Jason’s cooking lesson was on Sunday this weekend. That’s because on Saturday, he had led an expedition of curious, adorable little children on an outing. The kids belonged to Jason’s Aunt Rose and her husband’s brother – in exchange for two hundred bucks (plus expenses), Jason and his girlfriend Paisley had agreed to baby sit the entire passel of them all day, thus providing both sets of parents a much-needed and affordable respite from those members of their huge broods who are still young enough to require constant supervision.
And on Sunday, Jason and I worked in my kitchen from about one until four in the afternoon, preparing a huge feast for those kids, their older siblings, their younger siblings and their parents – plus Paisley, of course, and Jason’s parents, too. The meal was based around that venerable staple of huge Italian Catholic families – pasta. True, Hank, my sister Rose’s husband, and his brother are Polish Catholics, and Hank’s brother’s wife is an Irish Catholic, but the venue for this big family meal was my house, and Rose, Jason’s father Rob Roy and I are Italian, and besides, everybody knows Italy has much better food than Poland or Ireland do. If you don’t believe that, visit those three countries and try the food before you write me a nasty e-mail, okay? What were Jason and I supposed to be fixing, anyhow – kielbasa and shepherd’s pie? Nonsense! We were preparing hand-made pasta, that’s what we were doing.
“So how did everything go yesterday?” I asked as Jason carefully assembled the pasta machine.
Jason shook his head, obviously a bit peeved at mention of his Saturday baby sitting gig.
“One of them disappeared when we went to Baskin-Robbins,” he griped. “It took us over half an hour to find him.”
“What happened?”
“Looks like,” Jason related as he gave the pasta machine’s handle a tentative crank, “he saw somebody walking a puppy on a leash outside the store. So he ran off to see it, naturally.”
“Oh, boy,” I sympathized, “you two were very brave, agreeing to take all those mischievous rug rats out of the house.”
“That’s not half of it,” Jason informed me dryly as we began breaking the first of four dozen free-range organic eggs into a mixing bowl. “When we took them to see ‘Fly Me to the Moon,’ Paisley and I spent the entire movie shuttling them back and forth between their seats and the bathroom. And then there was that thing at the petting zoo.”
“What thing at the petting zoo?”
“One of Hank and Rose’s kids put lipstick on the pig,” Jason grumbled as he cracked a handful of eggs against the mixing bowl a bit harder than was actually necessary. “Potbelly pig. He didn’t like it; raised a [expletive] ruckus. And when the manager saw that, he threw us out. Paisley and I had to improvise and fill up the rest of the two hours we were supposed to spend there.”
“What did you come up with?”
“We were driving around, trying to think of something, when Paisley spotted a pond in a park that had some ducks in it. You know – mallards. She said the males are colorful, and the ducklings can be cute. So we drove down the road a little farther to a country store, bought some loaves of bread and bags of popcorn, then went back to the park, unloaded all the kids, passed out shares of bread and popcorn, and told them to feed the ducks. It worked out pretty good – the ducklings were getting their flight feathers, but they were still cute, and as soon as the kids broke out the food, a bunch of Canada geese and mute white swans showed up, and the swans had some young with them, too, so it was, I donno, probably more entertaining for the kids than the [expletive] petting zoo, actually. Then, about twenty minutes into it, I realized we’d left one of the kids back at the store. Turned out the Jamaican guy tending the cash register kept him happy with a bag of Reese’s Pieces, so naturally, I had to bring back bags for everybody. I mean, yeah, the parents paid the expense bill, but damn – fourteen extra bags of candy, that they weren’t expecting, you know?” Jason shrugged, diffidently, considering his experience. “Huh! Putting lipstick on a pig,” he muttered, “what the [expletive] was that little [expletive] head thinking?”
“Probably just reacting to her environment,” I speculated. “Besides stuff about hurricanes, what else has she heard for the last week? ‘Lipstick on a pig’ this, ‘lipstick on a pig,’ that – if you were a little kid and all the adults around you were yakking about ‘lipstick on a pig,’ all the time, and every television and radio news program were constantly reporting about ‘lipstick on a pig,’ wouldn’t you wonder what strange, important and possibly magical things would happen if you, yourself, were to put some lipstick on a pig?”
“Sure,” Jason fumed as he opened a bag of organic Semola di Grano Duro flour, “and the strange, important, magical thing that happened was, we all had to leave the petting zoo before the llamas. Man,” Jason ruefully recalled, “you should have heard those ankle-biters wailing. I mean, it was totally off the [expletive] hook – they could see the [expletive] llamas, and they could see other kids petting them, and here they are, getting hauled out of the [expletive] petting zoo! So, wouldn’t you know it, one of them points at lipstick girl and starts yelling that it’s her fault the rest of them can’t pet the llamas, and the others went with the [expletive] program, so Paisley and I had to spend the rest of the day keeping her beloved brothers, sisters and cousins from beating the living [expletive] out of her!”
“Sounds to me,” I opined, “like typical behavior for children that age.”
“In that case, I ain’t havin’ no kids,” Jason muttered as he measured out the flour.
“Oh, don’t say that,” I advised. “You’ll probably change your mind when you get older.”
“Maybe,” Jason shrugged, “but what the [expletive]’s up with that ‘lipstick on a pig’ [expletive], anyway?”
“Well,” I began, “it all started when Sarah Palin said ‘You know what the difference is between a hockey mom and a pit bull?’ Then she gave the answer – ‘lipstick.’”
“Yeah,” Jason nodded as he drizzled in the Breton gray Atlantic sea salt I always use for dishes where the salt is dissolved in the food, “so what?”
“Then,” I continued, “a few days later, your man Barack Obama was filmed…”
“Filmed?”
“Oh, not really,” I conceded. “That’s just an outmoded figure of speech people still use, like ‘dialing’ a telephone number – hell, nobody actually dials numbers anymore, do they? He was taped, I guess, or digitally recorded maybe, talking to the voters about how McCain and Palin are going on about ‘change,’ trying to steal his thunder, and he said um… let me see if I remember the whole thing… yeah, okay, he said ‘You can put lipstick on a pig. It’s still a pig. You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change. It’s still gonna stink. We’ve had enough of the same old thing.’”
Jason looked up from opening a bottle of Solé still mineral water, which I use instead of spring or glacier water in various recipes to enhance flavors with its enhanced calcium and magnesium content. “No [expletive]! That’s what Obama said?”
“Yes,” I agreed, “it’s pretty incredible, the huge brouhaha the Republicans made about him using that particular outmoded figure of speech. McCain accused Obama of sexism, and, as I’m sure you heard, conservative commentators had a field day insulting Obama for allegedly insulting Palin.”
“Yeah, I know all that,” Jason sighed as he lowered the mixer tines into the eggs, flour and salt, turned the mixer on slow speed and began carefully dropping quarter-teaspoons of mineral water into the bowl, “but it seems so, I donno, so [expletive] retarded. That [expletive] Palin already called herself a [expletive] dog, didn’t she? I mean, according to her, here’s this pit bull that gets up in the morning and puts on some lipstick and magically transforms into a hockey mom, right?”
“Essentially,” I concurred. “That’s enough water. Turn up the mixer speed to medium.”
“Okay,” Jason grunted diffidently, folding his arms across his chest as he watched the mixer knead the pasta, “so [expletive] Sarah Palin tells the world she’s a [expletive] dog.”
“And a pit bull at that,” I pointed out, “not, for instance, something smart like a collie, or nice like a Labrador, or cute like a samoyed – no, she chose to tell the world that she’s an aggressive, not particularly intelligent breed of dog that’s raised by cruel, inhuman chumps like Michael Vick and brutally trained to tear other dogs to shreds while bloodthirsty pieces of human garbage bet on the outcome of the fight.”
“From what I’ve heard about her,” Jason observed as he shut off the pasta mixer, “maybe she ought to apologize to pit bulls. What are we making?”
“Agnolotti, tagliatelle and fusilli,” I answered as Jason transferred the pasta from the mixing bowl to a large flour-coated maple board positioned on the center of the kitchen island. “We’ll make the fusilli first. Yeah, Palin sure has that rough-tough-cream-puff style – like that business about her hunting moose.”
“Jesus,” Jason sneered as he locked the fusilli blade in place and loaded the pasta machine. “She shoots moose. What do you think that’s like, Tom – shooting a moose?”
“Well, it’s not like moose are quick and clever like elk, sneaky and wily like deer, impossibly agile like antelope, or hidden up in the high mountains on dangerous cliffs like bighorn sheep. When you find a moose, it’s going to be on pretty flat terrain, and what you see is a huge animal up to its knees in mud, grazing on aquatic vegetation. I mean, really, provided you’ve brought along a rifle that shoots bullets big enough to kill an animal that size, and you can aim the damn thing straight, you really might as well be shooting a cow.”
Jason frowned contemplatively as he turned the crank and fusilli started coming out of the pasta machine. “Only a total idiot could possibly think Obama was actually trying to insult Palin in the first place, but even if he was referring to her, aren’t pigs smarter than dogs?”
“Considerably,” I vouched as I started pressing garlic for the five kinds of pasta sauces scheduled for the upcoming extended family repast.
“So,” Jason queried, “you could argue that if you have someone who has voluntarily announced to the entire world that she’s some kind of vicious, stupid dog, and you call her a pig, you’re actually paying her a compliment, couldn’t you?”
“That line of reasoning,” I assessed, matter-of-factly, “makes about as much sense as any other I have heard applied to the issue – to tell the truth, it makes more sense than most.”
“What would happen,” Jason wondered aloud, “if you put lipstick on John McCain?”
“Well,” I averred, “with a wig and a decent gown, he could pass for J. Edgar Hoover in drag.”
“How about if you put lipstick, a wig and a gown on Joe Biden?”
“He’d still talk your ear off, no doubt about that,” I surmised. “I would imagine it would be like Bea Arthur lecturing you – at highly uncharacteristic length for Bea Arthur, by the way – on foreign, fiscal, societal, monetary, military and environmental policy, until you pass out from the effects of acute ennui.”
“And how about if you put lipstick, a wig and a gown on Barack Obama?”
“I’d be very careful about doing that,” I warned.
“Why?”
“He might not want to take them off. That’s enough fusilli. Start making the tagliatelle.”
“Where do you think,” Jason questioned, as he re-configured the pasta machine, “that whole expression ‘lipstick on a pig’ came from anyway?”
“Well,” I replied, “I think it probably came from the same bucolic, rustic, pastoral, rural American subculture that gave us gems like ‘you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear,’ ‘in a pig’s eye,’ and ‘don’t buy a pig in a poke.’ Whenever a good old country boy, say, someone like Fred Thompson, for example, wants to coin a pithy, memorable figure of speech, they go right to the barnyard for source material.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because, in many cases, those animals out there in the barnyard have more personality than most of the humans in the vicinity – especially in Fred’s case. Turn the crank a little bit slower; the tagliatelle’s coming out with cracks in it.”
“Okay. Sorry. So pigs have a lot of personality, and that’s why they get so many sayings and stuff made up about them?”
“Sure.”
“And dogs, too, I guess,” Jason mused as he arranged the tagliatelle in neat piles beside the heaps of fusilli. “There’s stuff like ‘I wouldn’t send a dog out on a night like this,’ ‘every dog has his day,’ ‘dog days of summer,’ and ‘dog’s dinner.’” Jason frowned and stopped turning the pasta machine crank. “What’s ‘a dog’s dinner,’ mean, anyway?”
“A complete mess,” I explained as Jason resumed cranking out the pasta. “As in, ‘George W. Bush has made a dog’s dinner of American finance, economics, social programs, emergency preparedness and foreign policy.’”
“Hah!” Jason japed, “You better not say that in front of Aunt Rose and Uncle Hank.”
“And don’t I know it,” I agreed mordantly, “I bet they’ll stand foursquare behind Old King Pumpkinhead until the last second of the last minute of his pathetic and disgusting reign.”
“Yeah,” Jason smiled ironically, “it’s [expletive] amazing, that’s what it is, when you think about how Bush absolutely [expletive] them, and everybody like them, for Christ’s sake, and yet, for some reason – I don’t know what – maybe fear of admitting, after eight miserable [expletive] years, that they were like, completely, utterly, totally wrong – they still stick up for him.
“Okay,” I interjected, “enough tagliatelle – now start making the agnolotti.”
“You know,” Jason scowled as he changed blades again and a dark thought crossed his mind, “it just makes me [expletive] sick to listen to them spout all those lame excuses they make for how the Republicans screwed up everything – it’s just incredible.”
“What it is, cool dude,” I informed my dear nephew, “is a perfect specimen of what they call putting lipstick on a pig.”