This Afternoon In Drama

Let's Drop Out Of The Competition After This

My family makes another entry into the cancer Olympics, with my dad clocking in this past Wednesday with a brain cancer diagnosis.  For those of you counting, that's his third type of cancer.  When he beats this round, he pulls ahead of some guy in China for the medal.

The biggest tumor is, using the words of the doctor, "the size of an apricot," which is somewhat ironic considering that my dad does his best to stay as far away from fruits and vegetables as possible.  To my amazement, this morning the hospital let him order both the French Toast and the toast-toast for breakfast, a meal which seemed redundant and generally lacking in nutrition, but I've been having Cookies 'N Cream ice cream for my breakfast the past few days, so I might not be in a position to judge.

Everyone says that shows like Grey's Anatomy portray unrealistic hospital staffs because the doctors are too attractive, but what I've discovered is that surgeons and high-powered cancer doctors have such a cocksure way about them that they make you think they're attractive.  You start thinking that you'd go for them, age-difference be damned, if you weren't otherwise very much in love with some dude from Arkansas, meaning that along with beer, people should add "hospital goggles" to the list of sexual phenomena. 

The nurses have a different sort of attractiveness about them, one that has less to do with rough-and-tumble egotism and more to do with their seemingly genuine neutrality in the face of bad circumstances.  They don't laugh because they have to; they laugh because their humor litmus been adjusted.  I'm charmed by almost all of them.  All of a sudden I become a matchmaker, wanting my brother to date his way through every single sixth floor RN, even the one who looks like Shirley from What's Happening.

Since the steroids have kicked in, my dad has stopped calling a chair a watch and so on, which is an incredible relief, but I admittedly laughed when the nurse asked him to describe what was going on in the illustration of a mother washing dishes at the sink, and he gave her back something that was a cross between Sigur Ros lyrics and the found poem of an electrician (lots of mentions of light).  Happily, his speech is returning to normal, and when I begin to try to fill in every possible name starting with a "T" as he attempts to recall the name of someone he works with that begins with a "T", patience never being one of my strongest traits, he's now gotten back the words to chew me out.

As Fast As Jew Can

It's no secret that I love Martha Stewart and not ironically.  Whenever someone makes me do a "Three People Living Or Dead That You'd Like To Have At A Private Dinner Party" list, she's automatically on it, and no, I wouldn't be nervous about what I served.  The lady likes hot dogs.  Whenever someone says, "She's a bitch!" I say, "No, you're a bitch."  She understands that it's human responsibility to make life special.

Every holiday season I flip through her holiday issue of the magazine, charmed and inspired by every future memory on the page.  I keep telling myself every year that the next one I will make every single fucking thing in that magazine, and then it comes around and I've napped away the days I could have been baking the Cranberry Noels and Marshmallow Dreidels. 

And true, this year I napped away the bulk of my days and when I wasn't napping, I was studying Star's annual "Best and Work Beach Bodies" issue and trying to figure out what Rosie O'Donnell's ankle tattoo is of (it took me awhile on Google to find out it's "made up of gears, screws, and flowers intertwined around a cross.").   On New Year's Day, though, I finally pulled my shit together and said, "I'm going to bake."

Tapping into Martha's innovator spirit, I seized upon a brainstorm I'd had a few weeks before when eating a noseless gingerbread man from Starbucks.  I'd thought, "This cookie is clearly not Jewish."  And then I thought, "But whaaaaat if it was..."

Below is a photo of the Jewngerbreads I made for dinner at the Litwacks, each numbered with a matching description underneath the picture.  As if there's any other way to do it, they're split into two camps based on dough color: Ashkenazi (to your  left) and Sephardic (right).

Ashkenazis:

1.  Orthodox rabbi with curls

2.  Big-time agent (in "I Own H'Wood" T)

3.  East Coast Jew (in "I Love NY" shirt)

4.  My dad (in a scarf)

5.  Female Reform cantor carrying the Torah

6.  Nerd banker

7.  Money-grubbing Jew

8.  Everybody's Jewish Grandma

9.  Record producer

11.  Old Guy At The Hanukah Party Who Insists On Bringing Out The Dreidel

(Below him, I forgot to number: Jewish Wanderer In Teva Sandals)

Sephardics:

10.  The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

12.  Happy Bar Mitzvah Boy

13.  Beachy Tel Aviv sunbather

14.  Blond Jewess Who Passes as a Shiksa

15.  (some money)

16.  Daddy's Little JAP

17.  A depiction of a Jew through a Midwesterner's eyes: two-headed monster with devil horns.

My Wisdom Is Like A Tub. Soak In It.

This summer I got an email from Andrea Buchanan, telling me about a book of inspirational essays she was editing; did I have one I could stick in there?  I wrote her back saying, hey, I'd love to be in this, but I'm not exactly an inspirational writer.  Or person.  She told me that Sheryl Crow had contributed, and I was like, shit, anything I'm going to write is going to be completely inappropriate next to what I'm guessing is going to be a breast cancer survival whammy.  A competitive person, I considered writing about the time I had a cervical cancer scare and took Valium before the biopsy, but I'm really not that great with drugs, so when my dad treated me to the Daily Grill for dinner afterward, and the waiter asked how I wanted my burger, I slurred at him, "Rawwww."  That didn't seem to have the stirring power I'd need to take down Sheryl, though.  I wondered if I should write about how my mom and I were shopping at the Sak's outlet store and she was like, "So lately I feel like my stomach is getting rapidly bigger, and it's strangely hard, too," and then I touched it and was like, "Holy shit, you need to get your ass to the doctor, OBVIOUSLY," except all I did there was inspirationally eat a burger and three chocolate chip cookies in the hospital cafeteria while she was resting after surgery.  I needed to produce a literary "One Moment In Time."

I told Andrea, naw, sorry, it's not me, and then I went into the shower to wash my hair.  While I was towel-drying, I started thinking about what I'd done lately that had felt good and right and personally uplifting, and I remembered that a few months before I had sent a fuck-you note to the guys who bought the rights to my first book and then used them to scratch their balls.  I wrote Andrea, asking, "You want me to write this fuck-you note story?" and she said, "Yeah, totally," so the anthology came out today, and there I am, nestled just one essay away from Sheryl, hers starting on page 253 and mine on 269.  I haven't read Sheryl's yet, nor I have I read Jenny Bick's or Kathy Najimy's who bookend mine, but hopefully they're not all about brave and tenacious battles with life-wrecking diseases.

Below is a tease of my essay, kind of like it's showing you a breast but holding three fingers over the nipple.  (Breasts again.  Hope everyone in the book didn't write about breast cancer except me.)