You Can’t Drink All Day if You Don’t Start in the Morning (9 page)

As the CDs of
A Gosselin Christmas
sell in the millions, I can picture a gleeful Kate looking at a photo of the McCaughey family and saying, “Face bitch!”

The McCaugheys have chosen to keep a much lower profile, choosing only annual chats with the perpetually sad-eyed Ann Curry on
Dateline
and the occasional
Ladies Home Journal
update.

Will Jon have to assume the role of Jackson Five patriarch Joe, herding them into the recording studio and demanding that they rehearse until their tiny vocal cords snap like dry twigs?

“Holy God, it’s ‘TEN LADIES DANCING.’ How many times do I gotta tell you? Oh my God, I am so stressed out. Kate, can you handle this? I’m just gonna go grab a tan.”

At times like this, OK, at times like when I’m simply breathing in and out, I am grateful not to have eight children.

My grandmother had eight children, spaced out every couple of years or so to assure a steady supply of strong arms and legs to work on the family farm.

Some of us just weren’t intended to have more than one child. We can’t all be Kate Gosselin—or my grandmother, for that matter.

Members of the one-and-done club can be ferociously protective of that one little cub, though.

That’s why I could never understand why the mama of that little Chinese girl who had to sing behind a curtain at the Olympics didn’t make a stink.

In the words of Mr. T., I pity the fool that would tell me that my daughter would sing on the sly while the cuter kid would lip-synch and soak up the credit.

Here’s the way that conversation would’ve gone if little Yang Peiyi’s mama had, say, just returned from a few months visiting her long-lost adopted sister raised in the Deep South.

Chinese Politburo member (CPM): “Mrs. Peiyi, we need to use your daughter’s voice but her teeth are a little, how you say, snaggledy, so we’re going to pretend the prettier kid’s doing the singing, okeydokey?”

Mama Peiyi (MP): “Do whaaaaat???”

CPM: “Don’t worry. It is still a great honor to you and your ancestors to have even a small part in this most magnificent ceremony ever staged in the history of the Olympics.
Now. Please tell your obviously genetically inferior daughter that it has been decided.”

MP: “You want my daughter to sing but you want everybody else to think it’s another kid that you think is cuter?”

CPM (relieved): “Ah, yes! That’s it exactly. Of course, we will compensate you for this inconvenience (fumbling through tote bag). Yes! Here it is! An officially sanctioned souvenir bird’s nest Olympic Stadium ashtray and cigarette lighter combo.”

MP: “Are you trippin’? My kid doesn’t smoke.”

CPM: “Well, of course not. She’s only seven. You should probably set it aside in a safe place until she’s nine.”

MP: “My daughter’s earned the right to sing. She’s rehearsed for weeks!”

CPM: “Oh, cry me a Yangtze. Your daughter’s not the only one we’ve insulted. At first, we picked a ten-year-old but, ultimately, she just looked too old. You know how it is. You say ten-year-old and right away everybody’s asking, ‘Who’s the hag?’ Look, it’s in the national interest that the child who sings ‘Hymn to the Motherland’ be flawless in appearance, and I believe it’s obvious that your daughter could easily eat an egg roll through a picket fence. I mean no disrespect.”

MP: “You looked in a mirror lately, asshole? You’re uglier than a bucket of armpits.”

CPM: “Madame! May I remind you that this is a very serious matter. Everything must be perfect. Perfect voice,
perfect looks! Oh, why can’t you embrace perfection like that nice American woman Kate Gosselin?”

MP: “You ain’t perfect. In fact, you’re a mo-ron. Anybody can look at you and tell the wheel’s still a-turnin’ but the hamster’s dead.”

CPM (happily distracted): “Mmmmm, hamster . . .”

Which is to say that a Southern woman defends her progeny ferociously and it’s hard to imagine anything else. It’s a statistical fact that a Southern mama is more likely to plunge a butter knife into the gut of anyone who would ever hurt her baby girl, even if that baby girl is old enough to wear faux denim Koret pantsuits and order “senior coffee.” You don’t ever read headlines about a mama in, say, North Dakota, plotting to kill off her daughter’s competition for head cheerleader or prom queen. No, no. It’s always some crazy-ass Southern mama being led away in handcuffs wearing sweatpants and a huge T-shirt that reads
DANCE MOM!
in glitter.

And a Southern mother of an only child (like me) is worst of all.

I’ll give you an example. This week, the Princess has been at her first sleepaway camp. (And yes, I’m going to call it “sleepaway college” when she goes.) She’ll swim, canoe, and learn to sail. I’ll mope, pout, and be a little ashamed that I paid the extra ten bucks so the camp could e-mail me photos of her enjoying camp, updated hourly.

So while she thinks she’s making papier-mâché crafts and learning how to use a bow and arrow and dive off a diving
board into water that, frankly, doesn’t look all that clean to me, away from the prying eyes of her meddlesome mommie, it’s not exactly so.

The old hippie in me can’t believe I’ve done this. Camp should be her personal retreat, not an excuse for me to spy. Shades of Big Brother.

But I can’t help myself, and this is the lot of the mother of an only child.

I’m fairly certain that if the Gosselins sent their brood off to summer camp, they’d just toast their good fortune with wholesome glasses of sparkling cider and tell Aunt Jodi to drive them to the airport.

For me there’s an heir, but no spare, and that’s why I sat, one day into camp, clicking on the hourly photos and wondering who the hell this kid was who appeared to be sitting too close to Soph on the hayride and looked like a Jonas Brother.

I haven’t decided whether or not to tell her I was spying but it’ll probably spill out with something like: “Those cinnamon rolls at your breakfast Tuesday morning looked amazing. But why did you have to share half of yours with that Jonas wannabe. Was that a pencil-thin mustache?”

The last pictures of the day showed the Princess wearing someone else’s clothes. Zoom in. Oh, it’s her best friend’s outfit.

One day in and she’d already used up five of the ten outfits I packed for her plus some of her friend’s.

And she’d done something funky with her hair, too. Zoom in closer . . . enlarge photo . . . Oh. Never mind.
That’s not her. Shit. I just clicked to buy a photo of somebody else’s kid. I was officially nuts.

One thing was sure when I saw the end-of-day pictures. She hadn’t applied nearly enough of the SPF 50 that I bought for her. There appeared to be too much pink on her shoulders and the tip of her nose. Ohmigod! There was a Band-Aid on her left knee. And it wasn’t even a cute one. I wanted to weep.

Compare and contrast this with the Gosselins, who could easily miss one of their kids showing up at the dinner table with a severed limb.

Kate: “Jon, could you go outside and get Mady’s arm?”

Jon (whining): “I dunno. Isn’t it your turn? I got the last one.”

OK, to be honest, burned and scarred as she is, the Princess seemed to be having the time of her life. Away from me. And this was as it should be. Although, thanks to the wonder of digital uploads, she was never as far away from me as she thought. Heh-heh-heh.

By the middle of the week, the guilt had set in and I resolved not to look at the photos for the rest of the week. Something about it just didn’t feel right.

I let her daddy do it.

Here’s the perfect way to lure kids out of the road and into the house, although I’m sure Kate Gosselin wouldn’t approve of all the processed ingredients. Then again, who cares? Your kids will
love
this.

• 1 (16-ounce) can chocolate syrup
  
• ¾ cup peanut butter
  
• 19 ice cream sandwiches
  
• 1 (12-ounce) container Cool Whip
  
• 1 cup salted peanuts
  

Pour chocolate syrup into a medium microwave-safe bowl and heat two minutes on high, making sure it doesn’t boil. Stir peanut butter into hot chocolate until smooth. Let this cool until it’s room temperature.

Line the bottom of a 9-×-13-inch baking dish with a layer of ice cream sandwiches. Spoon half the chocolate mixture on top; spoon half the Cool Whip on top of that, then half the peanuts. Repeat layers. Freeze until firm, about an hour. To serve, cut into squares. Makes about eighteen kid-sized servings, six grown-up servings.

Over the years, there have been a few unfortunate times when not everyone got the memo that I write a humor column.

Instead, the column is taken seriously, which can cause some very hard feelings and lots of angry “and-your-little-dog-too” type mail.

My standard reply to the more vitriolic mail used to be: “Dear Irritated Reader: I write a humor column in the same manner as that of the late Dave Barry’s, except I get paid a lot less and I rarely write about boogers. Oh, and he’s not really dead. I was just messin’ wid ya.”

I would never imply that these overreacting readers are humor-impaired. Rather, I believe they are stupid.

OK, that didn’t come out right. I think they’re, by and
large, very earnest but misguided folks who probably believed Barry when he wrote that aliens lived in his underpants.

“It must be so uncomfortable!” I imagine someone writing Barry. “Can you tell me: Does the alien look like Alf? I like spaghetti, do you?”

All of this is to say that sometimes it’s the things you least expect that end up getting you in trouble with the haters. I’m recalling the great Angry Knitters United of two thousand ought five, who had an unexpectedly violent reaction to my, I thought, lighthearted lampoon of the proliferation of stitch-and-bitch clubs at coffeehouses. And by proliferation, I mean how there was a while there that you couldn’t drink an overpriced vanilla latte without finding a couple of strands of mohair floating on top. Ah yes, there was a time when between the knitters and the nursing moms, there was scarcely any room for the poser writing bad poetry on his laptop at the local Starbucks. The common denominator of all three was really ugly footwear. I’m just saying.

But as whiny as the knitters were, they weren’t nearly as mean as the nightmare-inducing rage of the restless leg syndrome sufferers who wanted to hobble me like Kathy Bates did to James Caan in
Misery.

“I hope you get restless leg syndrome in spades one day,” said one angry writer who was pissed that I thought it was hilarious that one of the drugs used to treat RLS lists “compulsive gambling” as a side effect.

Hmmm. Spades. Interesting word choice, no? The notion that casinos and gambling boats are full of zonked-out RLSers who wonder the next day why they have swizzle sticks in their pajama pockets is just too delicious.

Apparently the notion that I thought the
drug
was funny, not the ailment, was lost in translation.

The hate mail came from everywhere: I even heard from both people who live in Wyoming.

A reader in upstate New York was disappointed in my “lack of journalistic ethics.” Yeah, me too. Whatever that is.

“I can’t believe a responsible journalist would write such a demeaning editorial,” wrote a Florida reader.

OK, so (a) I’m not a responsible journalist, so stop calling me names—I write pee jokes, for heaven’s sake; and (b) I can’t write editorials because that would require me to learn about important world issues, which would definitely eat into the time I have to do the stuff that really matters, like watching reruns of
Scott Baio Is 45
. . .
And Single
on VH1.

The knitters and the RLSers were plenty pissed, but it was the Claymates who took hatin’ to new heights—or lowts, as it were.

See, it’s always the gentle references that backfire, the easy joke, the quick quip, if you will. The itsy, tiny four-word phrase implying that Clay Aiken wears women’s clothing.

And so it was that I became the target of the Clay Aiken Defenders League Poutfest of 2008.

Most of them said I was implying he was gay and, long story short, how dare I?

Here’s the thing: When a celebrity arranges to have a turkey-baster-style baby with a fifty-year-old woman “friend,” all bets are off, hons. You’re in the Big Leagues of Weird Celebritydom when that happens. Own it. Relish it. Bathe in its intoxicatingly skewed stew.

Here’s a small sampling from the anthrax-soaked mailbag:

“How can you sleep at night? I wish I believed in voodoo so I could procure an ugly doll that looks very much like you and find someone who would give you a wild ride issuing pain upon you. How did you get your job, anyway? With the assistance of your probation officer?”

OK, first off . . . procure? And secondly, leave my P.O. outta this.

Another got right to the point, sans threat of juju: “In case you haven’t noticed, you are a jerk. I wish you huge failures in your career.”

Well, no, I hadn’t noticed that jerk thing, but then it’s really hard for a jerk to recognize his or her own jerkdom. Donald Rumsfeld still has no clue, for example. So I guess I’ll just have to take your word for it, person whom I’ve never met and who hasn’t met me.

As for huge failures in my career, don’t worry. I can hardly concentrate with these awful stabbing pains being issued all over my body.

“Can’t you find a better way to make people laugh?” wrote
another. Well, sure. But going house-to-house with a whoopee cushion just seems so, I dunno, Arte Johnson retro.

“I wish you can’t-get-a-job journalists could get a
real
job.”

Well, this
is
my real job. Go frikkin’ figure! Ouch! I think my eyeball just fell out.

This next one made me laugh so hard I turned inside out.

“Dear Ms. Rivenbark: I opened my newspaper this morning and was horrified to see you taking a potshot at a celebrity!”

Oh, no! How could I? Why, that would be like making fun of Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan or Kim Kardashian. Who would do such a horrible thing to our nation’s most talented and deserving, uh, nation-spawn?