Building Better Girls

You may not have noticed, but there's a big "Blog Her" banner running along the top of this blog. When I signed up to be part of the Blog Her network, I didn't read the fine print on the contract, which said that 25% of these posts had to be original, i.e. not links to posts that run on other websites and in other publications. This morning, I received a pleasant little email from the folks at BlogHer, reminding me that I'm periodically supposed to post fresh material. I don't want to get thrown out of BlogHer, and not just because they throw a great annual conference in Manhattan. Women need women, writers need writers and I like being part of this group. With that in mind, here is fresh material. Thank you for reading.

Last weekend, I went with a group of women to a spa in the Berkshires. It was a lovely few days, full of vinyasa and restoration yoga, steam baths, clean towels, locker combinations, salad bars and hot food fixed by other people. My friend and I went for a walk in the snow one sunny afternoon but mostly we stayed inside. The weekend was a gift from my mother, who understands that mothers periodically need to get out from under. I didn't once put on makeup or wear anything but workout gear and sneakers. Though there were some men at this spa, the vibe is definitely women-friendly, with everyone sitting in the dining room, freely talking about menopause, hot flashes, weight, books, marriage, divorce, the better-looking masseuses, clogs, and salad dressing.

While I was there, I read one of the best books I've read in a long time, Elissa Schappell's Blueprints for Building Better Girls. This is a collection of short stories, peopled by characters who get older and jump around the country. Many of them know each other. The stories revolve around the demands of female friendship, getting a bad reputation in high school, eating disorders (in girls and boys), rape, female promiscuity, the fraught relationship between mothers and daughters and mothers and teenage sons, infertility, infidelity, rescue dogs, and the bliss (or lack thereof) of marriage and child-rearing. This book was fantastic. It was brilliant, brave, and energizing, Some of it was gut-wrenching. In the middle of the story "Aren't You Dead Yet?," the narrator, a playwright, writes about an aspiring artist she's involved with and a play she'd written that he wanted to read. "I'd never written anything like that, nothing expressly female. Nothing that felt true like that. I mean, nobody cared about that stuff. Ray wanted me to read it to him."

If you are a girl, woman, mother or wife, or know someone who might turn into a mother or wife, read this book. Most of the characters are resilient women who are deeply unnerved by the challenges life has thrown at them. You'll probably relate to a few of them. In the story, "Elephant," two young mothers meet on a playground, exchange life stories and become close friends. This was one of the saddest and most memorable descriptions of the pitfalls of marriage and child-rearing, and the importance of female friendship I've ever read. The story rips your heart out.

I gave one of the stories, "The Joy of Cooking," to a writing class I taught last semester. The story is narrated by a divorced, middle-aged mother, who attempts to give cooking advice to her anorexic daughter. Both mother and daughter cling to each other but are also trying to forge new lives for themselves. For various reasons, none of the students in my class liked the story. I loved it. The mother-daughter jousting felt familiar but fresh and funny. You learn what it's like to be in a clinic for girls with eating disorders. And though there was a sad undercurrent running through the story, it also makes you laugh out loud.

This whole book was pleasantly disturbing. Buy it for yourself or take it out of the library and discuss it with your sister, your mother, your daughter, your book group, your friend.

Girls Night Out: Shana Tova

Every Rosh Hashanah, I look at the dog-eared copies of  bon appetits piling up in our kitchen and think, "I'm gonna make something new and different this year!" The stakes were really raised this week because my neighbor and I decided to join forces and celebrate the New Year together at her house. My neighbor's husband is an excellent cook, the kind of guy who reads the New York Times Dining section and gets out his fryer on Thanksgiving and fries turkeys in the back yard. Plus, my good friend from high school was coming with her family, as were my mother and stepfather, and my neighbor's extended family. All of these people had eaten my standby holiday food too many times before so I wanted to make something other than brisket, string beans and my mother-in-law Dorothy's sweet potato casserole. But then I realized I didn't really have time to start playing around with new recipes and making eight trips to the grocery store. My neighbor was making chicken and noodle kugel. The most I could do to change things up a bit was to make a new kind of sweet potato casserole, the one Amy had given me last year, which calls for fresh sweet potatoes.

Amy is my younger son's Spanish tutor. She and my mother-in-law are the kind of women who make you relax as soon as they walk in the door. They smile, say something cheerful, offer a compliment, make themselves comfortable and put you at ease, all at the same time, even though it's your house and you should be putting them at ease. The word for these women is "lovely." Amy used to teach Spanish at a local public high school and she likes to cook. She comes over late afternoons, and I always seem to be making dinner while she's here. Last year, she gave me her recipe for sweet potato casserole. It was a little more challenging than my mother-in-law's, in that it required buying the potatoes, boiling them and then peeling them, but other than that prep, the recipe was easy to make and really yummy. Amy's recipe also calls for a bottle of apricot brandy and a jar of marmalade. My mother-in-law's recipe is more old-fashioned, relying on canned sweet potatoes, lots of melted butter, brown and white sugar and graham cracker crumbs. Needless to say, you won't lose weight eating either casserole but you'll be go to bed happy. Greasing an old white Corning casserole dish, pouring in the sweet, chunky mixture, adding the topping, sticking it in the oven and knowing that every hot spoonful is going to be delicious is a wonderful way to spend an hour.

But then my editor at Patch asked me to cover a meeting in town the night I was supposed to cook. I should add that this request came after my editor told me that my stint with Patch was coming to an end, since her freelance budget was being cut to nada for the fourth quarter. "I want to give you as much work as possible before September 30," she emailed, after she'd basically kicked me in the gut. I should add that I really like and respect this woman: I don't know many women who work ''round the clock, but she seems to, and she has two kids who are exactly my kids' ages. I always feel like a bit of a sloth when I talk to her, because she stays on top of a website that is live 24/7 and had to cancel her vacation when Hurricane Irene stormed through our town at the end of August. I suggested that Patch start charging readers for on-line subscriptions like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and that Patch charge people to leave comments on the Patch website. The ability to leave comments on the Patch website drives a lot of readers to the site, but no one pays to be there. There's a lot of on-line arguing going on, and my editor spends a good amount of time playing on-line referee. "Tell people to leave two cents if they want to leave their two cents..." I said, trying to think of ways Patch could keep making money so that I could.

My editor ignored my suggestions. She just wanted to know if I could cover the meeting. The town sub-committee on Hurricane Irene was planning to listen to residents and business owners describe their seriously bad flood experiences. My editor said the meeting started at 7:30 and was likely to go to 10 p.m or later, on a school night. Oh boy, that sounded like fun. I could just imagine my kids rattling around the house, sweaty from football and water polo practice, cruising Facebook and iTunes and not doing their homework. But my editor was giving me a chance to write my last swan song. She added that she couldn't go to the meeting because she had to go to her son's back to school night. How could I say no? I wasn't happy that my stint with Patch was grinding to a halt---I don't make much money writing for Patch, but I like the steady drumbeat of a deadline. Writing under pressure is a great way to shatter writer's block. But the best part of writing for Patch was having a sharp, gracious editor to talk to and hash out story ideas with. Plus, cranking out stories gets your adrenaline pumping and makes the more leisurely pace of writing fiction and creative non-fiction that much more pleasurable. The yin of news reporting fueled the yang of creative writing. Now, the gig is over. I'm trying to take the advice I'm always doing out to my kids: When one door closes, another opens.

Before the door slammed shut, I agreed to go to the sub-committee meeting, knowing that the next morning, I'd be churning out copy instead of cooking. Armed with a bag of chocolate covered espresso beans, I spent two and a half hours at town hall, typing like a maniac, trying to make sense of tributaries, reservoirs, river basins, ponds, ground water, overland flow, flood plane storage, bridges, sewage, dredging, basements, and record rainfall, all of which would explain why our downtown flooded so badly during a tropical storm. Despite the espresso beans, I forgot to take pictures, but if you feel like reading about the collective stress of living through a flood in a small New Jersey town, click here.

This afternoon, I set about cooking for the holidays. Unfortunately, I had forgotten to buy sweet potatoes and I had no idea where the apricot brandy was. During Hurricane Irene, we lost power for several days and had to throw out everything in the refrigerator. The jar of orange marmalade I had bought to make Amy's sweet potato casserole last spring was gone. I looked in the pantry: There were three old cans of sweet potatoes. One can was starting to rust but the expiration date said October 16, 2013. That was my brother's birthday! To borrow an old Yiddish expression, it was bashert (destiny). We also had a package of graham crackers. I wasn't sure how old it was, but it didn't matter. Once you mix graham cracker crumbs with the amount of butter and brown sugar my mother-in-law's recipe calls for, it doesn't matter if you're cooking with dust.

Both Amy and Dorothy's recipes are below. L'shana Tova.

AMY'S SWEET POTATO CASSEROLE
5 pounds sweet potatoes
5 teaspoons butter
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup milk
1 cup Triple Sec or Apricot Brandy
1 jar of marmalade
cinnamon

Set oven to 350 degrees.
Boil sweet potatoes until soft. Remove skins.
Mash sweet potatoes with milk until smooth.
Add all the other ingredients, except cinnamon.
Put in a baking dish and then spread marmalade over the top and sprinkle with cinnamon.
Bake for 30 minutes.

DOROTHY'S SWEET POTATO CASSEROLE
Filling:
2 cups (one large can) of sweet potatoes
3/4 cup sugar
2 eggs, beaten
1/2 cup milk (I used skim)
3/4 stick butter, melted
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
1/2 teaspoons cinnamon

Topping:
1/3 cup brown sugar
3/4 stick melted butter
3/4 cup mashed graham crackers

Set oven for 400 degrees.
Mash sweet potatoes in food processor. Mix together sweet potatoes, butter, milk, sugar, nutmeg, cinnamon. Grease a casserole dish and pour in filling. Cook for twenty minutes.

While casserole is cooking, make the topping. (If you don't want to use graham crackers, just mix the brown sugar with the butter and pour it on top of the casserole). Mix the graham crackers with butter and brown sugar, take casserole out of the oven and cook for 10 more minutes.

Skip Plan C and Go Right to The Big C

Ah, summer time. The kids are away, swimming, hiking, studying screenwriting, eating new stuff and making their own beds (here's hoping, anyway.) I'm not teaching this summer so I have had the luxury of doing whatever the hell I wanted these past few weeks. I promised myself I would do a little work and not get swamped by domestic chores: I would write a short story (started it.) I would write an article (in the middle of it.) I would self-publish a book of recipes and essays called My Inner Fruitcake on Amazon (haven't even begun.) What I have done, besides sitting on the patio, paying bills, seeing doctors, submitting medical claims, muddling through Cutting For Stone and hiring a crew of painters to paint the basement, is watch a lot of TV, specifically, "The Big C."

Every summer, I get a mammogram, sonogram and pelvic sonogram. A lot of women I know schedule these appointments while the kids are away so that we can, as my sister-in-law says, make sure our lady parts are in working order, without having to worry about other people's feelings if the results aren't what we hoped for or expected. I had a couple of scary moments and in the end, everything was fine but while I was waiting for results and going back and forth to the city for tests and biopsies, I started watching "The Big C" on Showtime.

If you haven't watched this show, you are lucky, because now you can start! For the past ten days, my husband has come home from work, and there I've been, sipping a glass of sauvignon blanc, blissed out and laughing as Laura Linney, Oliver Platt, Idris Elba, Gabourey Sidibe, John Benjamin Hickey and Gabriel Basso make you believe that you are watching an extended family of smart, screwed-up people deal with the fact that Laura Linney's character, Cathy, has cancer and lives in Minnesota.

I know that sounds depressing, but this show is so funny, sharp, sad, sexy and thought-provoking, you won't be able to stop watching or thinking about it. At the end of every episode, I was laughing or crying. My friend Liz, a writer/artist/designer who runs the firm Elizabeth Conn Design,, told me about "The Big C." I have to admit, I was initially dubious. The premise sounded upsetting and besides, I've spent the past few years watching "Weeds" and couldn't bring myself to watch another show about a middle-aged mother on Showtime. "Nancy Botwin," Mary-Louise Parker's character on "Weeds," was the worst mother on TV but she was so much fun to watch. At the end of last season, "Nancy" chose Plan C, turned herself into the police for a murder her younger son had committed and went to prison. This season, she's living in a halfway house, her handsome, drug-dealing husband, "Esteban" is supposedly dead, her kids seem just fine, and I didn't care about the characters anymore. I needed a new viewing distraction so I started watching Laura Linney and Oliver Platt in "The Big C."

The show is addictive. Linney plays Cathy, a beautiful, blonde, 42-year old wife, mother and high school teacher who has stage four melanoma. (Linney is 47 in real life but easily passes for younger.) She initially doesn't tell anyone she loves about her diagnosis because she doesn't think they can handle it. Only her good-looking, thirtysomething oncologist knows what's going on. She keeps her illnesss from her handsome, homeless, bipolar brother, Sean (the awesome John Benjamin Hickey, who just won a Tony for his role in "The Normal Heart'), her husband Paul (Oliver Platt, overweight, self-conscious and unattractive but so funny, loving and sweet, you can see why Cathy adores him), her teenage son Adam (Gabriel Basso, really good and believable as a cute, confused 14 year old boy) and her favorite student, Andrea (Gabourey Sidibe, who was so beaten down, sad and vulnerable in "Precious" and is so wise, sassy and articulate here.) Eventually, Cathy tells her 79-year old neighbor, Marlene (Phyllis Somerville, beautiful and moving, even though she plays a racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic woman with Alzheimer's) and slowly starts to tell her family and students what is going on. Along the way, she has an affair with Idris Alba, who plays a charming, gorgeous artist with an English accent and great taste in women's scarves. Alba struts around in beautiful, linen shirts---that is, when he has his clothes on.

The first season of "The Big C" consisted of 13 episodes. The second season, which started a few weeks ago, has three so far. Alan Alda and Liam Neeson show up as men who try to cure Cathy, and Cynthia Nixon, looking skinny and vampy, appears as "Rebecca," a morally compromised, flirtatious pharmaceutical rep who is Cathy's best friend from college. Nixon's character is the polar opposite of her role as "Miranda" on "Sex and the City" and she is wonderful.

During the last ten days, I've watched every single episode of "The Big C." Yes, that's eight hours in front of the telly, hours when I could have been reading, writing and spending time with my loved ones. What can I say? Sometimes watching TV beats all else. The twelfth episode of season one was shocking. The thirteenth and final episode of season one made me bawl. One of the most memorable lines from the show is, "Getting old is a privilege."

If you haven't watched this show, you can watch the first episode free on line. Enjoy.