The Kitchen Shrink (5 page)

I was so shaky I shoved my fist through the neck hole of my shirt, as Elgin kept yammering away on the other side of the door. “By the way,” he shouted, “your bedroom could be a whole show by itself.” It was going to be a long seven weeks.

Elgin had me follow him downstairs. He sent Sam, the photographer, and his sound man, Dustin, ahead of him into the kitchen, I guessed so he could make his grand entrance. He walked in, swiveled like a bobble-head doll, pinched his nose and waved the air. “Whew, it smells like garlic in here.”

“The smeller is the feller,” I mumbled under my breath. Or so I thought. Right under my breath was just above the wireless mic that Dustin had clipped to my t-shirt. Which was strong enough to pick me up nose-whistling Dixie if I had been so inclined. Of course, I would learn the hard way it’s the things you don’t want anyone to see or hear that definitely make it into the show.

“Plans!” Elgin screamed. An assistant ran over to him with a sheaf of papers. “Come here, Lisby. This is what we’re going to do. We are going to destroy your kitchen. Everything must go. Everything.”

I nodded. “OK.”

“We’re going to put your refrigerator over here, your stove, microwave combo over there and your sink, over there, creating a fluid triangle work space.”

“Can I have an island?” I asked, crossing my fingers.

He snapped his fingers at me. “I’m the designer. Of course there will be an island.” He waved his hands trying to generate the general shape of it. “It’s going to be a ginormous polygon.”

I pulled at the neck of my t-shirt. “What do you mean?”

“I’m just say-ing,” he said. “It’s going to be fab. Trust me.”

I nodded.

“Now. Cabinets, out. Gone. B’bye. New appliances, stainless steel, of course, courtesy of The Home Depot, of course.” He leered into the camera. “Oh, that reminds me.” He snapped his fingers again. “Lisby needs a drink. Pronto.”

“No, thanks, Elgin, I’m fine.”

“No. You need a drink.”

“Seriously, I’m good.”

Another assistant came running up with a can of Dr. Pepper. “Here you go,” he shoved it in my hands and ducked out of the shot.

“What? No, thanks. Really. I’m not thirsty. Besides, I don’t really like Dr. Pepper.”

“Sh, Zzzt, Ffft,” Elgin sounded like he was short-circuiting as he pumped his hands at me. “Honey. You’ll learn. Drink it. Go on. Take a sip. Dr. Pepper is the official drink of The Kitchen Shrink.”

“What?” I started laughing. And he didn’t.

“Hello, DVR? People zip right through commercials so the ad-men are putting the commercials right in the show. Product placement? You never heard of it?” He turned and grabbed for a can of his own then clinked it with mine. “À votre santé.”

“Cheers, big ears,” I replied, taking a sip, wishing it were spiked.

Elgin made me do it over.

“Cheers.”

“Good. Now. Pull up a stool. Ew, these are going,” he said, manhandling my bar stools that had cut-out suns in the bronzed metal backs. Brett and I had fallen in love with them a lifetime ago. They were cute. They weren’t the most comfortable chairs around, but Elgin didn’t need to be so snide. He patted the stool next to him. As I sat down, he uncovered a black matte board with the drawing of my new kitchen. He put his head down and peered up at me over his glasses. “Teal, or no teal?”

“Elgin. No teal. Seriously, I hate teal. Who paints a kitchen teal? Don’t you think…”

“Tut, tut, tut….” He tutted. He pointed to himself, “Designer,” then he pointed around my kitchen swirling his finger, “disaster. I’m just say-ing.”

“Elgin, come on. I was thinking a soft, elegant ivory…”

“Honey, you already have ivory. Have you seen your grout?” He slid his fingernail through the yellowed lines crisscrossing the white tiles of the kitchen bar. Elgin continued on his bizarre outline for my kitchen. Teal cabinets, I kid you not.

“Jane Jetson may like something like this,” I tried to tell him as the crew laughed in the background, “but really, I am much more simple.” And tasteful, I wanted to add. “This is southern California,” I tried again. “Not Manhattan.”

“Trust me,” he said. I wondered if this show was really all part of one big joke, on me. Had I been famous it would have been a great way to punk somebody. “Now let’s get busy clearing all this stuff out of here,” he said. He jumped off his stool and started opening all the cupboards. “We’ll do this for awhile,” he wiggled his eyebrows, “and then it’ll be time for true confessions.”

Great. I unloaded cabinets with the help of some of the crew while Elgin confabbed with the associate producer, MaryBeth. I remembered her from the production meeting. Daria had thought she looked like Underdog. To be fair, she looked more like his girlfriend, Polly Purebred. Sam, the photographer walked over to me and tapped me on the shoulder. Wow. He looked different without that twenty-five pound camera bolted to his shoulder. It was the first time I got a good look at him.

He was pretty tall with dark hair, and the form-fitting t-shirt he was wearing showed how well he stayed in shape lugging that twenty-five pound camera. I wondered how old he was, since I was helpless at guessing anyone’s age, mistakenly believingwishinghoping everyone else was older than me.

“Hey, Lisby,” he said with a smile. “Just so you know, with your mic,” he reached his hand toward the small microphone clipped to my shirt, “if you rub the area with your fingers right around it, it will distort the sound, in case you need to say something you don’t want Elroy or the producers to pick up on when they view the tapes.”

“Oh, thanks,” I said, thinking back. “The smeller is the feller?”

He nodded and laughed. “They love stuff like that. Also, thanks to your Jane Jetson crack, the whole crew is now calling Elgin ‘Elroy.’”

“Oh, geeze, I don’t want to get off on the wrong foot.”

“You’re not,” Sam said. “You’re doing great. Just have fun with it.”

We got the kitchen cleared out surprisingly fast. Amazing what a crew of five workers bees can do. Elroy, dang it, I mean Elgin, had Trish come and touch up my make-up for my first ‘heart-to-heart’ interview. I was so nervous. I inhaled the powder she was brushing on my oily spots and sneezed so hard my eyes spurted tears and smeared my mascara. Elgin tapped his foot like he was late for clog dancing. After a final pouf of my hair Trish smiled and nodded. Sam seated me in the big overstuffed chair I had in the living room. He had lights all around and a jumble of cables slithering across the floor. Dustin readjusted my mic as Elgin took the seat across from me.

“Look at me, hon, not the camera” Elgin said. He studied his notes as the camera loomed over his shoulder, aimed right at me. “Lisby, what is your biggest dream?”

“What?” I shrugged my shoulders. “Sorry. That’s just such a big question right off the bat. Wow.” I took a breath. “I want my kids to be happy.”

“Interesting,” Elgin said. “And by interesting, I mean boring. What else?” Elgin prodded, nodding at me like I was close to the right answer even though I had no idea what he wanted me to say.

“I just want what everyone wants. Me and my kids to be OK, healthy, happy, secure.” Elgin just stared at me. An old interview trick, letting the silence build until I blurted something out. Well it worked. I tried to think in sound bites to give them snappy fifteen-second sentences that producers loved, editors needed and viewers thought magically appeared.

“It’s been a tough year for me and my kids. Sometimes life just doesn’t turn out the way you always dreamed it would. So now, I’m trying to figure out what my new dreams are. Working on the house like this in The Kitchen Shrink, is really helping motivate me to think about what I want for me, and for my kids.”

I was so not going to pull a Jerry Springer and tell them about my son Ryan and his buddies getting busted for smoking pot. Excuse me, they call it weed nowadays. Or about the hickey on Nicole’s neck I discovered the other day. Long gone were the days where I gushed over even my kids’ bowel movements. Now it seemed as if I was walking a tightrope, wearing rollerblades. The stakes are so much higher now than when they were little and Nicole’s preschool teacher had me freaked out about her lack of pedaling skills. ‘Hey, Mrs. McKay,’ I gave a silent shout out, ‘she’s fifteen and knows how to ride a bike.’ Apparently she knows how to ride boys, too. Ugh.

I cleared my throat and tried again to give Elgin some useable sound. “I’m so excited to get a fresh start on the house and see what kind of difference it will help make with my life.” Yadda yadda yadda…not brilliant, but Elgin was a-nodding and seemed OK with it.

“OK?” he said, standing up, looking at MaryBeth.

‘Here she comes to save the day,’ I hummed in my head.

“Lisby, that was a good start,” she said. “But we’re really going to need to dig deeper and get at real issues you are having with your life. We really need the audience to feel your pain so we can work on showing how your life is improving,” she said in a not very Polly Purebred way. More like tense-high-pressured-TV-executive-not-having-a-very-good-day way.

Elgin nodded in disappointed agreement. “I’m going to go over my plans with the carpenter and then we’ll start destruction city. I’ll meet you in the kitchen in about a half an hour, Lisby.”

“OK.” I started to stand up, but Sam told me to just hang tight, as he was messing with his camera. He came around and sat down in Elgin’s seat and stretched. “That Elgin is something else, isn’t he?”

“I like him,” I said, lying through my teeth. “He’s very funny. I just don’t know what he thinks of me.”

“He’s got a lot going on. Everyone does. They really have high hopes for this show.”

“I know. I want to do a good job, but I warned them I’m not great on camera or anything.”

“It’s not easy,” Sam agreed. “Tell me about your kids, you have two, right?”

“They really are great.”

“I didn’t say they weren’t,” Sam said with a laugh.

“I know, but, they are teenagers. By definition, the word teenager just has that negative connotation. You know, like slob, or brat, or self-centered. It’s their job. I really worry about Ryan. He’ll wait for three hours for me to get home to pour him a bowl of cereal.”

Sam laughed. “I think it’s a guy thing.”

“You’re probably right,” I said. “But Ryan is my marshmallow. He has the softest heart. I worry about him getting it broken by some girl. He’s had a couple of crushes, but nothing serious, so far. But it’s going to happen.”

“It happens to all of us, right?” Sam asked.

I nodded. Dig that. “Builds character, I guess. I just want to get him in college and have him enjoy his independence and find out for himself what a great guy he is and that he can do anything he wants to.”

Sam nodded. “He sounds like a good kid. I can’t wait to meet him. What about your daughter?”

“Well, Nicole can be a charmer, when she wants to be. But, she can also put me in my place, which is far, far from her space. She used to be my best little buddy, always cuddling with me, happy to be with me. You know I just miss those days when my kids thought I had all the answers and could always make everything better for them.”

I shifted in my chair, turning more toward Sam. “With Nicole, I had been so thrilled at how close we were. I always worried that since I don’t have the greatest relationship with my mother, I was afraid that’s what I’d get with my daughter,” I stopped to smile. “Sometimes it’s like that, but I know that we really do have a special bond. I wish so much for her. She’s funny and really intuitive and such a sweetheart.” I looked at Sam. “Do you have kids?”

“I’ve got two boys, fourteen and sixteen. So girls are foreign turf to me.”

“Girls are different, that’s for sure.” I looked over at Sam. “You do know we can out-talk you seven to one?”

Sam laughed, “Oh, yeah.”

“Anyway,” I continued. “Girls like to make sense of their world and maybe tend to over think future scenarios, like if this happens, I’ll do that, or if that happens, I’ll do whatever…”

“Is that your daughter you’re talking about or yourself?”

I shrugged. What a nice guy. But why did his crow’s feet make him look like he laughed a lot and mine make me look, well, like a crow had tracked through wet cement? “I think boys are more action, reaction,” I added. “You know how we always try to look for similarities and say, ‘oh, she got her temper from me’, or, ‘he laughs like my husband’ or whatnot?”

Sam nodded. “My son always sticks out his lower lip when he’s upset, just like I do,” he smiled as if at the image.

 “Well, soon you’ll have to realize that just because he may quack like you, he is nothing like you. Teens really are these complex-wired pseudo-adults and all the similarities we may find are just superficialities. They’re not mini-me’s…they have their own world of drama, of which we usually know nothing.” I’m sure my smile was bewildered. “We can’t take the credit when they succeed and we can’t take the blame when they fail.”

“Good advice,” Sam said.

“Lisby,” Elgin called, interrupting us, “it’s demo time. Hey, Sam, did you point out all the cameras to her?”

“The crew has been very busy, Lisby,” Sam said, pointing to two of the corners of my living room which had small mounted cameras near the ceiling. “There are two more in the family room, and two more in the kitchen,” he told me. “Plus, there are two other camera crews to help make sure we cover everything, but I’m the main character cam, so I’ll be with you most of the time.”

I smiled. “This is all pretty overwhelming.”

“You’ll get used to it,” he continued. “You will most likely be mic-ed all the time, plus there are additional mics to pick up stray sound. Just be aware,” he held up his finger to me. “It’s easy to forget you’ll be on camera pretty much at all times when you are downstairs.”

I nodded and tried not to frown.

“But, the point of the show is not to embarrass you, so don’t worry too much. The producers just want to get to know you and your family, warts and all.”