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Authors: Celia Rivenbark

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When Underwear Jokes Bomb, the Terrorists Win
D
oes it mean I have to turn in my liberal card if I admit that I actually
like
the notion of profiling terrorists at the airport?
Here’s the thing. I want to be against profiling, really I do, but I just can’t get past the fact that as much as I want to be fair and logical and open-minded, all that high-minded crap is overshadowed by my fervent desire for my ass not to be blown out of the sky.
So, after much soul searching (OK, actually not that much; I’ve taken longer to toast a Pop Tart if we’re being frank here), I have decided that the TSA should go for it.
TSA, for those of you who don’t follow the news like I do (while cooking dinner, drinking box wine, and screaming at my kid every ten seconds to finish her damn science project),
stands for the Transportation Something Administration. These are the folks who are charged with keeping us safe in the sky and stuff.
Bottom line: I’ve decided the TSA should profile suspicious characters. Hell, even nonsuspicious ones. If someone acts just a little odd (furtive glances, shifty eyes, annoying under-breath chanting of “death to American pig scum,” etc.), then the TSA should profile the hell out of them. I don’t care if they just have a
hairstyle
you don’t like, go for it, TSA!
Ever since that creep flew into Detroit with junk in his trunk, planning to blow everyone to bits on Christmas day, I’ve changed my whole way of thinking about profiling.
TSA, if you see somebody suspicious, I don’t care if you strip search ’em and force ’em to sit for hours in a detention room the size of a Triscuit. I repeat: I don’t want my ass blown out of the sky. Or yours, either. I’m bighearted that way.
But what of the trampling of individual rights, you ask? Hey, like Gandhi or somebody said, you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. And if those eggs happen to be stamped U.S. CONSTITUTION, well, that was written way before air travel so it’s not terribly relevant.
Face it: The founding fathers might have even embraced some profiling but those were simpler times. When teeth were made out of oak trees and everybody kept poop in a pot beneath their bed. Frankly, it was all a little weird.
The TSA needs to step it up, though, and I’ll tell you why.
If you’ll recall, the terrorist dude paid cash, bought a one-way ticket, and didn’t have any luggage.
These are things that most security officials and, well, people who breathe in and out many times in the course of a day, would aptly call “red flags.” Wouldn’t it have been positively Smurfy if someone had noticed the terrorist bought a one-way ticket, paid for it with cash, and didn’t have any luggage? Wheel, meet asleep person.
The TSA needs an overhaul, and this should worry all of us. While crazy people with no luggage and exploding underwear board with abandon, my eighty-nine-year-old friend—think classic Rockwellian grandpa wearing a cute ball cap covered in collectible battleship pins—was frisked like a whore in church (OK, wrong metaphor but you get the idea) while trying to get to ’Bama for his grandson’s wedding. What up with that?
I was flying on bidness a few months ago and standing right behind a female soldier wearing full-camouflage uniform as we waited to go through the metal detector. As she stepped through, the alarm went off and a TSA worker had to wand her. It happened four or five more times until I finally pointed out that she was wearing a banana clip in her hair that was probably causing the ruckus. She removed it, the alarm stopped beeping, and no fewer than three TSA workers grinned happily at me and said, “Hey, thanks!”
I hate to overstate the obvious but when y’all are depending
on me for airport security, there is a huge problem. I just happen to know about banana clips. (And I’m wondering: Where did she find that thing, since I haven’t seen one of those since
Full House
?)
I know what you and the other members of my yoga class are thinking: But, Sistermaiden (that’s my new yoga name), you must realize that profiling is a very flawed system of protection.
True that. After all, terrorists could easily switch gears and recruit blond, blue-eyed sympathizers to put explosives in their underpants and fly all over the world. It’s not that hard to disguise yourself. Remember how Philip Kiriakis got an entire face transplant on
Days of Our Lives
a few seasons ago? I can’t believe terrorists didn’t see that story arc and learn a little something from it. And who among us can honestly remember what Carrot Top used to look like? Or poor Mickey Rourke, brilliant in
The Wrestler
but still kinda goofy, what with that Chihuahua on his arm at the awards shows and all.
So, yes, I guess it’s possible that as soon as you start profiling for only dudes rockin’ the smelly/swarthy vibe with noticeable bulges in their bottoms, the terrorists will just switch gears.
Hey, I know that the overwhelming majority of Muslims in this world are kind, decent folk who only want to work hard, worship peacefully, and raise happy, healthy families. Everybody knows that. But look at it this way: You’re walking down the street and you see a tiger on one side and a dog
on the other. OK, it can be Mickey Rourke’s Chihuahua for the sake of illustration. Which side do you want to walk on?
I’ll give you a hint: It ain’t the tiger’s.
One of the worst things to come out of all this was the inevitable onslaught of bomb-in-underwear jokes, which should only be attempted by truly funny people. Bomb jokes aren’t for amateurs. Consider the fact that a German family lost out on their whole vacation after the dingbat daddy, all boisterous in anticipation of a holiday with his wife and daughter, cracked wise at the Stuttgart airport.
“Hey! I got explosives in my underwear!” he said. While everyone shifted uncomfortably in line, don’t you know his wife was mortified and his daughter was rolling her eyes and texting her friends about how lame her dad was? It reminded me of the time—OK, the many times—duh-hubby, the Princess, and I have vacationed only to have Duh be the one in the tour group at the antebellum home/space museum/ petting zoo to ask questions of the guide. While the Princess and I visibly cringe, Duh will pepper the guide with all sorts of inane questions. (“Yes, but who was the
third
man on the moon? We’ll wait while you look that up.”)
German guy wasn’t so much harmful as clueless of correct comic timing. You can’t, just days after the plane incident, say stuff like, “Yep, I’m a
little bit
worried about servicing all those virgins once I get where I’m going but, Allah be praised, I’m sure there will be a way. Hahahahahaha! Did I mention that my underpants are explosive?”
This is a great example of why humor should only be attempted by professionals. This guy, perhaps overly giddy at the notion of a much-needed week-long vacay away from the sausage factory or making my next car, went too far. And he has the unpleasant body cavity search by Lars to prove it.
Still, he gets points for trying to wring something funny out of current events, even when they’re decidedly unfunny. Any story involving the word “underpants” has the potential for comic gold. Any story. Trust me. This is what we in the Professional Humor Business call “a sure thing.”
There are just some news headlines that seem ripe for fun-making. Take the time Obama invited the Cambridge cop and the professor to the White House for a beer in hopes that they could make up. While others thought this was a unique approach to opening a much-needed dialogue about race relations and, yes, profiling, my first thought was: “Oh, hells yes! I’m gonna ask Obama to help me patch things up with the carpool bitch who
always
gets out of her car and disappears to chat while we all have to drive around her stupid van.” If the leader of the free world has time for this sort of thing, I am so in!
The other thing about the German would-be jokester is that he didn’t understand when to quit. You can’t keep telling the same joke over and over. Unless you’re Larry the Cable Guy. No, I was right the first time. You really can’t.
Dave Barry, a little-known comic who, I believe, lives on a bed of plantain peels in a Miami alley, once noted that humor
has to be a
series
of punch lines. You can’t just have one joke in your arsenal. That said, you also should be careful to always leave ’em wanting more. Jon Stewart? Yes, please. Carlos Mencia? Not so much.
The problem with our German friend is that his timing was off. Way off. It’s the same reason it’s OK now to joke about Michael Jackson but right after he sailed away on a puffy cloud of injectibles? No flippin’ way. Only now is it acceptable to joke about those wacky Jacksons. And while I’m glad the chirren have found a stable home with Michael’s mom, I have to wonder if it wouldn’t be better if they were in the care of someone a little younger—say, Methuselah.
The important thing to remember is that in humor, timing is everything. The German guy could’ve tried out his best Michael Jackson material instead of the underwear-bomb joking and nothing would’ve happened except the Germans, who love ’em some
Thriller
, might’ve been pissed.
All of these are weighty matters that are best left to the deep thinkers among us. Yeah, that’s right: Dane Cook.
Movie To-Do List: Cook Like Julia, Adopt Really Big Kid
I
went to see
The Blind Side
with duh-hubby and the Princess a while back. For those of you who haven’t seen it,
Blind Side
is a fuzzy-wuzzy inducing movie in which Sandra Bullock plays a tough-talkin’ Southern belle married to a Taco Bell mogul. One day, she discovers a homeless high school boy walking alone in the freezing rain and immediately stuffs him into her fancy imported car and takes him to her house, where he will spend the next few weeks sleeping beneath an Yves Delorme comforter on her couch. Which strikes me as weird, since her crib looks like it would have at least a dozen spare bedrooms. Let’s just say that gorditas have been very, very good to this family. She works a little, too, as all good tough-talkin’ Southern belles do, and naturally it’s as an interior decorator. This makes it possible for
the movie to include a few shrieking phone calls to some off-camera and impeccably gay assistant to show that, yes, she is quite tough-talkin’. It’s easy to see how she’d fall for her husband. When I think Taco Bell, I think interior design, don’t you? Aye Chihuahua!
No matter. She is the classic Southern woman who will move mountains for those she loves, including and especially her new black son. She spends the crucial first few weeks together with him teaching him how to coordinate his Aber-crombie with his Fitch. Along the way, the kid becomes a football star at the fancy private high school her kids attend, which isn’t a real surprise because this kid is frikkin’
huge.
All I can think is thank God Almighty that kid’s birth mama supposedly smoked lots of crack or he would’ve come out weighing, like, forty pounds when he was born.
The movie was pretty good but I had a hard time concentrating because there was another bright screen just a Twizzler’s breath away. A woman I’ll call Turdette was sitting beside me and spent the whole movie compulsively texting on her Dingleberry, which had a screen bright enough to land a jumbo jet on a rainy runway.
It was so annoying that I almost missed the best scene, where Sandra Bullock chews up her bigoted lunch buddies at the club and spits ’em out like Sanka at Starbucks.
Even Turdette paused momentarily from her texting to watch, but then she went right back to it.
I shouldn’t be surprised. The movie theater is the last bastion of lawlessness in polite society.
Where else can you just toss your used food and drinks on the floor? I mean besides the opera, of course.
Movie theaters have always had a slightly seedy vibe and not just because the back row is always reserved for blow jobs. Which I tried to explain to my mother as she headed up the steps toward the top row when I took her to see something forgettable starring Catherine Zeta-Jones, who, she made a point of saying, “looks like she’d be the kind of daughter who would treat her mother very nicely.”
“You can’t sit there! That’s where the kids sit. It’ll be noisy and, uh, gross.”
“I bet Catherine Zeta-Jones would let her mother sit anywhere she’d like,” she huffed.
“But this is the illicit sex row! Everybody knows that. Children have been conceived back here. Remember that girl in the Princess’s home-ec class? The one who named her son Avatar? You think that was just a coincidence?”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she snapped. “I’ve got a bad back. I have to stand up every ten minutes. Do you really want me to do that in the middle of the theater?”
Point taken. We sat in the back row and I breathed a huge sigh of relief when a bunch of older folk showed up and filled in the rest of the row. Throughout the movie, it was like everyone had little national anthems playing in their heads as
they periodically popped out of their seats and just stood there for a minute or two cracking and stretching before sitting back down.
From our perch on high, I could see all sorts of movie-going malfeasance. For starters, there were the latecomers. These tardy assholes like to come in and ask you to scoot down so they can take an aisle seat.
What they don’t understand is that dues have been paid for that aisle seat. Until you’ve suffered through seventeen minutes of movie trivia (“Sandra Bullock was born in Arlington, Virginia!”), all I’ve got to say is talk to the imitation-butter-soaked hand.
Another violation? Using your coats and assorted shitwear like crime scene tape, to rope off a bunch of seats just so your trifling friends will have somewhere to sit when they stumble in late.
And then there’s the creepy theater-etiquette violation: If the theater is practically empty (think any Steven Seagal comedy), make sure not to sit close to the only other person there. That’s just plain pervy.
Without a doubt, the worst movie behavior isn’t bright screens, pervs, saved seats, or latecomers who lean over to ask, stupidly, “Is this seat taken?” spilling half their popcorn into your lap or (back row only) your girlfriend’s head.
Just because you’ve seen a movie once or twice, this doesn’t entitle you to spoil it for the rest of us. Don’t say, “You know he ain’t coming back alive, right?” when Diane Lane watches
her beloved Richard Gere speed off in his fancy-doctor car to save sick orphans.
Years ago, I was watching
Pay It Forward
when the clod behind me coarse-whispered to her friend, “This one has a sad ending.” The friend tried to shush her but it didn’t help. “I mean this is the saddest ending I’ve ever seen. You’re not gonna believe it.”
The friend said, “Shhhh!” again but the coarse whisperer was unstoppable. “Well, I’d just better tell you, don’t get too attached to that little boy with the eyes that remind you of Hummel figurines ’cause, well, he’s gonna get dead!”
Overall, I love going to the movies, although there are some I wish I’d just waited to rent instead. Like
Marley & Me
. It’s another fuzzy-wuzzie inducer based on a book that a newspaper columnist wrote about his mischievous lab dog.
And by “mischievous” I mean shithead.
As my fellow moviegoers stumbled out sobbing into their tissues and remembering their own long-gone pooches, I asked Duh if I was the only one in the whole damn theater who thought Marley needed to die a lot sooner.
When the “rascally” Marley tripped the couple’s toddler, who happened to be human and still possessing a soft spot on his little noggin, that would’ve done it for me.
“That kid could’ve had a hematoma!” I said.
“You don’t understand dogs,” Duh sniffled, pausing to look at a faded picture in his wallet of his childhood dog, Tyrone, who died twenty-seven years ago, I kid you not.
“Don’t you get it? Dogs are perfect creatures because they love you unconditionally,” he said. “They have no expectations and they make no demands.”
“Well that’s just messed up,” I said.
What good is love if you can’t extract something fabulous in exchange for it? Well? I’m waiting here.
A red-nosed theatergoer who overheard all this gave me the stinkeye on the way out. What can I tell you? I’m a shallow creature who craves order and calm. If I walked into my living room and discovered my “lovable” dog leaping about in a snowstorm of couch stuffing, I’d have to be sedated. Seriously.
The book which
Marley & Me
is based on sold millions and made John Grogan very rich indeed. Maybe now he can afford a cat. His newspaper career was steady but unspectacular until he started writing columns about his dog’s latest misbehaviors. Having been a newspaper columnist for a couple of decades, I can tell y’all that writing about your pets is what we in the bidness call “pulling one out of your ass.” It’s right up there with the “from the mailbag” desperation column. These columns usually, in journalistic terms, reek.
But in Grogan’s case it clicked. Which means that my next book will be a collection of heartwarming stories about the antics of my three cats. Look. It’s not like old, dying professors named Morrie are growing on trees, right? Between columnist Mitch Albom’s Morrie and Grogan’s damn dog, I need to read the handwriting on the Whiskas.
If that doesn’t work out, I can always write a book like
Blind Side.
I will cruise the highways and byways looking for an exceedingly large and innately talented young man whom I can befriend in hopes of selling my screenplay. (Plus, this will get those exchange student nags off my back. Why would I want to take in some kid from another country who doesn’t even
understand
football?)
Duh thinks this is all a tad ridiculous. But until he becomes a Taco Bell mogul (God, I love that phrase), I’m not paying a lot of attention to what he has to say.
“You start coming home with sacks full of pillowy cheesy goodness and then we’ll talk,” I huffed.
Despite our movie friction, we trudged out to catch
Julie & Julia
, about spunky New York blogger Julie Powell who cooked all 534 recipes in Julia Child’s cookbook in just one year.
What can I tell you? I had myself a good old-fashioned epiphany. The next day, I sat down the fam and made my announcement.
“Don’t try to stop me,” I said, shoving my own copy of Ms. Child’s ginormous
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
toward Duh with my foot because it is simply too heavy to lift.
“I know it sounds crazy but I’m going to cook one recipe from this book at least once a year.”
There. I said it. No applause, please.
“Big deal,” said the Princess, who stomped out of the kitchen to return to her full time-job: staring at the life-size poster of Robert Pattinson in her room. Oh, wait. That’s my room. Well. I like to support the arts whenever I can.
“Once a
year
,” mused Duh as he constructed the only thing he knows how to make: vanilla wafers stuffed with peanut butter. “But in the movie, she makes something every single day. That was kinda the whole point, wasn’t it?”
“Well, I believe we established that she was spunky, which I am not. Go ahead: Pick out any dish you like from this book and I will make it. Some day. Within the next year.”
Naturally Duh went straight to some amazing looking multilayered torte thingy dripping with chocolate ganache.
I love the pictures in this cookbook more than anything. I love pictures of food in general. It’s why I’m curiously bitter when eating at fancy gourmet restaurants, because they almost never have pictures of food on the menu. Except Olive Garden, of course.
Truly, the only fault I could find with
Julie & Julia
was a definite shortage of food porn. I love a movie like
Like Water for Chocolate
, where there’s food in every single scene. The camera did linger lovingly over Child’s classic beef burgundy for a few extra blissful seconds, but I craved more naked butter shots.
Julie & Julia
went a long way toward restoring my food equilibrium after watching
Food Inc.
, a nauseatingly well-done documentary about where hamburger comes from. For months, I had only been able to buy organic chickens, tough old birds who dropped dead in their tracks from a life well lived. The kind of chicken that was given a little bonnet and shawl to wear at night to ward off a chill. The kind of chicken
that would stand up in the last row of the theater every so often just to stretch.
So, yes, the movies have a huge effect on me. I started going to the local farmers’ market but felt like an outsider because I (a) shave my pits and (b) think patchouli smells like ass.
No matter. I’m learning. And in the meantime, there’s that torte to make. Sometime in the next fifty-one weeks.
BOOK: You Don't Sweat Much for a Fat Girl
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