Jodorowsky's THE HOLY MOUNTAIN: perfect change of pace viewing for the holidays!I'll be back fairly soon after the Thanksgiving break, ready to once more regale you with pop culture drivel and such, and hopefully I'll be feeling better by then. For me being in Connecticut is a boring ordeal, but here's the breakdown on my holiday thus far:
- In an unusual and welcome change of pace, there was none of the long-standing family dysfunction that regularly mars my time visiting the place where I grew up. I have no way to explain why this year was different, but I definitely enjoy being at home without tension, relentless criticism and recrimination hanging in the air. Let's hope this keeps up as a standard state of affairs.
- This year's Turkey Day feast was a mouth-watering, stomach-filling, five-pound-turd-producing triumph that saw my mom at the very top of her culinary game. We're talking a perfectly-cooked and juicy Butterball turkey, exquisite sausage stuffing, noodles cooked in rich turkey stock, homemade cranberry sauce, and perhaps the finest green bean and dried onions casserole I have ever had the pleasure of eating. This year I managed to devour three helpings of this excellence over the course of several hours, the kind of holiday-appropriate eating I used to be able to accomplish in my youth as a matter of course, and damn my burgeoning Turkey Day girth if it didn't fill me with near-erotic pleasure.
- In anticipation of how weak this year's holiday television marathons would be (they get worse every year) I brought a number of DVDs with me that my mom and I would most likely enjoy, and my choices proved sound. We saw THE COURT JESTER (1955) with Danny Kaye (one of my favorite movies), the surprisingly good NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM, and the Wanda Sykes comedy performance video, SICK & TIRED. That last one came as a real surprise to my mom, an aging Southerner whose tolerance of raunchiness and vulgarity decreases at an alarming rate as each year passes (yet she somehow spawned me, so go figure), and she nearly laughed until she puked when exposed to Wanda's singular take on the world at large. Many of the sentiments espoused jibed with mom's viewpoint (although the segment about how the girls in porno look like they're on FEAR FACTOR when they eat each other's pussies touched on things of which she has no knowledge and that she adamantly seeks to keep it that way) and the bit about the "detachable pussy" caused my mom to shriek with unbridled laughter like I have not witnessed since I can't remember when. Consequently, my mom now counts herself as a full-fledged Wanda Sykes fan and eagerly awaits Christmas, when I'll be running another of her concerts in the TV room. My mom had a rough life and as she gets older she's a tough audience for comedy, so seeing her totally lose it over a comedian was quite gratifying and I intend to find stuff to make her laugh as often as possible from now on.
- Thanks to a very bad chest cold that reared its ugly head on Wednesday morning and escalated without mercy thereafter, I was up until well past 5AM this morning barking like a goddamned dog and coughing up things that I swear bounced when they hit the tissues. Things are clearing up slowly, but of course it would be my luck to get sick during what's supposed to be a four-day holiday. Oh, well...
So with that in mind, we'll soon cross paths again.
My wife has led me to believe that saying "stuffing" instead of "dressing" is some kind of whites-only thing. And she ridicules me when I accidentally revert to the former.
ReplyDeleteGoing to have to use this as Exhibit A that the terms are fully interchangeable between the races.
Of course, the risk of doing so is delaying my next bout of nookie by at least a day, so maybe I'll let it slide...
Deacon, it's funny you should bring this up. My mom, who was raised in the deep south, was discussing this with an equally aged friend who is while and also grew up in the deep south, and she says that the use of "dressing" as a term rather than "stuffing" in a regional thing. She grew up with "dressing" in common use, as did her pallid friend, and it wasn't until the two of them left the south that they encountered "stuffing" as the blanket norm. And her friend says that where she grew up the two terms were used to differentiate between that which was cooked inside the bird and that which was cooked separately in a pan as surplus.
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