The Best and Worst of Christmas

 By Maria Lagalante Schulz

I read a blog post in the New York Times the other day that asked readers to list their very worst Christmas gifts at http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/20/tell-us-the-worst-christmas-gift-you-ever-received/?scp=1&sq=worst%20christmas%20presents&st=cse

Most of them were downright hilarious, some were sad, and some killjoys kept telling everyone that “it’s the thought that counts.” Yes, but it’s still funny when you get a gift that

1) Has no thought behind it

2) Was obviously bought for the person who gave it to you, who decided it was too hideous to keep

3) Is half-eaten and/or moth-ridden

It got me to thinking: what was the worst Christmas gift I ever got? I can’t help but feel guilty while I think this, because Christmas gifts (like all other gifts) were my mother’s responsibility.

My mom was a really wonderful person; funny, sweet, kind, and not even psychotic despite having 7 children, 8 years apart. If that wasn’t a reason enough to jump off the roof, I don’t know what is.

The thing was, my mother wasn’t always the most organized person—and any mom knows that a lack of organizational skills at Christmas can kill that happy holiday buzz.

Besides having to shop, cook, clean, and wrap gifts for all 7 children, my mother also had to find suitable gifts for her mother, father, brother, mother-in-law, sister and brothers-in-law, her nieces and nephews, work colleagues and assorted friends.

Money was very tight, and her gift selection was often skewed towards gifts that were practical, cheap, or funny. I think her sister (my Aunt Nellie) learned to shop at the same time my mom did, because she often gave my mother gifts like a decanter shaped like a wino, that twirled around on a musical base and played “I’m tired and I wanna go home.” It also allowed you to pour wine out of the bum’s head. Classy!

We only got one gift each, so you really, really hoped that Santa Claus would intervene and get you something you’d asked for. I never really understood why Santa and my mother had the same handwriting, but boy was I glad that he was around. He came through with Dawn dolls, Barbies, baby dolls, Battle Ship, the game of Life and other fun stuff that I never would have gotten if I hadn’t written to him.

There are two years that I remember vividly. The first was in 1973. My father had a really good year, and money was flowing a little more than usual. My brothers, Tony and Jude, came and woke up Chris and me and brought us out to the living room at 4:00 a.m. There was Paul across the room, shining the light from his new GI Joe Camper and sounding its alarm while Goldie barked. Joey was yelling as he tore open a package that had his name on it. Louie handed me a gift, and then another—which was really something, since we didn’t usually get more than one gift from Santa. Chris got GI Joes, I got a Drowsy doll and some Barbies, and all of my other brothers got loads of gifts. There was a lot of laughing and screaming. We were all so excited.

My parents slept through the whole thing, until I went into their room and showed them my Drowsy doll. “Look, Mom,” I said. “Santa’s got the same handwriting as you!” My mother had outdone herself that year, and we were all feeling very merry.

Then, of course, there was the following year. In 1974, my father lost his job when the company he worked for left New York and moved to California. At first, it was a novelty having my father around while he was unemployed. He was only out of work a few weeks, because he took a big pay cut to make sure he had a steady income again.

The money that had been flowing so freely the year before kind of dried up. Santa was back to giving just one gift again, which was okay by me. We got up a little bit later on Christmas morning as my parents handed out our gifts. Each of us opened something a bit more practical that year, and much less extravagant. Jude got a coat. Louie, Joey and Paul got shirts and sweaters. I got an African doll my father bought at the United Nations. Chris got another GI Joe to add to his collection.

When we were all done, Tony was standing there, empty-handed.

“What’s wrong?” Jude said.

“Mom and Dad didn’t get me anything,” Tony said.

I felt like I could cry, but Tony, at 15 years old, was too old to start crying.

“Oh, wait!” my mother said, as she ran into her bedroom. She came out a few minutes later with an envelope and handed it to Tony. “Here you go.”

Tony opened the envelope and found $5 inside. “Thanks.” Tony said.

We all felt pretty bad that Tony had gotten so royally gypped. I’d like to say that there was a happy ending like in one of those Rankin and Bass cartoons, but unfortunately, Tony still ended up with just $5 when all was said and done.

Here's Tony with Chris and me.

I couldn’t feel too bad for him for too long, since my Aunt Nellie arrived a few hours later with my gift: a tee-shirt of Jimmy “J.J” Walker, from the TV show “Good Times.” It featured his big smiling face, and the words “DY-NO-MITE!” scrawled underneath in red letters. My aunt got me a red plaid skirt to go with it.

I took my mother aside the next day as she was folding everything and putting it in my play clothes drawer. “Mom,” I said, “I can’t wear that outfit. The girls in the neighborhood will tease me to death over it.”

“It’s perfectly good clothing!” my mother replied.

“Ma, I wear a green plaid skirt all week long with my uniform. Why would I want to wear a red plaid skirt on the weekends? And I hate, hate, HATE Jimmy J.J. Walker.”

“I’m sorry, Maria, but money is tight. You have to try it on, and if it fits, you’ll wear it,” she replied.

Well, thankfully, the skirt was too small, but the shirt fit perfectly! So began a long year filled with taunts and teases that included being called “The Good Times Blimp.”

As I got older and I stopped believing in Santa Claus, my mother’s gifts became more practical. There was a blazer one year, a sweater the next. I tried not to mention that my feet were cold, because I would almost certainly get ten pairs of socks for Christmas that year.

My mother tried, though. She saw me admiring a harlequin doll at the store one year, and I got that very doll for Christmas when I was about 14. She’d also surprise me with grown up gifts like Love’s Baby Soft perfume, a makeup kit, or a new typewriter (an IBM!). I had to share it with all of my brothers and father, but it made writing papers a million times easier than the manual.

I think of my mother all the time, but especially on Christmas Eve. That was her birthday, but she was usually so busy that she barely had time to say “thank you” if and when we remembered. Like all December babies, her birthday was eclipsed by Christmas.

She knew a thing or two about getting terrible gifts. Very often, people would combine her birthday and her Christmas present and give her one big, awful gift at once. Like the year my grandmother gave her a vacuum—a big wonderful Christmas/Birthday combo gift that my mother despised.

I remember my father taking us to a small boutique on Bell Blvd. It was called Hen’s Yen, and it featured really groovy outfits that screamed “it’s the 1970s and only Huggy Bear looks better than me.”

For her birthday, Dad let my mother buy any outfit she wanted, which was a big deal since we weren’t made of money. My mother bought a brown corduroy pantsuit that had flaring bell bottoms, a flowered vest, and a white frilly blouse to match. She also got boots, which really made her look and feel pretty wonderful.

The best Christmas gift my mom ever gave me, though, wasn’t one she handed to me on Christmas morning.

I was in the second grade and we were going to do a play called “The Littlest Christmas Tree.” It was about three Christmas trees that hope to be chosen to celebrate Christmas. The star of the show was, of course, the littlest tree. I was one of the tiniest kids in the class, and I was sure that I could get a part as one of the Christmas trees, or maybe as one of the kids who come traipsing through the Christmas tree lot. They were all speaking parts, and everyone got at least one line.

The day the parts were going to be handed out, I was sick. I stayed home with a cold but couldn’t wait to get back into school the next day (which was a first for me).

“Why do you want to go in so badly?” my mother said.

“I’m sure Mrs. McGovern saved a part for me. I want to see what it is!”

I got to school that day and approached Mrs. McGovern.

“Which part do you have for me in the Christmas play?”

Her face was a mask of confusion, until it dawned on her that I’d been absent the day before.

“Uhhhh,” was all she managed.

“Didn’t you save a part for me?” I asked. I was crestfallen.

“No, I didn’t,” she said. Good old Mrs. McGovern was about 22 years old, always confused, and she didn’t ever sugarcoat things. “But you know what? I’ll make you the fourth Christmas tree.”

“There is no fourth Christmas tree in the play,” I replied.

“Well there is now.” Mrs. McGovern replied.

Of course, there were no lines for the fourth Christmas tree, so all I had to do was stand there and look like an idiot. This play that I’d been looking forward to for weeks became torture to me.

My best friend, Perette Murphy, was the lead in the play. She was tiny and cute and made the best Littlest Christmas tree ever. I thought she was the luckiest kid there.

The day of the play, my mother pulled out a red turtleneck and red plaid skirt for me to wear (no, not the one my Aunt Nellie gave me). Then, she brushed my hair into two gleaming pony tails and kissed me on the head.

“You’ll be the best looking Christmas tree there,” she said.

“Ma,” I replied. “You don’t have to come. I know you’re busy. I don’t have any lines, so don’t bother.”

My mother just laughed. “Go have fun. At least you don’t have to worry about stage fright.”

I knew how much work my mother still had to get accomplished for Christmas. We would have the usual 15-20 people over for dinner in just a few days, the house needed to be cleaned from top to bottom, and she probably had stacks and stacks of gifts to wrap. Who needed to take time out to come see me, the biggest loser in the Christmas tree lot?

That day on stage, as the lights dimmed, I stood off to the side of the other “Christmas” trees and watched while the story unfolded. I sang when I was supposed to and watched Perette be the best littlest Christmas tree ever. When I finally looked out into the audience, I saw my mother waving at me. She was in the third or fourth row, which meant she must’ve gotten there early. She also gave me a big thumbs up.

I remember thinking, “now why on earth did she come to this? I don’t even have a speaking part,” but I felt really happy. Maybe Mrs. McGovern didn’t remember me, but my mother did.

After the play ended, my mom came back to the classroom with a big tin of Christmas cookies which she handed to Mrs. McGovern. Then, she hugged me. “I have a surprise for you,” she said. She pulled out a glittery Christmas tree pin and put it on me.

“You didn’t have to come,” I said. “You’ve got a lot to do.”

“Don’t be silly! This was the most important thing I had to do today,” my mother said, as she laughed.

A lot of Christmas mornings have come and gone since my mom gave me that Christmas tree pin. I grew up. I moved away. I had children of my own. My mother got older, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease, and died 14 years later. Whenever I miss her, I remember her, out in that audience. She’s waving at me, and she’s giving me the thumbs up.

Now, my parents were not the overly sentimental types. They didn’t run down to the school for every event. This was the 1970s, after all, and parents let you have your own life while they lived theirs. But when push came to shove, they were there.

I learned a lot by looking out into the audience that day and seeing my mother there. When I get caught up in the craziness of Christmas and start focusing on the toys and the presents (and panicking that I will mess up somehow), I take a deep breath, put my arms around my husband, girls and all the people I love, and remember that being with them is the most important thing I have to do on any given day.

Recipes

Here’s a great Sugar cookie recipe from The Food Network: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/sugar-cookies-recipe/index.html

 Here’s another great Candy Cane cookie recipe (to enjoy this week while school is out):

http://www.food.com/recipe/very-easy-candy-cane-cookies-143570

And of course, Christmas Tree cookies: http://www.food.com/recipe/christmas-cookies-11712

So—what was your worst Christmas present? What was your best? Got a Christmas recipe you want to share? Post your comments here, let all of the hungry lifers in on the fun.

8 Great Christmas Specials

by Maria Lagalante Schulz

When I was a kid, I found the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas to be really exciting and full of anticipation. Christmas seemed like it would never, ever get here. One of the things I enjoyed most, right after putting up the Christmas tree, was scouring the TV Guide to make sure we didn’t miss our favorite Christmas specials.

Here are 8 of my all-time favorites:

The Year Without a Santa Claus

Santa thinks no one loves him anymore and decides to take a vacation. Mrs. Claus wants to prove him wrong and so she sends out two elves, Jingle and Jangle, who have the combined brainpower of a fist full of snow. They take along a baby reindeer that can’t take this kind of pressure-filled situation just yet, to find some Christmas cheer. Of course, trouble ensues.

Heat Miser and Snow Miser come onstage to sing about the joys of life in the heat vs. a life spent in the cold. I loved these two guys, mainly because I thought they looked like Joey and Paul, and I could see my mother as Mother Nature, demanding that the two of them get along.

Will Santa find Christmas cheer? Is Mrs. Claus going to be responsible for the premature death of a baby reindeer? Does anyone care if Santa doesn’t do his yearly sleigh ride anymore? What do you think?

A Charlie Brown Christmas

Charlie Brown goes “in treatment” with his trusted therapist, Lucy Van Pelt (the doctor is in) and discovers that the thing he needs in order to find Christmas spirit is to become director of the Christmas play.

Charlie Brown, I don’t want to burst your bubble, but did you forget that Lucy is the same person who keeps pulling the football away when you try to kick it? Or that Violet tells you to your face that you’re a loser? What makes you think you can direct this group of kids, when even your own dog wants to boo you?

I owe Sally Brown and Lucy for the lines that I still use to this day. First, when Charlie Brown ridicules his sister for asking Santa for cash, she replies, “all I want is what I have coming to me. All I want is my fair share.” Later, when Linus asks Lucy to give him one good reason why he has to memorize some lines, she tells him, “I’ll give you five. One, two, three, four, five,” as she makes a fist. How can you not love Lucy?

But really, Lucy, why on earth would you, Violet, and Frieda of the curly hair ever send Charlie Brown out to get a Christmas tree? Do you want him to fail?

These were the existential questions my brothers and I hurled at the television in between dancing as Schroeder played “da-da-da-da-da, duh duh duh duh duh duh duh” and then singing “wooo wooo wooo wooo wooo wooo wooo wooo” during the final scene.

Most of all, I love that Linus tells Charlie Brown what Christmas really means.

“And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, ‘Fear not: for behold, I bring unto you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the City of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.’ And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God, and saying, ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.’”
[Linus picks up his blanket and walks back towards Charlie Brown]

“That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.”

Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer

Rudolph came of age in the 1960s, when bullies were not only tolerated, they were encouraged. I could feel Rudolph’s pain as he ran off with his little elf friend, Herbie, and his new pal, Yukon Cornelius, to the Land of the Misfit Toys with the Abominable Snowman hot on their heels.

I thought Santa was kind of a creep in this one, and this disturbed me. He was not this way in all of the other cartoons! He was picking on a reindeer because his nose was red! He jilted those poor misfit toys FOR YEARS!

When Santa approaches Rudolph and says, “Rudolph, with your nose so bright/won’t you guide my sleigh tonight?” I always wished the song went like this:

“Then how the reindeer snubbed him.

As he shouted out with glee,

Not on your miserable life, Santa.

I hope you crash into a pine tree!”

But no, Rudolph is always trying to get that rotten Santa’s approval, so all he says is “It would be my honor.”

As Snoopy would’ve said, “boooooo.”

Santa Claus is Coming To Town

Now here’s the Santa Claus that I knew and loved. I watched him learn his craft with the wise Kringle family. I saw him land Mrs. Claus (who my brothers thought was quite a babe) and bring toys and joy to kids of Sombertown despite the threats sent his way by the Burgher Meister Meister Burgher.

Kris Kringle, a.k.a. Santa Claus thawed out the Winter Warlock’s heart and taught him how to “put one foot in front of the other.” And he busted out all his friends from jail with the Winter Warlock’s magic-corn-eating, flying reindeer.

So how’d he do it? With toys and songs. How else?

The Grinch Who Stole Christmas

“Every Who down in Whoville liked Christmas a lot, but the Grinch, who lived just north of Whoville – did not. The Grinch hated Christmas – the whole Christmas season. Now, please don’t ask why; no one quite knows the reason. It could be, perhaps, that his shoes were too tight. Or it could be that his head wasn’t screwed on just right. But I think that the most likely reason of all may have been that his heart was two sizes too small.”

I think the most likely reason the Grinch hated Christmas was that he’d spent a lifetime working in retail. He probably had to work on Thanksgiving, when all the Who’s who weren’t eating their roast beast kept him busy at the Whoville K-Mart. Then, after missing out on Thanksgiving, he almost got trampled to death on Black Friday when he opened the doors to let the screaming hordes in.

Or maybe it really was that his heart was too sizes too small. Personally, I always found the Grinch to be thoroughly amusing in his nasty grinchy-ness. I did work in retail, and there were a million times that I wanted to say “Pooh-pooh to the Whos.” The endless noise, the incessant gaiety, the mob scene mentality…I could totally relate to the Grinch’s dismay.

He loses me, however, when he straps the antlers on his poor dog Max and hits him with the whip. Then, he lies to poor little Cindy Lou Who and takes her tree (and all of the food, so that there’s not even a crumb big enough for a mouse). The song that plays in the background while the Grinch goes wilding through Whoville always cracks me up: You’re a vile one, Mr. Grinch / You have termites in your smile / You have all the tender sweetness of a seasick crocodile / Mr. Gri-inch / Given the choice between the two of you, I’d take the uh… seasick crocodile.”

But then, The Grinch realizes that the Who’s still celebrate even after he stole all of their stuff. Maybe, just maybe, Christmas means a little bit more than that. He’s a changed Grinch! His heart grows three sizes that day—and he brings everything back. And he goes to their feast and carves the roast beast.

Of course, in my version, the Who’s would have arrested him as soon as he rode into town with all of their stuff. But then he and Max wouldn’t have gotten any roast beast…unless the Who’s brought it to him in the Big House.

Nestor the Long-Eared Donkey

Not too many people remember this one, but I sure do. My twin brother, Chris, and I saw it the first time it aired. I can still see us sitting there together, in the living room of my parents’ home, back in 1977. We were munching on cookies and watching the special by the twinkling lights of the Christmas tree, and we were mesmerized.

Yes, the storyline bears an uncanny resemblance to Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer (bullies make Nestor’s life miserable). Come to think of it, it’s also a lot like Dumbo (big ears, mommy issues).

But here was a Rankin & Bass story that was sweet and sad…and actually featured Mary and Joseph (and oh yeah, the birth of Jesus). Unless your heart is made of stone and you’ve got ice water running through your veins, you can’t help but root for Nestor. Yes, this one made me cry, and no, I didn’t want an alternate ending where Nestor is arrested by Roman soldiers or forced to eat roast beast in the Big House.

Frosty The Snowman

I love the freedom the kids have in Frosty the Snowman. Once the kids run out of school (why are they in school on Christmas Eve?), they get together to create a snowman. Luckily, the terrible magician they had in school throws his hat away because he thinks it’s useless. Now, Frosty the Snowman comes to life.

Unfortunately, the thermometer is in the red zone and now Frosty has to get somewhere cold. They decide to get him a ticket to the North Pole, and Frosty says to Karen (the kid who actually made his head, which by her own admission, is the hardest part to make on any snowman):

Frosty: Are you coming to the North Pole, too?
Karen: I’m sure my mother won’t mind, as long as I’m home in time for supper.

So off they go, with the crazy Professor Hinkle hot on their heels. He wants his hat back! He will stop at nothing to get it! Even if that means he’s going to essentially kill Frosty in the process.

Good thing for him there’s a hot house in the North Pole. Frosty, whose only real concern is getting Karen home in time for dinner and not having her freeze to death beforehand, makes the tragic mistake of carrying her inside because he’s sure he can get outside before he becomes nothing more than a puddle.

Well, of course Professor Hinkle locks him in there. Wouldn’t you do the same thing if you wanted your hat back?

His rabbit turns state evidence and spills the whole story to Santa Claus, who must’ve wanted some roses for Mrs. Claus so he happened to be in the area. He walks in on Karen, who is adding some tears to the Puddle Formerly Known as Frosty.

Santa Claus: Don’t cry, Karen, Frosty’s not gone for good. You see, he was made out of Christmas snow and Christmas snow can never disappear completely. It sometimes goes away for almost a year at a time and takes the form of spring and summer rain. But you can bet your boots that when a good, jolly December wind kisses it, it will turn into Christmas snow all over again.
Karen: Yes, but… He was my friend.
Santa Claus: Just watch.

And with that, a strong North Pole wind blows into the hot house, transporting Frosty’s puddle remains out the door. And guess what? FROSTY’S BACK IN TOWN!

Luckily, Santa’s able to drop off Karen on the roof of her house while he and Frosty waves goodbye.

I always wondered how she got off the roof…and if her mom was mad that she missed dinner.

Elf

Okay, so I was hardly a kid the first time I saw this movie, but it quickly became one of my favorites. One Christmas Eve at the orphanage, Buddy crawls into Santa’s bag and Santa doesn’t realize it until he’s back at the North Pole. So, naturally he gives the baby to his top elf, Papa Elf, who raises Buddy as his son.

Buddy believes he’s an elf, but since he’s about 6 feet tall by the time he’s 10, he starts to thinks something is wrong. When he discovers he is actually not an elf—and horror of horrors, his real Dad is on the naughty list—he sets out to find him. In order to get there, Buddy has to pass through the seven levels of the Candy Cane forest, through the sea of swirly twirly gum drops, and then walk through the Lincoln Tunnel.

Enter James Caan, who is hilarious as Buddy’s long lost Dad. Ed Asner also makes a slightly cranky and totally lovable Santa. And who wouldn’t love Bob Newhart as Papa Elf?

My favorite scene is when Buddy goes to work in the mail room for the first time and he says: “It’s just like Santa’s workshop! Except it smells like mushrooms… and everyone looks like they wanna hurt me…” Soon enough, Buddy’s made a friend with an ex-con, who shares his booze with Buddy, and then Buddy is doing some Russian dance moves on the tables and causing a riot.

Oh yeah, and eventually, by singing and making others happy, he saves Christmas.

What’s not to love?

Christmas Cookie Recipes

The only way to really enjoy these Christmas specials is to have a glass of milk and some cookies while you watch. Here are some of my favorite Christmas cookie recipes:

Gingerbread Men

http://www.cooks.com/rec/view/0,1810,150189-247199,00.html

Chocolate Chip Cookies

http://allrecipes.com//Recipe/best-chocolate-chip-cookies/Detail.aspx

Snickerdoodles

http://www.christmas-cookies.com/recipes/recipe71.snickerdoodles.html

So, what’s your favorite Holiday special or cookie recipe? Share it with the rest of us Hungry Lifers.

I Like Candy

by Maria Lagalante Schulz

Halloween has always been one of my favorite holidays. I love buying creepy signs, silly scarecrows and spooky plastic body parts and bones to spread across my lawn. I also enjoy coming up with fun costumes for my kids, my husband and myself.

I also enjoy trick-or-treating, and I always have. When I was a kid, there was nothing better than using every minute of available daylight to go door to door, essentially begging for candy. I dressed like Raggedy Ann one year and went out with my brother Jude and his first girlfriend, Cindy. Other years I went with the standby costumes of witch, gypsy and/or bum. Now that was fun!

But you know what I like best of all? Candy. That’s right, there’s almost no type of candy that I don’t love. There’s a world of candy love to choose from: chocolates, hard candies, butterscotches, caramels, bubble gum, pixie sticks. You name it, I probably like it. So, here, in no particular order, are my ten or so favorite candies of all time:

10. Good-n-Plenty

“Once upon a time there was an engineer./Choo-Choo Charlie was his name we hear./He had an engine and he sure had fun/He used Good-n-Plenty candy, to make his train run.”

Here’s a taste of licorice goodness that always made me smile. I liked to get it at the movies and sometimes enjoyed it even more than the movie I was seeing. For instance, any of The Planet of The Apes movies would have been a lot less enjoyable without Good-n-Plenty. Sometimes, I liked to mix things up by getting Good-n-Fruity. I lived on the edge!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExSlyoVTX3I

9. Candy Cigarettes

I heard once that candy cigarettes were banned because scientists believed that children who loved them were likely to grow up and develop a smoking addiction. That’s funny, because I was a two-pack-a-day candy cigarette smoker but I never grew to love their horrible smelling, cancer-causing cousins.

I had no desire to take up smoking myself, but my father smoked when I was a little girl. He’s the only person I ever remember smelling good as a result. He used to keep the cigarettes in his shirt pocket, and when I hugged him, the tobacco smelled sweet. I hated his habit of blowing the smoke anywhere near me, but I did love it when he’d give me some money and send me off to the candy store for his pack of cigarettes with enough change left over to buy my own “smokes.”

I enjoyed acting like Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief, with a scarf tied around my head, black sunglasses perched on my nose, while puffing on my candy cigarette. I would clutch the wheel of my parents’ green station wagon and make believe I was zooming around the French countryside since the wagon was the closest thing I could get to a convertible.

Sometimes, Goldie or Henry would be my passengers, and if they were agreeable that day, they’d be wearing headscarves too. You had to buy the right candy cigarettes though—the ones that puffed “smoke”—because otherwise you just got the plain bubble gum ones that were smokeless, and what fun was that?

8. Sugar Babies

Okay, so I was a sucker for these caramel suckers. Each one lasted a good long time, and they came in a box, so I could slip it into my Catholic school uniform’s bolero pocket and dream of something (really anything) other than my science class. I almost got into big trouble once when Mrs. Verdi realized I had something in my pocket (and in my mouth) and she made me hand the box over. Lucky for me, she jumped up and down in delight because she just LOVED SUGAR BABIES! I used to buy an extra box for her because she started eating all my candy.

Eventually, we moved on to Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and Reese’s Pieces, just to keep things interesting. For a teacher gift at the end of the year, I gave Mrs. Verdi a giant Hershey’s Kiss. That woman loved candy almost as much as me!

7. Giant Pixie Sticks

These are not your kids’ pixie sticks. These babies were BIG, BIG, BIG, and filled with over two feet of sugar. Chris and I would pay our 25 cents at the local candy store, have a rousing “sword fight” on the way home, and then slice one end of the tube open and drain it of its sugary contents. It was great! And of course it explains why we were both nearly responsible for driving our mother to an early nervous breakdown as we bounced off every available wall.

6. Wax Lips and Wacky Packs

Okay, so these two choices weren’t really so much about the candy as they were about the laughs. The cherry bubble gum from the waxed lips tasted weird, since after all, you were eating the equivalent of chewy car wax. But everyone would laugh when you wore them and you sounded like an idiot when you tried to talk with them on, so it was double the fun.

Wacky Packs brought great joy to my little life for the better part of the 1970s. Chris and I would take the stickers from the packs and put them on our headboard, then chomp on the cardboard like gum and howl with laughter over the ads. There was Mountain Goo soda, Blisterine mouthwash, Stove Glop stuffing and more. It was right up there with Mad Magazine for sheer entertainment value.

http://www.wackypackages.org/stickers/10th_series/album.html

5. Pop Rocks

I will never forget the moment, back in my CYO Wednesday bowling league, that I heard this heartbreaking (and completely false) news: Mikey, of Life Cereal fame, had died in a terrible, candy-related incident. He’d combined Pop Rocks with Coca Cola and BOOM! His head exploded. I heard his last words were, “I like it! I really like it!”

This was doubly troubling to me, since I was swigging down a coke and eating strawberry pop rocks simultaneously while listening to this newsflash. I immediately put the coke aside, but I couldn’t part with my Pop Rocks. From that day forward, whenever I wanted to live on the wild side, I would try my Pop Rocks with a Coca Cola chaser. What a rush!

4. Blow Pops

“How many licks does it take to get to the tootsie pop center of a Tootsie pop?” the curious young child asks the wise old turtle. “Ask the owl,” the turtle tells him. So the kid tracks down the owl and asks the same thing. “Let’s see,” the owl replies, and begins to lick the lollipop. And then, after three licks, the owl bites into the candy and scarfs down the whole thing.

This would have led me into a homicidal rage that would have resulted in feathers everywhere and a lollipop stick wedged in that bird’s head. Thankfully, it was just a commercial, but whenever my brother Paul asked me for a lick of my lollipop, I thought of that bird…and declined.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZ0epRjfGLw

3. Charleston Chews

There was almost nothing better than running down to the corner candy store, on 48^th Ave. and Bell Blvd., and bringing home a Charleston Chew. I learned the art of delayed gratification after Tony and Joey taught me how to put it in the freezer and enjoy it frozen. Of course, I didn’t always do this, because once my brothers taught me how to do it, the candy bars had a habit of mysteriously disappearing before I could get to them.

When my kids, husband and I visited a retro candy store and we introduced them to Charleston Chews, we had to explain the whole “frozen candy” concept to them. They weren’t as receptive to the idea of delayed gratification as I was many years ago. That was probably because they knew that my husband and I would eat the candy bars before they could get to them later.

2. Snickers

Long before Betty White appeared in that Super Bowl Ad, I was already a believer in the slogan “Snickers Really Satisfies.” I like to fool myself sometimes that the nuts in the candy bar make it a protein source that I would be foolish to deny myself. This also applies to Milky Ways and Three Musketeer Bars, which by the way have no peanuts in them. Also $100,000 Bars. Whose idea was it to change the name to 100 Grand Bars? And why didn’t anyone ask me first?

1. Almond Joy

“Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don’t.” Personally, I always feel like a nut, so I can’t imagine why anyone would choose Mounds over Almond Joy. Although, in the interest of heart health, I have been known to eat a few dozen Mounds every now and then (they’re made of dark chocolate! So now I will probably live forever). If a candy bar can transfer feelings, then Almond Joy lives up to its name.

This year, I took my girls and a big group of their friends trick-or-treating. We utilized every minute of possible sunlight and ran through our neighborhood, banging on doors and basically begging for candy. The best part of all? The girls let me have their Almond Joys.

Recipe:

Here’s a little history about the origins of the Almond Joy and Mounds, along with a great recipe from Top Secret Recipes by Todd Wilbur:

http://www.kitchenlink.com/cookbooks/2002/0452269954_3.html

So, hungry lifers…what’s your favorite candy? Post a comment and let us know all about it.

Dancing, Donuts and Uncle Don

by Maria Lagalante Schulz

Fun with Uncle Don, Jude and Tony

I really loved my Uncle Don. He was a hilarious character mostly for reasons thoroughly beyond his control. The way he approached life, the things that delighted him as well as the things that enraged him, always made me laugh.

He liked to ask us, “who’s your favorite uncle?” and my brothers and I would name every other uncle just to bother him. But despite giving him fun nicknames like “Uncle Old” and naming any one but him as our favorite uncle, I think he knew he’d already won. Uncle Don was always ready for a little fun.

When I was a kid, a surprise appearance by my uncle (say, his stopping by for dinner on a weeknight instead of Sunday dinner) would be cause for joy.

Uncle Don would arrive with donuts from the bakery or from Dunkin Donuts. When dinner was over, we would sit with him at the dining room table (and yes, without all of the other relatives there monopolizing the conversation, we had Uncle Don all to ourselves) and listen while we munched on donuts and he told hilarious stories about his workday.

There was the infamous job at B. Altman’s selling shoes in the women’s shoe department. Fighting it out with his co-worker Ceile (who he always referred to as Seal) and dealing with the crazy women who made him bring out 50 pairs of shoes before they realized they didn’t really want shoes, or had asked for the wrong size on all 50 pairs, would leave us in tears.

Our stereo was in the dining room, so we would sit there and eat, laugh, and listen to music or comedy albums. One time, when my brother Jude played Steve Martin’s “The Cruel Shoes” for him on our turntable, I thought my uncle would split his sides because he was laughing so hard.  Of course, you couldn’t hear Uncle Don laugh without laughing along too.

“I think I served this customer today!” my uncle said, between fits of laughter.

This album had us all laughing.

Uncle Don had a penchant for getting himself into ridiculous situations. There was the time he was driving in the Midtown Tunnel and he saw great big plumes of black smoke rising by the cars around him.

He started to laugh. “I wonder who the poor loser is whose car is on fire,” he said to himself. It took him a minute or two to realize that it was his car.

Then of course there was the time he was walking his friend’s dog in Queens when he saw two men driving by in a car that looked remarkably like his.

“Wow!” Uncle Don said to his friend. “That looks just like my new car.”

“Isn’t that your license plate?” his friend said.

That’s when my uncle realized that he was watching the thieves drive away in his new car.

He somehow made this extremely upsetting event sound hilarious when he told us the story. Although my uncle never hurt a fly, he was so aggravated that someone would steal something that he worked so long and hard for that he started to devise all sorts of plans to catch and punish the thieves.

“What would work great,” my uncle said, “is if the car somehow knew that the thieves weren’t the owners, so the doors and windows would lock, the car would fill up with water and then the thieves would get zapped with a million volts of electricity.”

“But then you wouldn’t have your new car either,” I said.

“True,” my uncle replied.  “But it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.”

 

Uncle Don and Maria in the 80s

When I think of my uncle, I think of three things: eating, laughing and dancing. He loved to come over for dinner or go out to a new restaurant. Plus, wherever he was, if there was music, he was dancing. And whenever we were in the same room, we were eventually laughing.

At my wedding reception, my uncle asked me to dance.

“You know I’m no good,” I said to him.

“You’ll be just fine with me,” he replied.

And off we went, dancing to “In the Mood.” I could never dance a real dance before, but with my uncle leading me on the dance floor, I felt light and rhythmic for the first time in my life.

Over the years, my husband and I enjoyed taking Uncle Don to any new restaurant we could find. We had him over with my parents and cousin Lorraine for the first dinner party we ever threw, and he raved over the crab-stuffed sole and the lemon meringue pie (my uncle’s favorite) we served that night.

Later, we would take my uncle out for dinner at a nearby Greek restaurant that we loved, and my uncle would feast on stuffed grape leaves and moussaka. My uncle was the skinniest foodie I ever met.

When I was a kid, we watched shows like “That’s Hollywood,” the glamorous show that highlighted movie clips from movies like “Singing in the Rain,” “Casablanca,” and anything with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in it.

On weekends at my grandmother’s house, I would watch Kojak with my uncle. We would share big bowls of ice cream before I went to bed and he headed out for a night of dancing.

So, with my uncle’s love of dancing and my love for the hilarious spectacle, it was only a matter of time before we found something that satisfied us both: Dancing With the Stars.

Let's dance!

Yes, the show ranks high on the cheese-o-meter. Yes, its definition of “celebrity” is somewhat elastic, and since I never know exactly who most of these “celebrities” are without doing extensive research on them, I find some of the show’s choices astounding. Yes, it’s over the top in almost every way.

You know what? I don’t care.  It’s fun, the judges are a hoot, and the dancers are always amusing—whether they’re great, or even better, if they are not.

When the show debuted in the summer of 2005, I missed it entirely. But my Uncle Don was right there, watching it week after week.

“I’m rooting for John O’Hurley,” he said, of the future runner-up. “He’s so much better than that soap opera star.”

His outrage over O’Hurley “getting robbed” when the crown went to the soap opera star at the end of the season was amusing to me. But I still didn’t want to watch it.

Uncle Don couldn’t believe it. “You should’ve seen it,” he said. “He was great! You’ve got to watch the show. You’ll love it.”

“Maybe,” I said, but I didn’t think it would happen. The premise of the show reminded me of the 1970’s classic Battle of the Network Stars. Nothing good ever came out of that show, and I wasn’t sure seeing loads of dubious celebrities dancing the Fox Trot, Waltz and Jive would be much better.

But Uncle Don was persistent, and by September of that year, he had talked me into giving the show a try. I thought it would be as interesting as those PBS dance-shows, where Juliette Prowse and other judges would whisper while severe looking women were whirled and twirled by skinny, intense men.

Boy, was I wrong! There were show-mances, snarky gossip and constant whispers of sex scandals and outrageous behavior from the contestants. The costumes were flashier than a flock of peacocks and left little to the imagination on both the women and the men. The live band could belt out a tune like nobody’s business, or at times, they could destroy a song you used to love.

Gotta love 'em

The dancers were mesmerizing to watch either because they were so precise and skillful, or because they were the equivalent of a car wreck.  So utterly bad and painful to watch, yet you couldn’t look away.

After Week 1 of the Season 2, my uncle and I started talking about who we were rooting for, and why.

“I like Drew and Cheryl.” I said.

“Me too,” my uncle agreed. “But that Stacy Kiebler is a great dancer.”

“Gary is rooting for Jerry Rice,” I said.

“Oh he’s no good,” my uncle replied. “He won’t go anywhere.”

Of course, he was wrong about that, and I was wrong sometimes too. The show had a perverse side to it otherwise known as a popularity contest. Uncle Don was a great dancer, and he could see who had the goods and who definitely didn’t. He didn’t care if they had a fan base. He just cared about who could dance.

Once we both started watching Dancing with the Stars, my uncle would call me at 10 or 11 at night to talk about the crazy happenings from that night.

All aboard for fun

Dancing With the Stars became a diversion that brought shared joy into our lives when it wasn’t always fun or easy. It got us talking about something other than my mother’s cancer diagnosis in December of 2005 as we got ready to watch the new season premiering in January.

When my mother landed back in the hospital a few months later, I watched the show in the ER while waiting to be allowed into intensive care to hold my mother’s hand. I knew my husband would be watching at home, and I knew my uncle would call me to talk about it later.

It gave us something to look forward to besides my uncle’s upcoming chemotherapy sessions after his own diagnosis of lung cancer in April of 2006.

“Why can’t George Hamilton dance?” I said during one late night call.

“Why should he be able to dance?” my uncle said. “Everyone who’s older can’t dance.”

“Yeah, but you can,” I replied.

“I would win that trophy!” Uncle Don laughed his great booming laugh. He was probably right.

“Did you see Jerry Rice? He should’ve never beat out Stacy Kiebler for the finals.”

As my uncle’s cancer progressed and the treatments became more and more aggressive, he lost his appetite and he dropped weight like crazy. My foodie uncle still loved going out to restaurants, but he did a lot of talking, laughing, and making believe he was eating, instead of actually eating.

But luckily, we still had Dancing With the Stars to distract us.

Season 3 ended on November 15, 2006 and the next day, I was visiting my uncle in the hospital and we talked about the finale. it was great to see him animated and excited about something.

“Mario Lopez is great,” my uncle said, “but that Emmit Smith sure can move! You’d never expect such a big man to be so graceful.”

He was excited when I told him about my latest gift from Gary.

“He got us tickets to see Dancing With the Stars Live at Nassau Coliseum!” I said.

“Oh,” my uncle said. “Maybe I can go with you.”

“Sure,” I said. “That would be great.”

Of course, it would have been great…but my uncle passed away on November 29^th, 2006.

Wow....

I think of him every time I watch our favorite show. I wished I could have called him when Marie Osmond fainted, or heard his gales of laughter from when we talked about Master P’s horrendous Paso Doble. He would have thought Cloris Leachman was a scream, and that Florence Henderson deserved to be on the show longer since she could actually dance. I’m sure we’d still be laughing about Bristol Palin’s last dance, monkey suit and all.

This week, while I’m watching Dancing With the Stars, I’ll imagine my uncle sitting right there with my family and me, munching on donuts, and laughing. Always laughing.

Recipes

Here are a few recipes for some of Uncle Don’s favorites.

Lemon Meringue Pie

http://allrecipes.com//Recipe/grandmas-lemon-meringue-pie/Detail.aspx

Moussaka

http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Moussaka/Detail.aspx

Stuffed Lemon Sole

http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Crab-Stuffed-Sole/Detail.aspx

Donuts

http://allrecipes.com//Recipe/crispy-and-creamy-doughnuts/Detail.aspx

And here’s an extra treat for all of you Steve Martin fans out there (it will give you a glimpse into my uncle’s tortured retail experience):

Cruel Shoes

http://new.music.yahoo.com/steve-martin/tracks/cruel-shoes–1389475

Have a fun story about a beloved aunt or uncle you want to share? How about their favorite recipe? Post one here and let all of the other Hungry Lifers in on the fun.

Back to School

by Maria Lagalante Schulz

Tonight was Back to School Night for my younger daughter. The school was buzzing with excitement as parents raced to their child’s classroom and sat in seats with their kid’s name on it.

My daughter’s teacher is an older woman who was also my older daughter’s teacher three years ago. She has been around the block a few thousand times. Still, she was fashionably dressed, with long blonde hair, stylish square-rimmed glasses, long nails and a beautifully tailored black dress with a matching jacket. On her feet, she wore beautiful black leather pumps that I’d seen at Nordstrom’s.

The Amazing Mrs. Z.

Mrs. Z, as I’ll call her, gave us a Power Point Presentation on “What We Do At School” and showed us a list that the class came up with that said things like:

1.    We Are Smart
2.    We Are Polite
3.    We Usually Listen Well
4.    We Do Not Bully
5.    We are Kind
6.    We are Compassionate
7.    We Have Lots of fun here
8.    We are Creative
9.    We Love Our Teachers
10.     We Expect the Best

She wrapped up her presentation by saying, “Listen, if your kids don’t do their homework, or they’re afraid they’re going to fail a test, tell them to relax. Nobody here is going to get kicked out of the 5th grade.” Many of the parents laughed and so did she. Then she said, “I cannot teach in an atmosphere that reflects anything but mutual respect and trust.”

When she was done with her presentation, we went down the hall to her teaching teammate and met Mr. B. He’s my daughter’s math and science teacher. “I want your kids to have fun while they learn,” he said to us. “So we’ll be playing lots of math games and building things like volcanoes and earthquake-proof structures. Even when they fail, I like to reward them with candy.”

Now, I think it’s great that both of my daughter’s teachers are supportive, kind and caring. It got me thinking, though, about my own elementary school teachers in general, and my 5th grade teacher in particular. Let’s call her Mrs. Colangelo

Mrs. Colangelo was an older woman who didn’t find us in the least bit amusing and who was fascinated by the oddest things. She liked to do long presentations on writing implements. “The pencil is very interesting,” she would say in her Elmer Fudd lisp. So, actually, it sounded like “The penciwal is vewy intewesting,” which of course led me to sit there in my chair and fight off great gales of laughter.

I knew that, should I be unable to hold back the raging tide of laughter that was building up inside of me while Mrs. Colangelo expounded on the merits of #2 pencils, ball point pens, and magic markers, that she would have no problem whatsoever pounding me into a fine dust.

Our classroom was not built on a foundation of mutual respect and trust. Our classroom was built on an atmosphere of mutual derision and lies. Mrs. Colangelo liked to make fun of every student in the class, especially because we were all a bunch of “stupid morons” who couldn’t remember to bring our #2 pencils on SRA Test days.

Also, as students, we wholeheartedly embraced the notion of lying whenever it was necessary. For instance, if you broke the pencil sharpener (one of Mrs. C.’s most prized possessions), you would stand there, cranking away, blowing imaginary shavings off your still dull and unsharpened pencil, and then head back to your desk. This way, the next poor sucker who got to the pencil sharpener would take the fall when Mrs. C. realized they’d just destroyed her pride and joy.

Mrs. C loved saying things to us like “You mess up again, and you’ll never get out of the 5th grade” and, the biggest threat of all: “not only will you get left back, we’ll expel you and you’ll have to go to public school.”

She's not wearing a wig but the anger is right.

Mrs. Colangelo never had designer dresses and shoes, stylish glasses or long blonde hair. Instead, she had an ill-fitting black wig that came loose whenever it was hot out. She also wore frumpy blue or black dresses that started at her head and ended about an inch above her ankle. Her shoes were orthopedic black loafers that even my grandmother wouldn’t wear.

If Mrs. Colangelo had ever thought to ask us to describe ourselves, this is the list we would have come up with:

1.    We Are Morons
2.    We Are Bored
3.    We Never Listen
4.    We Love Bullies
5.    We are Kind of Dumb
6.    We are Not Compassionate
7.    We Have Lots of fun elsewhere
8.    We are Creative Liars
9.    We Love Anyone But Our Teachers
10.     We Expect the Worst

When we had Open School Day, Mrs. Colangelo had me go up to the blackboard to do a math problem. I had about the same aptitude for math as a well-trained chimpanzee, and Mrs. C. immediately regretted her decision.

Now, chances are pretty good that if my mother was not standing against the coat closet, trying to use her best psychic powers to help me through this personal hell, Mrs. C. would have ripped the chalk from my hand, yanked on my hair and told me to get back to my seat. That would have been followed by a few sour calls of “I expect better from you” and “I thought you were the smart twin,” right before she got one of the brainiacs up there to bail me out.

But…since my mother, and a bunch of other mothers WERE there, Mrs. C. bit her lip, danced like she really had to pee or maybe just wanted to use her hands to strangle me, and said encouraging things like “C’mon now Mawia. You know you can do wit.”

Of course, I knew I couldn’t, but she still let me muddle through. It’s one of my fonder memories, seeing Mrs. C. unable to pull me by the hair even though she really, really wanted to. Thank goodness my mother actually came to those Open School Days.

What is 24 x 4???

Even if I had been able to do that math problem, there was no way Mrs. C was going to congratulate me with candy. I was just happy to escape her wrath, never mind expecting a treat.

I would like to say that this was the worst moment I passed in Mrs. C’s class, but it did in fact get worse. One day, when the temperature soared up to 90 degrees, my brother Chris and I walked to school together and wondered what the day had in store for us.

“Everything will be fine,” I said, “as long as Mrs. C’s wig isn’t half off. When it’s half off, there’s going to be trouble.”

Well, lo and behold, Mrs. C’s wig was ¾ of the way off, her face was purple, and she was on a rampage all day long. She browbeat the brainy kids for small infractions, like not being able to do calculus even though we were only 10. She screamed at the classmate with Muscular Dystrophy because he was slowing us down when we changed classes. She even failed to find something “intewesting” about her pencils.

I had managed to fly under the radar of Mrs. C’s heat-induced rage for most of the day and it was almost dismissal time. I felt like a marathon runner that can see the finish line just a few yards up. I breathed a sigh of relief when my classmate, Tom, poked me.

“Maria, look at what your brother’s up to!”

I looked out the back door’s window to see what mess Chris had gotten himself up to when I suddenly felt a hot, clammy and vise-like hand close around the back of my neck.

“You wanna see what yaw brothuh is doing? Fine!” Mrs. C said, as she lifted me off the ground and dragged me towards the classroom across the hall. “Now you can stay for detention too.”

She flung the door open and gave me one last push as I thudded across the threshold. “Looks like you’ve got the full set of twins now,” Mrs. C said.

Mrs. Delaney did not look happy to see me. “What did you do?”

“I was caught watching Chris get yelled at.” I replied.

I took a seat while Chris and Mrs. Delaney got back to their earlier argument.

“Maybe I should come to your house this afternoon and tell your mother what a bad kid you are,” Mrs. Delaney said.

“You can come,” Chris replied. “But I won’t let you in.”

“I’ll keep ringing the bell,” Mrs. Delaney said.

“Our bell doesn’t work.”

“I’ll knock on the door.”

“I’ll sic the dogs on you,” Chris said.

I thought that Chris was lucky to be in Mrs. Delaney’s class, because this conversation would have ended after the first word out of my mouth when Mrs. C jammed her pencil through my skull.

“Maria,” Mrs. Delaney said, “would you tell your mother how your brother has been acting today?”

“Sure,” I said, since I figured we would never get out of there if I didn’t. Honestly, I had no idea how this fight started, and as much as I was enjoying the spectacle of Chris having an argument with one of our teachers, I also wanted to get home. The Guiding Light was on at 3, and since we lived across the street from the school, we could still make it.

We ran out of there as fast as two kids laden down with twenty pounds of books could and darted across the street. When we got there, our mother greeted us at the door.

“Hi! Anything happen today that I should know about?”

“Nope,” we replied, as we dropped our books on the floor and threw ourselves down on the couch to enjoy another rousing episode of The Guiding Light.

Stories like these made me want to be a writer

There were two great things going on here: one, my mother had baked a pound cake the day before, and miracle of miracles, there was still some left. My mother mixed things up by sometimes using a Bundt pan or sometimes using a loaf pan. I preferred the loaf pan, but you couldn’t go wrong either way.

And two, the storyline we were following today dealt with my favorite character of all time, Roger Thorpe. Even though Roger had been killed off twice already (once he was shot, and once he was pushed off a cliff), there was now a storyline about a thoroughly bandaged man in a wheelchair whose face we couldn’t see.

The best bad guy ever.

“That’s Roger!” I said, as I dug into my pound cake and dunked a chunk furiously. I took a long swig of milk.

“Are you sure,” Chris said, in between bites. “There were sharks in that water.”

“Roger can survive anything,” I said, because of course he could. If there had been a storyline where Roger was hacked to bits by an axe-wielding maniac, I’m sure the writers would have found a way to put the pieces back together and bring Roger back to his hordes of adoring fans. The Guiding Light was never as much fun without Roger Thorpe around, making the ridiculously rich, spoiled Allan Spaulding’s life miserable.

Our Mom grabbed a slice of pound cake and sat down beside us. “How come you two were late?” she said.

Chris and I shot looks at one another and laughed. “Mrs. Delaney wanted to talk to the two of us,” I said.

During commercials, we told her the whole story: about Chris’s angry argument with her that led to detention, about me getting hauled out of Mrs. Colangelo’s class and thrown into Chris’s little melodrama; about my promise to tell on him.

Mom laughed. “You shouldn’t fight with your teacher,” she said to Chris. “And you should mind your own business,” she said to me.

The show came back on and we turned our attention back to it. “Just don’t answer the door if someone starts knocking,” Chris said.

RECIPE:

POUND CAKE

Hmmmmmm...pound cake.

Did someone say pound cake? I heard once that they called it a pound cake because you used a pound of butter, a pound of sugar, a pound of eggs and a pound of flour. I thought it was because you could really pack on the pounds eating this entire cake because it’s just so good. Here’s a link to a recipe and a little background on the beautiful pound cake:

http://www.joyofbaking.com/PoundCake.html

Here’s another recipe with strawberries on top:

http://www.recipes4cakes.com/pound_cakes/st-pound-cake.htm

And to lighten it all up, here are some tips on Healthy Homemade Cakes:

http://www.recipes4cakes.com/

So, do you have a story or a cake recipe you’d like to share? Post your comments here and let the rest of the Hungry Lifers in on it.

Burger & a Song

by Maria Lagalante Schulz

For my birthday this year, my family told me to pick any restaurant I wanted to go to so that we could celebrate. So where did we go? I chose Johnny Rockets. Besides the great burgers and sandwiches, milkshakes and root beer floats, they have something you can’t find just anywhere: live entertainment.

Whenever I hear Donna Summer sing the slow opening lines of “Last dance,” I watch with anticipation and glee as the teenage waiters and waitresses run to get on a chorus line.  It isn’t long until Donna’s singing and the teenagers are singing and dancing too.

Now since I enjoy minor discomfort almost as much as a burger and onion rings, I’m always delighted when there is a group of teenagers that look bored, frightened, and/or disturbed to be a part of this. Some of them may be mouthing the lyrics while others are doing the hand jive with a noticeable lack of enthusiasm.

But as far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t matter. I love watching a group of downtrodden teenagers singing for the man almost as much as I enjoy watching a group of inspired Broadway hopefuls belting out tunes from Wicked and Les Miserables.

I am so used to teenagers looking mortified and unhappy while they sing and dance that I was amazed when we stopped into Ellen’s Stardust Diner in the heart of the theater district in Manhattan. While we waited to be served and to have our order taken, one of the waitresses jumped up on the table and belted out Respect by Aretha Franklin.

She was dancing in her poodle skirt, sashaying and grooving, and she sounded so good that I thought she must be lip-synching to the original. But no, she was just blessed with real talent, stage presence, and a love of the spotlight. I’d say she was a ham, but that’s an understatement—she was more like the whole pig.

Once she finished, there was a flurry of orders taken before one of the waiters jumped up in a booth and started singing “Once You Have Found Her, Never Let Her Go,” from South Pacific. He was really amazing, but I was also hungry. I wondered where our waiter was, and then realized when Mr. South Pacific finished singing and came to our table, that once I had found him, I had better never let him go.

Some people weren’t into all the singing and dancing, and were getting cranky waiting for their food. Well, what do you expect? This wasn’t Johnny Rockets, after all.

My early love of singing was nourished by the existence of the band in my basement, New York’s Unemployed. My brother Jude and his friends, Jerry, Gary and Mike were always practicing for their next big gig. One night, they were recording Mott the Hoople’s All The Young Dudes and they realized that they needed a backup singer because Mike’s voice, which was kind of high, wasn’t high enough.

Chris usually got called in for this kind of thing. His early recording of Jim Dandy to the Rescue earned him a place in their hearts forever. So, when they came up and interrupted our made-for-TV movie, I was sure they would take Chris away and my mother and I could go back to our show.

“Chris, we need you,” Jude said.

Now that it was quiet, we could finally hear Sally Field in Sybil. She was up to about her 10^th personality, and I was riveted. So riveted that I didn’t hear Jude when he said, “Maria, we need you too.”

I tore myself away from Sybil’s multiple personalities and followed Jude and Chris to the basement. For the next hour, I sang “All the young dudes/carry the news/boogaloo dudes/carry the news.”

To this day, I still don’t know what that means. But I do know that I enjoyed myself and would’ve liked to combine my love of music with my future jobs.

I thought I might have gotten my chance when I got a job at the Sizzler Family Steakhouse. I would have been delighted if they let me use the microphone for singing such rousing songs as “Respect” during lulls in the service or even “Dominic The Donkey” during the Christmas season.

Order the steak well done.

It would have been a lot more fun than putting silverware into napkins and bundling it for hours on end, making iced tea and chocolate pudding, cleaning the salad bar or washing down the counters for the millionth time. My co-counter girl, Ann, used to call me the Sizzler Sinatra because I didn’t just say my orders, I sang them.

In my head, there were many compelling reasons to let me wow the crowd with my talent. I was so bored that I was sure I was ready, willing and able to amaze and entertain them, if only they’d let me. But no, the managers and owners just wanted me to use the microphone for ORDERS.

I really think my talents would have been put to better use if I’d been singing “Think” by Aretha Franklin. Like, when someone was browbeating me because we were out of Chopped Sirloin Steak or Baked Scrod, I could grab the microphone and start singing while my fellow counter girls sang backup:

You better think (think) think about what you’re trying to do to me
Yeah, think (think, think), let your mind go, let yourself be free

Oh freedom (freedom), freedom (freedom), freedom, yeah freedom
Freedom (freedom), freedom (freedom), freedom, ooh freedom

You need me (need me) and I need you (don’t you know)
Without each other there ain’t nothing people can do

Instead, night after night, I had to say things like “one Malibu Chicken, extra swiss, one baked potato, extra sour cream, one Sirloin steak, rare. The customer asks that you please make sure that’s rare.”

I would look into the kitchen at the cooks, and there was Gene, engulfed in flames (and he wasn’t the only one). Since Gene’s hygiene was questionable, I thought it was better to have high heat directed at any food he touched, but I realized that “rare” was not going to happen to that Sirloin steak, or any steak, while he was cooking.

This would turn the food buying public inside out with hunger-induced rage. For once I was very glad not to be working as a waitress, who got to make twice what I did thanks to the magic of tips. Yes, I was a lowly, salaried counter girl, but my customer interaction was limited to that moment in time when the hungry masses were still living in hope, instead of dining in despair.

The only way to assuage most of the angry hordes was to give them free food. Usually, this would involve one of our managers. Barely out of their teens, acne-ridden and not really blessed with people skills, our managers would often get the customers even angrier with exchanges that went like this:

“So I hear you’re not happy with your steak.” –Billy the manager

“It’s burnt to a crisp! I can’t eat that.”—Customer

“Well what do you want me to do about it?”—Billy

“I’d like a new steak.”—Customer

Billy scratched his head. “But you ate half of this one.”

“I took two bites. It’s tougher than a hockey puck.”

“Do you like hockey pucks? Because there’s more than 2 bites missing,” Billy replied.

Since the $3 wholesale for the steak wasn’t coming out of his pocket and the customer was becoming apoplectic, Billy would give it to them.

He returned to the counter laughing. “See how I made that customer work for their new steak?”

I nodded. “But it was really burnt. Why’d you give him such a hard time?”

Billy shrugged. “Slow night,” he said. We heard a WHOOOSH from the kitchen and looked back to see flames engulfing the customer’s new steak. “Things should pick up once we serve this,” Billy said, as he chuckled and hid in the back office.

I think that Billy would have been much more popular if he’d been out there, singing and dancing while he explained why the steaks were burnt beyond recognition. But Billy’s strengths lay in his magic act—the ability to mostly disappear whenever there was a problem.

I never did get to sing at The Sizzler, although I thought about it when I knocked on the owner’s office door to tell him that I was quitting. I wanted to grab the microphone and sing “All my bags are packed/I’m ready to go/I’m standing here outside your door/hate to wake you up to say goodbye…”

Instead, I just poked my head in and said: “I quit. Saturday’s my last day.”

He didn’t cry, but at least he didn’t applaud either.

I finally got my big break as a singer when my brother’s band, Pee Wee Sweet, needed a backup replacement. My brother Chris, my cousin Tommy, and friend Mike had brought in a girl who was supposed to sing a solo in Aerosmith’s Big Ten Inch, and backup vocals on School’s Out for Summer.

Unfortunately, on the day of the show, the girl was home sick with mononucleosis.

Now that my moment had arrived, I realized in a panic that there was no way I was going to get up there and sing by myself. Although desperation made Chris, Tommy and Mike my biggest supporters, my brother realized that even as a backup, I needed backup. My brother recruited one of our classmates to sing with me on School’s Out for Summer and ditched the solo for a female lead altogether.

It's scary out there

Pam loved being on stage. She was very outgoing and pretty. Unfortunately, she couldn’t sing or dance.  Pam tried to teach me everything she knew about being confident, having stage presence, and looking good for an audience in the 45 minutes we had to practice while I fought off heart palpitations.

Up to this point, my only singing experience had featured me in the last row of the Folk Group, singing such rousing hits as Shout to the Highest Mountain, She Will Show us the Promised One, One Tin Soldier Rides Away and I’m Getting’ Nuttin for Christmas.

Folk Group was great because no one could really hear me, so no one could say I wasn’t any good. Meanwhile, I got to sing with my friends and put on skits for nursing homes and children’s hospitals.

Sometimes those visits were not a lot of fun. Once, when we went to St. Mary’s Children’s Hospital to sing, we got to meet some of the patients. One little boy had been in a terrible train accident, and you could see all the way through his skull.

I was amazed that I was still conscious at this point, since reading about a fictional character getting her leg bitten off in Jaws had knocked me right out. I tried to focus on singing and making the kids smile.

Singing and a swaying

As my friends and I sang “Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell Rock,” we danced and swayed and clapped. When we got to “Dancing and a-prancing in the Jingle Bell Square/In the Frosty Air,” we suddenly heard a loud crash.

The entire Folk Group continued to sing and sway while we looked over our shoulders to see Mrs. McGrath dragging our fellow singer, Kim, off the stage before she started to throw up.

I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to faint this time, but vomiting was not out of the question.

When we finally got our cue to come on stage, I pushed myself out there. Despite the fact that I was suffering from the worst case of stage fright known to mankind, I sang. I also tried to keep up with Pam’s bizarre dance moves. It was the longest three minutes of my life. So what was my favorite part of the afternoon? The minute I ran off stage.

Perhaps a career as the next Janis Joplin wasn’t going to work out for me after all.

It’s too bad I was so shy. I spent most of my high school life yelling out funny things from the back of the room but being petrified if I was asked to come up front and share my thoughts with the crowd.

I like to think things would be different now, if had the chance. In fact, I couldn’t help but notice the last few times that I was at Johnny Rockets that there was an older waitress working there. She leads the teenagers out, dances by their sides, and makes them all laugh and smile. She laughs a lot and never messes up any of the orders.

I wonder if they’re hiring.

Recipe:

Ah, steak. I learned to really love it well done thanks to the culinary geniuses running the grill at the Sizzler. However, once I left there and got to taste steak that wasn’t charred more than a Mafia murder victim, I started enjoying grilling steaks to medium rare perfection. Here’s a London Broil recipe that my family always enjoys.

Marinade:

½ cup Italian salad dressing

¼ cup lemon juice

½ cup Worcestershire sauce

¼ cup Heinz 57 sauce

¼ tsp onion powder

¼ tsp garlic powder

¼ tsp freshly ground black pepper

¼ tsp kosher salt

1 tsp. Italian seasonings

1 tsp. parsley

1 tsp. basil

¼ tsp. lemon pepper

1 ½ pound London Broil (or flank steak)

Rub garlic powder, onion powder and Kosher salt into meat on both sides. Mix the other ingredients together and pour over the meat. Allow to marinade for a couple of hours or overnight if possible (if you’re in a rush, this still tastes good if you’ve only got ½ hour).

When you’re ready to grill, heat up your barbecue to about 450 degrees. Place the steak on the grill and turn the heat down to low for about 9-10 minutes per side. After about 20 minutes, pull the meat off the grill and serve with fresh mashed potatoes and green beans. Yum!

Got a steak recipe or funny story you’d like to share? Leave a comment and tell it to all us Hungry Lifers (now don’t be shy).

Birthday Cake

By Maria Lagalante Schulz

 When I was a kid, there was almost nothing as exciting as my birthday. The day would begin with a phone call from my Puerto Rican grandmother, who would get me on the phone at exactly the time I was born and sing Happy Birthday, or “Hoppy Birsday” with her big laugh at the end as a special treat. Five minutes later, she would call back to sing the same rendition of Hoppy Birsday to my twin brother, Chris. 

Christmas was right up there on the EXCITO-METER, and so was Halloween, but the most exciting part of my birthday was that I:

1)     Got cake

2)     Got to share it with my twin, Chris, and older brother, Joey, whose birthday was the week before ours

3)     Got to pick out my very own gift

The fact that I was only getting one gift, and that I could pick out anything I wanted in the store (under about $25 dollars) was huge to me. I used to spend almost the entire month of August researching my gift, because I knew it had to be good. It was the one and only gift I’d be getting from my parents, so I figured I had better make the best choice possible.

The year I turned five, I knew I wanted a Talking Stacy Barbie Doll.

Now a Collector's Item. Figures!

Stacy had long red hair that she wore up in a pony tail, and when you pulled the string in the back of her neck, she said wise, Barbie-doll things like, “Hi, I’m Stacy,” and “that sounds fun.”

I already had the Malibu Barbies, with their long blonde hair and glowing tans. I had Barbie, Skipper, Francine and PJ. They all looked very chic in their blue, orange and yellow bathing suits and had the most “mod” looking sun glasses around.

I also had Busy Hands Barbie, who could pick things up thanks to her opposing thumbs that clicked when you shut the hands. I clicked her hands so much that she became “Carpel Tunnel Barbie” and her fingers froze into position. This also happened to Skipper’s knees, because I loved that clicking sound that the joints made. But I digress….

My parents got me my Talking Stacy and I loved her. I pulled the string over and over again, soaking in her Barbie Doll witticisms, until my brothers were ready to string Stacy and me up. I could not have been more delighted.

Then, Jude approached me with a scientific request.

          “Maria,” he began, and I could tell that what he was about to say was very grown-up and important. At 13, he seemed like Einstein to me. “The guys and I would like to figure out how Talking Stacy talks. We know there’s some kind of mechanism that runs out of the back of her neck, but we don’t know how it works, exactly. Would you mind if we conducted a science experiment?”

            Who was I to stand in the way of science? “Can I watch?” I said, sure that this would be fun.

            “Sure!” Jude said. “But you can’t complain to Mom and Dad about it later. Deal?”

            I was so happy to be a part of things that I said, “Okay!”

            The next night, the seven of us gathered in my parents’ bedroom, which I would soon learn was doubling as an operating theater. Jude turned on the big overhead light and asked me for Talking Stacy.

            I handed her over, not sure what Jude intended to do next. But I soon found out when a loud ‘CRACK’ rang out and he smacked her in the back of the neck with a hammer.

            “Oh,” Jude said, as he held up the now limp string that wound through her back. “See guys, it’s just looped through here and it activates a small tape recorder. Too bad I broke it. Okay, here you go.”

            He handed back Talking Stacy, who from here on out would just be known as Mute Stacy or “the doll with only a head” in Barbie circles. Her body was smashed to bits, and I had to pull her head off and place it on a different Barbie Doll, whose legs didn’t click, who didn’t have opposable thumbs, and who probably came from my grandmother after a trip to the five and dime.

            Chris felt sorry for me. “That’s too bad about Stacy,” he said. “Are you going to tell Mom and Dad?”

            “No, I made a deal,” I said, forlornly looking at Decapitated Stacy.

Later that night, I realized something. The next time any of my brothers approached me with a request for a science experiment on one of my toys, I would say yes, but only if they let me do whatever I wanted to one of their toys in return.

            That cut down on the doll tragedies, somewhat, but not completely.

Other toys of mine that fell to my brothers:

• My first Drowsy was finally discovered at the bottom of my closet one day, after a long and frantic search. It seems that someone found the 9 things she could say reason enough to silence her forever. The string that made her talk was wound around her neck about 5 times. I would mourn Drowsy until Santa replaced her three years later, with a note that said “here’s a new Drowsy” in handwriting that I told my mother “looks just like yours!”
• My Julia Barbie doll lost her left leg in an unfortunate, Chris-related incident. He was so upset that he promptly hid her under my bed, meaning to go back later and fix her. When I found her minus one leg and under my bed, he confessed immediately. But Julia’s nursing days were clearly over.
• My Barbie Dune Buggy was pressed into service by my brothers and about 50 of their closest friends during a rough and tumble game of GI Joes. Unfortunately, at the height of a Top Secret Mission, they broke the front axle off my dune buggy and Barbie and friends had to walk to the beach from that day on.

Any toy that you got had to be guarded from the marauding hordes better known as my six brothers. Still, when August came around, Chris and I would watch TV ads, go to Korvette’s on Main Street with my mother and grandmother, and look through the toy catalogs on Sundays. Here’s what I chose in the years to come:

Baby That-A-Way: “Scoot and Scat-a-way, Baby That-A-Way.” The idea of a baby doll that could crawl down the hall, bump into things and then turn around, seemed like sheer genius to me. Of course, I really wanted Baby Alive but my mother heard of cases of Salmonella stemming from the doll food getting lodged in its’ body, so that was a no. Once Baby-That-A-Way met Goldie and Henry, however, it was time to stop letting her scoot and scat-a-way into any rooms where they might attack her and leave her as Baby Maul-Away.

Crissy Doll: I got this doll because her gleaming red hair could be curled (although I never figured out how to do it) and made longer or shorter depending on my mood. I wished there was a wheel in my back that could do the same thing, because when I cut my hair off it never grew back. My friend Perette gave me her sister’s old Crissy doll in an orange lace dress, and I made them twins.

Sweet 16 Barbie: this doll smelled like strawberries and came with hair brushes and some stickers, plus she was dressed in a pretty pink and white polka-dot dress.

I liked her, I really liked her, for about 5 hours that day. Then I realized that she didn’t talk, her fingers didn’t open and close, and her knees made that clicking noise but you couldn’t do that all day or you’d break her. I got tired of her pretty fast.

The Bionic Woman: Jaime Sommers was one cool bionic woman. When you turned her head, it made a clicking noise since she had bionic hearing. The skin on her arm rolled up and you could see the bionic components that gave her such incredible strength. Plus, she was a babe and looked great in her blue jumpsuit, standing next to all of my other Barbie dolls, and she came with a big red purse that was full of all sorts of bionic goodies.

     Even a year later, when the skin on her right arm began to fall off from excessive rolling, I was able to write an impassioned letter to the toy company, and they sent me two new arms and detailed instructions on how to replace them. Chris never got the Steve Austin: Six Million Dollar Man doll, and I like to think this was because his Mike Powers, Atomic Man doll and Jaime already had an understanding.

Cher: I wanted this doll desperately. She had so many gorgeous gowns, and she was as beautiful as the real Cher. She had long, silky black hair, came in a hot pink halter dress, and wore matching hot pink pumps. My grandmother bought her for me after I stood in the toy aisle at Korvette’s and became speechless. My mother had already bought me the black Barbie Ballerina doll, since I felt it was important for Julia to have family around her following her accident. So, if my grandmother hadn’t been standing there when I found Cher, I never would have gotten her. Unfortunately, we never got Sonny, but it was just as well, since Cher divorced him soon afterwards and I didn’t know where to get a Greg Allmann doll. 

A Custard Maker: this was one of those toys that my mother didn’t want to get for me. She never liked the EZ Bake Oven, fearing I would burn the house down. She also despised this tiny toy iron I had because you could plug it in and really iron things. I almost had a fit when she (rightly) cut the cord off and told me to use my imagination.

But the custard maker wasn’t something that required heat or electricity; you simply used ice, some powdered pudding mix in strawberry, vanilla, chocolate, or banana flavors, and a ton of arm strength to churn the custard and turn it into a soft-ice cream consistency. You could eat it in a cup or use ice cream cones. I loved my custard maker, and pretty soon, my mother loved it too.

When we were through picking out our toys and we’d spent the entire day enjoying them, my mother would call me out to the kitchen to help her bake a cake. 

It wasn’t hard picking one out. Chris loved yellow cake with chocolate frosting, but sometimes we’d mix things up by baking a chocolate, vanilla, or marble cake. My mother would show me how to add just the right amount of chocolate batter to the cake, and Chris, Joey, Paul and I would fight over who got to lick the spoons, beaters and bowls.

 My father would come home and after dinner, we would go for a walk around the neighborhood. He would always ask me, “so how does it feel to be turning 7? 8? 9? 10?” and eventually, “so how does it feel to be a teenager?” My response was always, “the same as it felt yesterday.”

When we got back, everybody would crowd around the dining room table and sing “Happy Birthday” to Chris and me. If it was a weekend, my grandmother, Uncle Don and Uncle Sal would be there. Sometimes Cindy was there too, and even the band members would sing along (there was nothing more tempting than cake as far as those boys were concerned).

 

As we got older, the trip to Korvette’s disappeared, along with the toys. My parents gave us cash and told us to get what we wanted. During my teen years, we all got really busy and didn’t always make time for birthday cake.

I haven’t had “Hoppy Birsday” sung to me since the year I turned 19, which really doesn’t seem as far away as it is now. Although the year I turned 20, my brother Tony called and sang the song in its’ entirety, so I wouldn’t miss my grandmother too much that day.

I remember turning 8 years old and thinking: I can’t wait to grow up. Now, I wonder, why was I in such a rush?

Recipes

Caramel Custard

http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Caramel-Custard/Detail.aspx

Flan (in honor of my grandmother)

http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Baked-Flan/Detail.aspx

Soft Ice Cream

http://www.cooks.com/rec/view/0,1613,150175-249201,00.html

So, what was your favorite Happy Birthday ritual when you were a kid? What toys did you get? What kind of cake did you eat? Leave a comment and let all the other Hungry Lifers know.

Love and Cookies

By Maria Lagalante Schulz

Love is funny. Whether in real life or in the movies, it can be inspiring, hard to understand, engaging or enraging. It’s usually full of surprises, and always an adventure. I think my favorite thing about it is it usually involves food.

One of my favorite movies of all time that’s about love, food—and that’s also funny—is Moonstruck. I love the “Italian-ness” of all of the characters; their loud fights, their urge to meet around the dining room table, and their unwitting ability to run towards life.

But I guess what I love most of all is their overly dramatic responses to simple comments. When Loretta points out that Johnny isn’t responsible for Ronny losing his hand, Ronny responds by saying:

“I ain’t no freakin’ monument to justice! I lost my hand! I lost my bride! Johnny has his hand! Johnny has his bride! You want me to take my heartache, put it away and forget it?”

Likewise, when Loretta insists that Ronny has ruined her life by sleeping with her, she proceeds to tell him:

“Y’know, you got them bad eyes, like a gypsy, and I don’t know why I didn’t see it yesterday. Bad luck! That’s what it is. Is that all I’m ever gonna have? I should have taken a rock and killed myself years ago!”

There’s a lot going on in Moonstruck, but you get the sense that all of the characters really do love one another. Vincent Gardenia’s character, Cosmo, is having a full-blown midlife crisis, complete with a girlfriend named Mona that he thinks no one knows about. Olympia Dukakis’s character, Rose, is Cosmo’s wife, and she knows exactly what he’s up to and keeps asking the question, “why do men chase women?” of everyone she meets.

Cher’s character, Loretta, has agreed to marry Johnny Cammarerie, who in Cosmo’s words is “a big baby.” In a classic early scene, he says, “what do you want to get married for? It don’t work out for you,” to which Loretta replies, “the guy died!”

In the middle of all of this, Loretta’s nutty Italian grandfather is out walking his dogs and howling at the moon, her aunt and uncle are still laughing and making out, and Johnny runs off to Sicily to see his dying mother. After he calls Loretta from his mother’s deathbed to say “she’s fading” and his mother starts screaming in the background, Loretta hangs up the phone. Rose says, “how’s his mother?” Loretta replies, “She’s dying, but I can still hear her big fat mouth.”

To say that the Castorinis, Cammereries and Cappamagis remind me of my family would be an understatement.

What’s so bad about a big fight? If they didn’t care about each other, they wouldn’t be screaming.

Well, that’s what I got out of Moonstruck. Growing up in my parents’ house was like living on the set of a movie, complete with a cast of characters who could be funny, smart, dumb, brilliant, superstitious, ridiculous, and loud.

I watched the movie on July 27, which would have been my parent’s 53^rd wedding anniversary.

Lou and Sarita, July 1957

It made me think of my parents’ life together, and with us.  We are loud people; my father is Italian, my mother was Puerto Rican. Someone once asked me if my ethnic background made it hard for me to keep my temper in check. I replied that when someone treated me poorly, I didn’t know whether to have them killed or do it myself.

My parents did not do the “I’m mad at you so I’m not going to talk to you” thing. When they were mad at each other, everyone knew it. It was usually over things, like “WHY IS THERE NEVER ANY MILK?” or “HOW IS IT THAT JUDE HAS LIQUOR AND A DOG IN THE GARAGE AND YOU NEVER NOTICED?”

They had an epic battle one morning because there was no clean laundry and my father had no socks to wear. He needed to go to work but my mother hadn’t done any wash and now he was going to be late. My father was screaming things like “Of course I don’t matter, it’s not like I’m one of your kids,” and my mother was saying, “oh stop it, they don’t have any clothes to wear either!” Which, I can tell you, was true.

It was about six in the morning and they were screaming at each other. Since I slept in the room next door, I heard it all. Lots of things were said about the other one not caring enough. I looked over at my brother Chris, who was sleeping soundly and thoroughly undisturbed. But I was afraid that my parents’ marriage was about to smash to bits.

My brothers and I had always talked about who we would live with if our parents died. I wasn’t sure how things would work out if they weren’t actually dead but only got divorced. But in the event that some horrible disaster struck both of them at once, Chris and I thought we were the luckiest of the bunch; our Godparents were Uncle Don and Aunt Mary.

Uncle Don was a lot of fun when he wasn’t threatening to make Chris live in the closet or throw us off the overpass of the Long Island Rail Road as a train pulled into the station. Aunt Mary was the gold standard of Godparents; she always had a cake baked and ready for us when we got there, and kept a constant supply of milk and Bosco on hand to revive us. Plus she was always laughing. I wasn’t sure how custody would work, but between Uncle Don and Aunt Mary I was sure we would have some laughs.

I couldn’t see me living with my grandmother, who had come to stay with us  when my mother went into the hospital for what felt like 3 years but was really only 3 weeks.

My father made us get up every morning at dawn to clean the house, because he felt that he could run the place like a barracks and keep it from falling apart. So, for the first time in our history, we had a house that was clean every day. We also had a house full of quiet children, since everyone was exhausted.

My grandmother was pressed into service during those three weeks. She made her son (my father) seem like a lazy slacker. She ran the tight ship my father was always telling my mother about. But, horror of horrors, my mother wasn’t around to offset the constant cries of CLEAN CLEAN CLEAN and GET OUT OF BED. It got to the point that school became the most relaxing and enjoyable part of my day.

As the weeks were winding down, my grandmother was as sick of us as we were of her. Chris and I would cry sometimes because we missed our mother, and my grandmother would do her best to stop cleaning and rub our arms while she consoled us with phrases like, “There, there. She’s not dead. She’ll come home soon.”

It got to the point that she finally forced Uncle Don to help her one day because she wanted to get rid of us.

“Take them somewhere, anywhere!” she said, as she sat down for a few minutes of relief.

“Okay,” Uncle Don said, as he piled Paul, Joey, Chris and me into his car and we set out for Port Washington.

I wasn’t sure where we were going. I was hoping that maybe he would take us to a movie, or out for ice cream. When we turned into Aunt Mary’s development, my heart leapt with joy. Maybe there was Bosco in my immediate future!

But then my heart sank as we passed her house. “Where are we going?” I said.

“Let’s go visit the Campenellas,” Uncle Don replied. “They love kids.”

Joey and Paul were giggling and Chris and I didn’t know why. I was still hoping we might have some fun when we went into their house.

The Campenellas  were my grandparents’ friends. They were an older couple who were out of practice having little kids around. There was a lot of marble statues and knick knacks around, and my uncle kept whispering “don’t touch anything,” while we walked through their house. The Campis were surprised to see us, but they welcomed us in and took us right to the kitchen table. I thought this seemed promising.

“Would you like to have some milk and cookies?” Mrs. Campenella said.

“Sure,” we all replied, because who wouldn’t want to have milk and cookies?

Mr. and Mrs. Campi put out plates and poured us each a teeny, tiny glass of milk. We got one cookie each. I was done about 30 seconds later.

“Would you like some more?” Mrs. Campi said.

“Okay,” I replied. “And can I have some more milk? I need a bigger glass too.”

My uncle shot me a dirty look, but where I came from, if someone asked you if you wanted more milk and cookies, you said yes. When was ‘no’ ever a suitable answer to that question?

Seeing as I’d already said yes, my brothers piped up. “Yes, more!” and “Can we have bigger glasses too?”

The Campenellas’ smiles seemed stretched pretty tight now. They were filling up big glasses of milk and saying things like, “at this rate, we’re gonna run outta milk,” and “whoa, how many cookies do you kids eat anyway?”

The frosty silence and death stares my uncle was throwing my way were a small price to pay for more cookies and milk. As soon as we were done eating, we piled back into Uncle Don’s car, where he berated me all the way back to Bayside.

“What’s wrong with you?” my uncle fumed. “you ate those people out of house and home!”

“Why did they ask me if I wanted more if they didn’t want to give me more?” six year old me asked.

“That’s what people do! They don’t really want you to eat all their food and drink all their milk! Hasn’t anyone ever told you that before?”

“That doesn’t seem fair to me,” I replied.

“WHO TOLD YOU LIFE WAS FAIR? LIFE ISN’T FAIR! THEY WERE JUST BEING POLITE. NOW THEY’VE GOT NO MILK OR COOKIES!”

My brothers were in the back seat laughing and I was trying not to laugh too. It was a rare thing to see my uncle mad, but I really couldn’t take him seriously. The whole conversation seemed ridiculous to me.

When we got home, my Uncle dragged me out to the backyard, where my grandmother was cooking dinner on our hibachi. It was like I was being put on trial for war crimes, and my grandmother was the judge and jury. Things weren’t looking good for me as my uncle told her in excruciating detail about the terrible way I’d acted.

“Next time someone asks you if you want more milk and cookies, say no,” my grandmother said as she waved a hot dog at me.

“But why?” I replied. “I did want more!”

“Because you four morons ate them out of house and home,” my grandmother said. “We didn’t send you there to drink all their milk and eat all their cookies.”

“Then what did you send us there for?” I asked. I wasn’t being a wise guy; to this day I still don’t understand what I did wrong.

My grandmother put her hands over her head and shook it violently, like she had water trapped in there.  “I JUST TOLD YOU NOT TO DO IT, SO DON’T DO IT!”

“Okay,” I said. But I have to tell you, to this day, I still can’t say no to the question “do you want more milk and cookies?”

Thanks be to God, my mother came home a short while after the Great Milk and Cookie Incident. She never got mad when I asked for more milk or cookies, although the answer was usually no because they were already gone.

Now, back to the great Sock Screaming Match. Ever since they’d joined Marriage Encounter, they felt free to share everything with each other. Even at 8 years old, I felt this was a mistake. I wasn’t sure why, but I knew that when someone asked you “if you could do it all over again, would you?” the answer most definitely was not “no.” EVER.

I closed my eyes tight and made believe I was asleep as the battle raged on. When my father came in to shut off our air conditioner and kissed me on my forehead, I made believe I was asleep. I didn’t want him to yell at me too.

Later that night, when he came home, I told him about my “dream.”

“You were screaming,” I said, “about socks.”

My father looked at my mother and they both laughed. “What makes you think it was a dream?”

I shrugged. “I didn’t think you would get so mad about something so silly.”

The Honeymooners

My father thought this was so funny that he had me come out to their Marriage Encounter meeting (being held in our living room) and share this gem later that night.

The other couples there all thought I was cute, and they laughed pretty hard when I recounted the way my parents screamed at each other in my dream. There were the Sedakas, an older couple who had been married about thirty years at this point; I didn’t like him because he always wanted me to sit on his lap and kiss him.

The Williams were also there; I liked Jerry and Sylvia Williams a lot. They were friendly and kind and seemed to respect me in a way that the others did not. They were not condescending and never spoke to me like I was a baby. The Williams were also married about a million years and thought of my parents as “wacky kids.”

The Stevens were also there, and they seemed all right. They had two daughters, one who was older then me and fun, and one who was a year younger than me and no fun. There were two more couples who were younger and really “into” this whole scene of airing dirty laundry for laughs.

I had already seen what happened when you let dirty laundry pile up—I didn’t think it was good to start showing it to everyone.

When I finished my story, my father laughed.

“You know, that really happened,” he said.

“I know, Dad.” I replied. “I was awake the whole time.”

This made all of the couples laugh and laugh. I wanted to run from the room, but they wouldn’t let me leave until I sat on Mr. Sedaka’s lap and kissed him. I thought they were a bunch of weirdo’s and I couldn’t wait until they stopped coming over to our house.

My mother came to me later when she tucked me into bed.

“You don’t have to get so upset when Dad and I fight. It’s not the end of the world.”

“Are you two going to get divorced?” I said. “I can’t live with Nonnie.”

My mother laughed. “Why would we get divorced? Don’t worry, I washed his socks. It’s all forgotten.”

Adults made no sense to me. “But you two were screaming,” I said.

“So what?” my mother replied. “You can love someone and be mad at them. Hate the sin, love the sinner,” she said with a laugh.

She patted my head and went back out to her Marriage Encounter group.

Love was complicated. Or, as Ronny tells Loretta when he makes his case for why she should continue to love him:

Ronny Cammareri: “Loretta, I love you. Not like they told you love is, and I didn’t know this either, but love don’t make things nice – it ruins everything. It breaks your heart. It makes things a mess. We aren’t here to make things perfect. The snowflakes are perfect. The stars are perfect. Not us. Not us! We are here to ruin ourselves and to break our hearts and love the wrong people and die!”

Ronny’s speech was particularly appropriate on my parents’ wedding anniversary. On July 27^th, 1957, Lou and Sarita got married. They vowed to love and to cherish and obey, in sickness and in health, in good times and in bad, til death do us part. They also agreed to fight, to be less than perfect, to break each other’s hearts on occasions, to make a mess, to love lots of crazy people (my brothers and I are included in this list) and in my mother’s case, for one of them to die.

I think they did a pretty good job of it.

Recipes

Who’s afraid of Cookies and Milk? Not me! Make these delicious cookies and eat as many as you want. Just make sure you’ve got enough milk (or for a calorie splurge, make the Toll House Chocolate Chip Cookie Milkshake listed below). Yum!

http://www.cooksrecipes.com/cookie/coconut_macaroons_recipe.html

http://www.cooksrecipes.com/bar/chocolate_chip_almond_biscotti_recipe.html

http://www.cooksrecipes.com/beverage/toll_house_chocolate_chip_cookie_milkshake_recipe.html

In-Laws Can Be Beautiful

By Maria Lagalante Schulz

There’s a saying that your family members are the people you are with by chance but your friends are the people you are with by choice. When it comes to in-laws, sometimes you get lucky and it’s a little bit of both.

My brothers all married to wonderful people that I’m happy to be related to. They are all good women and I love them for their quirky senses of humor, their willingness to listen to us tell the same stories over and over again (my husband is one of the long-time sufferers) and the way they build my brothers up when the outside world brings them down. They are all great people and although I didn’t choose them, I know that luck was on my side when they came into my life.

Of course, when you say the phrase “Mother-in-Law” you conjure up all sorts of images. It always reminds me of Ralph Kramden in The Honeymooners screaming: “Your mother is a BLABBERMOUTH!” Most of the world expects you to hate your mother-in-law. But sometimes, again, you get lucky.

I have a wonderful mother-in-law who has always been there to help me with my two girls. My brother, Tony, has a mother-in-law who has always been an involved and important part of his children’s lives. My brother Louie really hit the mother-in-law jackpot, though—because his mother-in-law was someone who thought my brother was the second coming of Christ.

Sitting: Christine and Helen. Standing: Sarita

Helen was small, with long black hair and a hearty laugh. She had beautiful eyes and you could see in them that she thought my brother was a genius, her daughters were fantastic, and her grandchildren were gifts from God. It was refreshing to see someone who loved her children and their spouses with such ardent fervor.

Helen was no saint. She liked to tell me stories about her three children, a son named George, her older daughter Christine (who married my brother) and her younger daughter Maria. Over tea and cake, she told me about taking her three kids out for studio portraits when they were little.

“Jim [her now ex-husband] got mad when he saw how much I spent on portraits of Georgie, so I hid them when I took Georgie and Christine out for their photos,” she explained.

“So why are there so many pictures of Maria as a baby?” Christine asked.

Helen shrugged. “Ah, by then we weren’t getting along, so I did whatever I wanted!”

Helen was a good soul who felt sorry for my mother when my father bought a Hyundai with a stick shift, and my mother could not learn how to drive it.

“I’ll teach you,” Helen said, sure that with patience she could teach my mother anything.

I watched them get into the car in our driveway, and saw Helen point out the stick shift, the clutch, and signal how to get the car started. She did it again, at least a dozen times, while my mother looked on, wide-eyed. I couldn’t hear what Helen was saying, but she was getting that look in her eyes that my father used to get when he was teaching me how to do scales on the trumpet and I messed them up for the millionth time. I was afraid that Helen would get mad, until I heard shrieks of laughter coming from inside the car.

Two hours later, the car never moved, but my mother and Helen had done a whole lot of laughing. They came through the front door in search of lunch.

“How did it go?” I asked.

My mother and Helen looked at one another and burst into more peals of laughter.

“It didn’t go at all,” Helen replied.

“You want me to make you a sandwich? Then you can try again,” I said, because my mother really did want to learn, and I figured Helen was the only one patient enough to teach her.

Helen and Mom just shrugged. “I’ll get a ride or walk,” my mother said.

“I can drive you sometimes,” Helen replied.

Satisfied, they went into the kitchen and fixed some lunch.

One of my favorite memories of all time involves Tom Jones, all of my brothers, some of my sisters-in-law, Uncle Don, my mother, and Helen.

We went to the Westbury Music Fair that night, excited as could be to see Tom Jones LIVE. I had been enjoying Tom Jones since I was barely old enough to walk. I thought his television show was to die for, and Chris and I often acted out the “tied-to-the-train-tracks” segment.

A new Tom Jones album warranted as much joy in our little household as a brand new Beatles album. I can still recall singing and crying over The Green Green Grass of Home.

So of course, going to see him LIVE was our destiny. I knew my family would be into it, and didn’t doubt that Uncle Don would have to contain himself from jumping up and dancing the night away. I knew my mother would sing her heart out from beginning to end. But what about Helen?

“Aren’t they sweet?” Helen said to Christine, as I took my brother Louie’s hand in mine and walked towards the theater. “You’re such a nice family.”

“Make sure you’ve got your underwear handy,” Louie said to her, as she swatted at him and laughed.

We howled with laughter as others (not Helen) threw their panties on stage, as Tom Jones strutted and sashayed, and as the band played all the songs we’d come to love way back in the 70s. When TJ broke into “Delilah,” my brothers, sisters-in-law, and I sang along, saying “Why, Why, WHY Delilah?” I looked back over my shoulder and saw Helen, swinging and swaying, arms linked with the rest of my crazy family.

If there was ever any doubt that she was one of us, it was gone. She had asked the eternal question (why, Delilah?) and didn’t seem at all disturbed by Tom Jones’s lurid hip action during “What’s New, Pussycat?”

Helen was a keeper.

Helen and her grandson, Matthew

As the years passed, Helen was diagnosed with breast cancer. For more than a decade and a half, she fought it off, and although her long hair was gone, she was still beautiful.

Helen had a funny way of approaching her illness. Once, over Easter dinner at her daughter’s house, she described her treatments and what she thought about them.

“It’s very annoying,” she said, as we munched on ham. “I go to my treatments and everyone else is as skinny as can be. I must be the only cancer patient I ever met that’s still fat!”

Christmas Eve came and went, and year after year, I saw Helen at my brother Joey’s house. We would talk about the after life, how much Helen looked forward to seeing George again (her son, who died in 1987) and about our hopes and dreams for the future.

She liked that I believed in an after life and didn’t seem at all worried about talking about death with her. “I’ll come visit you some time,” she said, and we both laughed.

At the end of the night, Helen would kiss me and say with a twinkle in her eyes, “I’ll see you next year.”

One of the last times she said that to me, she was wearing a Marilyn Monroe-like blonde wig and she leaned on a cane. She must have noticed the look of doubt that flashed in my eyes.

She laughed. “Don’t worry. I’ll be here.”

The following Christmas Eve, Helen grabbed me and gave me a kiss. “See! I told you I’d be here!”

On July 12, 2006, Helen passed away. She had fought breast cancer for many years, and eventually her fight ended. I like to think of her and my mother, driving around in that big Hyundai in the sky.

I bet Helen is driving…and they’re both laughing.

My nephews, Louie and Dan, do something in honor of Helen every year: it’s the Swim Across America. Every year hundreds of swimmers swim across the Long Island Sound to raise money to help in the fight against cancer. Last year, this event included over 770 swimmers and raised over $880,000.

To support Team Lagalante or for or more information, go to: http://www.swimacrossamerica.org/Page.aspx?pid=490&frtid=710

Recipes:

One thing I will always remember about Helen: she loved a party! Here are two wonderful Greek recipes that remind me of her: classically Greek and always good to have around.

Spanakopita: Greek Spinach Pie

http://allrecipes.com//Recipe/spanakopita-greek-spinach-pie/Detail.aspx

Homemade Gyros

http://greekfood.about.com/od/porkrecipes/r/mockporkgyro.htm

Got a funny in-law story or Greek recipe to share? Leave a comment and let all of the Hungry Lifers in on the fun.

Summer Camp

by Maria Lagalante Schulz

Joey, Chris and Maria, 1971

My girls were so excited the other night because summer camp was starting. They’re looking forward to lots of swimming, trips to water parks, roller coaster rides, arcade visits, barbecues, Broadway shows, fishing expeditions and more.

This of course made me remember my own childhood summers. If I had gotten to do even one of the many things my girls are doing this summer, I would’ve been overjoyed because I never went to summer camp. Instead, we hid inside our houses in the heat of the day (even though none of us had air conditioning), only venturing outside after the sun was lower in the sky.

You didn’t really need camp in a house overrun by six active boys, two dogs, countless buddies, girl friends, and band mates. You could scare up a great game of running bases or ride your bike from Bayside to Flushing and back again. Roller skating, hockey shoot-outs, basketball, running through the sprinklers, games of catch and whiffle ball tournaments were all in the realm of possibility, provided it cooled down enough to lure everyone outside to the street to play.

It didn’t matter if the weather was hot or perfectly mild: certain things demanded that you stayed inside and watched television. Bob Barker on The Price is Right at 11 a.m. on Channel 2 was always riveting. Five days a week, Barker dispensed wise counsel to the shrieking contestants that hoped to guess the correct price of a bottle of Pledge or a box of Tide. If they could just control themselves long enough to think strategically—say, passing on the first showcase showdown prizes in the hopes that a NEW CAR or a chance to glimpse Big Ben or the Queen with a TRIP TO LONDON would be in the second showcase—you could see someone walk away with loads of cash and unbelievable prizes.

On the days that my father was home, he couldn’t help but bring down the general gaiety that a confetti-drenched, screaming contestant brought into our little lives. “You know,” he’d say, unable to deny the Accountant he played on work days, “I would never want to be on this show. You have any idea what kind of taxes they have to pay when they win all this stuff?”

Actually, I didn’t, but now that my father shared this bit of wisdom with me, I no longer saw the contestants as the luckiest people on earth. I saw them as fools who would probably have to sell everything they owned just to pay the taxes on that new boat they had been screaming and crying over.

My father did not bring us down when our next favorite show came on. The Gong Show aired at 12:30 on Channel 4, and I was ready for it with my peanut butter and jelly sandwich in one hand and a glass of chocolate milk in the other. My brothers, parents and I roared with laughter at the outrageous contestants who tap-danced, played the bongos, sang (badly), juggled, or swallowed fire sticks.

Chuck Barris bangs the gong

Some of the acts stand out in my memory because they were either so bad that I can’t forget them, or they were really good and got gonged anyway. I still feel terrible for the 5-year-old girl who tap-danced and sang beautifully, but got gonged when Anson Williams (AKA Potsy from Happy Days) said he couldn’t stand her because she was “too cute.”

There was always a panel of three “distinguished” judges that determined who would win and who would get gonged. This bizarre group included Jaye P. Morgan (who would eventually get banned from the show by the censors for flashing her breasts at the camera), Rip Torn, Phyllis Diller, Jamie Farr a.k.a. Klinger from M*A*S*H, Arte Johnson from Laugh-In fame, Anson Williams and, inexplicably, Rex Reed. Most of the judges laughed and gonged themselves silly, but Rex Reed took everything way too seriously.

From the bitter judges to the perennially chirpy and over-caffeinated Chuck Barris, this show was mean-spirited and often cruel. I loved it! I also loved when the band broke out into a lively DA DA DA DA DA DA, DA DA DA DA DA, DA DA DUH DUH DUH and Chuck Barris pointed to the curtains and said, with a look of sheer and utter joy, “It’s Gene Gene the Dancing Machine!”

Gene Gene The Dancing Machine & Chuckie B dance!

Meanwhile, an older, chubby African American man named Gene Gene The Dancing Machine jiggled his way onstage and danced his heart out while people threw pillows, banjos, tires, or anything else they had handy from the wings onto the stage, while Gene Gene danced on, one fist raised exultantly towards the sky.

The appearance of The Unknown Comic was also a cause for great joy, even though his jokes were usually corny and not all that funny—but how could you not laugh at a guy who did his whole act with a paper bag over his head? Chuck Barris’s fake anger, the judges’ barreled-over laughter and the audience’s enthusiastic cheering just added to the fun.

Some days, everyone would be gonged and no one would win. Other days, there would be more than one winner. You never really knew how things would turn out, but it didn’t matter. When Chuck Barris came out to deliver the “highly unusual amount of $516.32” plus a Golden Gong Trophy to the winner, a dwarf would rush out and throw confetti while balloons dropped from the ceiling. On Fridays, he’d give the same cash prize to the Worst Act of the Week, plus a dirty tube sock.

With the credits still rolling, I jumped up and out the door for a game of whiffle ball with Jude, Chris and Joey. I didn’t have to worry about the bat being too heavy in whiffle ball, so I could hit like Babe Ruth. We played in our driveway, and if you hit the ball over Jude’s and Chris’s heads and it landed in Mrs. McGivney’s driveway, you had yourself a home run. Joey and I would play together against Jude and Chris, and while Joey pitched I tried to play the “outfield” that was our street. Every few pitches, I would yell ‘CAR CAR C-A-R’ and we’d have to suspend play to let the traffic pass.

The summer that I turned 4, Joey taught me how to ride a bike. He just said, “Get on and ride,” and I did. He didn’t really have to hold onto the back of the seat for long—I got the hang of it and rode down the alley behind our old house.

Of course, that knowledge was useless since I didn’t have a bike of my own. I still had a tiny red tricycle, even though it was way too small for me. My friend Nadine’s mom, Mary, gave me a big blue bike with white fenders that was clearly meant for someone twice my size, but I was so excited to have a bike that I tried to ride it anyway.

Since Joey had not just one, but two, bustling paper routes, he would often borrow my bike. I didn’t want to share my bike with Joey, but he would put me on the handlebars and take me for a spin around the neighborhood, which was always fun. That is, until the night when I was 8 and it wasn’t fun at all.

Our parents were heading out the door in a little while for another one of their Marriage Encounter nights. They would “dialog” and “share” with a room full of other married 70’s hipsters who thought that telling their significant other “everything” created deeper bonds. The fact that most of the people in the groups often quit and got divorced didn’t discourage my parents in the least.

As we raced out the door that night, my mother said: “now don’t go off the block.”

Normally, we would’ve just played a game of catch or ridden our roller skates up and down the block. But now that my mother said: “don’t go off the block,” leaving the block was the only thing that held any appeal for us.

“Re Re,” Joey said, “can I ride your bike?”

“But I want to ride my bike,” I replied.

“Get on the handlebars and I’ll take you for a ride.”

Riding with Joey was always a lot of fun. I loved the feeling of the wind in my hair and had perfected the art of sitting on the handlebars and out of harm’s way. Joey was a great bike rider and going places with him was an adventure, because everyone in the neighborhood would yell, “Hi Joe!” or “hey Leggo!” like I was out bike riding with the Mayor of Bayside. So, without asking where we were headed, I jumped on.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t much point in bike riding if you couldn’t leave the block. I shouldn’t have worried too much. We were off the block in about two seconds, heading towards Bell Boulevard.

“Mom said we aren’t supposed to leave the block,” I said.

“Oh stop worrying,” Joey said. “How will she know?”

Just then, we hit a pothole and my food sprang off the wheel nut where I usually kept it. Before I could stop myself, my foot became lodged in the wheel.

Within five seconds, my right foot was caught in the spokes and I spun off the bike and smashed to the ground. Joey fell on top of me, and the bike landed on top of the both of us, with my foot still stuck in the spokes and twisted behind Joey’s back.

A man walking on Bell Boulevard saw us fall and came running to our sides.

“Oh my! Are you kids all right? Is your foot broken?”

This is sort of what I looked like, only better.

I lay there in a daze. Between the throbbing in my ankle and the lack of oxygen in my lungs because Joey was using me as a giant pillow, I hurt all over. Once the man pulled my foot from the spokes and Joey was able to scramble off the ground, he pulled me to my aching feet.

“We’re fine, thanks mister.” Joey said.

“Let me call your parents,” the man said, as I tried to put my foot down and cried.

“No, she’ll be fine. Thanks anyway,” Joey said.

“My foot is killing me! I think it’s broken,” I said.

“Listen,” Joey whispered to me, “we’re not supposed to be off the block. If this guy tells mom and dad that he saw us crash on Bell Boulevard, we’re dead. Just climb back on the bike and I’ll take you home.”

I didn’t want to have my father, mother and brother mad at me, so I climbed on the bike and let Joey wheel me home.

Luckily, my parents were busy getting ready for their night out and Joey was able to get me situated on the couch.

“I need some ice,” I said, as I fought back tears.

“No ice until they leave,” Joey said, still panic-stricken that my father would find out. “But I will get you some ice cream.”

As my parents got ready to walk out the door, my mother noticed me sitting on the couch with my foot propped up. I tried to smile at her over my enormous bowl of ice cream.

“What have you got there?” my mother said, sensing that something was wrong.

“Joey made me an ice cream sundae,” I replied.

She turned to look at Joey, who was also enjoying some ice cream. Since we were sometimes unable to spend five minutes together inside of the house without one of us trying to strangle the other one, my mother didn’t know what to make of this sudden display of brotherly love.

“Okay.” My mother shrugged her shoulders since she couldn’t figure out what was wrong. “I will see you guys later.”

She walked out the door and I put the cold bowl on my ankle while Joey got the ice.

Hours later, my mother would solve the mystery when she came home and woke me, only to find that my ankle now resembled a tree trunk and I could barely walk.

Joey and I didn’t get in trouble for riding off the block, but I did get a badly sprained ankle that kept me off the handlebars for at least a week. Later that same summer, one of Joey’s customers gave him a lavender bike with a banana seat and a flowered basket on it since “that bike your sister rides looks too big for her.”

Just like mine, except my seat was white with flowers and I had a matching basket.

Joey and I did a swap, and I didn’t have to ride on the handlebars anymore.

The following summer, Joey tried to teach Chris how to ride my bike, which by that time had no brakes. But that’s another story….

It wasn’t exactly summer camp, but we sure had fun.

Joey’s Hot Fudge Sundae

We didn’t have Chunky Munky or the Perils of Praline in my house when we were kids, but that didn’t stop us from making some delicious sundaes.

Recipe

1 scoop Vanilla ice cream

1 scoop Chocolate ice cream

1 scoop Strawberry ice cream

Magic Shell Fudge Sauce

Walnuts

Redi Whip

Maraschino Cherry (optional. I opt out—they give me hives)

Place ice cream in a big cereal bowl. Add Fudge Sauce (it hardens a forms a cookie-like surface. Yum!). Add walnuts and Redi-Whip. Top with a cherry if you so desire.

So what did you do as a kid over your summer vacation? What was your favorite treat? Leave a comment below and let all of us Hungry Lifers know about it.