From time to time, Baby Jane Hudson appears here with her column But You Are In That Chair: Baby Jane’s Advice For the Confused, Depressed and Clueless. Today’s column is, appropriately, all about Halloween and how to celebrate the holiday if, like Baby Jane, you just woke up after a four-day drinking binge and realized that not a thing has been done to prepare for the holiday – no fake cobwebs strewn in the bushes, no plastic gravestones inserted in the front lawn and no costume purchased from the Halloween superstore that operates out of what used to be your neighborhood Blockbuster outlet.

Let the Halloween fun begin!

Dear Baby Jane,
OK, I need some good last-minute costume ideas. I was going to do what I do every year – sit in my house watching TV with all the shades drawn and the lights off – but now I’ve been invited to go to a party and then dancing at a club. I do like to go to da club! I need something easy and cheap.
Gonna Party Like It’s 1997
Baltimore, MD

Dear Party 1997,
The best costume idea I’ve ever had is the one I use  year after year – a drunk. All it requires is to get drunk. Then stumble around and say things you’ll regret the next day. If you’ve got the stones to take it up a notch, vomit on someone. It’s not just a costume – it’s performance art. If  booze isn’t your thing, pop some Lunesta and wait for that neon butterfly to appear. Then talk to it. Pet it. Now that’s what I call creepy. Want another idea? Go as a depressed person. All it requires is… nothing. Just read some news on the Internet and walk out of your house. When people ask you what you are, you say, “I’m depressed!” in an anxious, annoyed and yet dejected manner. But if you really, really want to go for the WOW factor, if you really want to be scary, here’s my best suggestion:

Now that’s scary.
Baby Jane

Dear Baby Jane:
Halloween is finally here and I’m having all my friends over for a séance. We’re going to find the open portal in my house (I think it’s in the laundry room but my husband insists it’s in our second bathroom), talk to the ghost who’s  been hanging around our split-level ranch for three years we’ve lived here and help her/him/it cross-over to other side. Any suggestions on what we could say to keep things on a positive level but convince them it’s time to go? I don’t want to frighten or anger them with any negative energy.
Batty,
Pittsburgh, PA

Dear Batty,
I had to do this very thing two years ago. It seems my sister, Blanche, just wasn’t ready to take her final bow. She kept hanging around, moping, using my eyebrow pencils at 3 a.m.  and pushing her old wheelchair ( which I keep around for toting empties back to the liquor store) down the stairs. It got oh so tiresome.

I got a few of my neighbors together, mostly people who wanted to see the inside of my house so they could tell everyone else about it on Twitter, and we all held hands (I wore gloves) and sat in a circle. I started out trying to use logic on her, pointing out that she was hanging around the sister who tried to feed her rats, tied her up, murdered her etc. etc. Big mistake – turns out people who turn into ghosts don’t really believe in logic.  Next, I listened to the walls and patted them while saying, “There, there, baby, it will be OK.” Nothing. So I started to sing and play the ballad rendition of “It’s Raining Men” I’d been working on and she disappeared for good. And so did all the neighbors, which was another good thing because they were starting to ask for things like food, water and where the bathroom was. So my advice is to sing. And maybe do some soft shoe.
Baby Jane

Dear Baby Jane,
Tonight is the big night but I can’t decide which sexy thing I want to be. My best friend wants us to be sexy kitties because its soooo easy and mainstream and we’ll probably get laid. But I want to be sexy iPhone in honor of Steve Jobs. We decided to let you make the call. Ha ha ha – pun intended!
Sexy Something Or Other
Appleton, WI

Dear Sexy Something,
Have you ever filled a bathtub with chocolate-covered cherries, gotten into it and then rolled around so that the chocolates spill out their syrupy, cheap cherry goodness? Then gotten out of the tub and sprayed yourself with a fixative or sealer? That, my dear, is a sexy costume. Unless, of course, you have access to a costume that looks like a tumbler of whiskey on the rocks.

Or, do you have something that would make you look like a cigarillo? Maybe a Swisher Sweet? Take me to Swishertown!

Baby Jane

Dear Baby Jane,
I was reading a list of top songs for Halloween – “The Monster Mash,” “Werewolves of London,” “Bark At the Moon,” – but noticed that you didn’t make the list with “I’ve Written a Letter to Daddy,” clearly one of the creepiest songs of all time. Not only does this seem like a major oversight it means that your legacy has not been secured. Do you worry about this?
Dumb Ditty
Portland, OR

Dear Dumb Dittie,
I’m not going to dignify this with a response other than to show you THIS:

I’ll bet you’re speechless. Ms. Bette Davis singing about me. Ha!
Baby Jane

Dear Baby Jane,
No matter what anyone says, to me Halloween is all about the candy. I’m crazy about it! I was just curious – what’s your favorite Halloween candy?
Sweet Tooth
Kalamazoo, MI

Dear Sweet Tooth,
Here’s what I’ll be handing out to all the kiddies who come by tonight:

Chocolate Liquor Bottles! One 64-count box for them and one 64-count box for me.

Baby Jane Recommends

Every Halloween I put on my Kim Carnes album and listen to “Bette Davis Eyes” while dancing in front of the windows with all the lights on. Just a little free entertainment for the neighbors.

As I’ve probably mentioned four dozen times, I luv Bette Davis. So I fully endorse this t-shirt, made by some people who call themselves Dolce & Gabbana.  Although it’s expensive, it’s a fitting and loving tribute to the greatest actress of all time (except for Kim Fields). Go check it out and buy one for when you’re lounging around the house with a dirty martini while viewing The Watcher In The Woods for the 27th time.

Categories: But You Are In That Chair!
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You know how sometimes you start reading a novel and you get all into it and you don’t want to stop reading it because it’s too good? You don’t want to eat, go out, or sleep because you have to know what happens?

But then something terrible happens. Not all at once but often subtly, sometimes very subtly, the book starts to shift in tone. Or something in the plot doesn’t add up. Or it becomes… boring. You keep reading anyway because this is that book you were so into, the one you stayed up until 3 a.m. reading, and you can’t just abandon it. You bravely soldier on.

This is not that book.

Thank you, Jeffrey Eugenides, for writing an interesting story, with three compelling characters (two more well-developed than others), that explores the nature of first love, beginnings, endings, mental illness, freedom and even the world of snobbish academia. I did not feel let down.

The Marriage Plot concerns a love triangle between the characters Leonard, Madeline and Mitchell that begins during their college years at Brown and spills over into the year or so following graduation. Much has been made about the character of Leonard being a not-so-subtle rendering of the late David Foster Wallace. My husband and I are already having arguments about this (I’ve finished the book, obviously, and he’s about 50 pages in so we haven’t been able to have the full Showcase Showdown yet).

I heard Eugenides on Fresh Air on NPR last week. Terry Gross asked him about the likeness and Eugenides, who was not close with D.F.W., said that he doesn’t wish to keep addressing it but that he would one more time – his character is NOT meant to be D.F.W. Sure, there are similarities (like the fact that Leonard wears a bandana all the time, chews tobacco, suffers from manic depression) and those choices are interesting, in light of the fact that Eugenides had met D.F.W. more than once. But all writers borrow pieces and facts and meld them into something else.

It’s like melting down crayons to make a new, waxy object.

That didn’t make a lot of sense, but whatever. You get the gist.

Anyway, my fear is that discussion of the book will become all about examining whether or not this is a rip-off of D.F.W’s character and quirks rather than a discussion of the story itself, which I found compelling even when it was chronicling the course in semiotics that Leonard and the female character, Madeline, take together their senior year. Of course, I’m partial to preppy-ish novels like Catcher In The Rye, The Secret History by Donna Tart, Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld, etc. etc.I guess I enjoy reading about privileged young people trying to make sense of their stifling surroundings while drinking imported beer.

Needless to say, when Dead Poets Society first came out, I was gaga.

That Leonard suffers from manic depression, an illness that eventually pulls him down and threatens his future, is just one of the threads of the book. One of the other threads, and possibly the more important one in my opinion, is Mitchell’s story. A young man on a search for meaning, he has to learn to decipher whether getting what one thinks one wants is necessarily the path to happiness.

Although The Marriage Plot is very different from Eugenides’s first two books (The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex) it feels somehow more real, intimate and personal. It is shot through with funny dialog (his ear for young women is amazing – Madeline’s friends and roommates are spot-on), longing, youthful fuck-ups and sincerity. And it doesn’t deliver a Hollywood ending, for which I’m grateful, although I would like to humbly suggest that there be a second volume that picks up with Mitchell where this book leaves off.

Mr. Eugenides, I loved your book but we’ve got to talk about this get-up.

(photo by Ricardo Barros)

Categories: Book Review!
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This morning while doing my usual eat-oatmeal-drink-tea in front of the Today Show, I witnessed Alexis Stewart’s interview (along with her ex-collaborator, partner, friend, co-writer Jennifer Koppelman-Hutt) about her new book Whateverland, which is supposed to be about… advice? Funny stories? And a bit about Alexis Stewart’s mom, Martha? The interview got so tense I had to look away a couple of times and didn’t even catch exactly what the point of the book is.

What was odd as well was that Savannah Guthrie, someone I pegged as a lanky Pollyanna, really dug in and stayed with the embarrassing questions as if she were a lawyer for the prosecution.

If you’ve never seen anyone radiate anger/hatred/disgust, then watch Alexis in action in the video below. This is the entire first segment, including the intro, plus the segment the following hour when Alexis and Jennifer were supposed to answer viewer e-mail questions. Apparently, Alexis and her co-writer Hutt are no longer friends/partners/ collaborators and are not on speaking terms because that’s the way Alexis wanted it. They talked about it as if it were a divorce, Stewart saying that one day you look at your spouse and just say, “Oh, not anymore.”

Which begs the question of why both women agreed to come on and do the segment. Shouldn’t one of them have played sick? They acted as if they were incredibly evolved but I noticed that they could hardly look at one another.

Most baffling, to me, is that at every turn Alexis refutes everything she says in the book about her mom, claiming it’s all one big joke. But this is a woman who looks like she’s never laughed in her entire life. She did look a tiny bit sad (and dare I say sincere?) when she admitted that there were no “prepared foods” in her house – nothing to eat but the raw ingredients to, like, make stuff because her mom was busy. No prepared food in Martha’s house!

It reminds me of that riddle about the ocean that goes “Water, water everywhere but not a drop to drink.”

“Arugula, pecorino, peppercorns and vinaigrette everywhere but not a gourmet salad to eat!”

I’m not sure if appearances like this will help the book or not. While the break-up of the friendship could draw some people in, if they saw this interview they probably would not want their money to benefit Alexis (in the form of buying her book.) She’s just going to go out and spend it on leather leggings.

What I did enjoy was that Ben Stiller was sitting in the studio waiting to be interviewed about his new movie while this was going on and, when they cut to him following the interview, he looked as annoyed and confused as everyone else. At the end of his interview he said, “And I’d like to mention that my father dripped hot Chanukah candle wax on me as a child.”

Categories: General Weirdness
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Halloween memories… Otter costume. Holding a Summit Brewing hat for unknown reason… as if my head would ever get cold in that thing!

Categories: General Weirdness
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This is where the magic happens… or doesn’t happen, as the case may be. My corner of the world.

You’ll never guess who I woke up thinking about this morning. No, I mean, you really won’t guess. It’s not anyone currently on Dancing With The Stars. No, not Oprah. Not Steve Guttenberg.

Brian Dunkleman.

Dunkleman was on the first season of American Idol. He was Ryan Seacrest’s co-host. It seems strange now that they thought the job required two hosts. Maybe it was a season-long tryout. “Look, we can’t decided between the two of you so consider this season sort of a cage match to the death.”

[Click here for a photo of just how orange Ryan Seacrest was during Season 1.]

I watched that first season of American Idol and what I remember, more than any of the performances, etc., was Brian Dunkleman’s disappointed face. Or his angry face. Simon Cowle would do his Simon Shit and Dunkleman’s jaw would clench up and twitch, trying to hold it all inside.

Here is what it has to say about the situation on Wikipedia:

In appearances on The Howard Stern Show, he had insisted that he intended to leave Idol to pursue a career in stand-up comedy and acting, but in 2008, Dunkleman admitted to Stern that leaving the show was a mistake. Dunkleman conceded that he experienced several months of depression, and also still harbored resentment against current show host Ryan Seacrest, but has come to terms with his situation. Stern has compared Dunkleman to Pete Best of The Beatles and several other famous celebrities who chose to leave (or were forced to leave) successful show business careers, only to wind up as has-beens. Dunkleman good-naturedly put up with the ribbing from the Stern crew, but insisted he was happy with his current life.

Wow, Pete Best of The Beatles? Harsh.

Dunkleman still does stand-up comedy in L.A.

I recently saw a profile of Ryan Seacrest on CBS Sunday Morning and what I concluded after watching it was this: if you show up for things and work relentlessly, it sometimes does not matter if you have the personality of a shoebox. It really doesn’t. I mean, if you were a painter or a sculptor it would matter if you had no inherent talent, but not if you’re hosting New Year’s Eve broadcasts or producing meaningless reality TV shows.

In the interview, Seacrest denied the gay rumors and defended his relationship with Julianne Hough but I’ve read enough volumes of Hollywood Babylon to understand the concept of a career-boosting beard. He needs her and she definitely needs him. I wonder if there is some secret Hollywood Gay/Straight Relationship Broker you can call who then puts the word out.

“Trust me, I’ve done all the big ones. I lured in Katie Holmes for Tom Cruise- that was a coup. My first gig was Kelly Preston and John Travolta. My only mistake was Liza Minnelli and David Gest – that guy just can’t keep the closet door latched, if you know what I mean.”

In other news:

Reading: Just finished My Korean Deli, a memoir about a family who buys… uh… a deli. In Brooklyn. It was funny and also had a lot to say about the outlook and worldview of first generation immigrants and their children versus Protestant/Waspy people who’ve been here for awhile (the author is a Waspy Protestant whose ancestors landed in Plymouth and he married a Korean woman whose parents immigrated
to the U.S.).

Which reminds me of a strange run-in I had in front of a hardware store while working on a freelance writing assignment. I started talking to a guy who I thought could be useful for my assignment but a few minutes in it became clear that he was insane. Here is a sampling of his  thoughts:

Him: I miss 1962. That was the perfect year to live in Minneapolis. Everything was clean and beautiful and perfect and there were no immigrants.

Me: How old were you in 1962?

Him: Four.

Me: How do you remember 1962.

Him: Because I have a photographic memory! Where’s my landlord? He’ll tell you. I remember everything that ever happened to me.

[Landlord was shopping in the store, so unavailable to verify photographic memory.]

Him: I can say whatever I want because I’m part Native American. But I’m also English, Scottish and Welch. My people were not immigrants, they were pioneers. There’s a difference.

Me: How much Native American are you? Like, an eighth?

Him: One sixty-fourth. But it still counts. The problem with immigrants today is that they are opportunists. They just want to make money.

Me: What’s wrong with that? Everyone likes money.

Him: They should do that in their own countries.

Me: Maybe their own countries won’t allow them to.

Him: Well, that’s just too bad, isn’t it?

Then landlord appeared, saving me. Insane man toddled off to Great Harvest Bread for a free piece of bread.

Watching: Not nearly enough. Just finished watching all seasons of Arrested Development (ready and waiting for the new stuff, guys!) and also went to see 50/50, aka The Hipster Terms of Endearment. It was funny, well-acted, blah blah blah, but ultimately hyped too much. Poor storyline and use of the talented Dallas Bryce Howard as Evil Girlfriend Who Bails When She Feels Overwhelmed By Boyfriend’s Cancer. They really should have just outfitted her with devil ears, tail and pitchfork.

Doing: Excited for the Day of the Dead Sale at Zinnia Folk Arts at GUILD in St. Louis Park, the Twin Cities’ Vintage Clothing, Jewelry & Textile Sale at the State Fairgrounds on Friday and Saturday and the Twin Cities Book Festival on Saturday.

Also, still working on a novel. It’s called The Grand Tour and someday soon it will be finished (in rough draft form). That’s what I do a lot of the time in my corner of the world.

Categories: Wednesday Outlook
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Do you love memoirs? I don’t know that I really love them and yet I find myself reading them quite often. Sometimes they serve the same purpose as reality TV in that they make me feel instantly better about myself. I’m not the one standing there, quivering, hoping for that rose, you know? I’m not trying to put together a gigantic puzzle on some remote island’s beach while wearing a lycra band as a tube top.

And the book In Spite of Everything by Susan Gregory Thomas seemed to have some promise, as memoirs go. The angle is that she’s one of the bitter statistics from Generation X (of which I’m a card-carrying member) who barely survived her parents’ terrible, traumatic divorce and came out the other side, only to end up in a bad marriage herself. Her argument is that most people of Gen X experienced the same thing in terms of their parents splitting up, so we’re extra-protective/paranoid/hyper about our own families and children, trying to make sure everything goes as swimmingly as possible all the time.

Statistics might be on her side where the incidence of divorce is concerned but anecdotal evidence from my own life suggests that this isn’t true for me and most of my friends. First, my parents are still together after 44 years. According to her book, this makes me akin to the Ivory-billed Woodpecker in terms of rarity. But then, while reading, I started ticking off all my friends and realized that pretty much all of us have parents who are still together. Even in high school most of my friends still had parents who were together.

Maybe the answer is to live in the Midwest. We like to tough things out.

I began to suspect that, even more than her parents’ divorce, what really fucked her up was that her dad was a cold-blooded alcoholic who didn’t just divorce his wife but the entire family, moving away and starting over with a new family. The guy came across as a complete asshole. I don’t care what generation you’re from, when Dad’s an asshole things aren’t going to be fun.

Anyway, I was going along, reading her back story and all the research she’d done and then I got to the part about her own marriage, which unraveled despite her determination to stay married. Notice I didn’t say “efforts.” There weren’t any therapy sessions. No vacations away just the two of them. No reliable babysitters to take the kids off their hands for date nights. They just stayed home with the kids all the time.

Which brings me to the part about co-sleeping. It seemed OK when she described how the co-sleeping started – she and her husband sleeping with their infant daughter while she was nursing. But by the later half of their marriage she was sleeping in bed with her two daughters (roughly about ages 3 and 6 by the end of the marriage) every night and the husband slept alone in the master bedroom.

Hello?

In my (albeit limited) playbook, it’s good to teach kids that Mom & Dad sleep together in their room because they are adults and they are in a relationship that doesn’t always have to be solely about the kids. So, suck it up kids. This is how Mom & Dad stay married – by escaping you every once in awhile. It’s good for everyone. If you can’t sleep alone at age six, well, maybe I’m old school but kid’s got a problem.

But the really appalling part, the part that made me cackle with glee (because isn’t that what we do with memoirs?) is that they underwent a $100,000 kitchen renovation but would not spring for a second computer or even a laptop so they could both be on the computer during the day.

They both worked from home in order to be home for their daughters because they, I don’t know, couldn’t bear to be away from them, but they only had one computer. So when Susan got a book deal, the computer time became a big issue in their marriage, especially since their arrangement to split the day with computer time/work vs. child care didn’t really work out.

More often than not, as time went on, the schedule did not work as planned. By the time it was my time to use the computer, Cal would already be so engrossed in work that he could not stop, or would have been pinged by a client who needed to have a conference call right away, or his business partner would need him to come over, or I would conk out with the kids on returning home from preschool and forfeit my turn, or someone would get sick or something else. It became clear after a few months of this that I was never going to be able to use the computer. My requests enraged him. Fine, I could use it – he just wouldn’t get his work done! Fine – just tell him how we were going to pay the bills… Ultimately, I joined a writers’ space in our neighborhood, ceding the home office to Cal.

It would take one afternoon of that bullshit and I’d be down at Best Buy and coming home with a laptop that I’d be setting up in my newly-renovated kitchen. You can’t tell me they didn’t install an island or a “breakfast bar.”

Basically, the marriage ends In Spite of Everything. Is that a fair title? In spite of never sleeping with her husband, allowing him to do all the cooking (which she claims rendered her rather useless) and both staying home all day instead of going out to work (which could save a marriage -sometimes less is more) and then buying a brownstone they couldn’t really afford and renovating that (this is after the kitchen renovation in the apartment, which became too confining and not homey enough), her marriage ended.

Here is where I spoil some stuff.

She becomes poverty-stricken, sometimes only having $10 in her bank account (oh, to have invested the $50,000 inheritance she stuck into the kitchen!) (I know – I just can’t get past that!). She can’t allow her daughters to stay with her at her apartment because some drunk-hobo-vagrant guy is allowed to live in a storefront below and, I guess, would eat her daughters if given half a chance. She gets some dough, buys a ramshackle house in Brooklyn and gets a boyfriend. Gets pregnant by boyfriend in, I guess, an “oops” moment, although I’m not sure, given the way she almost fetishizes babies (I could not take one more instance of her calling her kids “babies” when they were 6, 7, 8-years-old or referring to them as “schmushkies.” I know your kids are always your “babies” but something about the frequency of it disturbed me.)

End of story. So, what’s the point?

I guess that, despite your best intentions, bad shit can happen to you. And sometimes even smart people make terrible decisions. Which is, um, Adult 101, is it not?

Categories: Book Review!
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I love Arc’s Value Village in Richfield. It feeds my sickness. Witness:

Vintage LL Bean Norwegian Fisherman’s Sweater found at Value Village in the Men’s Section (not the vintage section – their vintage selections are completely random but I do appreciate that they have a section):

This is one of the LL Bean classics of preppiness. They “re-issued” this sweater in 2009 and you can buy a new one through their site for $130 (although the model doesn’t look too happy to be wearing it). It was featured in GQ Magazine as a hip thing cuz it’s made of “unscoured wool” which is waterproof.

You can also troll eBay for vintage ones. I found them for between $50-80.

Here’s the label in mine:

But at Arc I paid $12. I just got so excited I bought it before even thinking about if I wanted to wear it. It is a hot number, and I don’t mean sexy. You could go outside in this at 10 degrees and probably be OK.

But then I figured out exactly who would want to wear this because she’s a “dyed-in-the-wool” preppy WASP.

Her favorite movie is 1990′s Metropolitan.

Categories: Fashion!, Today's Treasures
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All of these bangles were $1, except for the off-white, carved one, that I actually paid $10 for:

The leather ones with the studs (which a friend of mine said look like cat collars) were $1 at Salvation Army. All the rest are courtesy of Originals Antique Mall in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, one of my favorite out-of-the-way spots when I’m in the Fox Valley, yo!

Word to the Bangle Wise: hit up your local antique mall for unique stuff that will probably be cheaper and of higher quality than what you find in retail stores. Sometimes people with a lot of stuff in their booths get tired of it and want to change things up, so they have a mini fire sale, which is what I stumbled across – everything $1 or $10.

I’m on my way to achieving Nancy Cunard Bangle Greatness.

Categories: Fashion!, Today's Treasures
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After a hiatus from my series about the First Ladies, I’m ready to dig in once more and sally forth with their biographies and recipes, as detailed in The First Ladies Cookbook, brought to you by Fritos.

Which brings us to Jane Means Appleton Pierce and her husband, President Franklin Pierce.

After the President Pierce’s election but before the inauguration, the Pierce’s 11-year-old son was killed in a railroad accident. Here is what Wikipedia has to say about it:

Pierce suffered a devastating tragedy just weeks after his election when he, his wife, and his last son Benjamin were in a terrible train accident in which Bennie was decapitated in front of his father. Pierce put a sheet over the boy hoping his wife would not see the body, but she did anyway. This sent Pierce and his wife into a plummeting despair, affecting his presidency until he left office in 1857. Jane was never happy with her husband’s involvement in the political world. She took no pleasure from life in Washington, D.C., having encouraged Pierce to resign his Senate seat and return to New Hampshire, which he did in 1842. After the gruesome death of her last child, shortly before Pierce’s inauguration, she was overcome with melancholia and distanced herself from her husband during his presidency. She became known as “the shadow of the White House.” She was deeply religious and regarded the death of their last child as God’s anger brought on by her husband’s political life.

I can’t read that part about “the shadow of the White House” without thinking it would make a good title for a Scooby Doo episode.

When it says “melancholia” what it means in plain English is deep, dark depression. Not only did Benjamin die tragically, he was the last of her three children. Her first son had lived a few days, her second son had lived until he was four and then died of typhus.

Interestingly enough, The First Ladies Cookbook, brought to you by Fritos, glosses over all of this except for the fact that Benjamin died. It says she eventually recovered enough to receive visitors at Friday afternoon receptions and then goes on to talk about bouquets of camellias wired to lace paper doilies, which became all the rage in D.C. fancy houses.

President Pierce is often remembered as one of “the worst president of the United States,” a title that seems difficult to hold considering all the terrible Presidents since then. I’d say that Nixon would give Pierce a run for his money.

Admittedly, Pierce doesn’t sound very cool. He was a “doughface,” which sounds like a nickname for a fat person, but really meant  a Northerner with Southern sympathies (being down with slavery). He wanted to buy Cuba from Spain (pro-slavery peeps wanted it as a “slave state,” or basically a “slave factory” for that constant, fresh supply of human capital) and, if Spain refused, he wanted to go to war with Spain. Talk about making someone an offer they can’t refuse.

Adding to the calamity was the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which basically established these territories and also said that settlers could vote to decide if they wanted slavery or not. This did not sit well with the Northern states. Just as in Broadway shows, if it doesn’t “play in Peoria,” it ain’t gonna go far.

Anyway, Franklin Pierce was essentially abandoned by his party and didn’t get renominated for President. And he had a drinking problem. And then he supported the Confederacy during the Civil War, which in the North was akin to someone being a Nazi sympathizer during WWII…

He died of cirrhosis in 1869.

And what of Jane? By all accounts she was a shy, frail woman, given to illness and fainting. She hated her husband’s political career (she reportedly fainted when she found out that he had received the nomination for President). After her son died in the train accident, she cloistered herself away in the second level of the White House (hmmm… this is sounding familiar, First Lady Margaret Taylor AND First Lady Abigail Fillmore) and wrote letters to her dead son. She died in 1863 of tuberculosis, which rears its ugly head yet again [For more on TB, see my post Understanding the Olden Days: Tuberculosis]

So… exactly whose recipes are featured in the First Ladies Cookbook? I’m sure they do not belong to Jane Means Appleton Pierce. There is no recipe for Melancholia Tea or Sad Cake here. No Dust In The Wind Pie or Ashes to Ashes Rump Roast. No, instead there is a recipe for Baked Clams (Whole or Minced) and Beef a la Mode. No, that doesn’t mean Beef With Ice Cream. It’s some sort of gravy.

According to the book, the Pierces hired a couple from New Hampshire, their home state, to serve sort of an innkeepers at the White House. Wikipedia claims that Jane’s aunt and a close friend tended to the duties. In any case, there seems to be little record of what they actually ate or served during their time in the House.

Rather than bore you with the recipes from the cook book, I decided to find something that would honor the pioneers of the Kansas-Nebraska territories. Hopefully, they did not have slaves.

Western Sandwich

“Pioneer women masked the flavor of over-the-hill eggs by mixing them in plenty of onions. Of course those frontier women lacked some of the principal ingredients of the classic Western Sandwich–green and/or red bell peppers. Other food historians believe the sandwich may have originated with chuckwagon cooks, then been refined and embellished over the years. Whatever its origins, the Western Sandwich seems not to have made it into the pages of cookbooks–or onto the menus of restaurants–until well into the twentieth century. In the West, it’s often called a “Denver.”
—The American Century Cookbook: The Most Popular Recipes of the 20th Century, Jean Anderson [Clarkson Potter:New York] 1997

1/4 pound ham or 4 slices bacon, diced
1 green pepper, chopped
1 medium onion, chopped
4 eggs
Salt
Pepper
Bread or round buns

Fry ham or bacon for several minutes. Toss in green pepper and onion and cook until vegetables are almost tender. Beat eggs in a bowl with salt and pepper. Pour over mixture in skillet and cook until eggs are set. Turn with a broad spatula and brown second side lightly. Place between slices of buttered bread or buns. Makes 4 sandwiches.”
—American Heritage Cookbook and Illustrated History of American Eating and Drinking, Menus and Recipes [American Heritage:New York] 1964

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