There’s so much wrong about this recipe, I hardly know where to begin. It’s from The Mike Douglas Cookbook, which in itself is enough to give one pause. I have a lot of peculiar celebrity cookbooks in my collection (my favorite: Candy Hits by ZaSu Pitts, which includes cookie recipes…
Most big cities have summer stock of some kind. Phoenix’s post-theater season typically equates to a handful of remounts and three months of dinner theater. For the past decade, one of the few bright spots has been Phoenix Theatre’s New Works Festival, a monthlong showcase of original plays and musicals…
Not too long ago, my spouse and I took our friend Caitlyn out to celebrate her seventh birthday. Our plan was to have a little lunch at Scottsdale Fashion Square (7014 E. Camelback Rd., Scottsdale, www.fashionsquare.com) and then let her go nuts in the Missy section of one of the…
by Robrt L. Pela My spouse claims that I manage to work into every conversation the fact that we are not allowed by law to marry one another. He’s exaggerating, of course, but I am pretty bitter about this. His accusation came to mind when I sat down to write…
by Robrt L. Pela Not only is there no rabbit in this Rabbit Omelet, but it tastes like shit, besides. There isn’t enough cheese, and there’s too much beer, which might not have mattered if I’d made it with something other than Old Milwaukee, which was the only beer I…
He claims he “isn’t even a D-List celebrity,” yet he has an Emmy Award and a best-selling memoir and is on a national tour. It’s not the kind of comment that comes from humility — Leslie Jordan is, after all, an actor — but rather from the psyche of a…
It’s a theater critic’s job, as he enters a playhouse, to leave at the door any attitudes or preferences he may have about a particular genre of play. Therefore, I abandoned my ennui about camp in the lobby of Nearly Naked Theatre as I headed in to see what they’d…
by Robrt L. Pela If the house caught on fire, I’d grab my French press and run. Oh, and the cats. I’d grab the cats, too. Except that in my horror fantasies, the cats are waiting patiently by the door (even though they’ve never gone outside in their lives) to…
by Robrt L. Pela I’m glad this one still has its (tattered) dust jacket, otherwise I’d have no idea why Ruth Ellen Church is the author of Mary Meade’s Magic Recipes for the Electric Blender. Turns out, according to this book’s flap copy, that Church is Meade, although there’s no…
Let’s face it: What most of us know about transgender people could fit into a Barbie shoe. And what we think we know about them — that they are men in dresses or confused, closeted lesbians — is just plain wrong. Lori Girshick, a sociologist and activist who teaches at…
You live in a town long enough, and every corner contains a memory of someone you used to know. I’ve been here almost half a century, and I can barely walk across the street without being reminded of one person or another. I drive past that cheesy diner at 16th…
by Robrt L. Pela A lot of my favorite kitchen stuff came from my mother. Mom appears never to have purchased a single kitchen item herself; point to any implement specific to food prep in her kitchen, and she’ll tell you who gave it to her as wedding or bridal…
by Robrt L. Pela What is it about Fifties cookbooks and the word “Fluff,” anyway? You can open practically any cookbook published during the middle of the last century and find a half-dozen recipes with the words “Fluffy” or “Fluff” in their titles. My favorite is Fried Cornmeal Fluff, which…
He was a defining figure in American public life, and that rarest of people: a local politician of whom we could be proud rather than ashamed. Senator Barry Goldwater’s impressive legacy is particularly resonant in an era in which American conservatism has rather a bad name, and his story, as…
He was a defining figure in American public life, and that rarest of people: a local politician of whom we could be proud rather than ashamed. Senator Barry Goldwater’s impressive legacy is particularly resonant in an era in which American conservatism has rather a bad name, and his story, as…
My friend Michelle and I were the only white people in the audience at last week’s performance of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf, which made me all the more aware that I was a white man who doesn’t like poetry who’d come to watch…
by Robrt L. Pela I borrowed a baking pan from my mother the other day—one of those square, aluminum Wear-Ever pans made in the 1940s, which is when Mom bought this one. I was making brownies and I don’t like to make them in a rectangular pan. One of my…
by Robrt L. Pela I’m a sucker for peculiar old cookbooks. They call to me, from eBay, and Glendale antique shops, and from the shelves of used bookstores in Tempe. I always come running, desperate for a volume I’ll love as much as I love Dishes to Make Him Happy,…
It’s gotten so we don’t even see them, the carefully placed product endorsements that are part of everyday life. On an episode of American Idol, Simon Cowell raises to his lips a monstrous neon tumbler emblazoned with the Coca-Cola logo, and what we see is a man taking a drink…
by Robrt L. Pela Last week, a reader wrote pleading with me to tell her about my favorite spatula, but I cannot. I’m afraid that if I do, my other spatulas will feel bad. If I single out one spatula, the others might stop working properly. I can imagine those…
For some folks, nothing says “happy” better than a pink-iced Hostess cupcake and an ice-cold Nehi. And then there’s Mindy Sue Meyers, whose sweet tooth is lodged firmly in her brain, which is spilling over with new ideas for making sweets into visual art. Her inspiration comes from old cookbooks,…
Once upon a time, people were allowed to be unhappy. Today, we have Deepak Chopra and Prozac and seminars that turn ordinary people into psychobabble-spouting Dr. Phil clones who say things like, “The way that you’re showing up for me is as someone who’s in denial about the trauma I’ve…
