God Save the Sweet Potato Queens (17 page)
Country Club Eggs
Mary Ellen, leader of the Shreveport, Louisiana, Crude Queens, sent me this recipe that she got from her mother-in-law. It sounds hideous, but you know I wouldn’t suggest anything using deviled eggs that wasn’t fabulous, knowing that I love deviled eggs more than life its ownself. A deviled egg is nothing to be trifled with, no indeed. Mary Ellen says her mother-in-law, Mimi, called these Country Club Eggs, and I must admit, they are pretty high-falutin. You start with regular ole deviled eggs—you know, mayonnaise, mustard, pickles, paprika, etc.—and you put them in a casserole dish. Don’t they look yummy? This is the hardest part for me—looking at those eggs just sitting there, begging me to eat them. I must have eaten a thousand deviled eggs before I ever got this recipe made the first time. Delaying gratification has always been tough for me. Anyway, you put them in there and then as quick as you can (before you eat them all), cover them with tomato soup (it could take more than one can, unless, of course, you’ve eaten all but, say, one of the deviled eggs, in which case it won’t take much soup at all), and then you cover that with lots and lots of sliced Velveeta cheese. Velveeta is just like other cheese in that you can never have too much of it. You bake this concoction at 300 to 350 degrees until it gets bubbly around the edges. It’s a good thing this is so much trouble—I’m not sure it would be prudent to eat it as often as you’re gonna want to.
Dinksy’s Gooey Bars
My friend Mary Rathbun, who owns the Great Acorn store in San Anselmo, California, where you can get just about anything worth having, sent me this recipe for a behind the size of the sun. This will, as they say around here, put some junk in yo’ trunk, as if we needed any help in that department. We are just about to give up on looking for rich half-dead guys and focus on guys who like fat women. Wouldn’t you just love to be with a man who never thought you were qui-i-i-ite plump enough? “Just eat a little sump’n, baby,” would be his litany, spoken low and sweet in our happy little ear. Mary claims she got this recipe from her friend in Beaufort, South Carolina, who is four-ten and called Dinksy. She does not say how much Dinksy weighs; my guess is, though, since she is called Dinksy, she doesn’t eat this stuff herself. Good. More for us.
To make Dinksy’s Gooey Bars, you start with a Duncan Hines Devil’s Food Cake mix—already off to a good start, I say—and mix it up with a stick of butter (not margarine, but I don’t think we have to say that, do you?) and an egg. Put it in a 9 x 13 pan. Then mix up 8 ounces of softened cream cheese, a box of powdered sugar, 2 eggs, a running-over teaspoon of vanilla, and a cup of chopped pecans (not walnuts, not almonds—
pecans
). Pour all that over the cake stuff in the pan and bake it at 350 degrees for around 40 minutes. Do this all in secret while everyone else is gone; otherwise you’re gonna be forced to share.
Bacon Monkey Bread
I know you’ve had Monkey Bread—where you take the little hunks of canned biscuits and roll them in butter and cinnamon and sugar and pecans and you put them all in a bundt pan and bake it and then you eat it by delicately plucking off little wads of yum off the pile. (We call those canned biscuits “whomp” biscuits because you used to have to whomp the can on the counter to pop the seal. Now you’re just supposed to peel back the label and it pops open, but we all still whomp it on the counter because we like to.) Well, I wouldn’t have thought there could be any variation of that theme that would please me as much, but Leslie Monk has come up with a new version that’s every bit as yummy, and since it falls into the Salty Food Group, you could actually have both, which would pretty much make your life complete, as far as I can tell. I can’t think of what else you could possibly expect life to hand you after this unless you are just too greedy to live.
Leslie calls this Bacon Monkey Bread, and so you know from that that it’s got to be good. I can’t think of a food containing bacon that I don’t love. First you cook a big wad of bacon. Now, this is at least as big a problem for me as the deviled eggs—I am completely powerless over bacon. I rarely buy it for this reason: However much there is is what I consider to be a “serving”—be that two slices or two pounds. If it is cooked and in front of me, I’ll eat it till I gag—can’t help it. So, anyway, you cook enough bacon so that when you get through eating it, there’s still a bunch left for the recipe—you’re gonna need at least a dozen slices for the recipe, I’d say. Crumble them up (they need to be crumbled for the recipe, but this will also inhibit further pilfering on your part). Mix the bacon bits with 1⁄2 cup of Parmesan cheese and a small chopped onion. Okay, now melt a stick of butter. Take 3 10-ounce cans of whomp biscuits and cut each biscuit into quarters. Dip the biscuit hunks in the butter—but don’t
just
dip them: Roll them, bathe them in the butter. Put about a third of them in a lightly greased bundt pan and sprinkle some of the bacon stuff over them. Fill up the pan with layers of buttered biscuit hunks and bacon stuff, ending with biscuit hunks. Bake it at 350 degrees for around 40 minutes, but for goodness’ sake, don’t burn it. Let it sit in the pan for a few minutes after it’s done and then dump it out onto a platter and jump back to avoid being trampled.
Twinkie Pie
Also known affectionately as “White Trash Trifle,” this is just the most embarrassing recipe we know of, and it’s a tribute to our character that we can confess not only to owning such a recipe but making it often and loving it as well. You would think we would be too proud to admit all that, but we think pride of this sort is a sin, and besides, we want you to have some because it’s so shamefully good. Also, we are trying to popularize being fat so that we will be on the cutting edge of fashion. If you will do your part and eat lots of this and all the other stuff in here, I think we’ll have a pretty fair start on your basic groundswell movement.
You start with a crate of Hostess Twinkies—don’t even mention the fat-free variety to me: They are an abomination and should be outlawed. You know you’re gonna need a billion of these because you’ll eat them as fast as you can open the packages. Try this—take one out of every package and eat it on the spot. Take the other one and cut in two lengthwise and put it in a 9 x 13 pan—or whatever size you want, depending on how hungry you are. Now us, we lean toward your big pans, and we think you’re like that, too. Then make up some vanilla pudding—the kind in the box, whatever brand you grab first, it doesn’t matter. Spread the vanilla pudding over the Twinkies. Cover all that with sliced bananas, strawberries, peaches—whatever kind of fruit you want. Now, if you are really and truly just absolute total white trash at heart, you may use fruit cocktail. We think you should try to overcome this urge, however; it really doesn’t speak well of you at all. Put it in the refrigerator, and when it’s cold, eat it until you either get full or sick. And don’t tell anybody where you heard about this.
One of my very favorite men and writers in the whole world, living or dead, Bill Fitzhugh, sent me a recipe, and Lord knows, he meant well. I mean, it’s got chicken and sausage in it, after all. But on further inspection, I saw that it specified that the chicken, although thighs, should be skinless and trimmed of fat. Well, I could tell it was gonna deteriorate from there, and I was right. At every turn, he had you draining off fat and such as that. It was called something or other “maque choux”—and I have no idea what
maque choux
means, but I’m certain that it has nothing to do with cream of mushroom soup, Velveeta, or even bacon. The sausage called for turned out to be Italian, which everybody knows is deficient in fat content.
Bill Fitzhugh is a fine man, a precious darling man, and an excellent writer—I highly recommend you read all his books—but he has apparently been living in Elle-Aye for a little bit too long and has done got way above his raising, if you ask me. I mean, I got to the end of the recipe and he wrote—in his own hand—that the
maque choux
should be accompanied by “crusty bread.” Now, no Southerner has ever said such a thing in his life. Cornbread certainly, but everybody down here knows that bread crust was made only to serve during shipment as a protection for the soft white middle and should be cut off cleanly before serving.
Bless his heart, let’s get him home and feed him.
19
The Time Is Now
I
cannot imagine who came up with that phrase about “time marching on.” For whom is time merely marching? And I have to wonder why it seems to be moving so slowly for them: Poor things must be bored slap to death. For us, on the other hand, time is whipping by so fast, we feel like the way dogs look when they hang out the window of a fast-moving car—hair and ears blown straight back, tongues hanging out, grinning and blinking in the wind. This must be because we devote so much of our lives to having fun. We love to play.
One year, for my birthday, a couple of the Tammys had a party for me at Ton-O-Fun. This is a locally owned establishment, much like the national chain Discovery Zone, only better. It’s a big, indoor playground thing, full of things to climb on and through, things to swing on and slide down, and the best part of all—the big pit full of plastic balls to land in. They rented the whole place one night after closing time for an adults-only party. Problem was, we all had to show up before closing time and be there, in our little party room, with all the tiny little chairs and tables, while they ran all the actual children out of the play area to make way for us. We got some dirty looks from some of those tots that were fairly advanced. Their parents seemed only too happy to leave, however, having been there for hours watching the kids play, never getting to join in.
The second they were all gone and the doors were safely locked behind them, we went berserk. Mothers and fathers, CEO’s, Junior League presidents, pilots, TV personalities, doctors, lawyers—all that was forgotten in the mad rush to be the first one through the maze of tunnels and slides to land in the big ball pit.
Let me just tell you, the big ball pit is IT. If they would put one in the break room of every workplace in America, they could quit making Prozac. If the post office had these areas, the disgruntled postal worker would be a thing of the past. If the waiting room at the doctor’s and dentist’s office were big ball pits, nobody would mind waiting and nobody would ever be late for their appointment. Instead of installing a hot tub in your house, I beseech you to consider a big ball pit. We played there for hours, just laughing fit to kill the whole time—it felt like we were about six years old. Fabulous.
We got out and had the funky pizzas—you know, they’re all cheese because the kids won’t eat anything else—and Fat Mama’s Margaritas—we brought those with us—and birthday cake. The staff sang to me and I got a T-shirt and everything—just like a real kid. Best birthday party I ever had.
We got the idea because the year before, on Tammy’s son Timothy’s birthday, she had rented one of those space jumps. After about an hour, the kids got tired and distracted and went off doing other stuff, and Tammy and I got in the thing and made ourselves sick jumping and laughing. We made so much racket, the kids heard us and came back; and, of course, they wanted to get in there again now that it looked like so much fun. We wouldn’t let them, naturally, partly because we were afraid we would jump on one and crush him, but mostly because we are selfish. Eventually they shamed us into getting out, but we didn’t forget how much fun it was, so when my birthday rolled around, well, it just seemed like the natural progression of things. That’s how we think.
See, one of our secret weapons, as Sweet Potato Queens, is the power of play—the restorative, almost magical healing powers of play. Dressing up the way we do is a big part of it. When you are wearing something so completely outlandish, it imparts a certain degree of freedom to your behavior. I mean, no matter how we act (or act up, as it were), it is still difficult to live all the way up to the outfit. Those outfits set an incredibly high standard.
This year before the parade, Tammy decided we needed a bullhorn for the parade. I have no earthly idea why she thought we needed a bullhorn, but she was adamant and could not be dissuaded in her pursuit of one. She took the prescribed course of action in this pursuit, of course: She told one of our ever-dancing-in-attendance guys she needed one and set him off in search of it. She chose Michael Rubenstein for this errand, and it was an excellent choice because he located one that very day. And so the night before the parade, as we were gathered at Tammy’s waiting for our limo to take us to Hal and Mal’s for the big party we were flinging for the Wannabe Wannabes from all over the country, suddenly the voice of God came booming through the walls: “Sweet Potato Queens! Come out with your hands up!” We determined that, although the voice was very Godlike, the choice of words probably was not and, upon further investigation, it turned out to be not God, but Rube.
Well, that was all it took for Tammy. The borrowed bullhorn immediately became her favorite toy. Anything said through a bullhorn by anybody, let me just tell you, takes on surprising heft. We managed to pry it out of her hot little hands after a bit and dragged her off to the party. She forgot all about it on parade day—whatever the urgent need had been had evaporated—but the next day (that would be Sunday) she popped out of bed with nothing but bullhorn on her mind. We all loaded up in the car to go down to the Edison Walthall (the official hotel of the Wannabe Wannabes) for breakfast. Tammy has the bullhorn in the car (trust me on this, a bullhorn is too loud to be used inside an automobile) and insisted on running by a few folks’ houses to give them a little shout, as it were. We pulled up to the home of the revered Southern writer Ellen Douglas—who is our friend, lucky for all of us, and her, too—and addressed her, from the street, naturally (when you’ve got a bullhorn, you don’t need to go to the door): “Ellen Douglas! We know you’re in there writing those trashy books! Come out with your hands up!” When you’ve got a bullhorn, it is just second nature to demand that everybody come out with their hands up.
Then we passed First Baptist Church. Now, here’s a real bone of contention in Jackson, Mississippi. The Baptists wanted to build a skywalk across North State Street so their members wouldn’t have to go to the light at the intersection or jaywalk to cross the street. And they did everything but harelip the world to get that skywalk built—it was against all manner of laws, ordinances, and regulations, and promised to be a hideous eyesore, but they were persistent, as Baptists are known to be, and they got their silly skywalk, and don’t you just
know
that not a one of them use it,
ever
. I personally have never seen a single Baptist up in that skywalk. It just irritates the fire out of everybody in town that they won’t use it: Drivers will honk and gesture vehemently at the jaywalking Baptists, indicating with an extended digit that they should not only go up into the skywalk but also what they should do once there. Now, we are not a community against jaywalking by any means. First Presbyterian Church is right down the street, and the Presbyterians jaywalk all day long and nobody minds, because they didn’t harelip the world to build an ugly skywalk and then refuse to use it. Anyway, as we were driving by the Baptist church, we spied a covey of dressed-up Baptists casually jaywalking (directly
under
the skywalk) and Tammy addressed them with the bullhorn on that issue: “Hey! You Baptists! Get up there in that skywalk! You whined for it! Now get up there and use it!” It was a cathartic experience, I tell you.
Then we went by our beloved Eudora Welty’s house, and as it was her birthday, we sang to her through the bullhorn, but very softly, as we went by. Can’t be hollering at Miss Eudora. It must be said that Tammy fairly hogged the bullhorn all day long. We thought we were gonna have to buy her some Depends, she was laughing so hard. Now she wants one of her own, just so she can call her cat, her cat being one who would respond better to the voice of authority; your basic “Here, kitty kitty” just doesn’t move him much. I swear, we are so easily entertained—it’s one of our best qualities.
I got an e-mail one day—Rachel Kahan, our beloved and devoted Wannabe on staff at our publishing house, Crown, in New York, forwarded it to me—an amazing message from Kathi Lamonski, owner of the Fig Garden Bookstore in Fresno, California. Kathi declared that
The Sweet Potato Queens’ Book of Love
was her bestselling book of all time, and asked whether there was any way under heaven that the author might be persuaded to come out to Fresno for a visit. I just picked up the phone and called Ms. Lamonski at the Fig Garden Bookstore in Fresno, California, and said I would be tickled pink (with sequins on top) to come out there, if she would only send me a plane ticket. And that conversation led to the First Annual Festival of Queens in Fresno.
They sold tickets, forty dollars apiece, to a dinner—open to all Wannabes, consorts, and/or spouses (Spud Studs). The store sold out of tickets before any notice of the event ran in the newspapers, and they were forced to add more tables to accommodate the crowds. They gave every person a tiara and had great door prizes like baskets of Fat Mama’s Knock You Naked Margaritas and Come Back Sauce and other of the Queens’ favorite foods. There was a dress requirement for the event: You had to wear whatever made you feel Queenly. Attendees were encouraged to think fantasy—old prom dresses, majorette boots (for those lucky enough to have them), long gloves, dangly earrings. They could declare themselves the Queen of Whatever They Chose, one of the basic tenets of the Sweet Potato Queens’ philosophy. Since they were all going to be dressing for the evening, I took my outfit, even though we practically had to buy the thing its own airline ticket, it’s so huge.
Let’s just say the attendees got it, in a big way—and then some. There were
some outfits
out there, let me tell you. (Keep in mind the attendees selected their own Queendoms.) One tiny little woman was proudly sporting a banner across her bosom that proclaimed her to be . . . Queen of the Whores. (She wore a blouse. Not a tunic, a blouse—as in nothing else but sheer hose and high heels. I went up to her and said, “Darlin’, I think you must have misread me. I said, ‘Never wear panties to a party’—I didn’t say nothin’ ’bout not wearing pants!” She just laughed and laughed with her little nekkid self. I loved her.) The Queens Most Likely to Be Eaten—Queens of Chocolate—had Hershey’s Kisses stuck all over themselves.
The official emcee for the evening was the cutest man in the whole world, living or dead, and his name was Wheatie. Wheatie himself wrote me after the event and said that the party looked like a middle-aged spring break, and he thought it was a wonderful thing for all those women to give themselves permission to have that much fun, and he was so happy that he got to see it. There’s a message—or two—in that for all of us.
I know this wonderful—magical, really—woman named Sandra Williams. She is a marvelous watercolorist. She will paint a picture of you and your favorite celebrity, depicted engaging in the activity of your choice. Think about that. I think I would have me and Sean Connery in a passionate embrace; he is and always will be the sexiest man in the history of the entire world, living or dead. Sandra’s self-portrait shows her in a big clawfooted bathtub full of bubbles and James Garner—the two of them sipping champagne and looking re-e-e-eally happy. Maybe I would have Sean Connery carrying me in his arms. Is that the sexiest thing or what? If you have never seen a soap opera even once in your life—who are you trying to kid?—you can turn on any one of them on any given day and see somebody getting carried off to bed by somebody else. Nobody on TV ever has sex unless they get carried off—usually up some stairs—first. Now, this is one of those things that no guys in real life ever do. Why is that? Obviously, women love the idea of it or they wouldn’t show it to us every single day on every single TV station from eleven
A.M.
until three-thirty
P.M.
(I can remember watching
As the World Turns
before I started school. I can remember the very first episode of
Days of Our Lives,
and people have been getting carried off to bed that whole time, every day of the world.) You would think that something that has gotten that much publicity on such a regular, long-term basis might have trickled down to a couple of guys by now. I can’t figure this out. This is information we want them to have.
