We’re Just Like You, Only Prettier Read online

  They both started out their campaigns by saying they wouldn’t buy “attack ads.” But that was then, and this is two weeks before the election.

  Not long before Dole won, I turned on the TV in time to hear her say, “Oh, yeah? Well, your mama!” to Bowles, who replied with, “Your greasy grandma!”

  Or words to that effect.

  It’s fun to see how money and influence can make things seem more polished but, deep down, once white trash, always white trash.

  In high school, if you didn’t like the candidate for student council president, you could just trip him when he walked by.

  In the big leagues, tripping is frowned on so there is a “war chest” of campaign money that is raised and spent. This money represents small contributions from concerned individuals from across this great land. Oh, I crack myself up. This money comes from corporate fat cats who want their candidate to vote in ways that will benefit the fat cats. This is known as busting one’s erskines.

  The interesting thing about political campaign ads down South is that, because we are considered by the fat cats from other parts of the country to be, well, stupid, they will hire a very non-white-trash-sounding spokesman for the commercials.

  His buttery voice will ooze behind a backdrop of imported bumpkins who look just like real people, only slightly hickier.

  See, the irony is the candidate wants the white trash vote but doesn’t want to seem white trash himself or herself.

  The real fun begins with the “counterattack ads,” which are designed to confuse the voters even more.

  Voice of solemn announcer: “Liddy Dole plans to take all of your hard-earned social security money to Atlantic City and gamble it all on the Big Wheel, nickel slots, and Penn and Teller tickets.”

  Voice of counterattack ad announcer: “Erskine Bowles was Bill Clinton’s Chief of Staff.”

  Voice of solemn announcer: “Liddy Dole led the fight against raising minimum wage, thus ensuring that you would never be able to afford a better life for yourself or your children.”

  Voice of counterattack announcer: “Erskine Bowles is ugly and his mama dresses him funny. Oh, and he worked for Bill Clinton.”

  Solemn announcer again: “Liddy Dole hates being called Liddy and that’s why we keep doing it in these ads.”

  Voice of counterattack announcer: “Erskine is a dumb name. The kind of name a man who cheated on his wife while president might like.”

  It would be wrong to imply that white trash politicians are limited to the South. Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura embodied many of the fine white trash traditions of all of us who have lived, at one time or another, on a chassis.

  Yeah, he did.

  2

  BABY BORN

  Won’t Poop

  How a Constipated Doll Baby Sabotaged the Hap-Hap-Happiest Time of the Year

  The scene on Christmas Day afternoon was straight out of a Norman Bates, er, Rockwell, portrait. There we all were: me, my husband, and our three-year-old, lovingly surrounded by assorted grandmothers, uncles, aunts, and cousins all staring, rapt, at the festively decorated dining table.

  And there, in the center of the table, was no pineapple beringed ham or golden turkey but rather a foot-tall baby doll balanced, but barely, on a too-small pink plastic potty.

  “Why won’t she go?” my brother-in-law moaned. He stepped forward and began to squeeze, pinch, and then pound Baby Born on her pink potty.

  Aunts who had helped feed the doll, my daughter’s only Santa request “because she performs seven bod-diddy fun-shuns,” stood back and clucked their tongues.

  “Maybe she needs some prunes,” one finally said, apparently serious.

  The brother-in-law continued to pound Baby Born up and down on her potty. Saliva was now dripping from both corners of his mouth and his eyes gleamed like Jack Nicholson’s in The Shining.

  Baby Born had taken over our holiday and made us all a little crazy. She is made of hard plastic, has slightly maniacal blue eyes, and isn’t even fun to hold. She was one of the most in-demand toys that Christmas, leading me to realize that our wacky dining table scene was probably being repeated in hundreds of thousands of American households.

  Baby Born came with instructions that you should only feed her the specially formulated cereal (sample packets included) before sitting her on her magic pink potty and waiting for nature, or something like it, to take its course.

  There was a warning: “If Baby Born does not go on her potty, push her down and hold her in position until she is finished. Do not let go!”

  I could only imagine what horror would ensue if we let go, so, like paramedics doing CPR, one member of the family would hold on to Baby Born until they got tired and another would take over immediately.

  As my brother-in-law continued to pound away, my daughter began to cry.

  “You’re hurting her,” she wailed.

  “Don’t—be—ridiculous,” he panted through clenched teeth. His voice got all high and squeaky then. “Baby Born likes the trampoline jump, don’t you, Baby Born, don’t you? Oh, yes um do.”

  Okay, so he’d lost his mind.

  With several aunts taking turns, we decided to try to get Baby Born to at least cry real tears As Seen on TV.

  When she couldn’t even do that, I felt like crying a few of my own. For damned near fifty bucks, Baby Born should perform at least two of the seven fun-shuns.

  “Seven?” my husband mused. “That’s more than I got, I’m pretty sure.” The aunts laughed at this so he said it a few more times.

  The instructions advised that Baby Born would need to be rinsed frequently so she “would not be allowed to grow moldy inside.”

  Oh, great. Instead of a precious doll for my daughter to cuddle with at night, I was going to wrap her arms around a fungal, constipated, and vastly overpriced piece of plastic.

  The instructions further advised that, in the event of a blockage, you should “shake her vigorously in all directions, set her on the special potty, and repeat the entire procedure several times.” Note to self: Postpone life.

  We worked on this until late into the evening. Finally, six hours behind schedule, we sat down to a proper Christmas dinner. At my daughter’s tearstained request, Baby Born sat in her own chair, smirking I thought, as her place at the table meant the brother-in-law had to balance his plate on a tiny Hollie Hobbie TV tray that one of the aunts found rusting behind the dryer.

  I believe that if he could have, he would’ve taken Baby Born for a long ride into the country that cold December night.

  Over the next few months, we tried, in vain, to get Baby Bitch, as I took to calling her, to do anything at all except sit there and look snotty.

  She didn’t pee or poop, she didn’t cry “real tears,” she didn’t squeal “Bah!” when you lifted her arm (pumping vigorously according to the directions). She didn’t do shit.

  The directions were very specific about never giving Baby Born anything but water in her useless specially designed bottle. Lemonade, tea, or “even milk” would damage the “intricate interior workings” of the doll.

  One day my daughter and her little friend were giving Baby Born some orange juice, although I’d told them she could only have water. She had so much damned water sloshing in her now that she sounded like a coconut when you shook her. Which I had taken to doing a lot lately.

  “What are you doing!” I shrieked. “You know she’s not supposed to have juice. It will make her sticky inside!”

  “So what?” my daughter asked.

  “Good point. Carry on.”

  I have no idea where Baby Born is at this moment. Presumably she’s sitting around in her permanent squat position, full of mushy cereal, OJ, and water. Which, now that I think about it, sounds just like my aunt Sudavee before she went to the home.

  This Christmas, my daughter is angling for something called the “Make Me Pretty Talking Styling Head.” You tote it around by the hair and adorn its pretty face with makeup and curl
its pretty hair, but, at the end of the day, it still looks like what it is, a severed head.

  She’s also asked for something called the Fisher-Price Loving Family Home & Stable. I don’t really get the stable connection unless you’re supposed to pretend that if daddy comes home feeling less than loving, the little plastic family can retreat to the stable.

  My daughter’s wish list is very long this year, perhaps because she has learned that one lousy toy can wreck your whole holiday. So, as insurance, she’s asked for two popular dolls: Bratz and Divas, which really gives me new hope for her generation. (“What do you want to be when you grow up? A brat or a diva?” Of course, the inevitable answer is the same: “Britney.”)

  She’s also asked for a “kiddy recliner.” They’re hot this year, but I don’t get it. Isn’t there some dues-paying that has to be done here? You can’t just turn four and get a recliner to relax in after a tough day of finger painting and playing army.

  Nope, you have to earn a recliner, preferably after working many thankless years for an abusive boss who is as innovative as drain hair.

  Christmas can be excessive at our house, but I’m still not ready to follow the advice of those killjoys at Money magazine who advise us to “shop sensibly” and “avoid debt.” Why don’t they just “bite me”?

  Obviously these folks have never put off their kids’ immunizations so they could use the money to buy more icicle lights at Wal-Mart.

  Oh, calm down. When’s the last time you actually knew someone with typhus? I thought so.

  I suspect these fancy-ass writers for Money are the kind of people who put portabello mushrooms in their stuffing instead of giblets or, worse, drink likker to celebrate our Lord’s birth.

  They probably all live in fabulous clapboard houses in Connecticut, wear sweaters from Barney’s that they paid too much for, and love to tell funny little inside jokes about pork-belly futures.

  What makes them the experts? A few diplomas from some so-called Ivy League school, a high six-figure salary, and a bony ol’ trophy wife?

  Gosh, I hope that doesn’t sound bitter.

  It’s just that when it comes to Christmas, you’re not supposed to be safe and sensible. If God had wanted us to be sensible, he wouldn’t have invented a food dehydrator that can make one hundred pounds of beef jerky in minutes, the singing bird clock (“Honey! We’re gonna be late; it’s already half past the sparrow’s ass!”), or Big-mouth Billy Bass, the Singing Rubber Fish.

  You can follow the magazine’s holiday “tips” or use my real-world suggestions in parentheses. Don’t thank me now. Thank me on December 25, preferably with a gaily wrapped gift that cost way more than it should and sent you spiraling into good old-fashioned proud-to-be-an-American 18.5 percent APR debt.

  1. Make a list. Ask yourself if everyone truly belongs on the list. (Sure, I could cut out my high school friend that I haven’t seen in two decades, but she’s sweet as a Harry & David tangelo and she’s the only person in North America who still thinks I weigh one hundred and ten pounds.)

  2. Set limits. As you’re making your list, write down a maximum dollar limit and stick to it. (Okay, I’m renewing my subscription to Money but I’m only paying you three bucks. How do you like it?)

  3. Be realistic. Buy only gifts that you can afford to buy with cash. (Fine by me. What will it be for you, Big Red or Juicy Fruit?)

  4. Trim expenses by making some presents yourself. (That’s fine for those of you who have never had to tell a paramedic, “See, I borrowed my neighbor’s glue gun….”)

  5. Buy in bulk: A case of wine, elegant candles, or tins of homemade cookies also make great hostess gifts. (You call this sensible? How about a twelve-pack, some Bic lighters, and some delicious homemade beef jerky? I’ve got plenty, you know.)

  3

  THERE’S A HAIR

  in My Bacon Grease

  Why the Greatest Generation Is Rinsing Out Ziploc Bags and Eating Ptomaine Turkey

  I think Tom Brokaw said it best when describing the “Greatest Generation”: Why can’t any of y’all throw out leftovers?

  Okay, maybe it was me, not Tom, who said that, but it’s a question that comes to mind often, especially around the holidays when my seventy- and eighty-something friends lovingly scrape a single tablespoon of pearl onion casserole into a Tupperware container “for later.”

  Waste not, want, oh, I forget how it goes.

  Don’t get me wrong. I adore my older friends. As I write this, my eighty-one-year-old neighbor is on his roof cleaning out the gutters. I’m just praying that when he finishes, he’ll offer to do mine. It’s chilly out, you know.

  So, yes, I get the whole war-surviving, Depression-dealing-with business, but what I don’t get is why somebody who had a $35 monthly house payment and bought Circuit City stock for a quarter a share is still cleaning and refolding used tin foil and washing out the Ziploc bags.

  My husband’s aunt once salvaged a piece of mayonnaise-speckled Saran Wrap I had tossed into the trash. She spent a good five minutes sponging it clean again and gave me a look that said I knew nothing of ten-mile walks to school, uphill, both ways, with rickets.

  The Greatest Generation refuses to throw away disposable cups. Just watch them. Oh, I know. We “young folks” are squandering our natural resources. Truly, great majestic forests of Solo-party-cup–producing red, yellow, and blue plastic are disappearing faster than pierceable body parts on a Gen X-er.

  For some time now, I’ve realized that the Greatest Generation has the Greatest Gastrointestinal Tract.

  How else do you explain how a very senior citizen can eat and enjoy a three-week-old piece of pork roast with no ill effects while it would send a younger person straight to the emergency room and a close call with the white light?

  My friend knows better than to eat her grandmother’s food. The woman has been known to thaw, cook, and refreeze a turkey until the poor bird finally just sits up on what’s left of its freezer-burned haunches and screams to be put out of its misery.

  My friend Merleen’s mama-in-law, like every Southern woman of a certain age, even saves her bacon grease in a fancy little jar she made in ceramics that says Drippings and has hand-painted trolls dancing around under a mushroom tree.

  As a newlywed, Merleen visited her mother-in-law and, being painfully eager to make a good impression, offered to clean up the kitchen. That’s when her mother-in-law caught her pouring the bacon grease into an old mayonnaise jar and tossing it into the trash.

  What happened next was a blur but Merleen said her mama-in-law’s reaction was swift.

  From the sound of it, she couldn’t have been more shocked or hurt if she’d personally witnessed Merleen doing the devil’s aerobics with the minister of music right there on her new Congoleum.

  She sprang like a cheetah across the kitchen, rescued the bacon grease, and, holding it tenderly as a newborn, slowly poured the still-warm contents back into the Drippings jar.

  The Greatest Generation often sniffs conspiracy where there is none.

  At the KFC, my elderly friend narrowed her eyes when told there was “no dark meat available at the moment.”

  “You don’t have any dark meat?” she asked, eyes narrowed and sizing up the Gen Y-er in front of her.

  Her tone implied that there had been some sort of dark-meat conspiracy and the employees were in the back juggling thighs and drumsticks and joyfully spitting in the coleslaw.

  We left and moved on to McDonald’s where I was berated for forgetting to order the “Senior Coke.”

  “I don’t know why you don’t just slow down and throw that twenty cents out onto the highway,” she huffed. “And where’s my Senior Fish Sandwich?”

  “It’s chicken,” I said wearily. “They were all out of fish.”

  “I’ll just bet they were.”

  Sometimes I am aware that I’m turning into my grandmother. I’m becoming one of “them.”

  Yesterday, I screeched to my ten-year-old friend who had
joined us for lunch that I’d give him a quarter if he’d take my kid to the gumball machine so I could complete the head-imploding task of calculating the tip.

  The boy looked distressed while I, once again, screamed “Where’s my purse?!” (and, yes, it was in my lap) and then he quietly informed me that I’d given him a nickel. Oh, well. It’s so dad-gum dark in restaurants these days.

  I’ve also discovered as I age, less than gracefully, that I have no patience.

  The other day, as I stood in the “twenty items and under” checkout at the new Slap-Yo-Mama-Fine Super Wal-Mart, I grew increasingly irritated. It’s supposed to be faster but it isn’t because it allows all kinds of credit and debit swiping and swooshing and Espanol and whatnot. No one actually pays with cash money anymore, like when I was a girl. I know this because I gave the cashier a twenty-dollar bill and she looked at it, puzzled, like it was badly aged lettuce.

  Before that, I’d tried three lines that turned out to be not moving at all. They were, apparently, faux checkouts. Wal-Mart seems to have more of these than anybody else. People who look like real customers stand for hours at a time talking with people who look like real cashiers but no one actually moves.

  Sometimes, you’ll stand in line forever and this one goober will come to the end of a long line, then jump in front when a new register is opened.

  I had a fight with a line-jumper last week, having invested fifteen minutes in a nonmoving line. A new register opened and he walked right up. I ran over, dropped to all fours, and started gnawing on his pants leg, pulling him slowly away from the register.

  “You’re a nut,” he said, backing away.

  “Fair’s fair,” I mumbled through his pants leg.

  Recently, I had the misfortune to get behind a giggly, cute young couple who, oopsie, had selected the only frozen turkey in Wal-Mart that had neither weight nor price on it. I waited and watched my nails grow until the perky girlfriend arrived, triumphant, with the newly weighed turkey. I scowled and considered wearing my bedroom shoes to the store next time because they’re so much more comfortable.