tedwords

Why is it that I have an unnatural fear of the food that's been consigned to the corners of refrigerators?

I'm not why it is, exactly. Whenever I reach into a fridge, though, to grab a snack or drink, or pureed kelp (Corb's big into pureed kelp), I automatically discount the two back corners on every level. Just black them out. They don't count. That's where the bad food goes to die.

It doesn't matter if whatever's there is fresh out of the oven. Something about being pushed into the corners makes it dirty. Moldy. Quite possibly older than Dick Cheney.

I just did it just last night. Theo wanted orange juice, and I just knew that there was a bottle in the corner that had just been opened three days ago. However, when I opened the door and realized that the bottle ended up in the bottom right corner, my scuzz alarm went off. I actually thought twice about things. Should I pour this and risk feeding my precious baby *gasp* OLD orange juice? What could that do to his insides?

P.S.: I poured it and served it to him, anyway. Just don't ask ME to drink it.

I think this has something to do with the disposable era we live in. My cranky Yankee grandmother, Nana Hall, certainly wouldn't have given two shits about drinking the remainder of the orange juice container shoved into the corner of a fridge, even if it had scat floating around the top. Waste not, want not, was her philosophy. It's that Depression mentality.

One time, when I was around ten, she was looking after me, and I didn't finish all of the Fruit Loops in my cereal bowl. She glared at me, as though I had just unloaded nuclear waste into the Cape Cod canal. Firmly, she placed the bowl on the counter and declared that until I finished the entire bowl, I wouldn't get anything else to eat for the rest of the day.

I swear to you, it felt like a Christina Crawford moment. I half expected her to whip out a few wire hangers, while she was at it. But I was stubborn. Screw that. No way that I was going to eat a few decaying fruit loops in a bowl full of curdling milk.

Thankfully, my grandmother wasn't a tough-as-nails Hollywood actress. My hunger strike only lasted until noon.

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Speaking of Joan Crawford, my latest obsession is the classic B-straining-to-be-A-minus classic Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? . I am oddly fascinated by watching Bette Davis chew all the carpeting out of that aging Hollywood estate, while at the same time feeding Joan Crawford dead animals on a silver platter.

In fact, I think they should have just gone for broke and made the whole movie a series of little surprises a la carte. That's where the real suspense lay, if you ask me...wondering what awful thing Bette was going to cook up next. Why stop with just a dead little parakeet and a big old rat? We could have days and days of Bette Davis bringing in increasingly strange delicacies to her paralyzed sister. "Look what I brought in today, Blanche," she could snarl, in that craggy voice that makes her sound like one of Marge Simpson's sisters. "G'wan! Lift up the lid, I dare you! Yeah, I cooked up the head of that maid of yours, how d'you like that?" "Look, I cooked up one of my Baby Jane dolls, just for you!" "Look, Blanche, look! Here's a side of daddy you've never seen before!"

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