Style You Can Feel Good About

I’m one of those people who shows up at the post office on a holiday only to become perplexed to find it closed. I once dialed up my local bank on a three day weekend and asked a question of the woman who answered. After listening to my query, she identified herself as part of the cleaning crew and informed me that it was a national bank holiday and she was sorry she couldn’t help me. It’s not that I dislike holidays, I just don’t remember them, despite having a sharp memory. I have similar feelings about weekends and so called ‘business hours’. I’ll get so wrapped up in a project that I forget what’s going on in the world around me. I get cranky if I want to do something like make a color photocopy at 2 am on a Sunday and discover that all the copy shops are closed.

So, with a certain degree amazement, I realized that I have a new weekly ritual that I haven’t yet forgotten. Every Friday evening that I’ve been in town for the past few months, my mother and I watch an episode of the Paula Deen show together. It started by accident. We were in her kitchen one Friday when a southern drawl coming from the TV in the living room caught our attention. My mother, a lifelong health nut, was appalled by this charming little woman swooning over bacon and cooking with obscene amounts of butter. It was her fantastic outfits and thick accent that got me. We were hooked.

Our weekly thing has evolved to include snacks (sans butter) and it’s own set of rules. My mother is blessed with a wicked sense of humor and getting to watch this show with her is a real treat. It’s like our very own ‘Rocky Horror Picture Show.’ We gleefully repeat words like ‘boil’, ‘oil’, and ‘foil’ with our best southern drawls, and keep a rolling butter count of both the total number of sticks and times she says the word ‘Buh-ter.’ For that half an hour each week, we watch a woman on TV prepare rich comfort food that neither of us would want to eat and really enjoy it. I couldn’t tell you why we find it so funny, it’s just one of those things.

But, it’s not really about Paula Deen (or the butter). It’s about finding time to enjoy my mother’s company. I haven’t had the time or the geographic proximity to spend that much time with her in the past several years. It’s nice to have our own little Friday evening ritual. Plus, when I was out shopping a while ago and came across candles with Paula Deen’s picture on them claiming to smell like “Coconut Pound Cake’, I knew just who to call and share a laugh with.