make amends and change its ways. I just tend to be a skeptic.

My wife is part of a clique of women with dirt under their fingernails. Their guru, who wisely advised that growing your own food was like printing your own money, died this past spring, just weeks before she’d have been turning the earth to plant her diet and stores. This group spends cold winter nights thumbing through the seed catalogs that arrive each year. There are dreams at work—visions of raised beds with produce begging nurture and harvest, flowers anchoring the fence lines and corners with bright displays of colors and hues that bring contented smiles.

The simple act of small-plot farming can change the world. Industrial farming will lose its stranglehold on the consumer and stop its merciless land grabs if its profits are threatened. We can provide for our families, friends and neighbors deliciously, cheaply. It will allow us to dictate how we grow what we choose to put in our bodies—even if only for a few weeks’ worth of tomatoes and peppers at the end of summer.

It will help to put us back in charge.

Photo montage by Courtney A. Liska

Squash Sauce with Saffron

This was one of our most popular pasta dishes at Adagio Trattoria during the fall and winter months. It is one of my own creations and it was always gratifying to hear how much our guests enjoyed it.

2 medium butternut squash
Fresh sage (8-10 leaves)
Butter & extra virgin olive oil
½ cup onions, chopped
½ cup celery, chopped
½ cup carrots, chopped
1 cup dry white wine
2 cups vegetable or chicken stock
Saffron
Penne, #1 cooked to package directions
Gorgonzola cheese, crumbled
Poppyseeds

Peel and cube the squash. Season with salt, pepper and a few leaves of sage. Toss with some olive oil. Roast at 400° until soft. Heat butter & oil, and sauté the vegetables until soft. Add wine and cook until it evaporates. Add squash (remove sage leaves) and stock seasoned with saffron (a few threads) to taste. Puree. Stir in gorgonzola cheese and add to pasta. Stir. At service, top the sauced pasta with crumbles of the cheese and a light sprinkling of poppy seeds. Serves 4-6.

The California courts and the NCAA are currently grappling with the question of whether college athletes should be paid for their services. It is a story that deserves to be reported. But because it involves numbers and is not as sexy as covering the election of a new Pope, most are reluctant, even afraid, to tell it.

I am not afraid because I have sources I trust and people with calculators on my payroll, plus one guy with an abacus. And I don’t care who the next Pope is, although I wouldn’t mind an all-expenses-paid trip to Rome to be on the lookout for white smoke billowing from the Vatican, which means that the College of Cardinals, aka the Redbirds, have elected a new dictator without any suggestion of quid pro quo or extortion and that by then there’s just enough time for one more bowl of cacio e pepe and a bottle of fruit-forward Aglianico del Taburno with a charming soft-tannic finish before flying home. (Note: Faulkner could not have penned that sentence any better.)

Few people know the secret I’m about to reveal. Even fewer are likely to believe a word of it. But in fact, I became a professional athlete—a baseball player to be exact—when I turned nine. You read that right. Nine, as in an x-to-a-higher-power number—an equation my team is currently trying to solve.

I was the catcher for the West Side Weasels, a ragtag outfit of underprivileged (so we were told) neighborhood youths. Our sponsor was Big Nick’s Saloon and Spaghetti House—a neighborhood joint that few of its neighbors dared to frequent. Nick’s customers were men who drove black Cadillacs and wore black suits with white neckties. Some of them might have had guns. (One can’t be too sure of these things.) They all had colorful nicknames that often referred to missing fingers, and really fancy-looking girls who made funny coo-ing sounds.

Big Nick was everything one could imagine and then some—from the scar down his left cheek and ears that looked like roasted cauliflower to a pinky ring with a diamond the size of a pistachio. Because he was found bound-and-gagged in the trunk of his 1963 Coupe de Ville in Las Vegas (his death was ruled a suicide), it is safe to reveal certain other facts about him.

Nick was big. Hence, the name. His last name, translated from a Sicilian dialect, meant “Who wants to know?” He had wavy black hair pomaded fast to his scalp. He had a way of speaking English without ever uttering the “th” sound, although that can be said about most Chicagoans. And stuffed in the corner of his mouth was an ever-present cigar the size of an enchilada, a food item we hadn’t heard of in the late-50s. Nick loved baseball and let everybody know he did by keeping several bats in strategic locations under the long bar at his West Side establishment. The story was that when he batted, he never struck out. Sandwiched between a bad Chinese restaurant and a Martinizing Dry Cleaners, Big Nick’s had its motto printed on the front door: “Don’t Ask.”

The long-form version was “If Yuse Knowz Whazz Goot fer Yuse, Don’t Ask.”

Big Nick treated us well. He bought the Weasels brand-new equipment that first year, and black T-shirts and black baseball pants. Each numbered shirt was emblazoned with “Big Nick’s” across the back. We had fitted baseball caps and new gloves, all the latest catcher’s gear and shoes with steel spikes that were sharp enough to cut open a second baseman’s leg from ankle to knee, which we were encouraged to do.

We had everything the Chicago Cubs had, but we had better pitching.

After each game, we went to Big Nick’s for bowls of spaghetti and meatballs. After Friday games, we’d have linguine with clams. We’d eat at a big table in a big back room that had the biggest chalkboard I’d ever seen—floor to ceiling, with numbers scrawled on a grid by some guy named Eddie whose pock-marked face had earned him the nickname of Moon. He always had a wad of papers in his hand. I thought it must have something to do with insurance because he kept saying something about “policies.”

Anyway, while we Weasels were eating the spumoni tartufo we always got for dessert, Big Nick would walk around the table, giving each of us congratulatory noogies. Then he’d give each of us a ten-dollar bill. One time we lost a crucial game and Big Nick gave us twenty-dollar bills, big steaks and warm zabaglione spooned over French-toast slices of orange-flavored baguette with fresh strawberries that was simply divine, not to mention lushly fragrant. He and Eddie then shared a private moment, during which we all heard the phrase “sports book.”

Gah fig-ya, huh?

The NCAA would like to keep organized crime out of college athletics, although we all know it’s too late for that. And the NCAA would also like to ignore the fact that baseball, track and field, wrestling, lacrosse, swimming, tennis, rugby, soccer and beach volleyball, as well as all women’s sports, even exist. The NCAA likes basketball and football because they are the big money tickets, especially football.

In the meantime, the NFL would like to keep every single one of the billions of dollars it collects from television rights, ticket sales, franchise fees, parking, team jerseys, beer and smokeless tobacco. The NFL is so greedy and cheap that when a field goal or extra point is attempted, they put up a big net so God-forbid some fan who paid in the neighborhood of a semester’s worth of college to sit there in sub-zero weather won’t be able to claim a $35 football as a souvenir.

Major League Baseball has testified that it operates its own farm system to grow its players at its own expense, and allows fans to keep foul balls and home runs, to which NFL commissioner Roger Goodell—in court and under oath—uttered the word “chumps.” For the record, Goodell makes in the neighborhood of $35 million a year to tell his bosses what to do. (Where do people find these jobs?)

The NFL argues that it wants its future players to remain pure until their days as dedicated scholars in the demanding world of academia are over and they transition to the professional gridiron. The real reason for this approach—other than money—is so that when the players’ likenesses are shown on television, the player can proudly state “Stanford” or “LSU” rather than the more accurate “San Quentin” or “Leavenworth.”

As a compromise, the NFL has convinced the NCAA to band together in several lawsuits seeking to prevent college athletes from being compensated in the form of salaries, expenses, benefits, bribes, luxury automobiles, hookers, sex-change procedures or bail bonds. The two entities have suggested to the Court that a third party be allowed to pay the athletes in the form of endorsements. So far, the Court is “considering” the motion, thereby giving the NFL and the NCAA continued access to all the money they can grub.

What this boils down to is that a starting linebacker for South Delaware College of Farriers can make any deal he wants with Nike or Pete’s Clam Shack, which in all likelihood is zip, but will not be compensated by the responsible parties for a 60-hour work week or the injuries that seem to accompany repeated blows to the head over the course of four years.

I wish Big Nick was still around. After a nice bowl of spaghetti and meatballs, Nick could take a little batting practice. Eddie could make book.

Photography by Courtney A. Liska

Zabaglione

8 large egg yolks
½ c. granulated sugar
¾ c. sweet marsala wine
1 tsp. vanilla extract
¾ c. whipping cream

In a copper or stainless steel bowl and using a whisk, beat egg yolks with sugar.
Blend in the wine. Place bowl over a saucepan with simmering water, stirring in one direction with a wooden spoon, until stiff peaks form.
Stir in vanilla.
If serving warm, fold in cream that has been whipped until soft peaks form. Serve spooned over small slices of orange-flavored French toast and garnished with fresh fruit and orange zest.
If serving cold, chill egg mixture in ice water. Whip cream and fold in with cold egg mixture. Serve in parfait glasses, topped with a dollop of whipped cream.

The age of Political Correctness came into its own in coincidence with the advent of bottled water, the widespread use of personal computers, and the lost art of telling a joke. Sound far-fetched? I don’t think so.

Bottled water came into being when people started distrusting the municipalities for the quality of drinking water they were being offered. There were all sorts of discussions about fluoride, usually started by conspiracy-mongering wing-nuts who think that a destructive evil lies behind everything. Suggestions that the urban filtration systems were designed to make raw sewage potable—a concept that is disgusting in every conceivable way—were rampant.

Before that, we drank from kitchen or bathroom faucets without giving it so much as a thought, although we all knew the water from kitchen faucets was far superior in both taste and clarity than that which came from the bathroom. Proximity to a toilet may figure into this comparison. Then again, perhaps it doesn’t. What we can agree on is that this is an argument that began in the innocence of childhood and has become one for the ages. Who among us doesn’t harbor thoughts about crossed pipes?

And then there are the French: eau de toilette. Really?

At school, from kindergarten all the way through post-Doctoral studies abroad, Americans drank from drinking fountains, a rather fanciful name for a clunky porcelain water dispenser that hung from a wall. Drinking fountains are dangerous because bullies and rival gang members like to push the other kids into them, face first from behind, which results in huge dental bills and leaves the victim looking an ice hockey goalie.

In suburban yards we drank from garden hoses—sometimes without even wiping off the end. Now, of course, we know that garden hoses are responsible for most of the cancers that plague mankind. Why drinking from them is bad but watering our food with them is okay is a question of equal import to that of the whole kitchen/bathroom taste controversy.

We also drank from the streams, creeks and ponds to which we rode our bicycles. Cupping the slightly murky, tadpole-filled water in our dirty hands while watching cows graze along the shores, we’d slurp it down as if it were a 1949 Chateau Margaux.

THERE ARE PERHAPS NO TRUER WORDS EVER SPOKEN than “boys love canteens.” Being of the somewhat privileged class, I had two of them. And for good reason.

One was flask-shaped and was housed inside an olive-drab canvas pouch that easily clipped to an olive-drab canvas belt that also held up to a dozen hand grenades as well as a holster for a .45-caliber sidearm. On those days when my pals and I were charged with defending the corner of Cermak Road and Austin Avenue in the famed Battle of the Bohemian Bulge, I would bring my flask-shaped canteen.

For the historically accurate, epic cowboy-and-Indian battles in the vacant lot on 12th Street, I had a round canteen decorated with a horsehair-like fabric in colors no horse has ever been. It was damn near like the one Festus was always filling from streams featuring thirsty cows taking care of business.

Neither of those canteens would be acceptable today. Both were made of aluminum, which made the water taste a little like aluminum, which is quite possibly a known carcinogen. Drinking tainted water from aluminum is thought to be a bad thing on many levels. Today, those canteens would have to have a BPA-Free plastic bladder inside the aluminum. Or, they can be made of stainless steel. Of course, then the water will taste either like plastic or stainless steel.

Either way, my canteens cost less than a buck each—about the same price as the Davy “King of the Wild Frontier” Crockett coonskin cap I wore to bed every night. Modern canteens—most of which look like cremation urns for Munchkins—cost an average of $74.99 and come with a 10 percent discount on 45-day survival kits. They stopped manufacturing coonskin caps when anybody who wore one was thought to be from the Tennessee hill country and, therefore, a devotee of fresh possum meat and banjo music.

Most adults are too self-conscious to bring canteens to the office, though they have no problem bringing an adult sippy cup for the coffee they brought from home. Coffee is cheap to make at home, about 7 cents a cup. The triple-insulated cup that comes in your choice of some 300 colors and patterns, costs about as much as your first car, provided your first car was a Ford that leaked oil, which all of them do. Amortized over 30 years, the adult sippy cup is part of a break-even financial proposition, unless you leave it at Frankie’s Fitness First & Brew Pub.

People who arrive at the office with paper cups, plastic lids and corrugated cup sleeves are announcing to the world that they have no problem waiting 40 minutes with their devices in hand to pay $7.55, plus tip, for a coffee with a minimum of six ingredients—one of them possibly being coffee. Baristas think this is funny, which is why they’re so damned cheerful before 9 a.m.

Chances are that the latter group of office workers drink bottled water. There are two reasons: They think that a $4 bottle of Smart water makes them look smart or that a bottle of Fiji makes them look Fijian; and, that group also all drive hybrid cars (proof that they don’t need their employers to buy them water from a communal dispenser whose intermittent glugs are quite amusing to the lower classes). This same group doesn’t seem to care that dolphins and killer whales are now living on diets consisting of plastic water bottles that appear to be translucent fish adorned with sponsor logos.

Outfitted with under-desk mini refrigerators, today’s office workers no longer gather at the water cooler to share pictures of their children, talk about how awful Aaron Rodgers’ State Farm commercials are, call the boss unflattering names that begin with the letter A, or tell jokes.

And that is precisely why we as a society are going to hell in a hand basket. It has less to with Trump than you might imagine.

Jokes are no longer told, except by comics in comedy clubs. But even they don’t really tell jokes as much as weave boorishly long, vulgar narratives of their tragi-comic childhoods. If the comics happen to be Jewish, there’s a level of angst added that the goyim know nothing about but laugh at anyway because they are embarrassed to admit their native tongue doesn’t include the word schmatta. If you share any of the same experiences as the comic, you laugh. Otherwise you sit nursing a $14 scotch and wonder whose dumb idea it was to ban cigarettes from nightclubs.

Today’s jokes come from the Internet. We watch or read jokes alone in a cubicle and laugh silently so the boss won’t figure out that we’re using the Internet improperly. (“At least it’s not porn,” is a lame excuse, by the way.) Then we email those jokes and funny images to various cubicles around the world and send supporting texts on a cellular phone named for a brand of bottled water.

When we do seize the opportunity to tell a joke, we choke because a good joke is anything but politically correct, which is what we’ve become. If you’re a paid comic, you can say whatever you want, no matter how insulting, provided you apologize for the punch line before the laughs die out. Don Rickles was the master of that technique, but he’s dead now.

In my youth, blacks and Jews were exempt from jokes unless you happened to black or Jewish. Sammy Davis, Jr., had the best of both comedic worlds. Everybody else was left telling the same old jokes about Polish, Irish, Italian, Puerto Rican, Mexican, Armenian, Greek and Bohemian people, and Chinese laundries. There has never been anything funny about Germans.

Conspiracy whackos will agree that the Politically Correct are ruining a meaningful exchange of jokes, although they’re likely to care more about vaccinations. They are also responsible for the plastic water bottles and the most militant of the PC are trying to keep kids out of creek bottoms. The only antidote is to bring back the office water cooler.

Hey Culligan Man!

Photo Illustration by Courtney A. Liska

Through the chain-link, blue-gray portico that looks like the entrance to a Lowe’s Garden Center, into its hallowed halls, and across the shadows cast by razor wire over the lush flower beds and manicured lawns have passed some of the most notorious of the criminal element—men and women who might shoot you if you smiled off script.

Patricia Hearst, the heiress-turned-bank robber with the Symbionese Liberation Army; Michael Milken, a junk bond dealer convicted of securities fraud; Sara Jane More, the would-be assassin of President Gerald R. Ford; Heidi Fleiss, the “Hollywood Madam” whose little black book contained the names and numbers of politicians, business tycoons and the entire Hollywood A-list.

Each has played tennis, worked on their tans, toned their bodies in a weight room shared with the Oakland Raiders, and gotten a head start writing their tell-all memoirs at Club Fed, the Federal Correctional Institution at Dublin, California.

And so too has Pavlo Lazaremko, the former Ukraine Prime Minister who was convicted of laundering $200 million at the Double-Bubble Clean & Green Laundry Emporium in Tarzana and is currently waiting his turn in the House spotlight to testify in the on-going impeachment inquiries of Mark Zuckerberg and Pierre Delecto.

This morning, however, the world awaits the release of Felicity Huffman, the Hollywood actress who was found guilty for her part in the sordid and tawdry criminal business of cheating on an SAT exam.

Ms. Huffman, who gets really miffed if you call her Mrs. Macy, has been described as a blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window. She didn’t actually cheat on the SAT exam, however. She paid somebody to cheat on it. Not for herself, mind you, but for one of her daughters who apparently isn’t bright enough to get into a decent college, like Harvard, for instance.

She could have been charged with criminal altruism.

For the record, Ms. Huffman took her SAT exams in 1980 when she was a junior at my alma mater, Interlochen Arts Academy. In Michigan. By Traverse City. Seventeen winding miles south on a road once lousy with deer. Lots of ‘em. Other than having been artistically gifted youths, we—Felicity and I—have nothing in common. (My rap sheet pales by comparison to hers.) I graduated eleven years before her, which meant I also had that whole gifted youth thing happening with Meredith Baxter who was more my type, even though she didn’t have a clue who I was.

Where was I? Oh, yeah…

Sunday morning. The television cameras are in place. The paparazzi armed with their expensive Leica box cameras—like the one Sonny Corleone smashed to smithereens at his sister’s wedding. The jaded print reporters in their rumpled khaki suits. They’re all there to await Felicity’s emergence from prison—cardboard suitcase in hand, a crisp $20 bill to help her start her life anew on the outside.

Things suddenly turn to black and white.

There was a desert wind blowing…one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen.

A ‘70s-era Chevy Impala, dusty from its trip across whatever desert is 20 miles southeast of Oakland, pulls up. The driver is not a familiar face. The dashboard is covered with faded Beanie Babies. Why? The back passenger door opens and Ms. Huffman starts to get in. She stops and turns. One leg poised against the rocker panel, her skirt pulled back to reveal her fishnet-stocking-covered thigh. For a moment, she felt like Faye Dunaway. For another moment, she felt like Tallulah Bankhead.

“I was studying for a part,” she says, her voice reminding all that before she was a desperate criminal she was a desperate housewife.

“What part?” yelled the notorious Harvey Weinstein from the shadows of the midday sun. “And what’s with the stockings? I don’t mind your showing me your legs. They’re very swell legs and it’s a pleasure to make their acquaintance.”

“It’s a noir thing,” she cooed, peering through the netted veil of her dark gray velveteen pill box hat. She felt like Bette Davis.

She turned her head to face the crowd. She wanted a drink. Whiskey. Straight, no chaser. The cheaper the better. And a cigarette, a Gauloises. For a minute, she sounded like Garbo. Or Goofy with a head cold. One of the two. The piano stylings of Thelonious Monk faded into the background, as if on cue.

It had been a long thirteen days. It could have been one day longer if she hadn’t received credit for time served. But the time spent—three to a cell designed for one—was a hard-won lesson.

She had busied herself with the assigned task of cooking breakfasts for the 1,200-plus inmates, all of them women who were trying to keep their girlish figures in the face of a steady diet of lard-fried potatoes, fatty slab bacon, locally sourced acorn porridge, and black coffee as thick as an Exxon oil spill. She took classes to qualify as a forklift operator. She spent her afternoons sewing nylon parachutes and velvet theatrical curtains in the Textile division.

Who would buy a parachute made in prison? she wondered.

Every waking moment of her incarceration she lived with her mistakes—the prison’s unpainted block walls echoing her guilt, the steps of the guards setting the tempo of her life’s new rhythm. She slept with one eye open, wary to the inherent dangers of prison life. Inside the joint, minimum-security means little. One never knows who holds a grudge, or a shiv fashioned from a swivel potato peeler.

The court-ordered parenting class taught Ms. Huffman that if her kid wasn’t smart enough to get into Harvard, how would she have fared academically had the fake SAT scores secured her acceptance. Ms. Huffman found it daunting. She was then assigned the task of diagramming that preceding sentence, which was even more daunting.

She spent her evenings watching Old Yeller (which alternated with It’s A Wonderful Life on a continuous loop in the prison’s plush den) and knitting, a pastime she had abandoned when TSA had once confiscated her knitting needles on a red-eye flight to Newark. She would eye the double-fenced wall topped with razor wire and yearn for her freedom. She imagined herself as Peter Pan, sailing past the guard towers scattering pixie dust in gentle arcs.

Why, she wondered, didn’t I just buy the kid a participation trophy and call it good?

“I was as hollow and empty as the spaces between stars,” she muttered, wistfully, but to nobody in particular. She found herself alone, but only with her thoughts.

That first taste of freedom on the dusty gravel driveway of Club Fed was delicious. It tasted like the whiskey she had craved for almost two weeks. After all, there is no bad whiskey. There are only some whiskeys that aren’t as good as others. And some seem to be dusty. Go figure.

Her adventure in search of a hidden truth had taught her that dead men are heavier than broken hearts, or something like that. She wondered what, if anything, it might mean. She felt like she was channeling an old friend whose name she never knew.

She settled deep into the car’s plush back seat, her mind swirling. She crossed her legs and lit a Gauloises with a match from the Copacabana. She had learned a lot in thirteen days in stir.

What she hadn’t learned was why FCI Dublin had received a 3.8-star rating on Google, who conducted the poll, and why it mattered. She knew that there was little comfort in numbers.

And she’d never been to the Copa.

Photography by Courtney A. Liska

There are very few Halloween stories that involve an adult man dressed for the big night as Freddie Mercury, only to be mistaken for Nacho Libre and then crying so uncontrollably over this miscarriage of masquerade justice that the only thing that will lift his spirits is to witness a pair of pumpkins get run over by a speeding Porsche in the Hollywood Hills.

Did I mention he was drunk?

Today’s story, while inspired by the most numbingly tedious of pseudo-holidays known to man in the last 5,000 years, has none of the above elements—although I’m sure we will all wish it had.

My story delves into the unremarkable history of Halloween, a day which, from its ancient pagan roots, has grown into the modern pagan tradition of teaching children to disguise themselves beyond recognition, go door-to-door begging for candy and, if the begging doesn’t work, threaten the neighborhood with devilish reprisals in the form of property damage—something the police and municipal judges like to call vandalism. Or criminal mischief.

My neighbors, who seem perfectly normal most of the time, love Halloween with an unbridled passion and this year they have decorated their house with spiders the size of Land Rovers. I find this fascination with arachnophobia rather disturbing, so I’m staying indoors until the spiders are gone. (If we’re invited to their party, I’m bringing a can of Raid.)

It should be noted that after the advent of Christianity, the pagans were allowed to keep a handful of pagan holidays that featured a lot of naked dancing in scary forests of trees with moss dreadlocks. This behavior was allowed so they wouldn’t desert the Church, thereby leaving the Grand Poobah and his minions in dire straits for the lack of petrified sheep testicles which were used as legal tender back then. In addition to Halloween, the pagans—after a few weeks arguing about what binding arbitration might mean—got to keep St. Patrick’s Day, Fat Tuesday, Oktoberfest and Thanksgiving, holidays that rely heavily on food and alcohol consumption, with Thanksgiving boasting a further attraction of virulent political discussions and football.

Immediately preceding All Saint’s Day, which is only observed in the most impoverished and superstitious parts of Italy and all of Ireland, Halloween is notable for having the pumpkin as its stand-in for something more serious, like animal sacrifices or a golden calf. This is much in the spirit of Easter whose main focus are giant pastel rabbits who bring eggs to leave in public parks, which is a clear violation of the First Amendment that guarantees our not having to worship rabbits at all, no matter what Pat Robertson says.

Pumpkins, which are related to cucumbers in a way that we don’t need to go into here in case children are present, are grown everywhere in the world except Antarctica, a part of the world that is almost as unsustainable as Las Vegas but much cheaper to visit. But that’s now. Back then, you could only find pumpkins in every square inch of Mexico and in Albany, New York, where, in 1584, the French explorer Jacques Cartier literally stumbled over one of the gourds and yelled, “gros melons!” in his native French. Out of curiosity, he cracked one of them open and stuck his hand deep into its slimy, stringy interior and yelled “gross melons!” right before he threw up.

Recognizing that the future was not in faux agricultural products, Cartier returned to New York City, but only after discovering Canada and gifting it to the French. In the heart of Manhattan on Rue de Cinquième, Cartier opened a jewelry store on the ground floor of Trump Tower. It was in his landlord’s honor that Cartier renamed the melon “pomion,” an obscure French word that means “corpulent oaf.”

But I digress, which is so frequently my wont.

Although Pilgrim-like Americans briefly enslaved the Irish to knit knock-off Aran Island sweaters and cultivate tubers, they (the religious wackos dressed in black) were nonetheless intrigued by their (the Irish, dressed in green) starch-only diet. They also were inspired by the Irish habitually carving turnips into lanterns. This had nothing to do with Halloween and everything to do with illumination so the wee ones wouldn’t trip over any of the fairies and be condemned to an afterlife as mummified gnomes in English gardens with small herds of fiercely territorial Corgis.

This might be hard to believe, but at whatever time in history all of that was, pumpkins were more plentiful than turnips. What they share in common is that both of them taste horrible. Though the taste of turnips could be improved with salt, pepper and arsenic, pumpkins were a lost cause until somebody invented a recipe for a gluten-free pie that called for three pounds of sugar for every one ounce of pumpkin flesh. Despite their being low in calories, fat and sodium, and high in fiber, pumpkin flesh is about as appealing as liver sashimi, but slimier. It also smells worse. The fact that pumpkins are a good source of Vitamin A, Vitamin B, potassium, protein, and iron is moot because all of that nutritional goodness is readily available in easy-to-swallow pills.

The support for whatever hypothesis was being hypothesized is that Americans will spend about $377 million this year on a food product that is scraped onto newspaper and thrown out. What will remain is a shell with various holes that will soften and rot on the front porch because nobody wants to touch it.

Baseball fans will save the seeds but lose interest in processing them when they remember how cheap they are compared to everything else at any ballpark. And if somebody wants to actually make a pumpkin pie because Uncle Wally the Fascist is coming for Thanksgiving, that person simply buys a 15-ounce can of Libby’s pumpkin puree, which may or may not be spiked with saltpeter, and follows the recipe on the label.

Carving pumpkins is kind of a fun family activity that has a lot in common with simple medical procedures that may or may not call for a general anesthesia. Carving a pumpkin can be dangerous and you are advised to read the warning labels that come on every pumpkin. If you need more information than what appears on the label, contact the FDA and request a copy of its 28-page pamphlet, Persistent Problems with Pumpkins, a kind of user manual for idiots.

Nobody knows for sure the genesis of “Trick or Treat,” but cloistered Halloween scholars donning glow-in-the-dark skeleton costumes and jaunty berets have suggested that it was an attempt by South Jersey Mafia dons to soften the sound of “protection racket” or “extortion.” They suspect both may have involved kneecaps.

Children between the ages of 13 and 27, are considered too old to beg for candy, so they go right for the tricks, many of which involve such highly creative acts as throwing eggs at people’s homes in neighborhoods where they are unlikely to be recognized, soaping windows, or spray-painting pithy sayings on walls or automobiles.

Sadly, the days of moving outhouses off their foundations and watching people stumble into the poopy pit are long gone.

One trick in which I may have been peripherally involved focused on a farmer’s a manure spreader. (I’m not sure of the statue of limitations and my attorney is currently too busy trying to avoid extradition to Ukraine to answer any of my legal questions.) Older models of manure spreaders were remarkably easy to disassemble and then re-assemble on a flat-roofed farm building. The result was quite funny to just about everybody but the farmer.

And what would a discussion about Halloween be without at least a mention of costumes, which are supposed to scare the bejeezus out of everybody. (This is why Trump costumes are so popular.) They should also glow in the dark. (Another reason why Trump costumes are so popular.) In Montana, costumes don’t much matter because it is usually so cold that children must dress in no fewer than four layers of thermal stuff.

At that point, the kids look like colorful roly-poly garden bugs—as if maybe they’ve had too much pumpkin pie.

Photography by Courtney A. Liska

Libby’s® Famous Pumpkin Pie
As copied directly from the can

1 (9 inch) unbaked deep dish pie crust
¾ cup white sugar
1 tsp. ground cinnamon
½ tsp salt
½ tsp. ground ginger
¼ tsp. ground cloves
2 eggs
1 (15 ounce) Can of LIBBY’S® 100% Pure Pumpkin
1 (12 fluid ounce) can NESTLE® CARNATION® Evaporated Milk

Preheat oven to 425 degrees F.
Combine sugar, salt, cinnamon, ginger and cloves in small bowl. Beat eggs lightly in large bowl. Stir in pumpkin and sugar-spice mixture. Gradually stir in evaporated milk. Pour into pie shell.
Bake for 15 minutes. Reduce temperature to 350 degrees F.; bake for 40 to 50 minutes or until knife inserted near center comes out clean. Cool on wire rack for 2 hours.

On the face of it, the promises being made by most of the current presidential hopefuls of free college for everybody seems charitable. Not necessarily wise, perhaps, but generous nonetheless. For it to be plausible, it needs a lot of thought and revision.

The current burden of student loans seems a nearly impossible hurdle for students with baccalaureate degrees who can only find work at McDonald’s or its equally low-paying competitors. (How the college loan situation got so out of hand needs to be addressed, its inequities corrected.) Those with Master’s Degrees and Doctorates seem either to be training more college grads to become hamburger flippers or delivering meals for DoorDash for commissions and tips. In my day, PhDs drove cabs, which have been displaced in recent years by unmarked cabs called Ubers.

See how far we’ve come?

There is due cause for concern that by footing the bill for college we will create an even larger workforce for fast food franchises and other various branches of the service industry. While it may be admirable to have highly educated workers, the effort might be wasted on those students not opting for careers in the hard sciences or technology, for which there is currently a great demand.

The scramble for degree programs in social sciences and the arts is basically over; in some places, certain disciplines are even being phased out of existence as funding dries up for liberal arts programs.

What’s at the root of the problem are the politicians’ all-inclusive promises.

“Everybody goes to college for free,” seems like an accident waiting to happen. (There is significant evidence provided from the fallout of the GI Bill of Rights following the Second World War. Many returning vets who weren’t capable of attaining a higher education, made the attempt because the program was free; the opposite may also be true, however, in that many a capable person without funding could attain academic success.)

As hard as it is for many a parent to admit is the fact that not all high school grads are college material. While they might be motivated to fully enjoy Thursday nights chugging pitchers of cheap beer and the early morning hours praying to the porcelain prince in preparation for a weekend of non-stop partying, they might not be prepared to comprehend James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, spend long hours problem-solving in the chemistry lab, or sleepless nights grappling with the notion of philosophical realism.

As they should, a lot of parents have really high hopes for Dick and Jane’s future. Many of those parents, however, are too invested with their own dreams for their offspring. Many of those dreams were once the parents’—now being passed along in the hopes of fruition on somebody’s part.

I knew a man once who had a son who was going to be a professional baseball player. The kid didn’t know about such plans but that didn’t seem to deter Pops. At the time, the kid was in the first grade and couldn’t quite grasp the notion of base running. When he fielded ground balls, he seemed to be a living imitation of a croquet wicket. He didn’t really even like baseball, but Junior was MLB bound because that was what Senior wanted—a dream deferred by one generation.

Senior didn’t get his wish and he might be somewhat disappointed now that Junior is succeeding as a research chemist rather than as a shortstop.

Other parents are so results-oriented in thinking of their kids’ futures that they have no regard for simple realities. For instance, precious little Johnny has all the brain power of an over-ripe turnip and his parents don’t have enough money to donate a wing of the new law building at Yale to guarantee both admission and a degree. Clearly, Johnny’s future is not on Wall Street, but in politics.

It is both ludicrous and unbecoming that society places values on what it is that people do rather than who they are. That in itself may well lead to unhappiness in the workplace.

On my first trip to Ireland, Geri instructed me to never ask what a person did for a living. The Irish seem to think more of themselves than to be defined by their labors—no matter how grandiose or menial they might seem.

Seeing somebody’s real value is probably easier to do in a small town where everybody depends on everybody else doing whatever job it is they do. I think we must appreciate workers of every stripe more than allowed by the compartmentalization seen in the big cities, where people live in neighborhoods defined by income, vis a vis, their working class.

Pete Buttigieg, the Mayor of South Bend, Indiana, is perhaps the smartest, most articulate guy to run for political office since Adlai Stevenson, the former Governor of Illinois who lost landslide bids for the Presidency to Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956. Mayor Pete told a wonderful story at one of the debates about an Asian woman who couldn’t qualify to teach elementary school, so she became a doctor.

One would never see that in this country. We tend to place doctors on pedestals and treat our teachers as if they were babysitters who have the nerve to whine about having to spend their own money on crayons and construction paper. Of course, doctors are on a lower pedestal than, say, a right fielder who bats .253 and makes $17 million a season.

If doctors were successful only one-quarter of the time, we’d not risk ever getting sick.

What’s missing from the free-college equation are alternatives to the four-year programs offered on campuses with a Depression-era Quad surrounded by ivy-covered buildings. When politicians say “college,” the assumption is four years of study. And when politicians say, “free,” they are failing to mention that for such a program to work, the admissions process would have to be rigorous and not everybody could be admitted.

A handful of states, Tennessee being among the first, are offering free tuition to students attending community or junior colleges and technical (trade) schools. The results in that red state include a higher high school graduation rate which is indicative of that program’s motivating participation.

Why politicians on the campaign trail don’t generally speak of associate degrees and trade-school diplomas is anybody’s guess. Maybe careers that don’t take place at a big desk in a corner office and involve a lot of paper-shuffling aren’t very sexy. That attitude results in subliminal job-shaming. But the reality is that as a society we need men and women who pursue vocational careers as much, if not more perhaps, than we need traditional college graduates—many of whom choose working in the trades anyway. (There are no shortages of English lit majors swinging hammers, sociology majors toiling in small-engine repair, anthropologists creating desserts in three-star restaurants, CPAs raising goats to make organic chevre.)

While every job is clearly important, it is likely that on any given day an individual will need the services of a mechanic, plumber or electrician more than those offered by a psychotherapist.

The point is that most of us realize our limitations at an early stage of life and act accordingly. For instance, I once dreamed of being an astronaut. When I realized that I had little aptitude for science, suffered from claustrophobia, and was terrified of both heights and flying, I abandoned that dream for one of becoming a professional basketball player. I wasn’t particularly well suited for that, either.

A major consideration in all of this is to determine the satisfaction and pleasure one gets from work and build on that without regard to social status.

Community colleges should be restructured to provide a core curriculum of liberal arts study that is a requisite for any academic major and mandate that those institutions be attended before a transfer to another college for degree study.

Technical schools should also have programs that include basic extensions of high school study in the liberal arts, with emphases on communications, finance and business management.

And rather than looking to increased tax revenues to finance the free-college plan, let’s get rid of athletic scholarships—a misnomer if ever there was one—and the let the NFL, the NHL and the NBA pay for what in all reality are their farm systems.

Photo illustration by Courtney A. Liska