Balls--Lots of Tiny Balls

Last week my coworker Sharon commissioned me, likely against her better judgment, and possibly after much pleading on my part, to make the cake for her son's end-of-season baseball party. In my free time, when I'm not harassing the cat, harassing Lawyer Boy, or making fart jokes, I love to bake and decorate cakes. I've mostly been commissioned to make them for showers at the office, either bridal or baby, and frankly, I would like some credit for politely abstaining from writing "Way To Spawn!" on the cakes for the fetus-themed fetes.

Last summer, my girlfriends asked me to make a cake for our friend Erin's lingerie shower, and I obliged by baking up a full-figured corset, slathered in creamy frosting and practically bursting from real womanly curves, made possible by my mad skills in creating 3-D cake-boobs. I was so proud of her, my delectable lingerie, that I named her Tammy Sue. Seriously, can you blame me?
In case you're curious, "EK" would be Erin's new monogram after her wedding. It did not stand for "Extreme Kurves" or "Extra Klassy." Clearly I am not so fantastic at drawing with frosting, but I am extremely skilled at frosting rosettes, and also very enthusiastic about cramming as many of them into a given space as possible. Poor Tammy Sue apparently has chicken pox. Or, more appropriately, the herp.

This time around, Sharon had told me that her son's team was the Yankees, so I tried to work around that. I looked up the professional Yankees' team logo...
...and immediately nixed that as a design option. While it would be very authentic, it would more likely than not look like a big gum-paste penis sporting an Abe Lincoln top hat by the time I had recreated it, and no parent wants to explain that fumble to their 10-year-old son. And that just does not scream CELEBRATION, unless you are a patriotic porn star. I pondered the design some more, even contemplating borrowing the 3D boob effect from Tammy Sue to produce a 3D baseball, but I had to nix that idea after I determined it was impractical to make an entire batch of cake batter for one 3-inch-round ball. It was impractical, because I would have eaten the remaining cake in one sitting.

I finally decided to keep it simple and write "Yankees 2009" on top of a white cake, bordered by baseball stitching and blue dots. I know, it's simple, but the less I had to screw up, the less I could screw up. I frosted the cake smooth, piped a long border of blue dots around the bottom, and wrote the words across the top in a script similar to the logo, being careful to actually spell the words right. Sharon said she had dreamed before I gave her the cake that I had horribly misspelled YANKEES, which, knowing me, is a somewhat reasonable fear. I took extra precautions to ensure that I did not write YANKLES or YANKIES, because blue writing on a white cake is like giving birth--once it's out, you can't take it back. I carefully stitched red piping along the top of the cake for the baseball stitching, and I was done!


Because it's so cute, and because I know how much you're just dying for more glamour shots, here's a side view:I was so proud of myself, I just had to share with someone, and it was completely impossible for me to wait 26 more minutes before I would drop the cake off to Sharon. So I called my mom and squealed a lot.

"Mom, it turned out so well. It's so cute! And I didn't smear blue icing anywhere!"

"That's great!" she replied. "What does it look like?"

"Well," I wound up for my dramatic monologue. "It's white, and it says YANKEES 2009 in dark blue across the top, and then I used red frosting to stitch all around the top edge like a baseball, and then I bordered the entire bottom with blue balls. Oh God." I am what is known as an external processor, meaning things do not often fully register to me until I have said them out loud. Therefore, all the time I had spent conceptualizing "blue ball border" and then thinking "careful with the blue balls" as I had piped them onto the cake, it had not actually occurred to me that I was ringing a cake with blue balls. As soon as the words left my lips, though, I realized exactly what I had done.

"So you're giving blue balls to an entire baseball team?" Mom said. I could hear her starting to laugh, hard, at my blunder. "Way to go, Grace!"

Adding to my discomfort over my foul ball(s), when I dropped the cake off to Sharon, she had brought along her ten-year-old son, the Yankees player himself. He thought the cake was sooooo cool, which was extremely gratifying, until he said, "and look at the blue balls!" I could see Sharon's face over her son's head, and she was making that "do not laugh do not laugh your face can explode but you cannot laugh" face that moms are so good at.

In keeping with the baseball theme, do you think this was a home run, or a strike out?

Run Like The Wind, If The Wind Were A Loser

I have never been what anyone with any remote command of the English language would call "athletic;" my greatest sports-related accomplishment as a child in Little League was striking out so many times that it was downright astounding that I still managed to be disappointed enough to cry each and every time. My parents signed me up for every single country-club popped-collar sports clinic that would enroll my damaged ass, with mixed results, but only if an alternate definition for "mixed" is "catastrophically loseriffic." A sampling:

• At tennis camp, they video taped each of us so we could watch ourselves and critique our stroke. My shiny-special-star sequence was played over and over, in slow-mo, fast-mo, and all other versions of mo, so that everyone could laugh hysterically at my throwing my racket, tearing around the court like a sugared-up preschooler, and all but shedding my clothes to get away from the bee the coach told me was chasing me. IN FACT THERE WAS NO BEE.
  
• I was signed up for "beginner gymnastics" when I was 9, and was placed with the five- and six-year-old class. Apparently my bespangled rainbow leotard with silver hearts and matching headband-legwarmer combo did not convey my inner Mary Lou Rhetton as strongly as I had hoped, and the ankle-biters leaped clear over my dreams...at least during the two classes I suffered through. Quitters R Us, cleanup on aisle 5.
  
• And ballet. For those of you who may object to its inclusion here as it is "not a sport," I defy you to argue that with the ferocious midgets who always jacked the leading roles in our overblown, long-winded recitals. In my last recital, my capstone performance after eleven years of honing my craft, I was cast in a role that graciously allowed me to remain seated for the duration of my own performance, at the end of which I pranced, gracefully (or not) and on-cue (or not) offstage. I just can't be sure--I think my bitterness may have gotten in the way of the stage directions.
• I played varsity (?) field hockey my freshman year of college, and with four games left in the season, the coach unabashedly told me that I was the worst player on the team, explaining why I had ridden the bus to a variety of Division XIV colleges only to ride the bench upon arrival. Also? We lost every single game without the benefit of my magnificent participation, so maybe the skills gap wasn't all that extreme. When your recruitment efforts consist of trolling the freshman dorm the day of move-in, asking stunned newbies if they've ever played skirt sports before, you really can't set your standards any higher than you can whack that ball.
  

Of course, all these rigorous physical challenges took place back in my glory days, when I could chow an entire pizza and not awaken the next morning to find that same pizza jiggling at the backs of my upper arms and battling fiercely with the waistband of my jeans. (Please note that yes, I do consider the ability to chow an entire pizza an accomplishment.) Now that I'm trapped in an adult's body, I find myself struggling to ensure that January's pot pies and February's truffles don't spend bikini season in a matrimonial relationship with my thighs. I have to do something to burn off my bad decisions, and so I run. Kinda. With great fervor, and much dying of the lungs.

It took me at least four years of running before I stopped hating it like Batman hates Joker. The only reason I kept at it, frankly, is because my college roommate/BFF/lovemuffin, Shelley, is a badass physical fitness genie, capable of running long distances in a single outing without having to bum oxygen off the elderly lady with the tank waiting for the bus. After a long evening of pounding shots, winning drinking contests, and finding our roommate in bed with the Mr. Goodbar Du Jour, Shelley would get up, spritz on her eau de Reebok, and bound off into the sunrise, only to arrive a sweaty hour later to proclaim, "I just kept running to see how far I could go, and I ran seven miles!"

Hell, I don't even like to drive seven miles, but guilt is thicker than vodka, and so I'd think to myself, "well, the worst that could happen is...I could pass out in front of the Sig Ep house, and they do have Miller on tap..." strap on my tennies, and stagger out into the sunlight, to bound approximately 10 feet before slowing to a light prance. I pranced, daintily, for about three years, before I determined that if I had the right music, I could up my shuffle to a moderate jog, and I was off! Never to run to the "Titanic" soundtrack again!

My current running playlist is a chronicle of high-energy embarrassment, but it really keeps me moving, mostly because it makes me picture the music videos full of dancer-chicks with waists like Pixie Stix and legs longer than War and Peace, and I feel the need to compete (losing is inconsequential, apparently). It's lame, and I know, but it burns off the wine. In case you're wondering, here's a short sampling of what keeps me hobbling along:

• Flo Rida's sample (cover? do-over?) of "Right Round," which is either about blow jobs or stirppers, the former of which is disturbing and the latter of which reminds me that tennis shoes are always more comfortable than thigh-high plastic boots. Also, someone pointed out to me that Flo Rida is just "Florida" with a space, so I spend the entire song snickering at the grammatic goof-up.
  
• A selection of Britney Spears songs, from her newest vocal vomit, Circus. In her latest release, Ms. Spears, with glitter-coated boobies bigger than her glitter-coated voice, has collaborated with a variety of high-end producers in order to disguise, as much as possible, the fact that she is actually singing. This doesn't bother me in the least, because honestly, were we ever really paying her to sing? I don't know about you, but I was there for the washboard abs and sex for free.
• Kevin Rudolph's "Let It Rock," featuring Lil Wayne being generally and unabashedly obscene. I love this song for the dance beat, but Lil Wayne's voice is like a middle-school smartass with braces and socially awkward jeans running his teeth down a chalkboard. If this kid had a voice, it would be Lil Wayne's.
  

So I tie on my ipod and bound away, hoping no one notices that I'm dragging at least three loose sphincters behind me in my daily death march. If you happen to drive down Grove Avenue and think you may have spotted me, I'm the one with an inhuman amount of red hair and a stride like a dying golden retriever. If you happen to be my boss and drive down Grove Avenue, you already saw me, mid-death spiral, and then made fun of me for it the next day at the office--specifically, my pink shorts.

Just add that to my list of athletic failures, and we'll call it a day.

Red Headed Slut: The Drink, or The Chick?

Let me begin with a statement of fact: I do not go to bars very often. I’m married, so I’m not biting at whatever slick-smiling bait the guys might be dangling in my direction, and I’m insanely talkative (who knew?), so having to yell over a crowd and an endless loop of drunken karaoke “Livin On A Prayer” really cramps my style. That said, what happened a few Saturday nights ago does not happen very often, which is cheery good news for my girlfriends, my husband, and my liver.

The weekend before St. Patrick's Day of Drinking All Things Dyed Green and Regrettable, my girlfriends Martha, Lauren, and Melissa and I had decided to get together for a girls’ wine night, our standard celebration for all of us being in the same place at the same time, which happens less often than Joan Rivers gets laid. So once every fourteen years, we converge on Martha’s house to chow spreadable cheese products and plow through the supermarket’s finest vintage offerings—preferably the ones sold in the largest authentic vineyard jugs under the NEW LOWER PRICE sign.* Martha’s house has become my personal binge-drinking black hole: Every time I leave to head over, I say to Lawyer Boy, “I’m not going to drink that much, and I’ll probably be home early,” which we now understand is code for, “Show up after midnight with the snow shovel to scrape me off the sidewalk, and load me into the back of the car like a slaughtered hog.”

So we hug and squeal hello and OMG WHEN DID YOU CUT YOUR HAIR I LOVE IT!!!, top off our glasses, and chat about our lives, a group of lively young professionals embarking on their meaningful careers and life journeys...and me. We (they) are all busily engaged in doing productive, important things with our (their) lives. Here, let me show you:

• Lauren holds a degree in Biomedical Engineering from Duke, and is currently pursuing an MBA at Darden Business School.
• Martha is a CPA, which means she passed that horrid Triple Frown of an exam, which I hear is like being butt-raped by an adding machine except for less fun.
• Melissa just finished an RN program and is now a nurse in the neonatal intensive care unit at a big hospital. She's also planning her wedding, which we all know involves more blood, sweat, and tears than saving babies.
• I, meanwhile, frequently make cupcakes.**

I started out the evening very proud of myself, because I only upended three glasses of wine in three hours, and had refrained from chugging from the chunky bargain bottle of alcoholic antics.*** I should have seen the finger-painting on the wall and gone home when the girls started talking about going out, but ever the social sheep that I am, I followed the herd through the rain to 3 Monkeys, a bar I only see the inside of when I'm too drunk to remember that I suck at bars, and usually humiliate myself in ways that embarrass my gender as a whole. Melissa, however, is really good at bars, and within two minutes of seating ourselves in a booth covered in someone else's spilled drinks and social failures, she had two random upstanding gentlemen who were in no way looking for a one-night stand, leaning over our table and begging to buy us drinks.

Immediately upon our arrival at the hooch hut, Martha had bought us a round of red-headed sluts, which taste like messy college nights spent pretending to be old enough to drink in public, and then we had the good sense to order a round of beers. By the time a dude shorter than me named Michael Doyle, Our New BFF Du Jour, was slurring over our table about buying us a round of Irish Car Bombs, I was far enough down the road to Bourbontown that 1) a drinking contest seemed like a great idea, 2) a drink that mixes beer and liquor seemed like a great idea, and 3) continuing to drink heavily seemed like a great idea. I was the only one of our pretty party who felt it necessary to try to drink a stranger under the table, so "Michael Doyle" and I went toe-to-toe with the car bombs, frantically chugging before they curdled into slippery pint glasses of baby vomit.

AND I WON. Me beating someone at a drinking contest says less about me than it says about him, and what it says about him is that he drinks like a toddler with a sippy cup. As much as I wanted to bask in the glow of my victory for the rest of the evening, the alcohol and my bud Michael Doyle had other ideas, and I spent the rest of the evening trying to pretend that I could still drink like I pretended I could in college. The events of the rest of the night are based largely on conjecture, since none of us left the bar able to remember what exactly had happened, as the Demon Liquor had stolen our memories, dignity, and my most favorite purple sweater. What I think happened was this: I beat Michael Doyle at car bombs TWICE more, I continued to gloat, I lost my sweater, we went to another bar, I bragged and drank and hopefully did not dance, and all the sudden I was on the bar floor, which is nastier than falling into a Port-a-John at a Billions O' Burritos Festival. It was at that time that the bartender casually suggested that we depart for the evening, whereby "casually suggested" I mean "told us in no uncertain terms to drag my drunken liability-laden ass out of their establishment."

One-what-the-hell-thirty in the morning found us (well, the rest of the girls and my body) standing outside the bar trying to hail a cab, stay out of the rain, and prop me up on the curb like a wasted Lindsey Lohan at an afterparty/in a club/on a movie set/in public at all. The cab drivers, traitors to my quest home, refused to take us since I looked like an ominous threat of a vomitous nature, so the girls ring-a-linged Lawyer Boy from his peaceful slumber to come scrape me off the sidewalk and load me into the car like a slaughtered hog, per my earlier encoded promise. As soon as the car began moving in the direction of home, the Mount Vesuvius of used drinks erupted all over Lawyer Boy’s car, which I tried to argue was the “upside” to the whole situation, with LB firmly insisting that his car covered in the contents of my stomach was, in fact, a “downside.” I settled the argument by proclaiming it an “upside-slash-downside,” and either the debate ended there or I passed out, whichever happened first. I stumbled into the house, fumbling as I shed a trail of failure-soaked clothing in my wake (otherwise known as my front yard).

I woke up the next morning on the bathroom floor, under a snuggly fleece blanket, wearing my socks, one contact lens, and the previous night’s makeup smeared all over my face a la “Braveheart.” I had no idea how I had gotten there, where my other contact was, or why I felt like I’d been hit upside the head with a dead ox. LB filled in most of the blanks for me, but Martha summed it up best in an email the next day: “Lauren said that when she went to your house to drop your purse off, she saw a pile on your front porch that she thinks was your shirt. Well done!”

Well done, indeed.

*Sadly, and much to my surprise, they are still not selling neon twisty-straws taped to the sides of wine bottles.

**If you know of any jobs that make use of my particularly impressive skill set, I'm also really good at making up new lyrics for songs on the fly. Favorites include my version of Katy Perry's "I Kissed A Girl," which is henceforth "I Kissed A Squirrel." (and I liked it/the taste of his nuts and berries/I kissed a squirrel just to try it/I hope my cat friend don't mind it/It felt so wrong, it felt so right/I might be up in his tree tonight.)

***Yes, I CAN have fun without alcohol.****

****Sometimes.*****

*****Only if you make me.

Snaps To You Awards: My Amazing Girlfriend and Vladimir Putin

This week, while not Friday, I am giving the S2U to two different individuals who are so equally deserving, in ways that make my little-girl heart soar, that I couldn’t divide my love between the two. So, in no particular order, this week’s S2U Award goes to my friend Erin King, and Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

Erin is the proud recipient of this week’s award for sending me the first wedding gift thank-you note I’ve ever received that included the word shit. Erin got married in October, and it took Lawyer Boy and me three months to remember to send a wedding gift. I kept meaning to, but then the whiney back-up dancer in the corner of my mind would be all, “lator gator,” and I’d be like, “okay, fine, let’s take a nap,” and it would get put off again. I finally celebrated the union of two souls by sending Erin and her husband a vacuum-sealing wine preserver and a set of cheese knives—both of which they registered for, by the way. I didn’t just pick random boozephenalia and ship it off with warmest regards.

A couple of weeks later, I received a hand-written thank-you note on lovely monogrammed stationery. It followed the standard my-mother-made-me format of “thanks for X, it’s really swell, and thanks for not table-dancing at the wedding,” but then veered off into nuptial originality with the next segment: “The wine opener looks really cool. We haven’t used it yet, but if I stop buying wine that tastes like shit and isn’t worth preserving, we hope to.” I love this for both the unexpected profanity and rare honesty it showcases. If newlyweds were more routinely honest with their thank-yous, more notes would read something like this: “Thank you so much for the place setting of our beautiful bone china complete with platinum etching and feathers from real angels’ wings. We will take it out of the box and use it once we grow up and stop eating frozen corndogs for dinner every night.”

The second recipient of this week’s award is Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, for being such a raging closeted ABBA fan that he reportedly paid $45,000 for a private performance by an ABBA cover band named (I am not making this up) Björn Again. As we all know, I LOVE ABBA, and I am so thrilled that someone as hard-edged and frosty as Putin shares my Nordic love affair. It really shows that there is so much more to our friendship than just a shared love of vodka, and of killing people with our bare hands on the secret orders of the government. Snaps to you, Puti (may I call you Puti?), for daring to bare your inner Dancing Queen and swaying to the Swedish beat in public. You’ll always be my super trouper.

Snaps To You Awards: The Butterfly Gift Fairy

Snaps to you, my best friend Shelley's mom, for consistently finding the most carnie-style and bizarre gifts for any and all gifting holidays (and some not, like St. Patty's Day). I've known Shelley for almost eight years now, and a garage sale at Michael Jackson's pad couldn't hold a candle to some of the gift-wrapped weirdness that's popped up in her lucky stocking. The thing about Shelley's mom is that, twenty-six years into (s)mothering Shelley, she's still not fully on board with the fact that she and Shelley are two extremely different people. Here is an illustrative chart:

Shelley's Mom's Likes:

• Butterflies
• Dainty flowers, dainty doilies, and other dainteries
• Kittens and all manner of cuddly things
• Pleated-front pants
  
• Things that kind of do nothing except sit around and collect dust and have flowers on them

Shelley's Likes:

• Running marathons
• Being in the army
• Being sporty and badass
• Not being dainty
• Cake and wine

I would have constructed a Venn diagram to make my point, but the only thing to go in the middle would have been "ovaries," so I felt like it would be a waste of my MS Paint skills.

Sometimes the gifts Shelley's mom gets her are clear attempts to get her things she thinks Shelley could use, and as an example of this, I offer The Year of the Glitterpants. Shelley's mom (who, for simplicity and no other discernible reason, will henceforth be known as Mrs. Batwing) was trying to get her, I think, fun party clothes for college, resulting in the tragic acquisition of a pair of skin-tight jeans entirely bedazzled in silver glitter. Like, so outrageously bedazzled that said pants snowed glitter 24/7. These would have been great for a fun college party, if Shelley had attended college at the Playboy Mansion, and was also RuPaul. Back they went.

Shelley's birthday is two days after Baby Jesus', so Mrs. Batwing really has to hustle and flow to bring the magic twice in one week. And oh, this year, how the magic was broughten. For Christmas, Mrs. Batwing got Shelley a tiny plate, covered in all sorts of dainty, precious baby flowers, big enough to hold a single Oreo. Shelley had no idea what it could be other than a portion-control diet plate. Apparently (and this is only hearsay) it's a plate whose sole purpose in life, its entire reason for being, is to hold a wet teabag. I have henceforth called it The Teabagger, and have not stopped laughing ever since.

For Shelley's birthday, Mrs. Batwing dug deep into the bowels of her creativity and really yanked out a winner. She took a picture of Shelley with which she is inexplicably obsessed, and did nefarious things with it. Exhibit A, the mug shot:

Shelley is completely mortified by this picture. So of course, for the sake of weaving my intricate web of storytelling, I'm sharing it with the whole wide Internet. LYLAS, chica!

Anyway, Mrs. Batwing had this Mona Lisa made into real USPS stamps, for spreading the humiliation far and wide, and in case that wasn't enough dignity damage for one holiday, she also had it emblazoned on every page of a notepad for Shelley. Outside of the envelope, for postal worker viewing pleasure: Army Shelley! Inside the envelope, visible only to the lucky recipient: Army Shelley! For a small finder's fee, I'll give Shelley your address, and you, my friend, can constitute the only time these rare objets d'art see the light of day (and thank G0d).

Capping off the festive oddities in a totally unexpected way, Shelley's mom also gave her a silver Tiffany's necklace. It really brings out the sparkle in the glitterpants, and that nice silver button on the green beret.