Letter from Sacramento

Typos, Grandmas, nutritional yeast, waste, Cher, horror, ice cream, clowns.

Dear Diary,

I’m sorry about the typos. When I read back through my posts, fishing for a dopamine hit, I get these anxious stabs in my belly every time I see one. I think - every time I let a typo slide, a paid subscriber draws back their dime. I mean, some people get really irked by this. A hair across my heart is how a friend with lite OCD once described how it felt to have her condition triggered, and I imagine typos are exactly that elusive, muscular itch for those highly attuned to grammatical right and wrong. I am sorry for how this mess of type might make you feel. I could promise to do better, but we all know how those promises tend to go. I’m 52. I feel super committed to not trying so hard anymore. I know, I know - it seemed like I was hardly trying at all!

Anyways. I am in Sacramento. My husband’s family lives in the sticks about forty minutes yonder. His grandmother, who raised him, is like 92 years old, I think, maybe even 93. She is a Pisces, with a lot of Aquarius in her chart. She thinks that this is her last Thanksgiving, but she has a pattern of thinking every day may be her last. How else can a 90-something live? She wanted a classic Thanksgiving to commemorate her possible finale, and she got it - turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy. Stuffing sort of gooey and gloppy from being in the turkey (put less water in it, Grandma Mary advised, if it’s going in the turkey). Greenbean casserole, which I never eat, as I remain traumatized by the canned green beans of my childhood. Sweet Potato soufle - classy!

We were tasked with bringing pecan pie and a ‘vegetable.’ As the teensy Airbnb we’re staying at has but an SRO hot plate on the kitchen counter, I despaired of being able to bring anything of substance. My man suggested ‘boiled carrots’ and I think the way I shot him down so quickly may have hurt his feelings. Holidays make everyone touchy. We went to the co-op, which was amazing because I was able to fill up an entire bag with BULK NUTRITIONAL YEAST, bringing me back to the days of living in San Francisco where I was lucky to exist proximity to Rainbow Grocery. Sigh. I felt deeply buoyed by this pillow of nutritional yeast, happy I can stop buying horrible, plastic shakers of the stuff at Ralph’s for a bit. My god, this is the most boring post EVER. I am so sorry, but it’s what I got right now. Perhaps taking refuge in a bit of boredom, as the excitement of my country engaging in genocidal warfare, the absurd yet serious charges of antisemitism flung at everyone who protests, the wild gaslighting of being told colonialism is not colonialism but, like, something else - perhaps the boredom of bulk seasoning feels like the luxury it is.

Anyway. We bought a few packages of prepared green bean casserole only to learn that Grandma Mary was making her own. When you are already a stress case because you are visiting your complicated and beloved family for a holiday you don’t even believe in, learning you just wasted money on a casserole can put you over the edge, especially if you are a Taurus who gets triggered by food waste. I felt badly for my sweet husband. We wound up at some big, shitty non-co-op grocery store and got like a million packages of microwavable broccoli and cheese, and a Pyrex bowl to bring it in. We would spend Thanksgiving morning making deviled eggs on the hot plate and microwaving plastic tray after plastic tray of broccoli.

One of my best sad family memories is a Thanksgiving late in my parents’ marriage when my mother just, like, microwaved everything. It was a very fuck this move that I appreciate now in a you go, girl way but at the time just felt fucking sad. We ate on paper plates. No one dressed up - I remember my father, whose fault it all was, eating in his undershirt, but I am known to take a tragedy of any size and streeeeeetch the details to make it as abject as possible, so who knows, maybe he was wearing a tie. I do know that the holiday did not feel like a holiday, and forevermore I am sensitive to microwaved food, paper plates, men eating at tables in their undershirts.

None of these shenanigans went down at Grandma Mary’s. It was a very sweet gathering. After everyone left we sat with Grandma Mary in her sitting room. She has a blocked artery and will be having surgery for it in the coming weeks; in the meantime, she gets easily exhausted. You’d think a ninety-something would just sit on her ass all day anyway, but GM is a powerhouse, swinging through her backyard on a series of strategically placed walkers so she can water her azelias. This new era of being pooped is a drag. Together, we watched the tail end of the rerun of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, excited to learn that Cher was coming up, tho puzzled to learn she has a new Christmas album. I guess she wants to fight Mariah for a piece of the holiday royalties pie. When Cher finally appeared, it was a bit of a letdown. She looked amazing, of course, with all her hair and cheekbones and whatnot, but her outfit was strange, like she woke up and threw on her stock broker boyfriend’s button-up and tie, but in a sort of wonky way, and paired it with some really strange yoga pants, and ran downstairs to lip-synch to her new Christmas banger which is about, like, telling the DJ to play a Christmas banger so she can dance all night in the club. It was weird, holisitically. “She should retire,” Grandma Mary said. This is my new catchphrase. For what it’s worth, the song remained in my head for hours.

Other Thanksgiving-related media I took in recently: the new Eli Roth horror flick, Thanksgiving. I give it two thumbs up. To my giddy surprise, it is set in Massachusetts, in Plymouth, and the actors toss the word ‘kid’ around with abandon, and the accents are varied and delightful, and the town high school is a vocational high school - there’s even a couple scenes set in the cosmotology shop. As a graduate of Northeast Metropolitan Technical Regional Vocational High School in Wakefield, Massachusetts, where I was not accepted into the Cosmo shop because of my blue hair, felt very seen watching the Final Girl try to stay alive by blending in with a shelf full of cosmotology mannequins. The sexy actress who looks like Gina Gershon and dies early on in a Black Friday stampede, her cheek getting ripped off her face by a runaway shopping cart - well, it actually WAS Gina Gershon! Loved that. Loved the murders happening in a colonial New England tourist trap, the small town parade where the turkey mascot gets his head knocked off by a clown wielding a baseball bat, loved the very creepy plastic John Carver mask worn by the villain and would love for it to replace the Ghostface, Mike Meyers and Jason masks that have become very passe. After crying at actual, real horror these past weeks, there was something undeniably cathartic about laughing at the outrageousness of this phony horror. Sorry for the spoilers.

We also partook in the Salt & Straw seasonal offerings. I can’t believe this ice cream place started by Portland food nerds now have outposts in Sacramento strip malls, but I’m glad they do. I got the Parker House Rolls with Salted Buttercream, which I’ve dreamt of periodically since last autumn; it is very, very good. The facially pierced chap behind the counter suggested it went well with Strawberry Honey Balsamic with Black Pepper, so I did that, but not before trying a sample of Cheesy Potato Casserole. I do think a cheesy potato casserole is one of my most favorite things in the world, but also, cold mashed potatoes is one of my least favorite, so I passed, but it really was like licking the wallpaper in Willy Wonka and shouting “Roast beef!'“ - I mean, the ice cream tasted just like a cheesy potato casserole! I should mention that last year my husband did get the Turkey Stuffing and Cranberry Sauce, and he did not get it again this year, but maybe that’s just the sort of thing you eat just once in a lifetime.

Anyways, speaking of once in a lifetime culinary experiences, this morning me and TJ went to PANCAKE CIRCUS, which is what it sounds like, a pancake restaurant with a clown / circus theme. I was hesitant, much as I was around the Thanksgiving movie - like, do I want to enjoy some bad-good stuff or would I just prefer some good-good stuff? But when I entered the clowny delight of this run-down diner, it was like coming home. I was mesmerized by a painting of a sad hobo clown holding a copy of The Wall Street Journal and, wondering about the depression-era origin of this icon, fell into an Emmett Kelly k-hole on my phone. Emmett Kelly, for the uninitiated, is THE sad hobo clown, ‘Weary Willie,’ and yes, he is of course inspired by the broke-ass sad sacks of the 1930s. Emmet Kelly’s son, Emmett Kelly Junior, took up the ‘Weary Willie’ character after his dad retired. Weary Willie Sr. was not happy about his son copying his art like that, though the son protested that he had innovated the character by making him less weary. Perhaps that’s what dad was pissed about. Either way, the two didn’t speak for years.

Emmett Kelly Jr. had a big, bustling circus career like his father, and also like dad he had two wives. The first divorced him for being on the road so much. One time, after their son lost a leg in a railroad accident, Emmett Jr. came back to, you know, be there, but didn’t last long. Apparently he said, “Willie’s got itchy feet,” and peaced out. His second wife he married on the back of an elephant. Please enjoy the inspired cell phone pics I snapped while eating my waffle.