Freelancette

Last Friday, I was flipping through channels in a hotel room in Albany when I spotted the comedically brilliant 30 Rock-er Alec Baldwin on FOX News. I paused, curious and a little nervous. Baldwin is an outspoken Democratic supporter and Huffington Poster, so something told me that FOX wasn’t running a story about how awesome he was on the previous night’s show (although that would have been accurate). He must have done something incriminating or embarrassing.

As the world knows by now, a voicemail message of Baldwin berating his 11-year old daughter, Ireland, and calling her a “rude, thoughtless little pig” had been leaked to the press. The FOX commentators could barely contain their glee at catching Baldwin in full-on bad-parent mode. “Can you imagine what hearing something like that would do to a young girl?!” they asked, hanging their heads in mock-horror to hide their contemptuous smirks.

Actually, I can.

“Little pig” is nothing.” Try “little s@#$” or “little f*&^%$” or “giant m*&^%!@-f*&^%$# *@#$ in the a&&!” Those were the terms of endearment my own father used with my sister and me when we were children –- and still uses today, when the mood strikes him. In fact, my sister recently burst into tears when her fiancée jokingly serenaded her with the Raffi song, "Baby Beluga," as that had been my dad’s favorite (and my sister’s most abhorred) nickname for her when she was a self-consciously pudgy kid.

I don't relish memories of Dad's put-downs, but to be honest, I've kinda grown immune to them. Parents lose their temper, and that can make them say mean things to their kids. But while it’s dispiriting to be called nasty names by your beloved mom or dad, it’s also a reminder that they’re fallible and human. Sure, I wish my dad could share his feelings of disappointment without referring to me as a “*&^%head,” and I’d be more receptive to his thoughts and ideas if they were served up without a side dish of bitter insults, but at least we’re communicating, right? And as Heather Havrilesky cheerfully pointed out in her hilarious Salon essay, even unpleasant name-calling is better than traditional methods of discipline, like plate-smashing or back-handing.

I've found that the experience of being insulted by your parent sounds much worse than it actually is. When I've told my friends that my father called me a "loser" or a "jerk," they've been much more shocked and offended than I was. That's because I heard his inflections of annoyance, frustration, or impatience, and I'm aware of the context of the conversation -- and I know what I did to upset him. I also know that those weren't the only things he said to me, and that our history is long and complicated and mostly pleasant. I feel manipulative and sneaky even telling people about these exchanges, because I know it makes my father look really, really bad. Now that I think about it, I'm ashamed to even be writing this post!

So imagine how poor Ireland feels about the news of her dad's bad-fatherness making headlines. Could there be anything more mortifying for an 11-year-old than having dad's private rants to you broadcast on national television? As the FOXies said, “Can you imagine what hearing something like that would do to a young girl?!” Whoever leaked this voicemail may have been out to nail Baldwin, but Ireland has gotten caught in the crossfire. She's been punished twice, and it's tough to say which was more malevolent.

Back to Albany... Dad and I happened to be staying in the same hotel last week, so I dashed across the hall to make sure he was paying attention to Baldwin broadcast. FOX News is his favorite news source, so I knew he’d be tuned in.

He was. The two of us silently watched the story loop around again. After Baldwin’s angry tirade spat out from the television set and echoed around the room, Dad and I looked at each other. He appeared to be genuinely puzzled. “I don’t think he did anything wrong!” Dad finally blurted out. I couldn't help but laugh with him.

Fathers should not call their daughters pigs (or whales, or losers, or retards...). I think that secretly, my father knows this. Baldwin does, and he’s apologized to his daughter. But he’s not the only person who should be asking for her forgiveness. Whoever leaked that tape made a serious, hurtful mistake.

However, I do have a bone to pick with Baldwin. In a pre-taped interview for The View, he implied that the stress over this incident has made him want to get out of the acting business, and quit 30 Rock. "If I never acted again, I couldn't care less," he says. (Thankfully, NBC said in a statement Wednesday that Baldwin would remain a part of the show, according to The Associated Press).

Mr. Baldwin, don’t punish the rest of us for your personal mistakes, and don't take your anger with the media out on innocent television junkies. 30 Rock needs you! Tina Fey needs you! I need you! Work on being a better father to Ireland, and then get back to making America laugh.

Posted by Corrie at 6:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The new ABC pregnancy comedy, “Notes from the Underbelly,” looked like it was written for my friends and me. As soon as we turned 30 last year, I felt like we were sucked into this time warp that aged us into a new demographic universe. My married friends started breeding like an alarm had gone off, and even the unmarried and uninseminated among us suddenly found ourselves enthusiastically sharing maternity tips and childcare advice. Truthfully, I’m so far away from being a mother, I’m not even in the same prefecture as pregnant –- and yet I’ve had many long conversations with girlfriends about how we’re going to handle the work-baby tug-of-war and how we feel about breast-feeding in public. I even bought my own maternity sweater (okay, that was kind of by accident). Babies, bellies and swollen breasts are a huge part of my life right now –- even if they all happen to belong to other people. But besides the fact that moms-to-be are main characters in my discussions with friends, in the articles I read, the web sites I peruse, and even the magazine I work for, no television program had pushed them into the spotlight.

Until now. First came this season's shows about love, then came marriage, and here comes "Notes from the Underbelly" with the baby carriage. The adventure of parenthood is the main theme of this half-hour sitcom about two pregnant couples and their two very single friends/sidekicks. The commercials made "Notes" look like "Sex and the City"-meets-"thirtysomething," and since I was a fan of both, I was curious to tune in last week.

At the start of the pilot, we learn that Andrew has been trying for months to convince his wife Lauren to have a baby. She was initially resistant to the idea, mainly because they hadn't done all the things they said they would do before starting a family, like--wait for it--"go on a whitewater rafting trip" (they both quickly admitted that neither ever had any intention of actually hitting the waves). Some other cliché baby "cons" are half-heartedly lobbed around (maternity underwear, "hideous minivan"), but then, while Lauren is out shopping for a peasant skirt, a little girl mistakes her for Mommy, prompting a major change-of-heart.

Cut to the couple freaking out over a positive pregnancy test. Well, Andrew (who looks barely old enough to rent a car, never mind father a child) is psyched, but Lauren is upset that this happened before she had time to lose weight and "file stuff."

The couple tries to keep the news from their friends for the standard three-month waiting period, but Andrew can't resist bragging about "shooting a hole in one," and Lauren inadvertently outs herself by ordering a decaf latte and refusing tequila shots (dead giveaways, right girls? Wink, wink!). So everyone knows about the baby within hours -- everyone, that is, except for Lauren's and Andrew's parents, whose conspicuous absence leads one to believe that they must be estranged, dead or not worth a long-distance phone call.

With a baby on the way, Lauren and Andrew have a lot to think about. So they grill other moms and dads and debate trading their Mini Cooper for a minivan. (I've got to interject here: I drove a minivan in high school, and it had a kickin' sound system and could fit ten comfortably. It was like a party on wheels!) But maybe because the couple is so overwhelmed and excited, and maybe because the show's producers didn't want to scare away potential viewers, they avoid the important stuff -- i.e., the kinds of things that any normal couple would discuss while pondering parenthood.

For example, Lauren works as a college counselor at a private school, which is a respectable job that surely required a college education and years of training and dedication. Yet the subject of what Lauren will do about work after having the baby never comes up. Maybe they'll deal with that in a future episode, but clearly Lauren's career has been superseded by her more pressing concerns about motherhood, like how to find time to go on vacation, renew her driver's license, decorate the nursery, diet, and organize her documents.

I'm already starting to hate these shallow, silly people when I'm introduced to their lame friends, stock characters like Julie the Sanctimommy-in-Training, Cooper the Bitter Divorce Lawyer (aka, female single friend), and Danny the Overgrown Frat-Boy (aka, male single friend). It doesn't help that the show is set in slick, sunny Los Angeles, a place where too many people make too much money by doing too little work. Everyone in the cast, including housewife Julie, can afford to shop on Robertson Boulevard, dress like B-list celebs, and drop loads of dough on expensive cars, shower gifts, multiple strollers and cribs. I'm really hoping that the jaw-dropping expense of raising a kid in America today will be addressed at some point. In the first double-episode, family finances, like Lauren's ambition, seemed to take a back car-seat to other ways that babies can affect a marriage, like sleepless nights and breasts "devastated" by breast-feeding.

These pregnancy "notes" must have come from someone who failed Parenthood 101, or perhaps from a sorority girl who skipped most of her classes in order to attend Pilates or get a manicure. So far, this show has done an embarrassingly bad job of addressing--or even alluding to--the complexities of having a baby and starting a family. At the same time, the dumb minivan snubs and tired jokes about Lauren's cravings (she scarfs tacos shells stuffed with pumpkin pie filling and nearly causes a ten-car pile-up in her manic quest for a burger) keep it from being subversive, fresh or even mildly interesting.

At the ELLE office, our giveaway table is always piled high with rejected mommy-lit. But at least I know that for every book like “Momzillas," there's a "Love and Other Impossible Pursuits" or a "Little Children" to read instead. If only there were other television shows that dealt with pregnancy and parenting in a smarter, more sophisticated way than "Notes from the Underbelly". For now, I think I'll pass up decaf lattes and lukewarm banter with Lauren and Co., and spend my Wednesday nights sharing straight talk about motherhood with my friends.

Posted by Corrie at 4:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Answer: when it's a shucream, or a Japanese-French cream puff.

This is something essayist Joel Stein should have realized before penning his almost-clever March 29 column in Time magazine, "A New Fast-Food Invasion." After all, the distinction is central to Stein's argument that the ways other countries alter American fast-food institutions are indicative of how they view our culture. Explaining globalization's effect on our deep-fried, super-sized, double-stuffed cuisine, Stein writes, "The stuff you invented--in this culinary case, fast-food hamburgers, fried chicken, pizza and doughnuts--gets sent out into the world, is replicated by other countries and then comes back to you all crazied up, like a giant game of telephone. And if you hold that piece of Filipino fried chicken up to your ear and are really quiet, you can hear what the rest of the world thinks about us." As examples, Stein discusses the Philippines' take on McDonald's, Guatemala's version of Kentucky Fried Chicken, and the convenience store and cream puff franchises of Japan.

I've never been to the Philippines, and I'm not familiar with how the Guatemalans like their chicken. However, I know my Japanese pastries -- better than Stein, it turns out.

Here's how Stein describes Beard Papa's, Japan's biggest and most popular purveyor of shucreams:

"Beard Papa's is the Dunkin' Donuts of Japan, only it has replaced fried dough with cream puffs on steroids. It opened its first U.S. store in 2003 and has been invading mall spots. Inside each store, Japanese women in uniforms push down on metal levers to plop rich, creamy custard mixed with whipped cream into oversize profiterole shells. Like so much of Japanese culture, Beard Papa's has taken our creation and refracted it through the mythological wholesomeness of America in the 1950s--which is just what you want fast-food dessert to taste like."

This may indeed what Americans want fast-food dessert to taste like. However, Beard Papa's puffs aren't American creations. Their history belongs to the French!

I don't know when the cream puffs first came to Japan (some sources say it was the late 19th century), but I do know that the Japanese have long been enamored by French cuisine, and have brought their signature passion, attention to detail and obsession with perfection to learning how to make it themselves (some even swear that the best French pastry chefs in the world are actually Japanese). Famous and frightfully expensive French patisseries can now be found all over Japan, and especially in Tokyo. In fact, the Japanese phrase for cream puff, "shucream," comes from the French terms, "choux à la crème." In an interview with a Columbia University student reporter, a Beard Papa's executive explained that the puffs are indeed rooted in French cuisine, and that the recipe, with its French "choux" inner shell, has been modified to appeal to Japanese tastes.

Stein does say that Beard Papa's "has replaced fried dough with cream puffs on steroids," so maybe he's dimly aware of the puff's French pedigree, and is focusing on the places in which they're sold, which he seems to think are distinctly American. The thing is, our Dunkin' Donuts are best known for their coffee -- as the name implies, their donuts are meant to be dunked. It's not uncommon to pop into a DD just for a hot cup of joe. But while Beard Papa's in the US often serve hot drinks, almost all of their patrons prefer the coffee to-go -- as mocha-flavored custard filling in a puff, not as a beverage in a cup! The only reason people visit BP's, both here and in Japan, is to pick up a puff (or six). And the shops are uniformly clean, cheerful and efficient because that's how Japanese people like their eating establishments to be (see Yoshinoya, CoCo Ichibanya curry, and Hachiban ramen).

So Beard Papa's is not a Japanese facsimile of Dunkin' Donuts, nor are their puffs take-offs on Boston creams. They actually have very little to do with US customs, culture or style. More accurately, the global franchise is made up of Japanese-style shops that sell modern, mass-market Japanese versions of classic French pastries. An interesting phenomenon, yes, but not at all in the way Stein describes. He claims that foreign fast-food can tell us what the rest of the world thinks of us. Unfortunately, he wasn't listening very carefully to what Beard Papa's was trying to say.

Posted by Corrie at 11:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)