I Remember Nothing Page 5
One day, about two years into my tenure, I was staying in Los Angeles, in a hotel, and I attended a Loews board meeting by telephone; it was so boring that I decided to put the call on hold and go get a manicure downstairs. When I got back to my room, only twenty minutes later, and picked up the receiver, everyone was screaming at one another. I didn’t want to admit that I had left the room—and by the way, no one had even noticed—so I listened for a while and realized that while I’d been out having my nails done, the company had gone bankrupt.
This was a shock to me and to everyone else on the board. I never did find out why the news hadn’t been mentioned earlier in the board meeting, but that, of course, was one of the reasons everyone was screaming at one another: there were people on the board whose companies owned shares in Loews Corporation who had just found out that they’d lost hundreds of millions of dollars as a result of a bankruptcy no one had even had the courtesy to warn them about. It wasn’t even on the agenda!
A few months later, a Canadian businessman bought Loews Theatres at a bargain-basement price and then sold it to AMC, which as far as I can tell has done nothing whatsoever to improve the food sold at the refreshment counter or anything else. I mean, it used to be so romantic to go to a movie—to sit in a great big theater that had a balcony, and boxes, and fabulous gilt trim on the walls, and a big red velvet curtain. Now we go to horrible unadorned gray rectangles where the sound bleeds in from the gray rectangle right next door. It’s sad.
Anyway, the other night. We passed the shuttered refreshment counter, went into the theater, and sat down. The ads were already playing. There was a diet cola ad that was so in love with itself that it actually recommended going to a special Web site that explained how the ad had been made. There was an ad for buying tickets ahead of time online. Then, suddenly, the sound turned off and the screen went completely dark. Several minutes passed. The theater was three-quarters full, but no one moved. In some strange and inexplicable way, I felt responsible. I stood up and went two flights upstairs. A ticket taker had materialized and was now taking tickets. I told her that the system in Theater 7 had shut down. She looked at me blankly. I asked her if she would tell someone that the system had shut down. She said she would and went on taking tickets. After a couple of minutes, when the customers had all passed through, she yelled out, “Projection, is there something wrong in Theater Seven?” I went back downstairs.
The system started up again. A trailer began to play. I noticed that there was a large band of white light across the bottom of the screen, and that the images of the actors that were being projected were all cut off in the middle of their eyeballs.
I left the theater and walked upstairs again. The ticket taker was still there, taking tickets. I asked her if she would ask the projectionist to reframe the movie. Once again she looked at me blankly, so I asked again. She promised she would. I waited until she walked off in the direction of the unseen projectionist. By the time I got back to my seat, the image on-screen had been reframed, although not perfectly, but by then I was too exhausted by my heroism to complain further.
The movie began. It was out of sync, but hey, it was a good movie. And it was only slightly out of sync. Besides, there was a huge amount of cutting and action, so you could sort of live with its being out of sync. Then, in the last twenty minutes, the movie became unbelievably, noticeably, extraordinarily out of sync. But it was almost over. And I didn’t want to leave my seat for fear I might miss something.
Afterward, on my way out of the theater, I asked if I could speak to the theater manager. She turned out to be on maternity leave. I asked if I could speak to the assistant manager. There was no assistant manager on duty. So I ended up with my old friend, the ticket taker, who was, as you can imagine, thrilled to see me again. I told her that the last reel of the movie we had just seen was out of sync and that they might want to fix it before the next show began. She promised me they would.
Twenty-five Things People Have a Shocking Capacity to Be Surprised by Over and Over Again
Journalists sometimes make things up.
Journalists sometimes get things wrong.
Almost all books that are published as memoirs were initially written as novels, and then the agent/editor said, This might work better as a memoir.
Beautiful young women sometimes marry ugly, old rich men.
In business, there is no such thing as synergy in the good sense of the term.
Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one.
Nothing written in today’s sports pages makes sense to anyone who didn’t read yesterday’s sports pages.
There is no explaining the stock market but people try.
The Democrats are deeply disappointing.
Movies have no political effect whatsoever.
Men cheat.
A lot of people take the Bible literally.
Pornography is the opiate of the masses.
You can never know the truth of anyone’s marriage, including your own.
People actually sign prenuptial agreements.
Mary Matalin and James Carville are married.
Bagels don’t taste as good as they used to.
Everybody lies.
The reason it’s important for a Democrat to be president is the Supreme Court.
Howard Stern is apparently very nice in person.
In Manhattan a small one-bedroom apartment that needs work costs $1 million.
People look like their dogs.
Cary Grant was Jewish.
Cary Grant wasn’t Jewish.
Larry King has never read a book.
I Just Want to Say: The Egg-White Omelette
There’s a new book out about diet, and it apparently says what I’ve known all my life—protein is good for you, carbohydrates are bad, and fat is highly overrated as a dangerous substance. Well, it’s about time. As my mother used to say, you can never have too much butter.
For example, here’s how we cook steak in our house: First you coat the steak in kosher salt. Then you cook the steak in a very hot frying pan. When it’s done, you throw a huge pat of butter on top of it. That’s it. And by the way, I’m not talking about sweet butter, I’m talking about salted butter.
Here’s another thing it says in this book: dietary cholesterol has nothing whatsoever to do with your cholesterol count. This is another thing I’ve known all my life, which is why you will not find me lying on my deathbed regretting not having eaten enough chopped liver. Let me explain this: You can eat all sorts of things that are high in dietary cholesterol (like lobster and avocado and eggs) and they have NO EFFECT WHATSOEVER on your cholesterol count. NONE. WHATSOEVER. DID YOU HEAR ME? I’m sorry to have to resort to capital letters, but what is wrong with you people?
Which brings me to the point of this: the egg-white omelette. I have friends who eat egg-white omelettes. Every time I’m forced to watch them eat egg-white omelettes, I feel bad for them. In the first place, egg-white omelettes are tasteless. In the second place, the people who eat them think they are doing something virtuous when they are instead merely misinformed. Sometimes I try to explain that what they’re doing makes no sense, but they pay no attention to me because they have all been told to avoid dietary cholesterol by their doctors. According to The New York Times, the doctors are not deliberately misinforming their patients; instead, they’re the victims of something known as the informational cascade, which turns out to be something that’s repeated so many times that it becomes true even though it isn’t. (Why isn’t it called the misinformational cascade, I wonder.) In any case, the true victims of this misinformation are not the doctors but the people I know who’ve been brainwashed into thinking that egg-white omelettes are good for you.
So this is my moment to say what’s been in my heart for years: it’s time to put a halt to the egg-white omelette. I don’t want to confuse this with something actually important, like the war in Afghanistan, which it’s also time to put a halt to, but I don’
t seem be able to do anything about the war, whereas I have a shot at cutting down consumption of egg-white omelettes, especially with the wind of this new book in my sails.
You don’t make an omelette by taking out the yolks. You make one by putting additional yolks in. A really great omelette has two whole eggs and one extra yolk, and by the way, the same thing goes for scrambled eggs. As for egg salad, here’s our recipe: boil eighteen eggs, peel them, and send six of the egg whites to friends in California who persist in thinking that egg whites matter in any way. Chop the remaining twelve eggs and six yolks coarsely with a knife, and add Hellmann’s mayonnaise and salt and pepper to taste.
I Just Want to Say: Teflon
I feel bad about Teflon.
It was great while it lasted.
Now it turns out to be bad for you.
Or, to put it more exactly, now it turns out that a chemical that’s released when you heat up Teflon gets into your bloodstream and probably causes cancer and birth defects.
I loved Teflon. I loved the no-carb ricotta pancake I invented last year, which can be cooked only on Teflon. I loved my Silverstone Teflon-coated frying pan, which makes a beautiful steak. I loved Teflon as an adjective; it gave us a Teflon president (Ronald Reagan) and it even gave us a Teflon Don (John Gotti), whose Teflonness eventually wore out, making him an almost exact metaphorical duplicate of my Teflon pans. I loved the fact that Teflon was invented by someone named Roy J. Plunkett, whose name alone should have ensured Teflon against ever becoming a dangerous product.
But recently DuPont, the manufacturer of polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) resin, which is what Teflon was called when it first popped up as a laboratory accident back in 1938, reached a $16.5 million settlement with the Environmental Protection Agency; it seems the company knew all along that Teflon was bad for you. It’s an American cliché by now: a publicly traded company holds the patent on a scientific breakthrough, it turns out to cause medical problems, and the company knew all along. You can go to the bank on it.
But it’s sad about Teflon.
When it first came onto the market, Teflon wasn’t good. The pans were light and skimpy and didn’t compare to copper or cast iron. They were great for omelettes, and, of course, nothing stuck to them, but they were nowhere near as good for cooking things that were meant to be browned, like steaks. But then manufacturers like Silverstone produced Teflon pans that were heavy-duty, and you could produce a steak that was as dark and delicious as one made on the barbecue. Unfortunately, this involved heating your Teflon pan up to a very high temperature before adding the steak, which happens to be the very way perfluoroctanoic acid (PFOA) is released into the environment. PFOA is the bad guy here, and DuPont has promised to eliminate it from all Teflon products by 2015. I’m sure that will be a comfort to those of you under the age of forty, but to me it simply means that my last years on this planet will be spent, at least in part, scraping debris off my non-Teflon frying pans.
Rumors about Teflon have been circulating for a long time, but I couldn’t help hoping they were going to turn out like the rumors about aluminum, which people thought (for a while, back in the nineties) caused Alzheimer’s. That was a bad moment, since never mind giving up aluminum pots and pans, it would also have meant giving up aluminum foil, disposable aluminum baking pans, and, most crucial of all, antiperspirants. I rode out that rumor, and I’m pleased to report that it went away.
But this rumor is clearly for real, so I suppose I am going to have to throw away my Teflon pans.
Meanwhile, I am going to make one last ricotta pancake breakfast:
Beat one egg, add one-third cup fresh whole-milk ricotta, and whisk together. Heat up a Teflon pan until carcinogenic gas is released into the air. Spoon tablespoons of batter into the frying pan and cook about two minutes on one side, until brown. Carefully flip. Cook for another minute to brown the other side. Eat with jam, if you don’t care about carbs, or just eat unadorned. Serves one.
I Just Want to Say: No, I Do Not Want Another Bottle of Pellegrino
We would like a bottle of Pellegrino. The waiter brings the Pellegrino. There are four of us at the table. The waiter brings glasses for the Pellegrino. The glasses happen to be extremely tall. Tall glasses are not necessarily the best glasses for Pellegrino, but before I can say a word on this profound subject, the waiter pours the Pellegrino into the tall glasses.
When the waiter is done pouring, there’s a tiny amount of Pellegrino left in the bottle. My husband takes a sip of his Pellegrino, and the waiter is back, in a flash, with the last drops of our Pellegrino. He tops off my husband’s drink.
The first bottle of Pellegrino is now gone. We’ve been at the table for exactly three minutes and somehow we’ve managed to empty an entire bottle of Pellegrino.
“Would you like another bottle of Pellegrino?” the waiter says.
I haven’t even had any of this one!
I don’t actually say these words.
I love salt. I absolutely adore it. Occasionally I eat at a place where (in my opinion) the food doesn’t need more salt, but it’s rare.
Many years ago, they used to put salt and pepper on the table in a restaurant, and here’s how they did it: there was a saltshaker and there was a pepper shaker. The pepper shaker contained ground black pepper, which was outlawed in the 1960s and replaced by the Permanent Floating Pepper Mill and the Permanent Floating Pepper Mill refrain: “Would you like some fresh ground black pepper on your salad?” I’ve noticed that almost no one wants some fresh ground black pepper on his salad. Why they even bother asking is a mystery to me.
But I wasn’t talking about pepper, I was talking about salt. And as I was saying, there always used to be salt on the table. Now, half the time, there’s none. The reason there’s no salt is that the chef is forcefully trying to convey that the food has already been properly seasoned and therefore doesn’t need more salt. I resent this deeply. I resent that asking for salt makes me seem aggressive toward the chef, when in fact it’s the other way around. As for the other half of the time—when there is salt on the table—it’s not what I consider salt. It’s what’s known as sea salt. (Sea salt used to be known as kosher salt, but that’s not an upscale enough name for it anymore.) Sea salt comes in an itty-bitty dish. You always spill it trying to move it from the dish to the food on your plate, but that’s the least of it: it doesn’t really function as salt. It doesn’t dissolve and make your food taste saltier; instead, it sits like little hard pebbles on top of it. Also, it scratches your tongue.
“Is everything all right?”
The main course has been served, and the waiter has just asked us this question. I’ve had exactly one bite of my main course, which is just enough for me to remember that, as usual, the main course always disappoints. I am beginning to wonder whether this is a metaphor, and if so, whether it’s worth dwelling on. Now the waiter has appeared, pepper mill in one hand, Pellegrino in the other, and interrupted an extremely good story right before the punch line to ask if everything is all right.
The answer is no, it’s not.
Actually the answer is, No, it’s not! You ruined the punch line! Go away!
I don’t say this either.
• • •
We have ordered dessert. They are giving us dessert spoons. Dessert spoons are large, oval-shaped spoons. They are so large that you could go for a swim in them. I’m not one of those people who likes to blame the French for things, especially since the French turned out to be so very very right about Iraq, but there’s no question this trend began in France, where they’ve always had a weakness for dessert spoons.
One of the greatest things about this land of ours, as far as I’m concerned, was that we never fell into the dessert-spoon trap. If you needed a spoon for dessert, you were given a teaspoon. But those days are over, and it’s a shame.
Here’s the thing about dessert—you want it to last. You want to savor it. Dessert is so delicious. It’s so sweet. It’s so bad for you so m
uch of the time. And, as with all bad things, you want it to last as long as possible. But you can’t make it last if they give you a great big spoon to eat it with. You’ll gobble up your dessert in two big gulps. Then it will be gone. And the meal will be over.
Why don’t they get this? It’s so obvious.
It’s so obvious.
I Just Want to Say: The World Is Not Flat
Last week I went to one of those Internet conferences I get invited to now and then, and of course New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman was there. He wasn’t actually there in person. It wasn’t that important a conference. He sent a tape of himself. He took the entire thesis of his best-selling book The World Is Flat and squished it down into twenty minutes. Coincidentally, two nights earlier, I had found myself standing across from Friedman, in person, at a craps table in Las Vegas. As he rolled the dice to make a five, I shouted, “This is it, Tom, this is your chance to make up for being wrong on Iraq.” But he rolled a seven and crapped out.
And then there he was at this conference. There was a big banner over the screen that said THE WORLD IS FLAT, and all the bright, young Internet people watched Friedman talk about globalization and say that technology had flattened the walls of the world. They were enthralled by him and actually managed to stay focused and off their mobile devices for the entire time he was speaking. Afterward, instantly, they all turned their mobile devices back on, and the huge conference room was suddenly illuminated by hundreds of small boxes and orchestrated by the sound of thousands of tiny fingers tapping away.