At which point the audience exploded into laughter.
It wasn’t supposed to be a funny line, but it cracked everybody up, and somebody shouted at the screen, “Oh, no, they don’t!”
Which renewed the gales of laughter.
That was the moment I realized that I could very well be sitting in an audience of women who were probably divorced, whose kids were spending Christmas with their fathers, and who had come to the movie with their divorced girlfriends to see a movie about everybody’s favorite divorced girlfriend.
And none of us wanted to get back with our ex-husbands.
Not for one minute.
It took a while for the laughter to die down, but eventually it did, and when the movie ended, we all went home to our lives.
I had learned a lesson, which took me this long to understand.
It’s all about expectations.
I never expected how my life would turn out. That fact comes into relief on holidays, because they’re the time when expectations are front and center, and all divorced people have different holidays than they expected.
I’m not saying we have better or worse, I’m just saying that they’re not what we expected.
And I learned on Christmas that that’s okay.
I can live with that, and so can Franca, and so can the forty or so women in the theater that day.
Because we can still laugh and be happy, but in a different way.
Best gift ever.
Happy Holidays, year ’round.
UnResolutions for the New Year
Time for my annual UnResolutions lecture. If you don’t know how this goes, I’m trying to change the way everybody in the world does things.
Now you see why I’m divorced. Twice.
Here’s what I mean.
In the real world, everybody makes resolutions for the New Year, i.e., things they don’t like about themselves and need to change. For example, I’d love to lose some weight, so I resolve not to eat chocolate cake.
Impossible. Wrong-headed. Dumb.
God wouldn’t have invented chocolate cake if he didn’t want us to eat it. Therefore, ipso fatso, resolutions are a waste of time.
And they’re so negative. Why even make a mental list of all the things you hate about yourself? Why start the New Year keeping all of your faults firmly in mind?
I have a better idea.
Flip it.
Hence, the UnResolution.
Think back to the things you’ve been doing this past year which make you happy and which you intend to keep doing. Come up with your own list of UnResolutions, and there’s no limit on the number of great things you can think about yourself. In fact, I hope you have a long list of reasons for your own awesomeness. Anything qualifies, even if it sounds odd or weird. In fact, especially if it sounds odd or weird.
This isn’t counting your blessings, exactly. It’s more like counting your eccentricities. As you will see below, with mine.
UnResolution Number One: I resolve not to wash my hair. By way of background, I used to wash my hair every day, like the shampoo commercials say, but nowadays, I wash my hair once a week and national holidays. And you know what? It looks better. And not in that too-cool-for-school dirty-hair way, but just healthier. Shinier.
Well, shinier, for sure.
Bottom line, washing your hair every day isn’t great for hair as “highlighted” as mine, which is euphemistic for bleached into blond obedience. So I resolve to keep my hair dirty this year.
Thus ensuring my single status.
UnResolution Number Two. I resolve to keep watching the same movies over and over because I love them. Now this is going to sound crazy, but I love to have movies on TV while I work, especially movies like The Godfather. I have seen The Godfather probably 145 times, yet I watch it every time cable shows a marathon. Bottom line, one of the great things about living alone is that no one is around to say, “You’re not going to watch The Godfather again, are you?”
Answer: You’re darn tootin’. I’m going to watch it until I have it memorized and then some. And I’m going to love every minute.
And The Godfather’s not alone. I’m talking Donnie Brasco. Mamma Mia! Something’s Gotta Give. What About Bob? The Bird-cage. Analyze This. There are so many movies I love, and if they’re on TV, I’m watching them. And I’m going to keep watching them, over and over, all year.
UnResolution Number Three: I resolve to keep my car too clean. I love my car, which now has over 100,000 miles. It’s as white as a bar of Ivory soap, and I love how it looks when it’s clean, so I get it cleaned a lot. This may be because all I have to do is sit on my butt and drive it through a car wash. If they had a House Wash, my house would be immaculate.
When my car is clean, I feel an unaccountable surge in self-esteem, as if a clean car means that I’m an organized person. Even though, at some level, I know I’m really a disorganized person with a clean car. Still, I resolve to keep my car too clean and not worry that it’s becoming a sexual fetish.
UnResolution Number Four. I love my two cats, Mimi and Vivi, and four dogs, Penny, Angie, Ruby The Unmedicated Corgi, and Little Tony The Anatomically Incorrect Cavalier. They make me happy every day. I love to walk them, talk to them, and kiss them on the lips. Well, this Christmas, I added to the brood, a little female Cavalier puppy named Peach.
And she’s a peach.
I know it sounds crazy and weird but she’s already making me happier, sleeping beside my laptop as I write.
With the TV on, showing Analyze This.
Happy New Year!
Happy New Year
It’s true that I believe in UnResolutions, that is, resolving to keep doing things you like. But I also try to make the old-fashioned, conventional New Year’s resolutions.
As usual, I’m easy on myself.
I know I’m not going to keep all my resolutions, and that’s okay with me.
I always resolve to do things I know I won’t do, so why should New Year’s be any different? Last week, I resolved to get my truck inspected and my roots done. I didn’t do either. If you inspected my roots, I’d get a ticket.
Don’t mistake me, it’s not as if I didn’t intend to do the things I’d resolved to do. It just didn’t work out. And I don’t feel guilty about it, because there are so many other things to feel guilty about.
Ask Mother Mary.
Maybe the problem is with the word resolution. It has a legal vibe that’s no fun at all. A resolution is for a corporation or a national constitution. Resolved is a good start to a preamble about the right to free speech, but it’s overkill for me losing five pounds.
Resolution is just too intense for what we’re talking about. If you look it up in the thesaurus, its synonyms are dauntlessness, staunchness, and tenacity.
Got a headache yet?
I do.
I suggest we replace the word resolution with wish, and from now on, we can all make wishes for New Year’s. It’s dull to make a resolution, but it’s fun to make a wish. It makes you think of birthday cake.
Everybody loves birthday cake.
And if you look up wish in the thesaurus, its synonyms are desire, hankering, and itch.
Isn’t that better?
Wish doesn’t take itself as seriously as resolution, and neither should we. We’re just people, and often we fall short. To err is human, right? For Homo sapiens, failure is a job requirement.
If we stop resolving and start wishing, we would never fail, because nobody ever expects a wish to come true. For example, I wish I could marry George Clooney. I wish I could lose five pounds. I wish I had naturally blond hair, so I didn’t have to worry about my roots in the first place.
We know that none of my wishes is going to come true. But I really do wish for them. And I’d like to keep wishing for them. Wishing fulfills a human need that goes beyond common sense. After all, we buy Powerball tickets and hold presidential elections.
Somebody wins, but it’s never us.
r /> I bet some of you are reading this and shaking your head. You agree that resolution is too hard-core, but you think wish is for slackers. You seek a compromise between resolution and wish. You wonder, isn’t there a middle ground?
Don’t despair. I have another word.
Aim.
How does aim suit you? You could make a list of New Year’s aims. I view aim as resolution with a fallback. With aim, you get to announce your resolution, but it automatically includes a Plan B. Like an exit strategy, built-in.
How would aim work?
Let’s say you aim to lose ten pounds this coming year. That’s like saying you resolve to lose ten, but you’d settle for losing two. In other words, if you lose ten, great. If you lose five, also great. But if you lose only one, then you have to feel guilty and worthless for the holidays next year.
Aim is like a pre-nup. You want to keep your aim. You will try to keep your aim. In fact, you aim to keep your aim. But you’re realistic enough to know that you might not be able to keep your aim. Because you can get so sick of your aim, it’s not even funny. And if your aim tells that duck story one more time, you might commit murder.
But I’m off track. Bottom line, if you don’t keep your aim, you keep the house, the Schwab account, and the car.
Aim is growing on me if you can’t tell. Aim has the connotation of physically aiming at something, like a target, but there’s wiggle room, in case your aim was off. As if you just missed the mark. Close, but no cigars. The failure wasn’t your fault, exactly. The sun was in your eyes.
You with me?
Come along. I’m converting to aim. Aim works better for me.
Observe.
Here is my New Year’s aim: I aim to marry George Clooney, but I would settle for sleeping with him.
Am I aiming too high?
Or would that be a miracle?
Love and Meatballs
By Francesca Scottoline Serritella
The relationship between a grandparent and grandchild is an easy one to take for granted. I was lucky enough to have my grandmother as my babysitter when my mom was working; she was like a second mother to me, so we’ve always been close. But time has passed, she moved to South Beach to live with my uncle, and I’ve grown and moved out of my mom’s house, so you know how it goes. Things change.
Mainly, my grandmother got too cool for me.
Not that she loves me any less, I’m not sure my grandmother could love me any more. But the last time she stayed with us, I really wanted to spend quality time with her. I didn’t merely want to be in the same room with her, I wanted to do things together, share things. But I had to face it.
She’s just not that into me.
For example, I got up early every morning with my mom, so all three of us could have breakfast together. But we quickly discovered that my grandmother sleeps in until noon or later.
She’s a hard-partying granny.
When she did shuffle downstairs, her short white hair disheveled, I offered to make eggs. But all she wanted for breakfast was an Apple Fritter from Dunkin’ Donuts, and would I mind running out to pick one up for her?
So much for brunch.
But, hey, when you’re eighty-six and you beat throat cancer, you’re allowed to enjoy whatever fatty, sugary confection you want. I figured I couldn’t expect her to change her routine, so I should try to show an interest in her hobbies.
Namely, “the puzzles.”
My grandmother is a master of word puzzles: crosswords, cryptograms, acrostics, seek-and-finds, etc. She has whole books of them. But crosswords are her very favorite, her puzzle soul-mate. Every morning, my mom would lay out the daily crossword from two different newspapers for her, and my grandmother did them first thing. They’re practically part of her diet.
I was an English major in college, I’m a better than average Scrabble player, and my mind is young and sharp, so I thought maybe I could help her do one.
Turns out, I suck.
In retrospect, I was deluded to think I could possibly help the Grand Master with her puzzles. She’s been honing her skill for more than a half century. She could probably teach Will Shortz a thing or two.
But I was worse than unhelpful. I was a handicap.
First, I answered the clues out of order, which made my grandmother insane. I had the gall to skip around, when the only proper way to go about a crossword puzzle is block by block.
Then, when she directed me to fill in an answer, I did so with a black pen. Outrage. Who raised me? Red is the only acceptable color ink. Black matches the lines and numbers, and therefore is not clear.
Red has contrast, not to mention style.
I let her do her puzzles in peace.
So I took a different tack. My grandmother was a hot number when she was younger, and one beauty habit she’s kept over the years is filing her nails. Her fingernails are always shaped and smoothed to perfection. She carries an emery board with her at all times.
She refused to carry that Life Alert we got her, but God help her if she can’t find her nail file.
Maybe it’s genetic, because nails are sort of my secret talent. I can do a perfect, freehand French manicure, even on my right hand. Impressive, right? So I thought, perfect—I’ll paint my grandmother’s nails for her!
Not interested.
Nail polish chips in a day, not to mention contains dangerous chemicals, she says.
This from a woman who held a cigarette between her fingers for sixty-five years.
So a “no” to the nails.
Finally, I make her an offer she can’t refuse.
“Will you teach me how to make your famous meatballs and sauce?”
This got her excited. She carefully dictated the shopping list, full of secret ingredients like onion powder, garlic powder, dried basil, and diced, pureed, and paste forms of canned tomato.
Freshness is against tradition.
When I returned from the store, I cleaned off the kitchen table and laid everything out for her approval. Everything passed inspection except one thing:
Me.
“You’re wearing nail polish,” she said.
“So?”
“You can’t make the meatballs with nail polish on. It will poison them.”
I knew better than to resist. “I’ll take it off.”
“With remover?” Her brown eyes got even larger behind her giant glasses. “Even worse. You can watch.”
But I begged, I pleaded with her to let me make them, and no grandparent can resist a wailing grandchild, even if she’s twenty-four.
So we set to work. I made plenty of rookie mistakes—making some too big, too small, too wet, or too dry—but even my grandmother’s nitpicking was loving. “No, Kitten, like this,” she would say.
If only this picture were scratch and sniff.
And when my over-enthusiasm for rolling sent a meatball flying through the air and onto the floor, she didn’t scold me. She laughed.
She may pretend I’m a nuisance, but I am her favorite nuisance.
When we were finished, we had made the most delicious meatballs in existence. Over fifty of them, which should give you an idea of my family’s portion control.
That night, the three of us had a spaghetti-and-meatballs feast. As I was clearing the table, I asked my grandmother if she could write out the recipe so I could make them on my own.
“My hands feel dirty. I’ll do it tomorrow.”
But her hands looked clean to me.
When I reminded her the next day, she said, “My eyes are tired. Later, Cookie.”
We love each other like crazy, emphasis on “crazy.”
But she did two puzzles after that.
What gives? At first I didn’t understand why my grandmother was reluctant to write down the recipe. Then it occurred to me that maybe she didn’t want me to make the meatballs without her. Not that she wanted to be the lone expert, but that she wanted to feel needed. She didn’t gather from my interest in breakfast, puzz
les, and manicures how much she already was.
When we were saying goodbye at the airport, my grandmother pointed a finger at me and said, “Don’t think I forgot. I’ll write the recipe when I get home and send it to you.”
I gave her a hug. “We’ll make them next time you come up.”
Big Love
I’m in love.
With my big TV.
It’s Big Love.
My big TV takes up the entire family room, but that’s one of its many charms. True, we’re in the early stages of our romance, when I still find its faults adorable. The minute it starts sucking its teeth, I’m outta here.
But I have a feeling this one’s a keeper. For example, honesty is the most important element in any relationship, and my TV always tells the truth, especially in high definition. It shows me every wrinkle on every face—except mine. How many home appliances make you feel younger?
In fact, if my third husband will be a dog, my fourth will be a big TV.
And now I have the best of both, my new puppy Peach and a big TV. We watch football together while I write, with Peach and Little Tony sleeping on either side of me, flanking the laptop on my lap. At other times, they take over and kick the laptop off my lap. If I ruled the world, they’d permanently replace the laptop, but they don’t pay the bills.
And by the way, I never forget about the other dogs, the two golden retrievers and Ruby The Corgi. The whole family has been known to sit on the couch together, watching the big TV during these long winter evenings, a motley lineup of fur and hair, sharing the same knitted blanket.
The cats, Mimi and Vivi, curl up in a nearby ottoman and the best chair in the house, respectively. They control the remote.
So it’s inevitable that I’m watching the big TV with five dogs and two cats when a show comes on A&E about animal hoarding. I’d never heard of animal hoarding, and it comes as a surprise to me. Apparently, there are people who live alone with too many pets.
Awkward.