Stirring the Pot Read online

  Until the take was over, my only option was to cross my legs and clench as hard as I could. And though I should have been focusing on my next line, I couldn’t concentrate on anything but what my excuse would be if blood spattered on the floor. I figured I could try to blame it on Charlie and claim he must have had a bloody nose. Given his lifestyle at the time, it was conceivable that people would believe me (Charlie himself might even have been easily fooled).

  Fortunately, I didn’t have to lie about Charlie’s drug-weakened nasal passages—the director said “cut” and I asked for a five-minute break to use the facilities.

  I obviously needed to get off the stage quickly, but I couldn’t take big steps and I couldn’t risk letting the studio audience see my ass; I had no idea what kind of red splotch would be blooming there. My only option was to shuffle offstage while continuing to face forward. Kind of like the characters on South Park. Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle stage left, and I was out of there.

  Once I was safely in the bathroom I could assess the damage. As I’d thought, I was a mess. There was no going back out there with the same pants on—they would need to be tossed. I stuck my head out the bathroom door and called for reinforcements: “Hello? Any female on the set, please, any female?” A young woman from the wardrobe department materialized, and I let her in. She went white when she saw the carnage. Sweet, naive, pre-motherhood girl that she was, she asked me if I’d just had a miscarriage.

  Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned … I seriously considered lying and telling her that she’d found me out. The sympathy would have been helpful at that point. But for once I wasn’t quick enough on my feet. I couldn’t tell that lie. I had to admit that I was just a gusher and couldn’t control my body for more than about twenty- or thirty-minute increments at this time of the month. I imagined she was making a mental note to never get older as she left to search for a replacement pair of pants.

  A few minutes later I was ready to go: I had the whole feminine products aisle tucked right where it all should go—a super-duper-duper tampon and, this time, two pads. I walked bowlegged back to the set and got on with the work of the day, asking for “pee breaks” as often as I could.

  The Mile-High Club

  Okay, I told a white lie about never being surprised by my period. Sometimes I’m blindsided just like everyone else.

  Recently I was blindsided while buckled groggily into seat 3A of an American Airlines flight. I was heading back home after being in a different time zone (which I’m going to blame for my miscalculation about what day it was). We had to wait on the runway for two hours—two hours of not getting up and moving around the cabin, and two hours of increasingly odd and uncomfortable cramping.

  By the time we were cleared for takeoff and the seat belt sign was off, I was pretty sure I was in trouble down there. I got up as fast as I could and crammed myself into one of those outrageously small and oddly lit coffins they call restrooms. I’d had the presence of mind to bring my purse with me, but my heart sank when I realized that all my emergency absorbent supplies were packed away in the bag that I’d checked. What the fuck is wrong with me? An emergency stash like that must be kept on you at all times! I know, I know.

  Of course I wasn’t the first nor will I be the last woman forced to do the only thing there is to do in that desperate and disgusting situation: I made a homemade maxi pad by wrapping half a roll of toilet paper around my hand and shoving the “pad” into place in my underwear.

  Now, if multiple tampons and maxi pads don’t even work for me on these heavy flow days, I don’t know why I ever thought that half a roll of one-ply would do the trick. (And is it even one-ply? Tracing paper would be a better description!) But what choice did I really have? I would just have to return to the bathroom every twenty to thirty minutes and keep spinning out my homemades. I washed my hands and returned to my seat to bleed—I mean sweat—it out.

  Over the course of the long flight I managed to stem the tide of the Red Sea by keeping myself awake and re-creating the pad at regular intervals. When we neared our destination, however, the captain asked us to stay in our seats for the remaining forty minutes of our descent. I didn’t panic. I just focused on not sneezing, coughing, or breathing until we’d touched down and I could visit the bathroom one more time before heading out to get my luggage.

  Forty minutes passed, then forty-five, then fifty. I needed to get up. I needed to get fresh TP. But we were nowhere near touchdown! The captain came back on and said something like, “As you’ve probably noticed, we have been circling due to weather and it doesn’t look like we’re going to be able to land anytime soon. So we are going to change course and land at the nearest airfield to refuel. We’ll attend to all of this as quickly as possible and get back in the air and back on our way as soon as possible. I’ll keep you updated on our progress.” All I really heard was, “You’re screwed.”

  Did you happen to see the look on Will and Jada Pinkett Smith’s faces during Miley Cyrus’s twerking performance at the Video Music Awards? They were right there in the front row and were clearly more than a little horrified. That’s more or less the face I made.

  I caught the eye of one of the flight attendants, who was safely buckled into her own rear-facing seat a couple of feet from me. I pointed at my crotch and mouthed, “I’m bleeding and I don’t have anything!”

  The look on her face told me that she felt my pain. The look on the other flight attendant’s face was a little less understanding. Embarrassed is more like it. He looked kind of in shock and then down at his hands. His female counterpart whispered that I should just go into the bathroom anyway and stay there while she hunted around for a tampon. That’s the power of the sisterhood right there!

  After a few minutes, my newfound friend and fairy godmother knocked on the door. Sitting on the toilet seat, I opened the door enough for her to both hand me a tampon and see the Nightmare on Elm Street damage to my undercarriage. I had bled through the jeans that were now around my ankles, and there was no disguising it. Her eyes widened, but—diplomatically, expertly, and helpfully—she held up a finger as if to say “Just a minute” and disappeared back around the door. I heard some whispering, and then a few moments later she knocked again and handed me the male flight attendant’s jacket! “He said you can keep it. He’s a fan.”

  My hero and savior had unbuckled and made himself scarce by the time I came out of the bathroom, and he and I didn’t make eye contact again for the rest of the flight. But when I was leaving the plane at long last, he was the one at the door wishing passengers a good day and thanking us all for our patience. I wanted to kiss his sweet face and thank him for his kindness but instead just patted the jacket that was now tied around my waist and whispered that I was his biggest fan.

  A Classy Charity Event

  I am not a golfer, but I’ll do anything to raise money for a good cause, even if the businessmen and politicians who have paid $10,000 to take that nice walk on the pretty green grass with you really just want to see you bend over in your Daisy Dukes. When you’re wearing short-shorts and you have your period, however, some of those big spenders probably want their money back. Especially when you steal their golf cart on the third tee in order to get your uterus back to the safety of the clubhouse locker room and you never come back to the links. Sorry, fellas!

  After each of these Red Scares I have called my mother to commiserate, to apologize for my insensitivity when she was going through this physical passage, and to let her laugh at me until she cries. She tells me that there are still more surprises to come in terms of the way I might experience menopause. I know some women don’t enjoy going through that particular “change of life” and others think we only get sexier with age (Suzanne Somers, I’m talking to you!). And I know that in ten years I’ll be ready to write another book all about the crazy ways it will have affected me. But right now I’m hemorrhaging, so I can honestly say that I look forward to a vagina as dry as the Sahara Desert.

  The
old McCarthyism meant … humorlessness

  The new McCarthyism means … being able to laugh at yourself

  The old McCarthyism meant … being suspicious of others’ motives

  The new McCarthyism means … never doubting the kindness of strangers

  If My Bed Could Talk …

  “Please flip the mattress. When you actually get lucky with a guy, it’s pretty obvious you sleep alone most of the time because he is rolling into the mattress dent you have created.”

  “Please buy me more than one outfit. You have one set of sheets, yet you own two thousand pairs of shoes.”

  “When you leave the house, the dog dry-humps me. Get him fixed or get rid of him.”

  “I can’t make myself, so do me a favor and get me dressed before you leave for work. What if you had to spend the day with your pants down? Wait … never mind.”

  “You might want to look underneath me if you are missing something. Playing hide-and-seek is the only fun I get to have. So far I’m hiding one earring, two remote controls, one of Evan’s shoes, and your ‘back massager.’ ”

  “I’m not a maxi pad. Mark a calendar and come to bed prepared, girl!”

  “Tell Evan’s friend Mikey that I’m not a trampoline. Next time I’m gonna make it hurt.”

  “You are multitalented: you snore, you fart, and you talk in your sleep.”

  “Even though boys may come and go, I’ve got your back, girl. Literally.”

  Ten Signs You’re Spending Too Much Time with Your Toddler

  1. You have strong feelings about the way Dora the Explorer treats Boots.

  2. Most of the food you eat is off your child’s face.

  3. There is a Go-Gurt or a juice box in your car door.

  4. You haven’t had an alcoholic cocktail in two years.

  5. You bite someone at Walmart for taking the sale item you wanted.

  6. You tell your husband you’re not going to blow him unless he eats all his broccoli.

  7. You use your spit to wipe something off a friend’s face.

  8. At the end of the day you’re wondering what letter brought the day to you.

  9. You wear a macaroni necklace out to dinner.

  10. You check your husband’s bum to be sure he wiped properly.

  Nourish Your Soul

  I grew up on the South Side of Chicago, and we liked our meals big in them parts. This was years before serving sizes and processed foods and calorie counting were a big part of the lexicon. Not in my family, anyway. Our test for a meal’s worth was portion size. Roadside diners always got high marks; I gained the nickname “Truck Driver” because of the way I could put away the mounds of food they served at their counters.

  Later in life, I gained something else: about eighty pounds in pregnancy. I read somewhere that the average weight of checked baggage is fifty pounds, and I can tell you it sure felt as though I was dragging around an extra suitcase or two—on my ass. My high-water mark was 211 pounds. It turned out that Evan’s adorable body only accounted for six of them. The other goop that was in there added up to another ten pounds; I left the hospital at 195.

  Evan didn’t mind my doughy body. He didn’t judge. But producers judge and casting directors judge and magazine editors judge. I don’t care what some celebrities say about not paying attention to tabloid headlines—no one wants to see her ass or thigh magnified (with a circle or arrow making sure everyone sees the cellulite) on the cover of a magazine. If I was going to stay in show business, I obviously needed to get busy losing some weight.

  My mom had had success with Weight Watchers, so I decided to give it a whirl. The portion control portion of the program made sense to me, and I could get my limited brain bandwidth (babies suck the intelligence right out of you) around the point system. I also liked that they didn’t overdo the lecture about having to work out as well. I mean, one thing at a time, right? Weight Watchers worked for me. I lost all my baby weight. I even became a spokesperson for the program for a while. I can’t argue with the results, even if I often wanted to gnaw off my baby’s pudgy arm on days when I’d consumed all my allotted points by 2:00 p.m.

  I’ve also tried a lot of fad diets when I’ve had to get “red carpet ready” (how I loathe HD—a girl can’t get away with anything anymore!). I tend to do a juice cleanse in early January every year even if it seems to make me more toxic … to be around, anyway.

  On the first day of the cleanse my hunger is predictably persistent but low-grade. I think about food with great fondness; not being able to chew anything makes me a little blue. The second day I am a hangry bitch. For those of you not versed in diet-speak, “hangry” is hungry + angry. In other words, short-tempered, headachy, and in no mood to deal with your shit. Day three is supposed to bring me renewed energy and internal lightness, but all I feel is dizzy and disoriented. By day five I’m googling for pictures of food like a porn addict. Every year I swear I won’t do this again, but every year I do it anyway.

  More recently I’ve discovered something totally, mind-blowingly, life-alteringly revolutionary: vegetables fill my belly without making my butt big. I can eat them to my heart’s content and the only thing I might get is gassy.

  Not news to you? Well, when I was growing up, the potato was the only vegetable we ate regularly (fried, baked, mashed, and hashed), so you’ll have to forgive my awe and excitement over the variety now available in the produce aisle. With the range of color, shapes, and sizes, it’s like the bra and panty section in department stores. Vegetables like carrots and broccoli and peas are the equivalent of granny panties—familiar, comfortable, and easy to put on (the table). Artichokes and eggplant and fennel? More like silky lingerie—I eat/wear them often but not so much that they become uninteresting. Then there are the more exotic vegetables—kohlrabi, bok choy, or mustard greens—that are kind of like the Swarovski-bedazzled bras and thongs only available at the Victoria’s Secret runway show. Pull those out on rare, rare occasions and wow someone with your ability to rock his world!

  The most nutritious, generally low-calorie, and easiest way to make any vegetable into a meal? Put it into a pot with some broth and a protein and ba-bam—soup. Another earth-shattering revelation for me!

  I know what you’re thinking: soup is a watery appetizer, the skippable section of restaurant menus. Until I began experimenting with soup, I would have agreed with you. But now soup works for me on so many levels. There’s the one-pot thing, for starters. You can make vats of it and not dirty a lot of pots and pans. Almost all soups freeze well—perfect for people like me who only want to devote one afternoon to stocking up on what I’ll eat for the whole week. And there’s the fact that my energy level is way up and my weight has stayed down while I’ve been eating as much soup as I could ever want. Oh, and eat soup regularly and you’ll be regular: my bowels are in the best shape of my life.

  I know this is getting a little carried away with the metaphor, but the humble soup is a lot like life. Good soups use simple, basic ingredients, are easy to modify with whatever you happen to have in your own personal pantry, most often get better with age (more flavor with each passing day), and can not only feed large gatherings of people but also nourish the soul. I have stacks of one-serving containers of my homemade frozen soups in my cold, cold Chicago garage. People beg me for my recipes! Maybe I’ll have to write that book next.… For now, here are two of my favorite veggie soup recipes.

  CARROT GINGER

  Ingredients:

  ½-inch finger of ginger, peeled and sliced paper thin

  ⅓ cup hot water

  1 medium onion, chopped

  1 garlic clove

  ½ tablespoon olive oil

  ¼ pound carrots, peeled and diced

  4 cups chicken or vegetable stock

  1 teaspoon salt

  ¼ teaspoon black pepper

  Directions:

  Steep ginger in the hot water for approximately 30 minutes, then strain out the ginger pieces and reserve the water.r />
  Sweat the garlic and onion in the oil until translucent.

  Add carrots and sweat for another five minutes, stirring occasionally.

  Add the stock to the pot, bring to a boil and then reduce to simmer until the carrots are fork tender.

  Add the ginger water to the pot.

  Puree the soup and season to taste with salt and pepper.

  NO-CREAM OF BROCCOLI

  Ingredients:

  2 tablespoons Not-Butter Earth Balance Spread

  1 onion, roughly chopped

  2 garlic cloves, minced

  ½ tablespoon olive oil

  4 cups chicken or vegetable stock

  1 head broccoli with most of the stems trimmed off

  1 russet potato, peeled and roughly chopped

  1 teaspoon salt

  ¼ teaspoon black pepper

  Directions:

  Lightly sauté the onions and garlic in the oil until translucent.

  Add the broccoli florets and the potato, sauté for about 5 minutes.

  Add the stock and continue to simmer until the broccoli and potatoes are tender.

  Puree the soup and season to taste with salt and pepper.

  How to Get Souper Skinny

  If I ever write a book about staying thin, getting in shape, or being in the “optimal wellness zone” (does anyone really know what those books are about?), I would call it The Souper Skinny Soup Diet Cookbook. All of my recipes would be gluten- and dairy-free. That is, mostly fart-free. Here are some I might include: