Pleasantville

When Sue was in seventh grade she took Home Economics. The first half of the semester was spent watching movies about procreation and the lady with no arms who drives with her feet and has a good attitude.

The second part of the term was the practicum. Socks were darned and hole-in-ones (AKA 'bulls-eyes')were constructed on the white Amana stove-tops using Wonder bread and eggs from Mrs. Reed's own backyard.

The satisfaction Sue got from flipping that piece of bread over and making her own breakfast was immense. At home she wasn't really allowed to touch ANYTHING, because her dad was very worried that any of his belongings would be ruined, so at 13, Sue had yet to change a channel on the television, or put an album on the stereo. She most certainly had never turned on an oven or used a mixer.

So when she slid the spatula underneath and turned it to reveal the whitecooked just through enough to hold it into the center of the buttered toast, she had a vision. A vision of herself in a tiny kitchen in New York, cooking a meal after a long day in the office of somewhere literary and elegant. Beige leather. Boxes tied in pink grosgrain and delivered to her Central Park-facing desk.

By the time she was a senior, she and Larry had already talked about getting married and she had started trying to decide which tract of the new development next to the mall they should move into after graduation.

Mrs. Reed would have been very proud of how well Sue adapted to the drudgery of mending all the metaphoric socks and making the equivalent of a bulls-eye three times per day for four people for over 13 years which meant somewhere in the neighborhood of 14,000 skillets to clean and counters to wipe after the last dish had been loaded.

Mrs. Reed would have been proud. Not Larry.

Larry called her lazy and told her she forgot the baseboards (she didn't forget) and that he preferred his chicken tacos with cheddar and not jack cheese and why did she always leave the separated laundry on the floor instead of taking it in and out of the basket (redundant and who comments on other people's chore sensibilities, anyways?)

It turned out that all those dinner dishes were perfect training for Sue's part-time gig at the Waffle House. The mats are a trick, with her slipped disc, and cleaning the toilets is her least favorite part of the job, but at least it's something, she tells herself when she takes the Advil at the end of the night and turns on the heating pad.

At least it's something.

Sue Gets Paper (work)

"I need your name, an ID number, and a copy of a current utility bill as proof of address." That's what the receptionist said to Sue this morning when she got to the front of the line that began forming at the front of the St. Vincent de Paul Food Pantry an hour before the stocky woman in the floral print skirt unlocked the glass door and propped it open with a sandbag.

It's what the clerk at the Department of Public Welfare had asked for the week before when she applied for rent assistance and food stamps. Also, the librarian, when she went to get a card to avail herself of the free internet services and computer workshops.

Had ANYTHING been in her name at all, she might not have been at their mercy, she felt like screaming, but silly old Sue had truly believed that staying home with the girls would turn out just fine so she never really questioned Larry being the only one to sign the papers. It worked that way for all the other moms on the block.

Larry is a real prick, sure, but he has a good job so there was no reason for her to go back to work when the girls were born. He's regional manager of a furniture chain and she gets got to pick out a new couch or armoire every Christmas. Things were great, financially. Plus, she figured, if they ever split up, she'd get half the house and the assets. She'd never thought about what happens if your husband leaves without bothering with the divorce part. He's still legally on the hook for all the payments, but he likes delaying them a bit, just enough for the creditors or mortgage company to start calling, which sends her blood pressure through the roof.

The good news is that since he hasn't made it official, she still has health insurance even if she doesn't have cash for the co-pays.  If she has a heart attack and lives through it, she won't have to declare bankruptcy.

Banana Bread. No. Really.

I worked for a freakishly rich family once who had a nanny, a chef, two maids, and this girl named Meredith who was an aspiring actress (Notebook) who came once a week to put pictures in photo albums. They were pretty self-made and not celebrities, did normal family things, and were as WASP-y as it gets. Where they were excessive was on staff. One of us for every one of them.

I replaced a girl whose previous job was asst. pastry chef at Spago so supposedly this is Sherry Yard's recipe although I've Googled the shit out of a bunch of connected words and cannot confirm this to be true. It's worth noting that there aren't that many recipes using mascarpone, which makes me believe it is indeed a unique spin, and that the Sarah girl was a goody-goody, but not a liar.

She told me to that get the kids to love me, I should make them this banana bread. The mascarpone and sour cream make it like a cake, not a quick bread. It makes a lot and you will house every bit of it, sometimes with butter, heated up in the oven, sometimes with honey-roasted peanut butter whipped with cream cheese or whatever. You can maybe give a little to someone you like so they think you're a person who has some secrets to tell them about life.

Those children were entitled shitheads, who were only ever going to love prissy Sarah and her ribbon headbands, but she was right about the bread, and now that I'm a mom and I'm faced with about 40 rotten bananas a month, here is where you put them.

preheat oven to 375

2 sticks butter, softened
1 1/4 cups sugar (I know. Beauty is pain)
1/2 tsp. each, cinnamon, nutmeg, ground clove
2 large eggs, room temperature
2 cups flour
1 tsp. baking powder (Rumford is the only one I can't actually taste)
1 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 cup sour cream, room temperature
1/2 cup mascarpone
2 bananas

I don't use nuts but if that's something you enjoy, don't use more than a 1/4 cup or it might affect the texture. Stay moist.

With a mixer or if you're fancy, IN a mixer, cream butter and sugar for 3 minutes until well-combined.

Scrape down sides of bowl and add spices. Add eggs one at a time.

In separate bowl, mix flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.

Add to butter/sugar mix in stages. Don't overwork.

Fold in sour cream and mascarpone.

Puree bananas however you see fit. Smooth, no chunks.

Fold into batter, again, be gentle. No overworking.

Spray 2 loaf pans or a 9 x 13 baking dish with evil death spray (Pam or something like it) This is why it was invented. Butter will dry the edges out in a not-good way.

Pour batter into dish or dishes

Bake until slightly set in the center. This will not carry-over cook by much so between 35 and 50 minutes depending on the size pan and type oven.

$30 Carrot Waffles

Sue is married to Larry, who left her a few months ago for Gloria. Didn't divorce her, just took the new truck and moved into Gloria's condo on the bay, leaving Sue at home with her two daughters, Cindy and Wendy. If Larry were a decent fellow, he'd give Sue some money or sign the divorce papers allowing her to apply and receive social services like food stamps.

Larry is an asshole. So when Sue goes to the local welfare office she is told that on paper she has too much money to qualify for any assistance. Today's funny joke comes at the expense of our girl who only has $11 in the bank with the mortgage due next week, and Larry is on a fishing trip, and not returning calls.

Thank goodness Sue's daughters are in middle school and can be taken care of by the public education system while she goes and gets a job with her multitude of coding experience. Or that dental hygienist program that Larry wouldn't pay for, for fear she wouldn't be home to make his dinner. She can easily lean right the fuck into that shit, AMIRITE?


Okay but see really Sue ends up at the Waffle House off exit number 3 in Bumfuck, because luckily Larry's sister knows what a shithead her brother is, and as senior waitress and sometime night manager, she is able to get Sue a dish-washing gig on the weekends. This is also pretty great since she gets a shift meal. It hardly matters to her that it's whatever the cooks deemed too rotten to throw onto the brunch buffet.

My Name is Sue, How Do You Do?

The thing about a restaurant is you have to have a dishwasher. Not a machine. That's the easy part.  Finding the person to put the plates and glasses and silverware onto the trays to send through. Who will also put all those dishes back onto shelves and behind the bar. Then fill the pans with ice because the sous chef is always magically doing the produce order during this part of prep, peel the case of potatoes between washes, and clean the vomit from the bachelorette party off the bathroom floor, walls and toilets. There are 20 other tasks the dishwasher is laden with during the course of a shift, and the finale is dragging several 30 lb. rubber mats covered with the scraps of the entire service out into the alley to spray and scrub clean. You let these dry while you mop. Sometimes you get to leave them for the am person, sometimes you have to drag the wet mats back into place.

It SUUUUUUCCKKKSSS to be the person who does this, but it makes you the unsung hero of the restaurant business because no place with barf on the walls is getting past Yelp these days.

You'd think this person would be one of the first considered. When building, when hiring, when planning menus and deciding what kind of service you're going to have. That's a funny joke.

The dishwasher is usually hired eleven minutes before the soft opening after somebody's cousin or brother flaked during menu-testing. I've worked for chefs who were in the dining room drinking wine while I hurled pans across the kitchen into the sink because they couldn't be bothered to lead their kitchen (thanks Lenny Rede) and I've found myself dragging those filthy mats outside plenty of times
because a kitchen is a kitchen and shit has to get cleaned no matter your rank. (Chefs find a way to avoid this always, though. Cop to it, you dicks, you do)

The dishwasher is not always named Hector.

I want y'all to meet Sue.

Hector Goes to College

That's a joke.

Hector being able to afford college or having the time to go acquire skills so he isn't a lowly $8 an hour you-deserve-it-for-being-an-immigrant dishwasher* anymore is a funny, funny joke.

Hector can't do anything but work and die and eat a couple tacos in between.

American Hustle, my ass.

*this is one of the two stupid reasons people give to avoid giving Hector more money. 1) He is an immigrant. Fuck those fuckers and the fruit they pick for us and shitty jobs they do so we don't have to. HOW DARE THEY. 2) Dishwashing isn't worthy of a living wage. Only people who can code deserve to live in something besides a sewer eating turds and feathers.

Yo Jabba Jabba (or Why I Believe in Raising the Minimum Wage)

Oy. You fucking people. Let's do this math so I can stop talking about it.

Hector is my favorite non-existent dishwasher. He makes $8 an hour, which his boss either doesn't consider, does consider and feels bad, but oh well, I've got a mortgage, or thinks Hector's salary is just fine because he knows a guy who only pays his dishwashers $5.

Hector works 2 jobs a day that are 7.5 hours each so that his employers can avoid paying his insurance which means 15 x 8, or $120. After taxes, and assuming Hector has a nice wife and two lovely children, we'll consider it to be an even $100 that Hector brings home per day. Do that 25 days a month (we'll pretend he also has a few hours of OT) and look at that huge pile of cash he made. All $2500 of it. That means Hector is a median-income earner in America.

Hector's wife stays home with the kids because childcare tends to be at least $8hr. if not more, and this is a better choice for them both.

They live with her sister and her family in a 2-bedroom townhouse and their share of the rent is $750. It's not really that cheap, because there is no townhouse in any major city that is 2 bedrooms and only $1500, but I don't want to argue, so let's say after $750, Hector still has a whopping $1750 left, and his family has a WHOLE ENTIRE BEDROOM TO THEMSELVES.

Hector and his wife have a used mini-van. They live in a part of the city where there is no reliable public transportation, and with no real credit and a minimal down payment, the car costs $400. Some of you will find it impossible that a used Caravan can cost the same as a Mercedes payment, I assure you that it's true. So now we're at $1350. Good thing Hector works sun-up to sundown or he might notice how screwed he gets on things like this.

Take that $1350 and subtract car insurance and the very minimum health plan offered, because you made that $10,000 emergency room mistake once, and you're at an even $1k. It's time to feed and clothe the fam damily.

If you go to discount stores, and outlets, buy bulk, and cook every meal at home (mostly vegetarian) you can do three meals a day for a family of four for about $150. That's providing you have those stores, and know how to cook healthy meals, but Irma (Hector's imaginary wife) is very resourceful and does it. 21 meals divided by $150, no snacks, is $7.14, divided by four, giving them a very generous $1.78 per meal. Good thing Hector earns the median. Can you imagine what the lowest end of that sliding scale have to spend on food. Or people who aren't lucky enough to have TWO JOBS like Hector?

Now that we've subtracted $600 for food because $1.78 per meal isn't starving for fuck sake, you can figure out how to leisurely spend that last $400 on clothes and other fun stuff. Oh. Wait. I forgot gas for Hector to get from Job A to Job B. Something is always getting forgotten. Now that it's back up to $2.50 a gallon, it costs $60 to fill, and he uses a tank and a half per week so that's $90 x 4 and we have $40 for whatever the children need. Or dental work. or a used couch. Again, good thing Hector is never home, or he might notice how the TV doesn't come in on certain channels anymore.

Now Hector is broke, even though he worked all day, every day. Hector doesn't qualify for any social services. Hector would love to participate in all these exciting things the commercials show like paddle-boarding and $4 cupcakes, but he can't. The worst part is how we act like he's doing okay and should be out there in the 'Bu with the rest of us except NOBODY IS IN THE 'BU but the McConaughey and he probably owes someone a fuckload of money too.

It's a lie we tell, we don't want to break it down like I just did or we'd have to admit we're all kind of fucked when takeout for a family of four, from the taqueria Hector works at part of his day, costs $40, which is almost half his daily take home. We don't want to admit that this game of LIFE is running out of the white money and promissory notes are all that's left.

Life is cheap, living is expensive.

It's really as simple as 3rd. grade math.

#49. I've Seen the Brightness in One Little Spark

They just don't make musicals about exploited, blind factory workers like they used to.

#45. You See What You Want to See

Collect yourself

Be cool

Be steady as a rock

#44. I'm Nobody but I am Someone

Ani gives me winsome, wistful, hopeful truth.

Alana gives me curves.

#40. These Days I Barely Wander

Back when I used to wander, I was always out looking for signs

But they were never there, so I'd pull 'em from the air
We all believed in something, but like you I can't say why
It's just a whisper in our ear, or a bottle for our fears

Hold me to light, let me shine
Come hold me to the floor and say it's alright
Come hold me 'neath the water's skin until I'm new again

And I said what I was thinking: now you can't see what's good 'til it's gone
Then there's something to be said for a place to lay your head
You told me I was simple, and you envied me that peace of mind
Then we listened to the creek and it did much more for me

I'll hold you to the light, let you shine
I'll hold you against the floor and say it's alright
'cause down beneath the water's skin where we will swim
Those diamonds on the surface then
And, they'll come clean us, we'll both live again

These days I barely wander, and I don't need no more of them signs
I'll just breathe in all that air and be happy that it's there