Step two: Add sugar, flour, and ricotta cheese and lemon zest. So I did. I carefully measured everything like a meticulous baker, and I put it all into a bowl, ready to mix. Fuck. I didn’t read that you are supposed to mix the egg and sugar and ricotta, THEN add the flour. No wonder this was sticky!
Feeling guilty about wasting food, I realized that I would have to waste four more eggs to get it right, and do it all over. Resigned to the waste, wanting these to be great for my man, I started cracking the eggs. . . . There were only three. No fourth egg. OK, fine. I would attempt to adjust the other ingredient ratios. Not something I EVER feel comfortable with. Three-quarters is exactly . . . one egg less or a quarter, what? I didn’t know how to measure that. OK, breathe again. Be free, I told myself, it’s only pancakes. So I trimmed the sugar. I trimmed the ricotta, and, of course flustered, I just started zesting the lemon haphazardly into the bowl.
I started mixing it with the eggs, and to my surprise it was a good consistency. OK. This was all making sense, and the flour should mix with this nicely to make something that resembled batter rather than mortar. Great.
I poured in the flour, and it started thickening. Then more thickening, then too thick . . . FUCK!!!!!!!! I forgot to do a quarter less on the flour. I started throwing spoons.
My fiancé at the time, Will, came downstairs, and instead of finding some sexy brunch-making lady, he found a hissing child. “Don’t come near me right now,” I said. He has the tendency to want to get involved, and that’s the last thing I wanted right now. “I’ll be over here,” he said as he headed to the couch and started reading the leftover paper.
Standing over the sink, I just felt lost and stupid. I looked at the counters and it was just a giant mess. I sucked in every way and the evidence was everywhere. It was all a sprawling avalanche of every bowl in my cabinet filled with wrong mixtures and flour and spills and splats of eggs and sugar, not to mention the ten spoons and whisks and wooden spoons lying like dead carcasses.
I was going to make this work no matter what. OK. Now what? Well, I heated up the skillet and decided to pour or, better yet, thwack my batter into the pan and start cooking it. At least, I figured, I could get what the flavor profile was trying to reveal. As the butter started melting and the batter started cooking . . . I could smell something positive. I got a moment of encouragement. Maybe these wouldn’t be right, but they might be edible.
Now, I need to mention a side note that the last time I made pancakes for my man, they were old-fashioned, they were blueberry, and they were raw. He was very nice about it. But it was my goal this time to at least take that screwup out of the equation by simply cooking them through.
The bottom was browning nicely on my current pancake, and I flipped it on over. Looked good. OK. Let it cook all the way this time, I said to myself. I did. And then I flipped it onto a plate, poured a little syrup on it, and served it to my little taster. He started on his first bite. I was tense. And he looked up and smiled . . . “It’s good.” I felt relieved. “And you know I’d tell you otherwise,” he said, and it’s true, he would.
As much as I want to kill him when he does tell me he doesn’t like something, I am always grateful when he does like something because I know it’s genuine! And I hate yes-men. I like it real. Honest. Tough love with support! And of course when you earn praise it even feels sweeter than ever! “So, one more pancake?” I wanted to ask, because if he said no, then I wouldn’t know what to think. But instead he asked for another before I could even speak, and I started happily slopping some more paste into the frying pan.
On about the fourth one I started really getting it right. Size. Color. Taste. But by then he was full and the best one of the bunch sat there on the plate. I looked down at it with a sense of pride and thought that I would always give him the later pancakes from now on because the kinks will have been worked out and that is the level of service I would like to provide my customers.
I turned around and looked at the destruction I had wrought on my kitchen. And instead of cleaning up, I just sat down for a minute, thinking that this should have never taken so much out of me. Breakfast is not supposed to wear you out both physically and emotionally. But there I was, slumped on the kitchen table. I slowly started reading the newspaper again.
All of a sudden Will got up from the couch quickly and said, “What did you put in those pancakes?” with a very panicked and pained look on his face. Oh God, what have I done? “Eggs, ricotta . . .” I started listing things off and then I said, “Nothing bad, why?”
He said, “I think I have to throw up,” and he started off to the upstairs bathroom. As I sat there in the kitchen, wide-eyed, I heard a small whisper from the stairs . . . “I think they were . . . raw . . .” His voice trailed off and the door shut behind him.
Well, I think to myself now, domestic bliss may be one thing, but domestic goddess you are not.
Greece, 1995
JUMPING SHIP
In 1982 I met my friend Mel, full name Melissa Bochco, at a John Denver celebrity ski tournament in Aspen, Colorado. My mom in classic fashion befriended her mom, and then when we returned back to Los Angeles, where we all lived, she would bring me to Mel’s house for a sleepover, and then show up again three days later to pick me up. This happened a lot. But Mel and I stuck together and stayed friends way past childhood. In fact, we are still friends in our forties with kids.
But one day, when I was nineteen, we heard Mel’s mom, Barbara, was going on this lavish boat trip through the Mediterranean, starting in Istanbul and making its way to the pyramids. It was a three-week extravaganza, and frankly, looking back, we were not at our most sophisticated yet, but somehow we visualized ourselves sailing through ancient ruins and wonders of the world! Luxury on the high seas? I’m not sure what we were expecting—steamer trunks and old-fashioned movie moments for me; Mel, I will never know.
Mel is a salty, sharp-witted gal who causes most people when they meet her to leave with their tails between their legs because she is a cut-you-down-to-size kind of person and, even worse, everyone is laughing because she does it with such humorous flair. She has softened in her older age, and she is probably the most sensitive to those she cares for, yet she hasn’t lost her edge totally, I’m happy to say. But Mel is also known to stay around headquarters when we travel. She is the kind of person who would fly to New York for the night, go to her hotel room, sleep, and then fly home the next day. She sleeps in late and does her own thing. Yet somehow she’s the person you want to hang with. I can’t explain it.
So we heard Barbara was going on this exotic expedition and we petitioned her to take us with her. We said we would pay our own way: I had saved enough money, and, well, Mel would be getting it from her parents as her mom’s treat. However, Barbara would soon begin to feel like I was anything but a treat for her.
When Mel and I showed up to meet the group, I was at that age where I had just come into my own body, so I was a non-bra-wearing, vintage-clothes-sporting gal who carried a boom box that I had hand-painted rainbows and hearts and clouds on. I showed up with my serape backpack and super-short blond pixie hair, and I was, simply put, a ’90s hippie. Mel, dressed in black, always in black, as if every day was a funeral, in about seventy-five-degree heat, showed up at the airport with me, and from the moment we stepped onto the plane, I could see the apprehension in Barbara’s eyes. She knew what this trip was for her: a well-deserved lifetime experience at the age of fiftysomething, her kids finally old enough to rely on themselves, and her moment to take a personal break from it all. Enter us.
On board the Lufthansa aircraft headed for Istanbul, we seemed to get the same look from our flight attendant. Skeptical! Don’t get me wrong, Lufthansa is a wonderful airline, but in this moment we were being stereotyped as two young A-holes in business class. A kind of “how did you get this seat?” feeling. We just got the giggles, and sometime after takeoff and a few compliment
ary champagnes, Mel announced to me that she needed to take a “Lufthansa,” meaning she needed to have a bowel movement, and the laughter went from giggles to roaring! More sneers from the cabin crew! But you can bank on the fact that we still make the “Lufthansa” joke to this day—again, great airline!
We landed in Istanbul. It was 1994. And again, I was just not dressed for the environment. I immediately realized I had totally misunderstood the dress code. Not that I had anything in my arsenal that would have been more appropriate, but I was having that “we’re not in Kansas” moment the minute we stepped off the plane. However, we proceeded outside to meet our greeter to take us to the boat, and as I walked out of the airport, I saw a giant tour bus. What the fuck! I was a nineteen-year-old semi-punk-rock rebel, and I didn’t do tour buses. I also started to rapidly clock the people gathering around the bus, and they were all Barbara’s age at best. Oh my God. Mel and I had stepped into a senior moment, and we were the black sheep, to put it mildly. Oh my God. So as we made our way to the bus, I was already freaking out in my head. I hated organized things like this. Less corporate and more running-naked-through-fields was my kind of journey, although I did not wish to run naked in these parts. Even I knew that!
We were handed itineraries, and I was looking at this dossier of everything being organized to the minute. We were to be ushered through every port and every destination. More sweat. We boarded the bus. They took us to a hotel to acclimate to the time zone and experience Istanbul as the first marvel of the expedition. OK, great.
As soon as we got to the hotel, I felt freer. For this day, everything was more relaxed and we were able to go through the bazaars and roam around. The senses delighted. Mel and I wanted to wander the marketplaces; Barbara insisted we go look at rugs because she wanted an authentic Turkish rug to take home with her. When you’re nineteen, you’re not thinking of worldly possessions and anchoring a room with a memory-filled throw rug. You’re not sitting with friends telling the story of how you handpicked this out of hundreds of rugs while drinking tea in the back room of a bustling shop. But here we were, me and Mel sitting cross-legged, drinking tea. I just wanted a beer or something fun, but Barbara ordered us tea, and I didn’t want to oppose her. Yet.
The man proceeded for about two hours to unfold rugs in a fast fashion. He unfurled hundreds of them. Mel and I started humming circus music just to keep ourselves amused. I could not tell the difference from one rug to another, but there we sat, stuck until Barbara finally picked one. Good! I thought. Now we can finally leave.
I am sure she was having her own thoughts about me, and they started to bubble when we went outside to see the light of day and there was a pigeon park. Of course, at that time I was a vegan animal-rights activist! So when someone saw a rat with wings, I saw a bird of peace! And so I started feeding them, and they were so aggressive that they started to fly onto my arms and hands. I was loving every minute of it! The locals started to gather around, in amazement, I thought, as if I looked like some bird whisperer. Mel said that they were probably laughing at me for being such an idiot to let these diseased things land all over me. This scene quickly turned Hitchcockian, and the spectacle of hepatitis meets inappropriately dressed American girl had the locals in a frenzy. I looked past the crowd to see Barbara’s small face in the distance. Yep! She definitely was regretting letting us come.
Day one. On the boat. I came aboard, and the truth was that this boat was beautiful. It was like a cruise ship, slightly shrunken down but very upscale. Since I had paid my own way, I started to feel my own sense of self, and marched right up to my cabin, shared with Mel, and I unpacked, set up my boom box with loads of fresh batteries, and my case of handcrafted hours-to-make mixtapes that all were decorated with stickers and Sharpies, each representing a different mood. There was the Cat Stevens–style one, the Roberta Flack one, and the acid-house remix one. All over the lot and each one ready to spring to life to get the party started or the wind-down winding.
I have zero gifts in the musical arena, but I have never lived life without an eclectic sound track. Life is better with music, although there is a certain class of jazz I still cannot eat to. It’s too energized and spastic and not meant for digestion but more a birthing of the deepest inspiration and a voracious call of the wild. I bring this up because I was becoming that for Barbara. I was quickly becoming something she could not digest to, and when I came into a room, it was as if aggressive life-altering jazz kicked in at level five. We would get to ten soon enough.
We set sail, and I threw on my new white 1940s ruched old-fashioned one-piece bathing suit I bought for the trip and went up to the pool and ordered a froufrou cocktail. I knew they wouldn’t question my age because it was more a marvel to them that I wasn’t in my golden years like the other passengers. It was more, Oh my God, she’s young, rather than Wait, are you old enough? And so with that cocktail cherry being broken, I decided that drinking was going to be my lubricant into total toleration. Turning to Mel with my drink, I said, “This isn’t so bad?” Mel and I cheersed as we left the first port!
We sailed all night, and into the dining room we went for our first dinner. This was a serious white-tablecloth atmosphere. Again, I had on a bright paisley Pucci-like dress, unlike the elder ladies of the boat. Oh my God, this is going to be a long trip, I started to feel again as Barbara walked in with her very sensible outfit, which resembled one large pashmina, and we all sat down. We were to eat at this table every night for the next three weeks. So when conversation ran out in the first five minutes, I excused myself and went walking around.
And much to my surprise I found a little casino room! Drinking and gambling, yes, please! So from then on I ordered one course for dinner and made my way out early every night and started hanging with the guys at the blackjack table and the roulette wheel. I felt much more at home swapping stories with this diverse younger crowd, and I didn’t feel judged. We actually all had interest in hearing each other’s stories. Not to mention I am a gamer through and through. It passed the time and was much more fun than staring at our plates in the dining hall.
One of our first stops after days at sea was the Greek island Crete. The beautiful Mediterranean landscape truly spoke to me. I loved it. I looked up high on the mountain and saw the white buildings. And the color of the sea that cannot be described in the way that it is light and dark all at the same time! It sparkles. It beckons. It is majestic. Today’s activity was to get to the top of the mountain where the actual town was and go walking around, shop, and go see ruins. It was like following a herd while a woman told you the history of this and that as you flocked together. No free-form.
I started to grimace. When we all waited to get up to the top, I saw people mounting donkeys and starting their way up the winding hills. What? I was too much of an animal lover to make this poor old donkey schlep my ass up this giant mountain. So, concerned for this creature’s well-being, in protest, I said I would walk it. Barbara rolled her eyes, embarrassed that I would not just follow protocol, and as I started up the mountain, the guys shouted, “Miss, it’s too far, you must ride the donkey!” I looked back smugly—“I’m good!”—and I mumbled to Barb that I would see her at the top. She responded by giving half a head nod, as if to answer and yet not let on to anyone else she knew me.
Now, where was Mel, you ask? On the boat. Once again, in classic Mel fashion, she chose to sit this one out. She said there were many Greek islands to stop at and she would see one, but for now she felt like just staying in. It didn’t surprise me, and yet somehow it was forcing Barbara and me together more and more. Without the Mel buffer it was not fun for either of us. Even though Barbara had known me my whole life, I was at that yucky age for her and she was not at an age for me that I could relate to. We were at a biological impasse here in the islands of Greece. She mounted her donkey and passed me on the way up. I gave her a halfhearted wave.
About an hour plus later, I reached the top.
Now I understood why they have guests ride the burros. My legs were simply jelly. They were so shaky that I could barely walk, and this was the start of the day when we were all supposed to walk around for hours. Oh shit. I limped around in pain and counted the minutes till we could get back on the boat and I wouldn’t have to look interested in what our guide had to say. All I wanted to do was break off and go sit in a café and see local culture. But I went with the flock and to Crete school we went.
Luckily I found a gondola that went down the mountain in another area, and avoided the donkey and the leg-breaking journey down. When we returned at sunset to the boat, there was Mel, unscathed and content. What did she do all day? The same thing she usually does. Be Mel. Just lie around like a lizard on a rock. Meanwhile I was like a mad chimp hearing the next day’s itinerary, and off I went into the casino, with my people.
The next week we went to a mosque. Mel had decided to join this day; maybe she even had a little cabin fever. As we entered the doors, Barbara wrapped herself up in a homemade burka, and I looked at my own attire. Baby T with no bra. Corduroy bell-bottoms and wacky platforms. Barbara and I made eye contact, and I could tell she thought I was a disrespectful idiot.
I learned later that it had said on the day’s itinerary that the women should cover up. I treated that paper each morning like a wasteful tree killer, and failed to learn about the dress code. So Mel, who dressed like she was going to a mosque in everyday life, managed to cover herself in a passable way. I wrapped my backpack across my front and took off my shoes and found odds and ends in my bag to make do.
As we went in, I started to cheer up because I love prayer. And here I was in a faraway land, doing something I love in an amazing place. I was a student of the universe asking for guidance in how to live, whether for the day or for life.
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