Different Tastes for Different Waists

My fascination with reality TV often takes me places I don't want to go. For instance, My Crazy Obsession or My Strange Addiction. I am not a regular viewer. Some addictions are too freaky, even for me. Like that guy in love with his car, who consummated the relationship in the driveway. Or the woman who drinks human blood. Or the gal who ate the stuffing out of all her pillows. Not to mention the lady who chowed down on her deceased husbands ashes.

Last week I came across the new season of My Crazy Obsession. Imagine my surprise when my DISH Network on-screen guide told me the show was about a guy who ate bugs, and a woman who got food out of dumpsters. I clicked on it and thought, "So what? A dude eats bugs. We all eat bugs. We just don't know it because we're asleep when they crawl in our mouths. Or their legs are in our cereal." Just because this dude ordered a big poisonous Vietnamese centipede and took it to a gourmet cook to surprise his wife does not make him all that special.

The second half of the show was even less impressive. A gal got food out of dumpsters and saved a lot of money on her food budget. Okay, she went a little overboard by wearing an apron and cap from each supermarket chain where she invaded the dumpsters. And she DID take a bite out of a peach that might have been fly-blown after a day in the sunny confines of a metal trash bin. Then there was the matter of her FREEZING her expired food to eat later. So she was approaching the crazy benchmark even before she whipped up a meal and invited her friends to join her without telling them they were eating dumpster treats. That's kind of wrong.

Which reminds me of another place and another time, when I and my fellow faculty hosted a potluck in the little upstairs cubbyhole of a teacher's lounge, in a school where paraprofessionals did the lunch duty. Wait! Here! Sniff these smelling salts! I TOLD you it was another time. Back when we used mimeograph machines with their sweet purple lettering and pungent aroma.

I think the occasion was Thanksgiving. We all crowded around our wooden table after harvesting goodies from the perimeter. One of our group was noted for bringing the same lunch every day. A can of Slim-Fast. She would sip and critique our meals on a daily basis. I'm sure she brought something for the potluck. She was not mean-spirited or cheap, just a tiny bit of a know-it-all. Perhaps she brought rolls, or a salad. I remember that I brought a crock pot full of deer meat simmered in BBQ sauce. This school was near the Huzzah Valley. A rural setting. Venison was not all that exotic. In fact, when our feast was in the planning stages, I proposed my dish and received positive feedback. Apparently, Slim was not at the menu meeting.

Slim brought her can of Slim-Fast to our banquet. She popped the top and took a few sips. Then she announced that she thought she'd try a little taste of everything. We did not begrudge her the tidbits, even though each of us had to stand and push in our chair as she went by. Slim quizzed us all on what we brought. Not in a manner that one wishes to avoid the fur-filled cupcakes from the crazy cat lady, but in a conversational way. "What did YOU bring, Val?" Slim sometimes treated me like a mail-order bride from an east coast city, perhaps because I'd been married less than a year, and she thought I was not yet seasoned in housewifely duties.

"Oh, I brought the BBQ in the crock pot."

"That is SO good! I'm going to have just a little bit more."

Every pair of eyes at that table met mine. Hey! Slim didn't ask what kind of meat was in there. And she liked it. She really liked it. I did not feel obligated to announce its species. If Slim had said, "Oh, the cow meat?" Or, "You mean the BBQ beef?" I would have set her straight. But she didn't.

After we all shifted to allow Slim seconds on my dish and some others, she returned to her chair and began to feed. "Mmm. You got this just right. Is it beef?"

"No. It's deer meat."

Well. You'd have thought I'd blindfolded her and served her a casserole of great big gobs of greasy grimy gopher guts sprinkled with D-Con rat pellets. Slim shoved her plate away and hollered, "I can't believe you did that to me!" Like I was Ashton Kutcher without a camera crew. Seriously. Everyone knew what was in that pot. We didn't even think she was partaking of our spread. Besides, her own husband went deer-hunting every year. Slim stormed out. After her side of the table stood up to let her by. Perhaps she did some refunding like George Costanza's date.

We were once again on speaking terms after the break. I even emailed her a few years ago about Career Ladder. I did not mention venison.