Better late than never?
So whichever political candidate you support, I encourage you to vote.
Especially if you have ovaries.
Or used to.
I believe I still have ovaries, but I’m dead below the waist. They’re there, like my appendix. Cute, but extra weight.
I can’t wait to vote and I’m enthusiastic about my candidate. I hope you feel the same way about yours. But if you don’t, I hope you feel enthusiastic about voting, because it matters, now more than ever. Our great country stands strong, as one of the world’s most stable democracies, founded on wonderful ideals and freedoms for each and every one of us.
So show whoever’s listening—even momentarily—that women have enormous political power, market power, and personal power.
It’s time for them to hear us roar.
It’s time for them to hear us, at all.
Mother Mary Gets an Idea
Lisa
Certain smells bring back memories of Mother Mary.
Among these are Estée Lauder Youth Dew perfume, More 100s cigarette smoke—and mozzarella.
Not exactly sentimental, but there you have it.
You can trust that all the memories of The Flying Scottolines will relate to carbohydrates.
Let me explain.
The other day, I was walking through the food court in the mall and I caught a whiff of a distinctive aroma.
Bad pizza.
Specifically, frozen pizza.
By way of background, my mother was a terrific cook, especially of Italian food. She made us homemade spaghetti, ravioli, and gnocchi from scratch. As a child, I’d spend hours watching her.
And it took hours.
If you’ve ever watched anybody make homemade spaghetti, it’s a domestic miracle. A loaf of dough that somehow ends up being rolled out and then fed into a spaghetti maker, coming out like flour-y tinsel.
Same with ravioli, because she mixed the ricotta cheese and seasonings according to her own secret recipe that had a tangy cheesy salty taste I could never duplicate and wouldn’t even try.
And when she made gnocchi, she started with the dough, but rolled it out into long, skinny tubes, cut it into little chunks, then floured her fingers and pinched each chunk, making the special dimpling that marks the best gnocchi—made by hand, dimpled by fingertips.
The problem was pizza.
When we were growing up, I wanted to be like the other kids, who got pizza delivered or had somebody go pick up pizza and brought it home. We never did that, because Mother Mary felt that since it was Italian food, it would be heresy to buy it at a restaurant. But she had no interest in making homemade pizza, and who could blame her, so she would buy it frozen at the Acme.
Or as we say in South Philly, the Ac-a-me.
She bought a no-name brand in a plastic bag, with ten small pizzas stacked on each other, as appetizing as hockey pucks.
She cooked it at home.
For three hours.
Okay, I’m exaggerating, but she overcooked the pizza every time, refusing to follow the directions. She wouldn’t even let me follow the directions. It was her kitchen, so she did the cooking, which meant that our pizza always sucked.
And let’s be real, back then, it was the dark ages of frozen pizza.
In fairness to Mother Mary, overcooking was the only chance that frozen pizza had of drying out, otherwise the crust stayed soggy and the tomato sauce distilled to hot ketchup.
So as I entered high school, I ended up at a friend’s house and they ordered pizza from a great neighborhood pizza place, Marrone’s.
I was hooked.
So one night, when Mother Mary wanted to make frozen pizza, I told her about the magic of store-bought pizza at Marrone’s, but she wasn’t having any. We fussed about it, but amazingly I persuaded her to give it a try.
Mother Mary was delightfully stubborn. You could move the Mummers up Broad Street easier.
So I went to Marrone’s, bought an actual take-out pizza, and brought it home.
Mother Mary opened the box, and we all waited in suspense while she slid out the first piece and cut the mozzarella strings with the gravity of a surgeon severing an umbilical cord. She took a bite, chewed, swallowed, then said with a wink: “I knew it would be better than frozen.”
From that day forward, we ordered from Marrone’s.
And I forgot all about that story until I walked through the mall the other day, and smelled the mozzarella.
I knew that somewhere, Mother Mary was winking.
Grief is funny that way, bringing back the good and the bad, the funny foods and the dumb fights.
And most of all, the love.
That never goes away.
And the best of it is homemade.
Picture Imperfect
Francesca
My best friend has been living in London for the last four years, and I’ve been dying to visit. In preparation, I’ve been saving my money, browsing TripAdvisor.com, and drinking enough Earl Grey tea to earn a title myself.
Thank goodness I checked one more thing before buying my ticket: My passport.
Expired.
Like, three years expired.
I don’t know why I was surprised; I got it when I was seventeen.
I’m forever twenty-seven in my mind.
It’s no great loss, my old passport photo was horrible. Caught in midblink, my eyelids are half-mast, so I look, in a very official capacity, sloshed.
The photo came at an unfortunate time about a year after my lone, teenage-rebel subversive act—a pixie haircut.
You know you’re a goody two-shoes when the most rebellious act of your teen years is accidentally getting a butch hairstyle.
My old passport photo—believe it or not, taken sober As any woman who has cut her hair very short knows, some stages of the growing-out process are better than others.
The stage captured in this passport photo can best be described as Gene Wilder.
I could only go up from here.
I’m not particularly photogenic to begin with, but I seem to strike out with every government ID.
Just once, I’d like to have a bar bouncer look at my ID without giving me that look, a disbelieving frown, like, really?
Yes, really, it’s me, okay? Makeup is magic.
I watch YouTube makeup tutorials to help me fall asleep. You don’t know contouring until you watch a drag queen do it.
The only compliment I’ve ever gotten on my license was a long-past one, when the woman who took it at the DMV handed it to me, and said, “You’ve got a face for the soaps.”
Looking like a D-list daytime TV actress was my peak.
Unless she meant regular soap.
We’re spoiled now with so many photo-filtering apps. Blemishes and lines get smoothed out, color adjusted, add a flower crown for panache.
I haven’t had to post a photo of what I actually look like in some time.
All ID photos use the Mug-shot filter.
Not to be confused with the equally horrifying, Ladies Room at Work and Bathing Suit Dressing Room filters.
Around the same time I realized I needed to renew my passport, the late, great Prince came out with his, which looked like an Annie Leibovitz portrait.
I felt inspired—this was my year to step it up.