You shudder when you think about it – you wish it wasn’t stuck in your memory like the song you heard when you had the flu.
It was a big deal. You met over Summer – You declared yourselves soul mates – you got an apartment together. This was it. This was forever. This was a disaster.
You’re not sure which one suggested it, but you arrived at the bizarre notion that both your families should meet over Thanksgiving. And you were going to make it.
You liked togetherness. Liked the notion of one big happy family. Visions of Norman Rockwell dancing in your head.
It was going to be your first Thanksgiving living together. You were going to make dinner for twelve. You were jazzed – you were ready – you were clueless.
One small thing – neither of you knew how to cook. McDonalds – Swanson TV Dinners – Take-home Pizza. That was the extent of your adventures in the kitchen. The stove only ever saw you light cigarettes or boil water. Anything more was foreign territory.
You were determined – even though your mom offered and her mom offered, you both said no. You wanted to prove you weren’t just playing house – you were the couple of the future and you could make Thanksgiving Dinner just like they did. She was “the old lady” – you were “the old man”; it’s how you addressed each other. It was quaint. Your friends called it “crunchy Granola” – marriage was obsolete – living together was fun. Your parents didn’t think so.
You got a Turkey the size of Cleveland – it was the last one Ralph’s had. It looked like an experiment and everyone avoided it. Fitting it in the oven was going to take engineering. You saw nothing unusual about it.
The “old lady” produced a Squash that rivaled the Turkey in sheer size. It was given to her by former roommates who were busy tinkering with “organic farming” and it was the fruit of their labor. They had no idea what to do with it except boil it and mash it like Potatoes. Or so they were told.
The big day came and you were still figuring out what to do about the Squash. The day before you raided the nearby Salvation Army Thrift shop and loaded up on Cook books. It was going to be a crash course – and neither of you were good at following directions.
All you both knew for sure, Thanksgiving started in the morning with The Macy’s Parade and your respective moms disappearing into the kitchen, only to reappear when the smell of baking Turkey filled the house a few hours later. You could do that – no problem.
You finally managed to get things started around 2 in the afternoon. You forgot the roasting pan – it was going straight on the rack – it would fit for sure in the oven – you forgot about stuffing and you didn’t know where it went anyway. The Squash was hacked into pieces and put in a pot filled with water to boil “until soft”; was how Betty Crocker put it.
Lucky for you you had friends who showed up around 4 and contributed food. Gradually the makeshift dining room was becoming populated by Tupperware bowls of salad and baskets of dinner rolls and assorted pies.
Both families got there at the same time and took an instant disliking to each other. Wine began to appear – a lot of it.
Dinner was going to be a while so everyone stuffed themselves on salad, Potato chips, dip and pumpkin pie while arguing about everything from Nixon to Vietnam to Gas Prices. The wine was vanishing quickly so a collection was taken up to raid the nearest liquor store and come back with gallons of whatever was cheap.
For a brief moment it was looking like Thanksgiving was going to join the ranks of Good Housekeeping or Jack Lescoulie’s spread on The Today Show.
But brief was a nanosecond before fights broke out and a strange smell wafted out from the kitchen followed by a cloud of smoke. Seems the Turkey wasn’t done, even though it was blackened from the smoke and could pass – it was 100% food poisoning – all the water had boiled off the Squash and what was left were briquets.
You and “the old lady” were so busy breaking up fights and getting drunk that you didn’t notice all the smoke spilling out into the neighborhood, attracting the Fire Department. When the firemen were convinced the place wasn’t going to explode and all the windows were open to air the place out, they left.
With the Firemen went the warring families, the friends and the neighbors who were curious where all the noise was coming from. You didn’t notice that joining the people exiting was also your girlfriend. “The old lady” who was going to stay with friends until the embarrassment went away which, from the looks of it might be never.
That just left you – an apartment-turned-refrigerator and an enormous un-eaten Turkey, sitting like a beached Albatros on a sagging card table in the dining room.
The best you could do was pick the cigarette butt out of the half-drunk glass of Chianti – down it, and turn on the radio.
The next 90 minutes of KPPC-FM would do the trick.
Here’s Peter Franklin from November 15, 1971.
One down – two holidays to go.
