You Can’t Drink All Day if You Don’t Start in the Morning (7 page)

Trixie: “Y’all, this is Trixie and I just want to say that we understand that the airlines aren’t like they used to be and that flying isn’t the pleasurable experience it once was. But it’s no picnic for us, either.

“Maybe you read about those two skanks that got escorted off a plane after creating a ruckus on a flight last year. These two little swamp sluts said they were mistreated because they were prettier than the other people on the plane.

“I know what you’re thinking. It’s always the same old story. Unattractive people always get all the breaks, and if there’s one segment of our population that’s consistently mistreated and abused, it’s the fabulous-looking eighteen-year-old girl.

“Passengers, I’ve dealt with a lot of creeps on the job, but these two? The worst. Dumb and Dumber whined as soon
as they got on board a full plane. They wanted water. I mean before takeoff, while the middle-aged bald guy with eczema was still trying to stuff his crappy
Sports Illustrated
duffel into the overhead bin.

“These coach-class bitches cussed everybody out and said the only reason they got picked on was because they were better looking than everybody else on the plane.

“They behaved so bad that when
Daddy Day Care
came on, people actually watched it just to drown ’em out.

“So, as you can see, while we know that the airline industry has made some missteps, it’s no picnic working with y’all, either, with your nonstop complaints: ‘I can’t breathe!’ ‘This cabin isn’t pressurized!’ ‘There’s spooge on my pillow!’ ”

Pilot: “Whoa, Trixie, that’s enough. Passengers, I’m sorry about that little outburst. Sometimes Trix gets a little confused when she takes too many Xanax. I’ve done the same thing dozens of times. In fact, I just took a handful of those bastards a few minutes ago ’cause there was a guy who looked a
lot
like Samuel L. Jackson getting on board with a box with holes punched in it and I started to freak out a little. But now, I’m mellow. And I’m just gonna take a little nap now. . . . This bird can practically fly itself anyway. Thank God, ’cause I really need some shut-eye. Crap, Trixie, get me another pillow.”

I guess I should’ve paid more attention when the Princess and her little friend asked if they could create a Facebook page for me.

“Sure,” I said, completely distracted by watching the new next-door neighbors move in that day. They were young. I’m talking practically embryonic. I couldn’t imagine how they could even lift all those heavy boxes with those little armbuds of theirs.

“So it’s OK?” Soph asked. “We can put you on Facebook?” She was upstairs and, rather than walk the eight steps to the landing, she was screaming. I screamed back: “Yeah, sure, whatever!” and went back to my perch at the front window.

Oh, gawd. They were standing on the sidewalk in front of the house
kissing.
I couldn’t tell them to get a room because, in point of fact, they’d just gotten about twelve of ’em.

“Mommie, what’s your star sign?” Again with the shouting.

“OK, honey, Mommie is doing some very important research right now, so why don’t you just fill out the Face-a-ma-call-it and let me know when it’s done, OK?”

“OK,” she and her pal said in unison. Then they both giggled for a long time, but I wasn’t sure why.

From my living room couch, I chewed on a Slim Jim and watched the embryonic new neighbor couple continue to work, toting box after box into their new home—the home beside the crazy lady who watches their every move while eating salted beef ears.

Every so often, the he-neighbor would step aside so she could take her box inside. So cute. What’s this? They just dropped boxes and hugged. This move is going to take for-frikkin-ever. I would need more jerky, that much was certain.

After an hour of this I was beginning to get bored, but rather than actually check on my daughter and her friend as they launched my lumpy ass into cyberspace, I decided to take a break and read the magazine beside me on the couch. Great. Oprah’s started a new diet where she lives off nothing but flaxseed tea and cardboard toilet paper rolls. I threw the magazine onto the floor and went back to spying.

I felt a little like Gladys Kravitz, the chinless, nasally, nosy neighbor in the old
Bewitched
episodes.

These new neighbors, with their youth and their still
slightly webbed hands, didn’t know from Gladys Kravitz. If I even laughingly compared myself to her when I finally showed up at their door with my famous “welcome to the neighborhood, now I dare you to ever take a normal dump again” eight-cheese casserole, they’d think it was perhaps Lenny’s mother, but even that was a stretch.

“Mommie, what would you say are your special interests?”

“At this moment, spying on our new neighbors,” I hollered back.

“Got it!” they said in unison.

“No! I was just kidding. Don’t put that!”

I wasn’t sure how Facebook was going to look but it was buying me time. As long as Soph and her friend stayed busy with that, they wouldn’t be asking me what they could do and I wouldn’t have to launch into my “When I was your age, we made our own drugs—er—fun” speech.

Holy God, was that a couch from This End Up? I needed binoculars.

More hugs, another kiss and, now, him lifting her off her feet and looking up at her while she placed her hands on his shoulders and looked down at him. Where had I seen this before? Ah, yes! The movie poster for
The Notebook.
Crappy book, decent movie—am I right?

Things were suspiciously quiet upstairs, but I didn’t care. They were happy, I was happy and, God knows, the Notebookers were happy.

I was sure he was telling her that she was the most beautiful woman in the world as he wiped a bead of sweat (dew!) from her sweet, young face, barely missing her ear gills.

And that made me think of Diane Lane, who has acted in plenty of Notebooky movies herself and who must have it written into her movie contracts that her leading man must say, at least once, “You are the most beautiful woman I have ever known.”

No, really. Watch for it. It’s practically a drinking game. I’m sure Richard Gere even wonders about it. In
Nights in Rodanthe
, I think he just said, “You are the most beautiful, ah, blech, blech, blech!”

The Notebookers continued to move in an assortment of furniture and appliances, pausing for little love pecks every few boxes. As they huffed a stackable washer-dryer onto a hand truck, I waited for her to scream, “Asswipe! Why are you too cheap to hire somebody to do this? I’m gonna bust an ovary over here,” as I had done during that exact same scene years ago.

But, no. They just cheered each other on. I gave ’em two years tops.

“Mommie! We finished your page!” I heard, and so I decided to take a look. The moving show was getting boring, even with wine, and I really needed to check on the girls.

But the adorable new couple next door rang the doorbell right about then, cheerfully wanting to borrow a screwdriver and introduce themselves, and I got distracted from
Facebook. In fact, I didn’t think about it again for about a week.

That’s when I got my first request by an old friend to be allowed into my Facebook world, where our friendship would be viewed by others and become an exceedingly shallow brand of friendship given to four-word sentences and the passing back and forth of lots of something called “lil green patches.”

Anyway, I let him in with a quick cut-and-paste, and then a few more crept in. What did it matter? But one day, a “friend” commented rather inappropriately about my marital status.

I finally took the time to actually look at my Facebook home page, and there it was.

Under “special interests and hobbies” was one word:
men
!

I summoned the Princess to the office where my computer lives and, apparently, flirts scandalously with near strangers when I’m not downloading even more constipatory casserole recipes from
cooks.com
.

“What is
this?
” I shrieked. “My special interests are
men?
! Won’t Daddy be surprised to see
that?
What do you have to say for yourself, little missy?”

Sophie hung her head, but not for long.

“Hey, wait a minute! It’s not my fault. Remember when we asked you for special interests and you said you were too busy watching the new neighbors?”

“Well, yes, but . . .”

“And when we asked again you said that right then your special interest was wondering why it is that Ashlee Simpson’s husband looks exactly like her?”

“OK, but you know I have a curious mind and sometimes, well, journalism is hard.”

“But we tried to get you to look at the page before we finished it,” Soph whined. She could see that long-promised trip to the mall to go to Forever-a-21-Year-Old-Skank disappear before her very eyes. “We didn’t mean to say that you were interested in men like that. We just meant that you’re straight.”

She was teary-eyed, so I believed that it was a simple mistake and I had her correct it immediately to read that my special interest was “celebrating the human spirit and bringing all peoples of all nations together.”

There. That sounded much better.

The Princess then showed me around the site, explaining that I had already been “superpoked” quite a few times.

“That’s disgusting,” I said.

“No, it just means hello,” Soph assured me. Hmmmm. I still had an image of Jodie Foster on a pool table in
The Accused
, but that’s just the kind of sick pup I really am. I didn’t want to be superpoked by anybody.

I also had a “past-life invitation” from some woman I don’t know, who said she could ask me five questions and discover who I was in a previous existence.

There were all sorts of “earthkeeper” invitations, where you send virtual plants to one another and somehow this is supposed to save the planet. Like I care.

There were even “virtual deliveries” of doughnuts and sweet tea, which just pissed me off. What good is a virtual food product? I mean, unless you’re on Oprah’s new diet.

I also discovered that there were many people who were asking to be my Facebook “friend” and I hadn’t answered them yet. I pictured an angry mob of old high school buddies who would grow bitter if I didn’t let them in immediately.

“Who does she think she is?” I imagined they would pout, all the while saying how incredibly rude it is to ignore someone’s “invitation to knighthood.”

My friend Amy, who runs her own business, wastes hours every day reading posts from old friends and sending them invitations to join “I love the ’80s” or “virtual bookshelf” or requests for “knock-me-out drinks.”

As for me, the only thing I’ve participated in is the past-life invitation, and let’s just say it’s pretty hard to be humble ever since I learned that I used to be Eleanor Roosevelt. Who looked a lot like Gladys Kravitz, now that I think about it.

Absolutely everyone has a Facebook page these days. One day over the backyard fence, my adorable child-neighbors asked me if I was on Facebook because, naturally, they are. I told them yes and now we’ve let one another into our lives via the “interweb.” I call it that just to mess with their heads.

“You should be friends with my mom,” he-neighbor said one day while planting a rosebush in honor of their (gag) second wedding anniversary. “Y’all have a lot in common. You both look a little like Diane Lane.”

OK, so perhaps I was hasty. This couple is actually quite wonderful. And they’re growing on me like a lil green patch.

Try this fabulous Southern creation the next time you need to impress the new Yankee neighbors. It’s practically vegetarian, give or take a half-pound of bacon, and comes from my mama-in-law, Nancy Whisnant, by way of her late sister Alice Armfield.

Make the biscuits yourself if you’re not too triflin’. And don’t even think about using canned tomatoes or substituting chicken broth for bacon grease. This is the real deal, Gomer; don’t screw it up.

• 6–8 bell peppers
  
• ½ pound bacon, fried crisp and crumbled (save drippings!)
  
• 6 tomatoes from somebody’s garden, peeled and chopped
  
• 1 bar Cracker Barrel sharp cheddar cheese, grated
  
• ¼ cup chopped onion
  
• 8–10 day-old biscuits, crumbled
  
• Salt and pepper to taste
  

Cut peppers in half and parboil them ’til they’re softened up but not mushy, about 10 minutes. Drain; set aside. Combine all the rest of the ingredients in a big
bowl and add about 4 tablespoons of bacon drippings (OK, grease) ’til things are moist but not mushy. Form into balls and stuff the peppers with this fabulous mixture. Set the filled peppers in a shallow pan and add water to cover the bottom of the pan so your pepper bottoms don’t scorch. Bake at 325 for about 20 minutes or until lightly browned on top.

Oh, poor little ol’ Gwyneth Paltrow, she of the porcelain skin, pale blond hair, and lithe body. Why on earth would I feel sorry for her? Simple. Because her decision to launch a lifestyle Web site,
Goop.com
, shows a lapse of good judgment that we haven’t seen since a certain cruise ship made its maiden voyage straight into an iceberg.

We know what she was thinking: “If Oprah can make a fortune showing people how to live their lives, why can’t I?”

Oh, Gwynnie, where to begin?

For starters, you can’t tell people how to live when you’re married to a
rock star.
It is, well, unseemly. Oprah’s never quite gotten it right in the romance department or the yo-yo dieting department, so we can relate to her a bit better. Also, it doesn’t hurt that she grew up ringworm levels of poor in Mississippi.

But you? You! With your adorable
rock star
spouse who is both cute
and
deep and your curiously named but nonetheless precious children, you just can’t. Again: unseemly.

The earlier Titanic metaphor is appropriate because Gwyneth is, so to speak, the first-class passenger wearing furs and a brooch the size of Kansas and the rest of us are wearing flour-sack knickers and eating turkey feet down in steerage.