Amy Ephron

Repeat after me:  Cindy Hensley McCain.  Say it again:  Cindy Hensley McCain.  I don’t know why but it sounds like Theresa Heinz Kerry to me. 

I like Theresa Heinz Kerry.  And I really like Heinz ketchup and I always wanted to write a piece about the 57 varieties of Heinz.  Remember when that used to be their slogan.  I always wondered what they were.  Relish? Pickles?  Baked Beans?  I wanted to have a barbecue and test them all.  Were there really 57 or were there really more (or less) and they’d just gotten used to saying there were 57.

But I digress because the point is Theresa Heinz Kerry didn’t want to release her tax returns.  She filed separately from her husband John Kerry.  And at the time that he was running for President, she resisted making her tax returns public.  For a really long time.  In fact, she released her tax returns on October 16, 2004, less than three weeks before the election.  And we all know what happened to him. 

Repeat after me, Cindy Hensley McCain does not want to release her tax returns either. Her father James Hensley had a big bottling corp, the Hensley Corp that exclusively distributed Anheuser Busch, Budweiser, Michelob, many varieties of ale, and by all accounts left a small fortune.  And Cindy Hensley McCain has always filed separately from her husband John McCain and she doesn’t feel that she needs to release them, now.

I have a theory that in order to be First Lady you have to have a cookie recipe.

Martha Washington had a cookie recipe:  jumbals.  (Jumbals have fallen out of fashion but they’re a little like a pretzel made out of biscuit dough.) 

Mary Lincoln had a cookie recipe:  gingerbread men, which is exactly what you would expect, if you were “writing a cookie recipe” for Mary Lincoln.

Jackie Kennedy didn’t exactly have a cookie recipe, she had a peanut brittle recipe (and, also, quite a good recipe for creme brulee) but she was Jackie Kennedy and it was the ‘60s and if you wanted a cookie really badly, peanut brittle might do the trick.

Pat Nixon did not have a cookie recipe.  She had a brownie recipe and further to my theory, he had to resign. 

My family likes sandwiches.  My present husband had his bachelor party at Langer’s.  The day before our wedding, while I was at a ladies’ lunch thrown by my sisters, my husband, his son, my son, his daughter’s boyfriend, my brother-in-law, and one of my nephews went to Langer’s Deli (across the street from MacArthur Park) and ordered pastrami sandwiches, lots of them, I understand, more than one apiece.  And it was further evidence to me that I was marrying the right person.

In our family, we think of sandwiches as comfort food.   The slightest thing, a bad grade, a lost soccer game, a minor heartbreak can prompt any one of us to say, “How do you feel about a sandwich?” – which is code for:  Let’s all jump in the car and go to the fish market in Malibu, Bay Cities in Santa Monica, Bryan’s Pit Barbecue in the Farmers’ Market...” or any number of other places where they have a great sandwich.  

My mother thought organized religion was one of the problems with the world, this extended to the Girl Scouts and the PTA (a somewhat convenient belief for a mother of 4, since you can’t ask someone to go against their beliefs).  She also believed that children shouldn’t be allowed to act.

I have never quite understood how I talked her into letting me enter the Beverly Hills’ Miss Easter Bunny pageant when I was 8 -- one of the prizes was a screen-test -- but I did.     

I don’t know what I was thinking.  I think I thought it would be fun to ride down Beverly Drive in an old white cadillac with the top down sitting next to the Mayor of Beverly Hills and wave at the throngs of people I imagined would be lining the streets.  I think I thought I was going to win. 

Little did I know, the fix was in.