Yesterday was, without question, one of the oddest days I have spent this vacation. Or possibly this year. I don't know...ever?

Okay, first of all, I wrenched myself out of bed, and Mom went to the hairdresser, so I was alone in the house as I was taking my bath. Was that foreshadowing? I'll never tell...

Anyway, I was bathing and all was well and all was good and I was all shiny and clean (as Molly is wont to say), and I got on my hands and knees in order to get out of the tub, and suddenly slipped and fell, smashing the right side of my face into the porcelain.

I swear, I thought I had broken my jaw.

It stopped hurting rather quickly, but I was really scared. I mean, had I actually knocked myself out and fell under the water and drowned, and my mother had come back from the hairdresser all coifed and stuff and found me...

Well, it wouldn't have been her merriest Christmas ever...

Anyway, I got out of the tub, somewhat shakily, and went downstairs to make the bread pudding.

We had bought the fixins the day before, and I had put the bread out to stale, and I mixed the butter and sugar and I found the eggs and the ginger and the evaporated milk, used up the old sugar, took the new bag of sugar out of the bottom drawer, tried to open the vanilla for ten minutes, realized that there actually wasn't enough anyway, walked to the corner store and bought a tiny little eensy bottle for three fucking dollars, mixed everything together, toasted the bread, looked for the raisins...

No raisins.

The raisins weren't in the cupboard over the fridge, the raisins weren't in the cupboard over the counter, the raisins weren't pushed really far in the back behind everything, the raisins weren't anywhere!

So I just put the bread into soak and left a message for Mom saying that I couldn't find the motherfucking raisins (I may not have used those exact words, but then again, I may have...) and left the house.

And why did I leave the house?

Because my friend Michael Hurley emerged from the dead into LA and we decided to celebrate this emergence by having lunch at Bob's Big Boy in Toluca Lake!

We ate and talked and caught up and he told me about the ghosts in an apartment that he stayed at for a few nights (he said that he went from not believing in ghosts to wishing that if they were going to wake him up every night at 3a, that they would at least acknowledge his presence!), then we went to his apartment.

He was living in a place I would kill for--a two bedroom apartment with no roommate or anything and a backyard and everything and it's cheap as hell and he got it from a friend of his who moved in with her multimillionaire boyfriend, so she pretty much gave him the place furnished!

Anyone out there who wants to do the same for me is more than welcome.

While I was there I called Mom and she had just gotten home and gotten my message about the damned raisins, and she had added them to the mixture to soak, and I asked where the hell they had been, and she said that she had put them in the drawer with the potatoes and she was really sorry, but then she realized that it was the same drawer that I had gotten the sugar from!

I swear, I hadn't expected to see them in the drawer, I hadn't looked for them in the drawer, so I did not see them in the drawer! Tells you alot about how I view life, doesn't it?

Anyway, then we went to the multimillionaire's place, because they were away and Michael was feeding the cat, and I threw a tennis ball for the dog belonging to one of the workmen and cuddled with the cat and got all sated.

I hadn't realized how much I had missed petting an animal since I had left home!

Then I went home and descended into the bowels of turkey hell.

I had no idea that it would be turkey hell when it started, I mean, my God, my mother has made a hundred turkeys if she has made one, but this year we had a new one of those roaster ovens that you put on the counter, and we were inaugurating it with the 18 pound turkey.

First she made the stuffing and I put my incredibly soaked bread pudding in to bake, then she realized that she, in cleaning the house, had misplaced her sewing kit and had nothing to hold the turkey together.

"Why don't you use metal skewers?" I said, "Many people, in my experience, use metal skewers and are deliriously happy with them!" So she found the metal skewers and skewed the turkey shut. Then we spent twenty minutes reading the instruction book, trying to figure out how long to cook this turkey in the new roaster oven, finally deciding on 3 hours (things cook faster in these ovens).

We sat down, and, because Mom couldn't wait, had some bread pudding, which was much better than about the last three times I had made it. I think I had been over-mixing it. Plus maybe soaking for four hours rather than one helped. Anyway, we sat on the sofa and I read David Sedaris' Santaland Diaries to her, which I had discovered a few nights before. She kept falling asleep during the reading, and I would stop and accuse her of sleeping and she would insist that she had only been resting her eyes.

"What was the last thing I read?" I would say. "You have read so much, how can I possibly remember it all?" she would reply.

Then, after two and a half hours it was time to turn the turkey over for the last half hour.

Well, let me tell you, turning this turkey was an extravaganza not to be missed. I wish that somebody had been videotaping the whole ordeal, we would have won $25,000 on one of those TV shows easy.

First of all, because of the sides of the roaster oven, it couldn't just be rolled over, it had to be lifted and twirled, all eighteen pounds of it plus stuffing, but it was sitting on a rack and those damn skewers were catching in the rack.

It took something like twenty minutes to turn the turkey, and once we did, Mom said "You know, I think this is done!" "But it's all pale and pasty and nasty!" I said, "Let's cook it some more anyway!"

So we did, and when we took it out it was so thoroughly over-cooked that it practically fell apart in the oven and we had to take a skewer out which meant that the stuffing entirely fell out of the neck all into the drippings.

We finally sat down to dinner, staring at the food, saying "I'm too tired to eat!" Everything actually was very good, and we remembered the rolls and the rutabagels were good (by Mom) even though they got scorched during the whole turkey turning, but I swear, we were so completely shattered by the whole experience that we mutually decided that Midnight Mass would be just the Last Straw.

So we both stayed up all night wrapping presents for each other instead, and watching various incarnations of A Christmas Carol. I saw the Alistair Sims version twice, and the musical version with Albert Finney once.

Anyone remember the musical version with Albert Finney besides me? It came out in 1970 and I saw it at the age of six. I don't remember much, just that the Ghost of Christmas Future scared the bejabbers out of me, but I had the record album, and know those songs and every word in them like my own name.

It's not a very good movie, I realize now. Albert Finney overacts appallingly, though Alec Guinness is a scream (ho ho ho), and I certainly don't remember that bit at the end in Hell and think it is absolutely so dreadful and un-Dickensian that the screenwriter should be haunted in punishment, but my main problem was that in this broadcast version, three songs were cut out!

Three songs! But, get this, they left in the reprises! Did they think that one time through was enough? But if the song has a different meaning both times it gets sung, don't they realize that the change won't make any fucking sense unless people know that there is, in fact, a change?

Other than that, though, I did enjoy seeing it. It really is a glorious story.

"I am the Ghost of Christmas Past."
"Long past?"
"No, your past. Rise and walk with me..."

Today's horoscope:
Thrills appeal--being on-stage, gambling, living life to the hilt in some fashion. Don't overdo, but do share the limelight and the fun.

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Last Updated Tues 27 December 21:46:09 1998