Butter Tastes Good!

Speaking of Mom.....

You know how much she liked to cook. She loved cookbooks. Dad told me once that she had a library of over 200 of them. She read them from cover to cover, and learned lots of interesting things about different countries and cultures from the introductions and chapter headings.

So, it was natural that when birthdays or Christmas or Mother's Day came around, my thoughts turned to kitchen gadgets and cookbooks. When VCRs were new, I think sometime in the late 1970's, I found what I thought was an inspired Christmas gift: a Videocassette tape of Julia Child demonstrating some of her recipes. The day after Christmas, Mom and I sat down in front of the TV to watch the tape. It was all about desserts. Each recipe started with the list of ingredients, including a picture of each one: 2 cups butter (picture of 4 sticks of butter), 1 1/2 cups sugar (picture of measuring cup containing sugar), 2 cups flour (picture of flour), etc. The first recipe or two were fun to watch. When the third one started, once again, with the obligatory butter (5 sticks), we giggled a little. Then the next one started with 4 sticks of butter and we laughed out loud. And when the last one had 6 sticks, we couldn't stop laughing--it was the funniest thing we'd ever seen.

I saw a trailer for Julie & Julia "there's no such thing as too much butter...", and it made me think of that day. Wilt and I saw the movie over the weekend and I laughed and laughed and thought of Mom. Check it out. You'll find the theater full of older couples and groups of women of a certain age who remember Julia Child's TV shows and cookbooks.

Bon Appétit!

I Remember Mama

Today is Mother's Day.
Turner Classic Movies is showing I Remember Mama.
Whenever I watch this movie, my initial reaction is "how hokey...some movies just don't hold up over the years."
But I can't quite bring myself to change the chanel.
By the end of the movie I'm crying.

It takes me back to our house with the crooked floors in Oakland, and the house with the big basement in Salt Lake City. My mother loved this movie, and the play it was based on.
She told me that when she was in high school, she had played the title role.
This made perfect sense to me.
She was the perfect person to play Mama.
It's who she was, after all.

I remember sitting on the floor in all those houses while mom did the ironing, and we watched I Remember Mama on TV.
She recited the lines along with Irene Dunne.
I was very impressed that she still knew her lines by heart.
This was years before I thought of doing plays myself.

About 15 years ago I directed a production of I Remember Mama at Arroyo Grande High School. Mom came to see it.
Her mom came, too.

My mother has been dead for over 10 years, but I miss her every day.

Happy Mother's day.

The Writer and the Frustrated Librarian

It's kind of funny the way things turn out. Billy is the writer. And I posted the first pictures here on the blog.
I'm not sure I wanted to be a writer all those years ago. I wanted to read books. Lots of books. I wanted to be a librarian so I could be in charge of all the books. Billy didn't cooperate, though. I carefully made little envelopes and glued them in all our books. The Nancy Drew books, the Little House on the Prairie books, the Dr. Seuss books--all of them. You were supposed to fill out the little card when you wanted to read a book and I would put it in my card file with a due date and everything.
But Billy always had to be the rebel. Maybe it had something to do with the fines for not returning a book on time. He tore out the little envelopes and didn't return the books on time. How can you have a proper library when the patrons don't cooperate?

It was Cathy's idea.

Several years ago, in the early 1960's my big sister Cathy had an idea. She was going to be an author. A writer of books. She was going to write books, and I would be the illustrator. This made perfect sense to me, since she was the one who knew how to write. And read. She got in trouble for sneaking Nancy Drew under her bedcovers with a flashlight. This was probably because I told on her, but I can't remember.
fast forward about 45 years, and there was my big sister Cathy again.
"You know what we should do? We should write a blog."
So here we go.
Say something Cathy.