You Can’t Drink All Day if You Don’t Start in the Morning

by Celia Rivenbark

  ¼ teaspoon salt

  ½ onion, grated

  ½ tablespoon dry mustard

  18 Ritz crackers, smashed up (I like to put them inside a Ziploc bag and then roll over them with the rolling pin a few times)

  Combine everything in a big bowl. Form into six patties. Fry in enough butter to keep everything from sticking, over medium-high heat for about 10 minutes per side. Garnish with lemon and tartar sauce.

  4

  High School Musical Triumphs: Dreams 1, Snot 0

  As we settled into our seats for the second act of a splashy stage production of Disney’s High School Musical we’d driven 150 miles to see, I did the math: two mezzanine tickets, plus gas, $140; one oversized peanut-butter cookie and chocolate Dippin’ Dots shared in the lobby before the show, $6; one youth medium-size HSM T-shirt, $20; sitting among kids and grown-ups who spent the entire two-and-a-half hours obsessively text-messaging and ignoring the show, priceless.

  Yes, I get it. You have the attention span of a gnat and rather than enjoying the show, it was very important that you tell someone, perhaps even the media, where you were and what you were doing.

  Oh! This just in: No one cares.

  To tell the truth, I was a little surprised to see the tweens texting their friends. It wasn’t like parents were demanding that their kids sit through all eighteen hours of Wagner’s The Ring, now was it? So, yes, I was a little disappointed that the target audience spent the show staring glassy-eyed at the little blue screens in their palms instead of savoring the real world in front of them.

  That said, I accept that kids are put on the planet to confound us and steal our liquor.

  My beef’s with the grown-ups. If you’re bored with what’s on stage, why don’t you haul your rude butt out into the lobby and text yourself into an exhausted puddle? Text until the paramedics have to come and sew your stupid thumbs back on. But don’t pretend you’re doing something important. You aren’t punching in missile launch codes; you just told your husband to pick up dog food at Costco. You are a moron.

  Throughout the play, the woman beside me feverishly text-messaged while her tween looked over her shoulder to read, giggle, and offer (in a loud, annoying whisper) suggestions for other people to text. They were so cool. They were at the HSM stage show. Except they weren’t. The woman was well into her forties and was letting her kid know that (a) performers really don’t deserve attention or respect after months of rehearsals and (b) I repeat, she was a moron.

  This wasn’t Broadway, but that was lucky for the audience, the way I saw it. If you pulled this junk in New York, they’d toss you out of the theater and onto 42nd Street before you even had a chance to pretend you were just checking on your dying grandma.

  I’m a little sensitive, maybe, about all things high school musical. If you must know, I have such an awesome crush on Zac Efron. Not in some creepy Mary Kay Letourneau let-me-have-your-baby-you-man-boy way, but in an isn’t-he-a-nice-young-man kind of way.

  In fact, I have an awesome crush on the entire cast and so do many of my “mom” friends.

  If we really want to piss off our daughters, we gently stroke the HSM messenger bags on the rounder at Limited Too and say, a tad too loudly, “Ohmigod, could Corbin Bleu be any cuter?”

  So, when tickets for the traveling musical went on sale I got in line quick. Good thing, too. Dirtball ticket scalpers have gotten good at getting blocks of seats at all the tween events.

  Remember how they grabbed up all the Miley Cyrus/Hannah Montana tour tickets? They didn’t even know who she was but that didn’t matter. All they knew was her tour was selling out faster than (awesome and inappropriate crush of ’04) Justin Timberlake and (short-lived crush of ’94, ruined when I heard him refer to his bossy wife as his, ick, soul mate) Sting.

  So while normal and admittedly unsophisticated moms and dads naively waited their turn to buy tickets on the day they were released, scalpers must’ve been laughing their criminal asses off at such futility. Fools!

  Oh, sure, a few would be successful (even a broken clock is right twice a day, didn’t someone once tell you that back in juvie?), but not many, on account of the fact that scalpers have computer programs that help them jam phone lines and buy up huge blocks of seats at every venue, then resell that $67 ticket for many times that amount. Suckas!

  Of course, it’s not all the scalpers’ fault. One nut-job parent paid more than $2,500 so his kid could see Miley Cyrus. Hell, I wouldn’t pay $2,500 to see George Clooney at my door toting a case of Pinot Noir from his own vineyards and hankerin’ to talk to a woman of substance for a change.

  So I get that we spoil our kids these days, keeping the mangy scalpers in business. But $2,500? As Miley’s alter ego, Hannah Montana, might say: “Scum-sucking greed-monger charged what?”

  But there were happy times ahead for the mommies and me. The HSM sequel was finally coming on the Disney Channel. I knew this because I had put big Xs on the days counting down to it on my “The Many Moods of Zac Efron” wall calendar.

  “Omigod, can you believe we almost didn’t TiVo it?” said one mom friend before making the dreaded L-for-loser shape in the air above her forehead.

  “Nobody does that anymore, Mom,” huffed her mortified ten-year-old.

  “Of course they don’t, honey!” said the mom, brightly. “I believe you . . . not!”

  “They don’t do that either, Mom.”

  “As if.”

  “Or that.”

  Gawd.

  I’m not sure this has ever happened before. How to describe it? Well, it’s as if it’s 1964 and your parents are standing in front of their black-and-white Zenith screaming and crying because the Beatles are appearing on The Ed Sullivan Show and you’re a tween who’s yawning and asking them to let you know when the ventriloquist with the singing monkey comes on.

  Oh, don’t get me wrong. Kids like HSM, even the boy kids.

  But moms love it, perhaps because it’s a little bit Grease, a little bit Footloose, and a whole lotta retro goodness.

  High School Musical makes us feel young and hopeful again. I’m fairly certain that even Disney, which has its corporate finger on the pulse of tweens to the point that they must surely feel light-headed most of the time, didn’t even expect this.

  Middle-aged parents jogging with “Stick to the Status Quo” and “Bop to the Top” on their iPods? How did that happen?

  Maybe this is my generation’s overdue optimism finally kicking in.

  Face it, we grew up listening to Jethro Tull describe homeless pedophile Aqualung as a snot factory with an unnatural attraction to little girls. Compare and contrast this with the ebullient HSM lyrics, which simply invite everyone to join hands together in making all their dreams come true.

  Final score: dreams 1, snot 0.

  Sure, it’s simpleminded fluff, but every now and then, when you’ve had a shitty day at work and a fight with your best friend, and you’ve got eight loads of laundry to do, a little fluff makes a mighty soft landing at the end of the day.

  HSM isn’t the only trend that adults have practically taken over from their kids. If your coworker asks you if you’d like to see his “love puppy,” or tells you he’s got one “cheeky monkey,” don’t call him a perv; he’s just addicted to Webkinz, stuffed animals that have an online identity that requires you to feed, entertain, and generally take care of them. Or else.

  It’s hardly news that kids love Webkinz. But now the parents are hooked.

  Look around; your coworkers might be angling for “magic forest charm bracelets” instead of Xeroxing their butts or playing computer solitaire like in the good old days.

  “You gotta keep ’em well, happy, and healthy,” a mom friend explained with utter seriousness.

  When her kids went to sleepaway camp this summer, she spent hours making sure that the many demands of their ten Webkinz were taken care of.

  It’s like real life, only it’s not.

  Last week, while my kid checked
on the food dish for her virtual pet and contemplated how much “KinzCash” she’d need to buy a virtual swimming pool, her seven-month-old kitten was rolling on the floor below her, slowly and dramatically choking on a three-inch blade of grass that had somehow gotten lodged in her nostril.

  “Hell-o!” I said, pointing to the kitten, now trying to give herself a tiny Heimlich maneuver with her own little forepaws. “Real life happening over here!”

  (Since you ask, it cost one hundred bucks to sedate kitty and remove what I now call the World’s Most Expensive Blade of Grass. I have placed it in a little shadow box like it was one of those face-of-Jesus grilled-cheese sandwiches or something.)

  While neglected Webkinz don’t exactly die some horrible Meerkat Manor kind of death (screw you, Animal Planet, for letting Flower die!), they do get the dreaded Webkinz “green snout” or clutch tiny ice bags to their virtual heads when they’re not well tended.

  The only way to get a sick Webkinz well again is to take quizzes or perform jobs that earn KinzCash so you can buy medicine for this virtual pet that, remember now, is actually based on a smallish stuffed animal sitting on your kid’s dresser.

  That’s just shoot-your-preacher-husband-dead-then-demand-custody-of-your-kids crazy, isn’t it?

  Across the country, people of the male persuasion are shirking office work to play Webkinz games online instead of shirking office work to study their fantasy football team’s stats like God and nature intended.

  Username Fluffydad is worried about his ailing Sherbet Bunny. It’s the beginning of the end, y’all.

  5

  Miss North Carolina Is Too Nice to Hate

  Aside from too many cute guys calling me “ma’am,” my reign as the North Carolina Pecan Harvest Festival queen was, in a word that I just now made up, Pecan-TASTIC!

  My lifelong dream of riding on a float and doing the demure “unscrew the lightbulb” wave was finally realized. I cut ribbons, I extolled the virtues of the pecan, I walked around for two whole days with a crown pinned to my head, I had breakfast with Miss North Carolina at our pecan-TASTIC B and B.

  Miss North Carolina, Jessica Jacobs, is slim and tall and gorgeous. As we chatted, just the two of us, she dined on a small compote of fresh fruit and a dainty cup of herbal tea. I, on the other hand, had three eggs, homemade sausage, toast, juice, two of those compotes, a hunk of blueberry-oat coffee cake, fried potatoes, and coffee.

  I’m fairly certain Miss North Carolina has never, as I did, leaned over to anyone and asked, “Are you gonna finish that?”

  As we sat in matching tiaras at the breakfast table, I was struck by how queenly she was. I had much to learn. I also had butter on my chin.

  I had borrowed three fur jackets to choose from, so I asked Miss North Carolina to tell me which one looked best with my consignment-store steal of an evening gown.

  “Oh, the white one, definitely the white,” she said.

  “Are you just saying that or is that a beauty pageant trick like where you tell another contestant they look perfect and really they’ve tucked the back of their dress into their panty hose by accident?”

  Miss North Carolina looked hurt. Great. The mean old lady had hurt Miss North Carolina’s feelings.

  During the Pecan Harvest parade lineup later that morning I got to meet my “queen’s court,” seven cute and bouncy high school girls.

  “How did you get this gig?” I asked the nearest one, a sweet thing named Madison.

  “I had to write an essay about how much I wanted to represent my town because I really wanted to give back to the community that has given so much to me.”

  “No, quit shittin’ me. Really, how’d you get this gig?”

  OK, that’s what I was dying to say because all that sincerity was starting to make my eggs come up. Besides, I’d been told these girls would serve me. Not a stinkin’ one of them had so much as offered to detail my car. These girls had a lot to learn about servitude.

  As queen, I was on the last float, just like Santa is in the Christmas parades. Which was fine since, after that breakfast, we were roughly the same dimensions. The float snaked through the tidy streets of Whiteville, North Carolina (yes, its real name). Small children scampered ahead, trying to grab all the candy tossed by the firemen who had preceded us.

  “Get out of the way!” I called cheerfully.

  Somewhere Miss North Carolina was cringing on the back of a convertible and thinking that I have a lot to learn about being royalty, even for a weekend.

  The journey had been fun, though. When they first approached me to be queen, I reminded them that, despite a very flattering picture on my Web site, I am not nineteen or even close. Plus, I wasn’t really pageant-ready. My thighs got more dimples than Jeff Probst and I can actually find Rwanda on a map. That’s two strikes right there.

  Y’all know I have issues with beauty pageants but this was different. The Pecan Festival queen committee actually wanted its choice to be a bit of a hag. They didn’t say that but they did say “seasoned,” which is the same thing.

  Having turned fifty just as the invitation to be queen arrived, I have to admit it sounded like just the shot in the flabby upper arm that I needed.

  Frankly, until the queen committee called, I’d been feeling a little down. It hadn’t helped when, at my favorite grocery store just a few days earlier, the cashier had said, while I swiped my debit card, “Don’t worry! I took off the senior discount.”

  “Whaaaa?”

  Apparently convinced that I was both old and deaf, he smiled even wider and said, quite loudly, “I said, I deducted the senior citizen discount for you. It’s Tuesday, you know. You get five percent off!”

  What can I tell you? The room began to swim. Yes, there was prune juice in the cart, but that wasn’t for me. And what if it was? Prune is the new plum.

  “How old do you think I am?” I asked through clenched, and now that I thought about it, somewhat loose teeth.

  “What?” he asked, still grinning foolishly and not quite understanding the out-of-nowhere raging can of whup ass that was gonna be opened up on him.

  “I said, How old do you think I am?”

  Finally, the slow dawn of recognition crossed his lineless face. Other shoppers paused to listen in.

  “Oh, I-I-I-I’m sorry,” he stammered.

  But it just wasn’t enough. A primer on manners was in order. Primer, now that I thought about it, sounded like a very old word.

  “You should never, ever assume a woman is a certain age; it’s rude,” I said. Besides, I was wearing $45 foundation and day-old highlights. Clearly, this asshole was blind.

  The bagger, a sweet elderly fellow, having missed all of this horror, approached with his own goofy smile.

  “Ma’am, do you need some help with these bags?” he asked.

  OK, it was official. I was fifty and decrepit, unable to carry two grocery bags out of the store without collapsing.

  While the cashier fervently tried to catch the eye of the bagger and shook his head no! quite violently, the bagger bored in on me, eyeing me from head to toe.

  “Ah, tough day at work, eh?”

  Holy mother of God! Would this never end? I grabbed my bottle of Pinot Grigio before he could hide it away in its embarrassed little paper bag. Perhaps I would smash it on the counter and drink from its ragged neck, here and now.

  “No, not a tough day at work. Actually, I have to go pick up my ten-year-old at school now.”

  “You got a ten-year-old?!” was the incredulous response from the bagger. Meanwhile, the cashier was on the verge of tears.

  “Yes! And right now I’m having a happy period despite my advanced age and clear addiction to prune juice and cheap wine. Go freakin’ figure!”

  After that late unpleasantness, being a queen would be the perfect antidote.

  It was weird turning fifty. When I grumbled to friends, they said, “Sure beats the alternative!”

  Yes. I know that. If this was 1906, I’d have be
en dead at least ten years from childbirth or horse pox or something equally gross. Then again, without movies-on-demand, it wasn’t like I’d be missing all that much.

  Would turning fifty mean that I’d start behaving strangely? And by that I mean ordering fried shrimp and drinking it with hot coffee and then complaining about how the coffee’s never hot enough?

  My friends scoffed at my anxiety and said dumb things like, “Fifty is the new forty!” Which just made me realize that there are a whole lot of other people who suck at math as bad as I do. No. Fifty is fifty. And overall, I’ll take it over horse pox any day.

  It was thrilling to be asked to be queen of anything at my age. These people got it. Age means wisdom!

  In preparation for the big weekend, I memorized many pecan facts. Did you know, for example, that there are more than a thousand varieties of pecans? Personally I only recognize one: the kind that goes in my stomach. I adore pecans, and that has nothing to do with the many pounds of shelled halves that found their way into the trunk of my car.

  Pecans are not cheap, my hons. In fact, in the South, the street value of shelled pecans just before holiday baking season is roughly that of crack cocaine. Do not confuse the two. It is almost impossible to make a decent crack cocaine tassie, I am told.

  In my research—I was going to be the smart queen—I learned that “pecan” is a Native American word which, translated from the Algonquin language, means “This is gonna make Stuckey’s a lot of wampum some day.” Would the Pecan Festival queen lie to you?

  Riding on the float that chilly November morning, I felt the years melt away.

  It helped a little, too, when Dan Rather, along about the same time, said that he thought Katie Couric would “tart up” the nightly news.

  Katie Couric, the fifty-year-old tart! The notion that a woman our age could be a goofy sexpot was, frankly, refreshing. Granted, “tart” isn’t the kind of word you’d find in the urban dictionary denoting unrelenting coolness. To some, the reference was so dated they didn’t understand he wasn’t talking about a pastry. Nope, this tart was a hussy, a real strumpet!