You Can’t Drink All Day if You Don’t Start in the Morning (12 page)

True that, I thought.

Dink, Duh, and I are crazy about a good steak and even crazier about my almost-famous perfect prime rib with horsey sauce. It’s supereasy but most people think it’s a really big deal to make. I served this to friends for dinner one night when we rented an oceanfront cottage at Bald Head Island, a one-hour drive and twenty-minute ferry ride from my house. Bald Head doesn’t allow any cars, so you ride around in little golf carts all day, exploring the island’s maritime forest and beaches. At sunset, there’s nothing like sipping cocktails on the porch of your cottage, listening only to gulls and the distant purring of golf carts while the amazing scent of this fragrant roast floats onto the deck and away on the ocean breeze. This recipe will always be in my culinary hall of fame, and it should be in yours, too.

• 1½ teaspoons kosher salt
  
• 1 teaspoon pepper
  
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
  
• 6-pound prime rib roast (3 ribs)
  

Combine salt, pepper, and oil and rub evenly over roast. Place roast on wire rack in a foil-lined roasting
pan. Bake at 450 degrees for 45 minutes; reduce heat to 350 degrees and bake 45 minutes longer (or until meat thermometer reads 145 degrees). Remove from oven; cover loosely with foil. Let stand 20 minutes before carving. Serve with horseradish sauce made by combining 3 tablespoons prepared horseradish with ¼ cup sour cream, a tablespoon of mayonnaise, and a teaspoon of Dijon mustard. Supereasy and supergood.

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who drive convertibles and, well, the rest of y’all.

That’s right, hons. Thanks to a whopping birthday surprise from duh-hubby, I have finally shed the abysmal anonymity that comes with driving a Ford Taurus. A tan Ford Taurus. A tan 1999 Ford Taurus, to be precise.

I believe I’ve made my point.

The delivery was successful, and it’s a girl. At least that’s what I like to think. She’s red and shiny and, best of all, she’s a Mustang with many horses under her hood and I love her more than cheese and TiVo
combined.

The thing about “Sally” is that she is, unlike my tan Taurus, easy to locate in a parking lot.

Never again will I have to ask the security guard at the mall to ride me around in his little electric car like some
kind of moron, trying to find my car. Who knew it was National Take Your Tan Taurus to the Mall Day?

I’ll never forget the hopelessness in his voice when I described my car to the security guard.

“This may take a while,” he said.

“Oh!” I said, suddenly cheerful. “I just remembered!
My
Taurus has a bumper sticker that says “I heart my cat.”

“They all do,” he replied, looking even sadder.

Now that I’ve got Sally, I understand how Harley owners feel. I’ve heard there’s a secret Harley wave they’ve worked out so that even if they’re driving a (snicker) Prius, they give the wave of brotherhood to a passing biker who then knows there’s something infinitely more cool at home in the garage and that the (OK, now I’m laughing out loud) Prius is just being driven because the biker is on his way to take his ailing mama to the orthopedic doctor.

Convertible people, of which I am now one, did I mention, have a similar kinship on the road. Nothing is more embarrassing than to be caught top up on a warm, cloudless fall day, passed by another convertible with the top down, whose driver gives you a well-deserved, “man, what is your
problem?
” look.

I’ve actually pulled up beside another convertible, our tops down, my hair in a kerchief that is less Jackie O and more Lucy-stompin’-grapes and exchanged the knowing, self-satisfied smile of the Chosen.

Sometimes, sad to say, there is snobbery among the Chosen. For instance, I see how the guy with the BMW convertible
looks at me as he takes his position in the carpool lane beside me at my kid’s school. It is not an exaggeration to say that we rev our engines a little as we sit side by side.

He’s pretending to ignore me but I know that’s impossible. Mostly because it’s hard to ignore the overwhelmingly cool sight of me singing “Cheeseburger in Paradise” into my hairbrush, with the top down, natch.

He’s listening to his XM radio or something talky and pretending not to notice that Sally has a phenomenal stereo system.

“I like mine with lettuce and tomato! Heinz fifty-seven and french-fried potato! . . .”

Despite this impressive show, BMW dad is smug because, no doubt, his convertible was a lot more expensive than Sally. But Sally has heart, she’s a real slice of Americana, something special, her shapely fortieth-anniversary edition lines reminding us of that sixties generation poised on the verge of rebellion. She is cool with a capital “Brrrrrr.”

The BMW convertible, on the other hand, is usually driven by men who work in vague and boring fields like finance and know nothing of blasting old Stones or Cream because that would interfere with their prolonged Bluetooth conversations with others of their own kind.

The only sour note since Sally came into my formerly beige life has been the inability of young men to mask their deep disappointment when they move closer to see the blonde in the hot red convertible only to discover that she is, well, their mother. They might want to work on that.

When they see me at the wheel, their faces drop in much the same way my daughter’s does when she goes trick-or-treating with her friends and the asshole family hands out pencils.

But just because I’m nobody’s version of a MILF or even a GMILF, it doesn’t mean I am ready for the old folks’ home. Women aren’t aging like they used to; we’re talking tough and driving fast cars. It’s not easy being impossibly cool at my age, hons. The other day my daughter wanted to hide under Sally’s floor mats when I announced, with radio blaring, that I really liked the artistic rap stylings of Florida.

“Did you just say Florida, like the state?” Soph asked.

“Well, sure, honey. It’s f-l-o-r-i-d-a, right?”

“It’s pronounced Flow-
ride
-uh,” she said, barely able to control her contempt.

Oh.

“You didn’t say that in front of anybody else, did you?” she asked, squinting at me through hands covering her face. She had the very same look I once gave my parents many years ago when they asked, “How’d he do?” after I came home from a Steely Dan concert. He???!!!!

“Of course I didn’t say it in front of anyone else. For Christ’s sake, I drive a convertible. I’m the
cool mommie
!”

“Florida!”

“Stop saying that!”

“Florida! Florida! Florida!”

“Grounded! Grounded! Grounded!”

Am I in some sort of second teenhood, driving a cool car and playing my music too loud?

We’re all in some sort of acting-out crisis, it seems. I’ll never forget Aunt Sudavee’s horror when, just as she was preparing to take the first bite of her raisin toast with Promise spread, she heard Diane Keaton drop the F-bomb live and in person on
Good Morning America.

Keaton’s always been quirky and ageless, wearing her ubiquitous white suits and wattle-disguising scarves. Midway through a fluffy little plug for her latest movie, she got caught up in some sort of faux lesbian girl-crush rant about the beauty of Diane Sawyer’s lips. As in, “If I had lips like that, I wouldn’t have had to work on my f’ing personality.”

“Well, I never!” Aunt Sudavee said, dropping her toast on the floor, Promise-side down, of course, ’cause that’s just what kind of day it was going to be.

A couple of weeks later, just when Aunt Sudavee thought it was safe to return to morning TV, there was Jane Fonda dropping a bomb of her own during an interview with Meredith Vieira.

What did she say? Let’s just say that I’m too much of a lady to speak or write it, so I’ll just describe it as the big scary worst one that women never use, you know the one, it rhymes with
hunt.

Unlike Sawyer, who giggled, licked her f’ing gorgeous lips provocatively and then threatened to wash Keaton’s mouth out with soap, things didn’t go so well at the
Today
show. Vieira returned from a hasty commercial break with a stiffly worded apology that just made things worse. I had the feeling that she thought Jane Fonda was a pretty big rhymes-with-hunt herself.

Fonda shouldn’t have said it, but she was just quoting from her role in
The Vagina Monologues
, so there was some context to it.

Then, not a week later, there’s that woozy old cougar, Kathleen Turner, dropping, not the effenheimer, but “asshole” during a live interview on local TV.

What’s next? Roma Downey greeting the ladies of
The View
with “Whassup, bitches?”

Truthfully, I’d rather hear the rough talk than that weird Oprah baby talk.

Can we please sign a petition or something to get her to stop calling vaginas “vah-jay-jays.”

Every time she says it, it’s as if she’s saying it for the first time, hooting and clapping her hands at her own cleverness.

What is she, two?

What’s next? Telling us that she has trouble finding blouses that fit because of her enormous ninnie pies?

So what’s with the aging movie-star potty-mouth syndrome? Maybe they’re tired of the twits on
America’s Next Top Model
having all the fun.

People always say that one of the perks of getting older is that you can get away with some major shit, which I guess is why Queen Elizabeth and Barbara Bush can hardly open
their mouths without resorting to F-bombs. What? You never noticed that?

After a while, there will be a cussing revolution in the nursing homes with all these foul-mouthed old broads. The only good thing about being in the home is that people automatically assume you’re at least a little bit crazy.

It’s the same as how Gary Busey can get away with anything because he lost half his brains on the pavement in a motorcycle crash a few years back. So when he was shown licking Jennifer Garner at the Oscars like she was a toaster strudel, everybody just said, “That? Oh, that’s just Gary.”

If Gary had been driving a convertible instead of a motorcycle that fateful day, he’d still have his right mind.

Rage on, middle-age dames. Buy a convertible, keep the top down, and sing into your hairbrush all the way to flow-
ride
-uh.

If you’ve been shopping for fashionable ladies’ clothing lately (not you, Ryan Seacrest!), you may have noticed a weird naming trend embraced by mall fixtures like Ann Taylor, Banana Republic, and Coldwater Creek.

For instance, are you an “Audrey”? At Ann Taylor, that’s the name of the pants that sits exactly on your natural waist, attends PTA meetings in a punctual manner, and always volunteers to help make the Popsicle-stick arks at vacation bible school. Audrey is the good girl, while “Margo,” with a slightly dropped waist, is more of a loose cannon. Margo votes Democratic and once painted her dining room walls whorehouse-red “just because.” A few racks over, “Lindsay” sits lowest of all on the waist. It’s easy to imagine Audrey hanging on the rack and sniping that Lindsay really should act her age, not prance about looking like a sixteen-year-old
sucking on frozen lemonade at Forever 21 where all of the clothes are probably named “Paris.”

Over at Coldwater Creek, you can choose from the über-natural sounding “Willow,” “Brook,” and “Holly” clothing lines. The clothes don’t look particularly outdoorsy, so the names are puzzling, but they’re not nearly as curiously named as the ones at Banana Republic: “Martin,” “Jackson,” and “Harrison.” I don’t know where they get the idea that women want to buy clothes named after dead presidents, but then I’m not a marketing genius. Which may explain why my sausage-flavored frosting never took off.

I can’t wait to see if this naming trend sifts down-market, as they say, to Walmart or Kmart, where things might get a little more real.

Frankly, “Margo” doesn’t tell me anything. A pair of jeans named “Reba Fay” or “Sha-nae-nae” tells me right away that they’re gonna fit perfectly—big in the ass and “relaxed in the thigh.” Truth is, if my thighs get any more “relaxed,” they’re going to demand their own ticket to the Bahamas.

I’ve been sad to see the revival of “mom jeans,” those disasters in denim with the nine-inch zippers and waistlines that threaten to crawl all the way up to your armpits.

They’re hideous and nobody looks good in ’em, so they’re not worth naming. But if they were, think “Ethel.”

Mom jeans are the perfect storm of bad design: they broaden hips, flatten the butt, and taper in a ghastly fashion at the ankle. Extreme mom jeans even come in odious pale blue washes and feature an elastic waist that tells the world:
“Why, as a matter of fact, my idea of a good time
is
dinner at the Cracker Barrel at four
P.M.
followed by a
Murder, She Wrote
marathon on TNT.”

The phrase “mom jeans” is so universally understood, it’s even in the urban dictionary, which notes that they are “usually accompanied by a sexy cardigan boasting birds or wildlife and accented by a quilted purse.”

Face it—when you’re wearing hand-knit sparrows on your chest and mom jeans, the message is clear: You have officially stopped trying.

I was surprised when celebs started wearing “Ethel.”

Fergie, she of the lovely lady humps, led the charge, followed by Mischa (“Feed me!”) Barton, Scarlett Johansson, and even Jennifer Lopez who, I’m sure, is terribly upset that she couldn’t find any that were trimmed in dead baby seal fur.

Of course, there are some women who are thrilled to have mom jeans back on the scene after years of too many low-risers that celebrate, rather than reign in, the aptly named “muffin top,” that unfortunate puff of belly fat. Maybe even the mom jean is better than super low-rise jeans that show the thong or the top two-thirds of an American Eagle flapping above the butt cheeks. It would be majestic, except it’s not.

Ethel jeans will never be sexy. Even Jessica Simpson, photographed in her mom jeans, looked as if she needed to be hauling webbed chairs and Capri Suns out to the soccer fields instead of nibbling on Tony Romo’s earlobe like it’s a piece of cheese.