First and foremost, an example of what is not comedy. To anyone else at LuthorCorp who thinks it would be funny to play a little joke like this on me...it’s not. Trust me. Anyone who was at work today and was within earshot of me, think of the tone of my voice and tell me if I was amused. Or as Paul Westerberg said, look me in the eye, then tell me that I’m satisfied. In short, just don’t do it.
What is comedy? My refrigerator, for starters. My refrigerator is a colossal freaking laugh. It’s one of those nasty little urban fridges for a nasty little urban kitchen. To be fair, it is a vast improvement over the first fridge the landlord gave us, which used to frost up about six minutes after we’d finished defrosting it, and which nearly broke my foot when the door fell off its hinges. When the nicest thing you can say about your fridge is “the door never falls off!,” then you know you have sunk to Bukowski-like depths, fridge-wise. The fridge, it fills me with shame. I couldn’t step back far enough to take the whole fridge in one shot, so I had to opt for pressing my bottom against the edge of the kitchen table and taking in as much of a shot as I could. Well, geez, Jen, if you’re so embarrassed, why post these at all? Because I am hopeless in the face of peer pressure, that’s why.
Without further ado, let us check out the freezer. Note the three loaves of bread, the quart of stock with the popped-off lid, and the pound of salted butter that Lloyd bought by mistake, and which I will never use, yet somehow refuse to throw away.
Next comes the freezer door, full of lime leaves, pignoli, pumpernickel flour and proper butter.
From here we move to the fridge, home of two and a half-dozen eggs and a big-ass capon.
Jen, do you really use all that stuff on the door? Damn right we do.
And last but not least, my favorite fridge accoutrement: a photograph taken by my friend and former colleague Jim Lee, who toiled with me at the newspaper in my little whitebread redneck mountain town in the Poconos. The lovely young woman in the photo is Miss Scranton/Wilkes-Barre; the scene is the 1988 Greene-Dreher-Sterling Fair. That is ice cream she is eating, by the way. I will refrain from making an easy and obvious joke, but you may certainly feel free to do so. It *is* Comedy Night here at PTMYB, after all.
It’s a Soup Lady sighting! Welcome back, stranger.
I guess I should fess up. Little whitebread redneck mountain town in the Poconos would be Honesdale, Pennsylvania, the county seat of Wayne County, the northeasternmost point of PA. I ran screaming out of Honesdale at my graduation from high school, only to return for a year to work on the newspaper and ostensibly save money for graduate school. Life, of course, had other plans, which led me to New York.
Useless Trivia 101: About two weeks ago Honesdale was the subject of City Confidential on A&E. (In 1986 a young woman died in a drunk-driving accident, in which her boyfriend was at the wheel. His blood alcohol level was under the legal limit for DUI, so he was convicted on a lesser charge, one that would have sent him to prison for a year. The night before his sentencing, his dead girlfriend’s brother showed up at his house, supposedly to “just talk,” and ended up shooting him in the head four times. This was the actual subject of City Confidential.) It was very weird to hear Paul Winfield referring to Honesdale as “Paradise in the Poconos.” Those of us unlucky enough to spend our adolescences there knew better than that.