Suburban Kamikaze

How many 13-year-olds does it take to make a pot of coffee?

                                                                         

Scenes from a remote tropical location where one suburban mommy has gone to reconnect with her close friends, but has instead been left babysitting their posse of 13-year-old boys while they are at work.

Somewhere in South Florida, 8:17 a.m.:
The Mommy/Houseguest has just been awakened by three teenage boys who burst into the room where she is sleeping on a fold-out couch.  The room also houses a home office and the boys have their glassy-eyed sights on the electronics.

They will spend the next six hours navigating three computers, a game system and an assortment of multi-level, multi-player pirate and baseball games. They will also walk all over the guest sheets. 

Mommy/Houseguest: GET OUT OF HERE!

Boys: When are you getting up? We need to get on the computer.

Mommy/Houseguest: You have got to be kidding. I am going to kill all of you as soon as I have had my coffee.

Boys:  So you're going to get up?

Mommy/Houseguest: Get out of here. Make me a pot of coffee and I will think about it.

The boys leave and clamor into the kitchen, where they crowd around "Mr. Coffee" and stare at his intimidating array of features, which include exactly one button. It is labeled "start."

Boy 1: "I've watched my dad do it before, but there are measurements involved."

Boy 2: "I am not responsible for any damage to the coffee maker."

Boy 1: "You put, like, water in, and you put a filter in there..."

Boy 2: "I know a secret way, but it involves maple syrup."

Boy 3: "Where's the on-off button?"

Boy 1: "Why is there a hole in the lid do you think?"

Boy 3: "That's where the coffee goes, you dolt."

Boy 1: "O.K., there should be like a box of - I found the coffee filters. They're wrap-around.  You know how to work wrap-around coffee filters?"

Boy 3: "We have no freaking idea how to make coffee."

The Mommy/Houseguest cannot take it anymore. How did she and her friends manage to raise such incompetents? She sighs deeply, rolls her eyes and heads to the kitchen, where she is greeted with enthusiasm, followed by a stampede.

Boy 3: "Wait! she's up! We don't have to."

Exit boys.

No rhinestone unturned

The future famous film director and the future restaurant critic cannot believe their luck.

They have stumbled upon a kiosk dazzling with rhinestone-spotted bangles and a rainbow of Indian scarves.

"OHMYGOD. Ohmygod," they repeat. "Look at THIS. I need this."

Also: "Oh my God."

"I think India is my favorite country," gushes the 10-year-old.

 "I LOVE these," she says with a sudden intake of breath as she reaches for one shiny thing after another. 

Her 11-year-old accomplice nods her head in agreement, but she is speechless as she runs her hands over a display of rhinestone-dotted bracelets.

I do not think they can hear me anymore.

They touch everything.

They choose matching bracelets in lime-green and yellow, an heiress-sized blue and green rhinestone ring shaped like a flower and a jeweled hair clip.

They look at me hopefully.

Being "future," their chosen careers are not in what you would call the salaried stage.

It is my money we will be spending today.

Putting the "pool" into pool table

In hindsight, it probably wasn't a good idea to let the girls give the rabbit a bath while I was distracted by the process of being edited and editing simultaneously.

It happens that way sometimes, and deadlines do not wait for bunny baths, as they say in the newsroom.

I was working with one editor trying to get a radio essay cut down to the allotted time limit when the second editor asked me to edit a news story.

No big deal. After more than a decade as a work-at-home mother, I can multi-task with my eyes closed. "Yes, I can!" is my motto. Also: "Can't You See That I Am Working?"

The 10-year-old and her 11-year-old accomplice, plus one very unhappy bunny, were upstairs in the master bathroom.

I was on the telephone with a reporter trying to get to the bottom of a situation in which law enforcement officials were being accused of helping to turn people in to immigration authorities in violation of a sanctuary ordinance - which is completely irrelevant except to demonstrate that I was not editing a simple story about giant vegetables or weather-related mishaps.

We were getting close to the end of the story when I heard a sound like -- the only way I can think to describe it is that it had the sound of rushing water. Like it would sound if you were standing next to a downspout in a torrential rain and the downspout, instead of being outside, was inside.

Kind of like that.

I listened for a few seconds in confusion. Yes, the girls were engaged in a water-based activity, and yes it sounded like water, but it was coming from the living room and the girls were still upstairs. This is the sort of keen, deductive reasoning that I provide for a fee as a freelance editor and journalist.

It was coming from the pool table.

"OH MY GOD," I screamed into the telephone to a young reporter who will be lucky to ever regain full hearing in that ear.

It was raining on the pool table. Hard. It was coming through the recessed light fixtures, splashing onto the felt and through to the floor below.

Upstairs, the unhappy bunny was still covered in soap, the girls were oblivious and the bathroom was suspiciously dry.

A full debriefing, however, later revealed that there had been a minute or two when the 10-year-old stepped out to change her clothes, the 11-year-old was distracted and a spray nozzle was left sitting on the ledge at full stream, very near - or possibly in - a weak spot in the wall that I had temporarily patched by shoving a plastic newspaper bag into it.

It was a harrowing failure of imagination on my part, particularly given the track record of these two girls, whose list of extravagantly executed bad ideas is too long to include here, except to say that they generally begin with a grand plan and a break in supervision and end with cleaning products.

In between are vaseline, paint, assorted bathroom products, a secret "bake sale," a makeover/runaway adventure, a bottle of glue and a variety of artistic undertakings in which the concept of "canvas" is enlarged to include walls, pool decks and home furnishings.

In fact, now that I think about it, flooding the pool table hardly seems worth mentioning.

Photo: An especially tricky shot.

How to ruin a perfectly good bag of caramels

In 17 Exceptionally Sticky Steps...

You will need:

One 10-year-old girl
Her accomplice
One Roald Dahl cookbook
One bag of perfectly good caramels
2 egg whites (Hint: 1 dozen eggs yields 1 1/2 egg whites.)
As many baking sheets as you have
Food coloring - as much as you have
1/2 cup of sugar.
Patience
Paper towels

1. Purchase Roald Dahl's "Revolting Recipes" cookbook during temporary judgment lapse in bookstore.

2. Encourage "creativity" in children at the expense of home furnishings.

3. Allow 10-year-old daughter and 11-year-old sidekick with a long history of food-based performance art to choose a recipe.

4. Shop for ingredients for Stickjaw for Talkative Parents, from "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory."

5. Give in to girls' demands for unsupervised kitchen access.

6. Call out "is everything okay in there?" occasionally, but provide no other interference, no matter how many times you hear "oops," "uh-oh," or "whoopsy daisy."

7. Explain to skeptical husband that encouraging independence is an important part of parenting.

8. Explain to skeptical husband that they have promised to clean everything up themselves.

9. Insist that teenage brother "leave the girls alone" in very firm voice. Repeat.

10. Remind girls to be sure that they have preheated the right oven.

11. Baking time: 1 hour, plus one extra hour for the time in which the Stickjaws sit in bottom oven while empty top oven bakes at 250 degrees.

12. Repeat until all ingredients have been spilled or used up.

13. Remove from oven and cool on every available kitchen surface.

14. Clean "meringue" from every available kitchen surface.

15. Engage in futile search for caps to food coloring bottles.

16. Feign smile while cautiously biting into oddly-colored meringue-encased caramels.

17. Arrange several oddly-colored, meringue-encased caramels on a plate, while surreptitiously disposing of as many as possible.

Enjoy!

The all talk diet

The Slutty Executive has gotten herself into another phallic-shaped vegetable cured in vinegar and spices.

"I need your help," she says. "As someone who has a track record of promising sexual favors you have no intention of delivering."

"Hey," I object. "That is not fair."

For the record, I had no idea that my X-rated Christmas poem would be taken as anything other than what it was; a bit of holiday fun in which I feigned a rhyming interest in committing a variety of lewd-sounding but completely fictitious acts. It was weeks later that I realized Mr. Kamikaze was waiting patiently to see how I planned to incorporate my ice skates into our love life.

"Yes," Executive interrupts, "but there was also that time after the sex toy party when you told him that your order had been held up by Customs because it was illegal in some states."

"You should have seen his face when I came home empty-handed," I say. "I had to say something."

"That's my point," says the Slutty Executive. "You say things. But you don't do things."

But this time it was the Executive whose promises had gotten her into trouble. She'd decided to raise the incentive in her husband's weight loss effort. Take it off, she'd told him, and she'd take it off too - and she'd bring a friend. 

It was the weight loss plan Mr. Executive had waited for his entire life. The South Beach Diet Three-Way. He lost 10 pounds on the spot. And another 10 before bedtime. He was shrinking before her eyes and she was starting to panic.

"You've got to help me," she says.

"Oh no," I say. "I am saving myself for Daniel Craig's sister."

"Does Daniel Craig even have a sister?" she asks.

"You better hope so," I say.

Photo: Does Daniel Craig even have a sister?

Withering Heights

Having never had any, I do not buy into the idea of natural ability.

I am not someone, for example, who can simply fire up the grill and start throwing meat on. I need to know, What Would Wolfgang Puck Do?

There is so much I need to know. I clip advertisements for schools that promise to teach Landscaping 101 or The Art of the Lobster. I take French classes so that I can learn to speak to the babysitter. When my husband brought home a pool table, I brought home a pool shark.

My game is still not very good, but now I can say things like "Are we playing bar rules or tournament rules?"  Also, I use a lot more chalk.

When I decided, like so many other middle-aged women, that I was going to take up figure skating, I got a coach. Then I found another coach for off-ice training.  This didn't really make me any better a skater, but I learned a lot about figure skating. For example, most figure skaters are 8 years old.  

Still, it would be an exaggeration to say, as certain members of my family do, that I would need a private coach to walk around the block.

I know how to walk around the block. I want to learn how to walk around the block in these.

I told myself when I moved to Chicago three years ago, that I would learn to be the big city girl I'd always pretended to be. And to my credit, I fell right into the habit of shopping on Michigan Avenue and spending the grocery money on theater tickets.

But still, I felt like a fraud.

I've seen one too many episodes of "Sex and the City" to pretend I am getting away with it.

Because I have been doing it all in comfortable shoes.

It is not a matter of not having the right equipment. There is plenty of high-altitude footwear in my closet.

But between the closet and the front door, I have a million excuses to take them off: I might have to run to catch a train, they make too much noise, I will fall through a grate, break a heel and plunge into the river. It could happen. 

And so I head out in my city-fabulous clothes looking like a cross between Carrie Bradshaw and Nurse Ratched. But it occurs to me that it might not be my fault. Maybe what I am lacking is not courage, but expertise.

With a little coaching, perhaps, I could gain the confidence I need to ramp up and head out.

It turns out I am not alone. There are enough of us to have spawned a whole new advice genre, including videos, books, blog testimonials, and - in some cities  - high heel exercise classes.

Seriously. How frivolous cool is that?

Uncontainable

Dear Container Store:

I know you mean well, with your dozen varieties of hooks and $49 cereal sorters, but this just isn't going to work.

It's not you, and I apologize if I gave you the wrong idea when we first met in that gleaming Dallas showroom.

You caught me looking. I admit I was checking you out.  There was something seductive about all that sparkling acrylic, each piece nestled suggestively into the next. The collapsible come-on of the day-glo laundry sorters took my breath away.

It was as close to obscene as a storage system could come.  

And then there were all those other women, hanging on your every closet accessory. They couldn't get enough. They were three-deep at the registers, their faces flush with your shiny, stackable promises.

God, how I wanted to believe.

I ran my fingers over your nested bins. My pulse raced at your take-charge innovations for taming closet clutter. I found myself reaching for your pantry devices. I was overcome with desire for things I had never felt before. I was ready to take you home, throw open the dark recesses of my basement, open my drawers and let you into places so long neglected, I no longer knew what they contained. 

But I knew, even as I gasped at the sight of your sleekly muscular shelving unit, that we were not right for each other.

I have to be honest with myself. The organizational deficit in my house is not that it isn't colorful enough. I could line the hallways end to end with fuschia and melon laundry bins but it would not increase the chances of a dirty sock ending up in one. 

It is not your fault. The underside of the couch emits a strange gravitational pull. It is stronger than both of us. We can't fight it.

The garbage bag under the sink, on the other hand, seems to project an outwardly directed force that prevents trash from reaching its interior, while the inside of the pantry looks as if we hired squirrels to open our cereal boxes. Do you really think your gleaming polycarbonate cannisters could make a difference here? 

We would have had a weekend together at most. And then, we'd only end up blaming each other.

It doesn't take much to see that the storage problems of one suburban household don't amount to a cannister of beans in this crazy world. Someday you'll understand that.  

We'll always have Dallas.

SK

Photo (top): Here's looking at you, lid.

Photo (right): Of all the hampers in all the stores, in all the world, she had to crawl into mine.

P.S.: The Container-Store Guy Wants to Be My Therapist?

Bravo, bravo, bravissimo

I hadn't even pulled off the tags yet, when this story from the Dallas Morning News caught my attention.

It was the 40th anniversary of the protest outside the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City that gave rise to the concept of "bra burning."

"Concept" because apparently no bras were actually set aflame during the protest, but were thrown into a garbage can along with other symbols of female oppression that included high heels, tweezers, bras, girdles and corsets. 

Meanwhile, my sisters-in-law, my sister-in-law's sisters and I spent the weekend tearing up the Texas asphalt in search of retail opportunities and I had struck the mother lode at a department store lingerie sale.

The haul included one pink, one ivory, one black and one black and white "balconette," which is like a slutty little balcony for your breasts.

As a symbol of oppression, the bra has long since outlived its usefulness. Better to set fire to your family's laundry than your own.

Still, like an ill-fitting bra hook, the irony left me with a teeny tiny stab of something like shame.

In lifting my profile, had I let down the side? How many bras are you allowed to own before someone comes around to revoke your feminist credentials? And do I get any credit for not buying the matching underwear?

There are no brunettes in Dallas

You cannot spend more than a few hours in this city before you begin to wonder how you would look as a blonde.

The women here have the most beautiful blonde on blonde highlights. The reflected light alone is more sun than I have felt on my face in three years of living in Chicago. You can get a pretty good tan just basking in line at Starbucks.

It is a big weekend here deep in the heart of Texas. Because everything here really is bigger. The sky is huge, the streets are as wide as parking lots and the parking lots, well, they are big.

I know this because my sister-in-law, my other sister-in-law and my sister-in-law's many, many sisters and I have spent the weekend driving around in big cars shopping for really, really big purses. Those New York city women have nothing on Dallas when it comes to the size of their handbags. 

Which may explain why my sister-in-law, Pamela Ewing, decided that the occasion of her daughter's high school graduation called for a really, really big party. So we are all here; my mom, my brothers, their wives, their kids, my kids and my sister-in-law's mom and dad, four sisters, a brother, their spouses and their children.

I know it sounds like too many people. But the truth is, it didn't really start to go over the top until she began inviting the neighbors. Which can seem like a really good idea after your third can of Coors Light. Or so I imagine. I do not share my sister-in-law's taste in beer. 

We are packed in wall to wall, sprawled on couches and sleeping bags and air mattresses and enjoying the kind of family camaraderie that you can only reach after three days of sharing a bathroom with 11 people.

But a hotel would be out of the question. Because in between the shopping and the fireworks and the frosty beers on the patio, the Iowans whip up what must be hundreds of pounds of potato salad and barbecue chicken and pork tenderloins with raspberry sauce and pulled pork with an honest-to-God prize winning barbecue sauce that must be prepared in secret, cookies and pancakes and scrambled eggs and bacon and something called "walking tacos" that really deserves an entry all to itself.

They are a machine in the kitchen and nobody ever stops eating or drinkng long enough to think about a hotel.

We the family,

in order to survive the holiday weekend, for which some of us have endured interminable flights and are sleeping on couches, to establish a new record for the continuous consumption of snack food, provide for the equitable distribution of bathroom time and promote the falsehood that it is a good idea to pack 27 family members under one roof, do ordain and establish this Constitution:

Article I

The family shall make no law abridging the freedom of other family members to shoot their mouths off, spill family secrets and otherwise embarrass themselves and others in ways that can be retold at future family gatherings. This includes the right of uppity Miami women to make Midwestern jokes in a room full of her brother's Iowan in-laws. She should not, however, expect anyone to come rushing to her defense should they turn on her in one corn-fed mass.

Article II

A well-lubricated family being necessary to the sanity of any gathering that includes more than four people who still remember the name of your ninth-grade crush and are not afraid to use it, the right of the adults to keep and bear drinks shall not be infringed at any hour. 

Article III

The quartering of more than 27 family members under one roof shall be discouraged, even if you do have a tent in the back yard. 

Article IV

The right of the little sisters to be secure in their suitcases against the unreasonable searches and seizures of their belongings by their brothers and cousins shall not be violated, except when no one is looking.

Article V

No family member shall be forced to give evidence against themselves with regard to who drank the last lime-flavored Bud Light. No person shall be held to answer for having consumed the last lime-flavored Bud Light except on a presentment or indictment by a Grand Jury consisting of whoever made the last beer run.  

Article VI

In all family disagreements, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public airing of the most embarrassing things they have said or done since high school.  Photographic evidence is encouraged.

Article VII

Shopping by Jury: When the value in controversy shall exceed $25, a jury of your sisters-in-law shall be called to answer the question of How Many Purses are Too Many. The opinion of brothers, husbands and other male family members shall be inadmissible.

Article VIII

It shall be considered cruel and unusual punishment to impose upon the adult women of the family the obligation to undergo continuous "makeovers" at the hands of the 10-year-old girls. Uncle Mike, however, is fair game as he seems to enjoy it and looks good in a tiara. 

Article IX

The enumeration of these rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the family. Also, the Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Championship does not constitute a real sport  for the purposes of monopolizing the television.

Article X

The secret ingredient of Grandma Saul's potato salad is pototoes.* 

Photo: Dibs on the air mattress.

*Aunt Cindy gave it up. Next we are sending her in for Bob's prize-winning barbecue sauce.