To be perfectly honest, the only food recipe I have is one for
disaster. My husband and I found that out the hard way. We hadn’t been
married very long, and I wanted to make a delicious home-cooked meal of steak
and potatoes. I put the steak under the broiler, waited a reasonable
amount of time and then opened my oven door to 12-inch flames. I
screamed, what else could I do, but my husband simply strolled over to
the fire and blew it out. In his sweet way he told me it would be fine,
we could eat the potatoes. He also said, don’t worry about cooking
anymore, we could eat out.
So over time our recipes for dinner came from the restaurants. When we dine out, we relax into our table and, as everyone knows to do, we look to mind our own business. But sometimes the tables are very close together, and being that my husband and I are both therapists, listening to what people have to say is what we do. In fact, our business really is minding other people’s business, so inevitably we may find ourselves paying attention as it becomes clear that the conversation at the next table is about to go up in flames, just like my steak. The other night we were at one of our favorite Italian restaurants. As soon as the waiter took our order we could hear it starting just a few feet away. The woman began.
She leans in toward me, her elbows on the counter. She is tall, blonde, and very slender. She’s wearing a tight black skirt and a white blouse open one button just past modest. A maid’s apron circles her waist. She begins to speak but I raise my hand and gesture for her to wait. I am listening to the teenage girl with the long legs and short shorts standing to the blonde’s left. She is a regular but, tonight, she wants more than usual.
Candy has been a bond between me and my pal Joy since we first became
best friends in sixth grade at Beverly Vista Elementary School in
Beverly Hills, California. Sure, there’s been humor, loyalty, shared
heart-throbs, and tears…but from the get-go, there were shared Nestle
Crunch candy bars filled with crinkly chocolate that we bought every
day as we walked home from school together. It became a ritual,
peeling off the blue and white wrapper, then the foil, and eating the
crunchy bar while hysterically laughing over some inside joke that was
funny only to ourselves. But it was better that way.
I always know the exact moment love officially strikes me clear and hard. The world actually goes silent. I can’t help but smile. My eyes light up. And most importantly, I shut up. Because in that very moment, no matter how ridiculous it sounds, I’m rendered speechless since there’s only one truth: I’m alive and I love you and I know it and that’s all there is to it.
At some point during college, probably while I sat drunk moribund
glued to a booth in a club birthed by a pomade-slick headed
Philadelphian, a forgettable hip-hop jam shivering my sternum, at some
point I realized this is not the best arena to showcase whatever it is
I have to offer women. Now, a couple of years later and back in Los
Angeles, those clubs and plenty of overcrowded, overloud bars in my
rear-view mirror, the thesis hasn’t changed. I have friends1 who,
god-bless them, don’t require that (trivial) intermediary step of
exchanging coherent words in between seeing a girl and kissing her.
Some sort of atavistic ceremony played out to the new Kanye. I don’t
know. Maybe I should let more chest hair peek out of my button-down
shirts.