Laura has decided to continue to update her Breast Brants by making the latest breast cancer news available to her readers. Posts with news and developments about Breast Cancer treatment and research will be brief and might even just include the headline and the link to the news story. All you have to do is click on the red-highlighted “Breast Brants” category on the right sidebar of Laura’s brant to go directly to this section.
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Laura doesn’t want to look like she’s using any little piece of news or information as an excuse to brant, but on Friday she got a really nice short email from Darryln Leikauskas, the VP of Marketing at Brigham’s:
Laura,
I just checked your link below and I’m sitting here laughing! I am a woman, so your assumption was correct.
Darryln
Laura was thrilled both because she has now developed an actual correspondence with Brigham’s — !! –and because her instincts about gender assignment were correct regarding the nebulous name of “Darryln.”
Anyway, Laura is finally starting to feel the positive effects of branting! The main one being: If you brant, they will respond!!
Happy Birthday to one of Laura’s NBFs who is also one of the Blog Moms, Hilary Monihan!
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Laura often refers to herself as a Recovering Publicist, given the fact that her early training as a highly-neurotic trained-anticipator-of-all-bad-things-that- could-possibly-happen-to-make-anyone-late-for-anything (i.e., traffic, weather) and creator-of-endless-suggested-back-up-plans (i.e., leaving an hour earlier; leaving 8 hours earlier; leaving the day before; why not just move there so we’ll already live there when we have to be there, etc.) has been very hard to shake.
OK, let’s be frank. Laura was so traumatized by her job and her subsequent cold-turkey quitting of it that in the process of recovery she had “blocked out” many disturbing work-related memories (which, at the time, accounted for most of her frontal lobe’s memory bank).
And so it was when she recently started to undergo deep psychiatric brantalysis (branting four to five times weekly in a stream-of-consciousness way) that some of those “bad memories” were “recovered.” Additional memory-jogging was achieved in other ways — in this particular case by Laura coming upon some (copyright infringementable) photos of Ina Garten at a recent book signing.
Laura’s particularly impressed by the top photo where clearly someone - a bookstore employee probably (she’s wearing some sort of pin) — is standing next to the signing table and she is not sweating and shaking and looking incredibly stressed out and miserable and harried and tormented. In fact, that (probable) bookstore employee looks incredibly relaxed, as if a really nice person(Ina Garten) has offered to do the bookstore and a few hundred people a big favor (sign their books) in return for the big favor this bookstore and these few hundred people have done for her: buy her book(s)!
Laura assumes that everyone assumes that that’s how all booksignings are — fun — and certainly Laura hopes that her own personal booksignings are like that — but what people perhaps don’t realize is that most big booksignings like those for the Barefoot Contessa where hundreds and hundreds of devoted fans wait in a line that snakes out the door of the store and down the street are incredibly tense and stressful and full of anxiety. Laura writes in her latest book (caution: shameless self-promotion coming!) Piece of Work about how the recently back-to-work Julia Einstein feels like she’s going to die everytime she has to be with the angry bitter former-star-of-stage-and-screen has-been Mary Ford at one of her celebrity fragrance in-store events because Mary is always screaming at her to either move faster or move slower, talk louder or talk softer, and to move the perfume boxes she’s trying to sign for each customer/fan at some mysteriously perfect pace which will finally make Mary shut the fuck up for a minute or two.
Now, Laura doesn’t want to imply that all the famous-author booksignings she supervised as a publicist were as bad as the one described above and (oops! cheesy cliche here!) that was woven into the fabric of her novel, though the one described above is sort of how a lot of the ones Laura supervised went. Especially the ones with the author on whom (faction alert!) she based her Mary Ford character on.
In her next post Laura The Former Publicist will tell a funny story about spending a week with Julia Child in Washington DC helping Julia Child promote one of her cookbooks. The story itself isn’t what’s so “funny” — it’s what happened after that week she spent with Julia Child…
Well, it seems that Laura has received her first request for brantextualization (contextualization + brant) from Wendy H. a reader who is particularly literal. The reader asked this question regarding the “Voldechords” posting.
“Were you guys just sitting around talking and vocal chords happened to come up?”
Laura’s answer is:
“When Laura burned her vocal chords swallowing that stupid pill they did.”
Hope this helps clarify.
Not to be confused with Harry Potter’s Lord Voldemort, Voldechords is Ben’s way of saying “vocal chords.”
See? Laura’s still not sure what tone her brant should take. A little crazy or a little KRAZY-er?!
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As usual, Laura isn’t able to do anything half-way. So she spent the morning organizing her brants into categories (see right of brant for complete listing). This should take a normal person an hour or so, but as we all know by now, Laura is not a normal person. It’s taken her two and a half hours and she’s still not finished! Why? Well, see for yourself. Laura just can’t resist the enormous potential for extensive list humor* right on her very own brant!
(*List Humor: This is a touchy phrase for Laura since it was once used in a rejection letter from The New Yorker referring to a piece of hers — “The International House of Hunan Pancake” — they were at that very moment rejecting. The aforementioned alleged “list-humor piece” was a parody of the ubiquitous Chinese Take-Out menus that were constantly getting slipped under Laura’s apartment door or into the foyer of Laura’s apartment building and the International House of Panckes menu with which Laura was intimately acquainted (not to be a tease yet again, but more about her “Resume of Failure” later). The complete phrasing of the rejection letter was:
“Sorry, but we’re not taking list humor right now.”
Laura was deeply annoyed by that phrase since she had no idea what it meant. I mean, obviously she knew that her piece contained a list and was humorous. But she certainly wasn’t aware of any Grand Unified Conspiracy Theory of List Humorists creating massive amounts of derivatively unpublishable list-humor pieces.
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Though she’s never branted about this, Laura tends to get crushes on people. It’s a long story which Laura The Reluctant Branter will someday tell, but for now she’s going to cut to the chase and get right to the heart (if you’ll pardon the pun) of the issue:
Laura has a new crush.
After spending almost two months recuperating from surgery in bed flipping channels, she ended up, oddly enough, tiring of her usual favorites — true-crime-forensic-into-the-mind-of-a serial-killer-documentaries leavened-by-grotesque-and-annoying [because of Vincent D’Onofrio] “Law and Order: Criminal Intent”-reruns — and instead watching the Food Network. It took only a day or two (let’s be frank — it actually only took a few minutes) for Laura to get deeply bothered by most of the Celebrity Chef Line-Up — Emeril (annoying); Rachel Ray (too chatty and gabby = annoying), Nigella Lawson (too bosomy), Giada De Laurentis (too thin); Michael Chiarello (too lounge-lizardy); Paula Deen (frightening), and the worst of all, Sandra Lee’s “Semi-Homemade Cooking” (extremely frightening). But just as she was about to give up on the TV Food Network and grab the remote she fell in love:
With Ina Garten. Otherwise known as The Barefoot Contessa.
![ina_garten2006_d[1].jpg](http://www.laurazigman.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/01/ina_garten2006_d%5B1%5D.jpg)
The minute Laura first happened upon the Barefoot Contessa show, she was hooked. She loved everything about Ina Garten and her show (which has been on for a long time and which clearly shows Laura to be a little slow on the uptake and quite the opposite of a trend-setter). She loves how good and simple Ina’s food is and how Laura thinks that even she, if she wants to, could make it herself. She loves Ina’s enormous shingled house in East Hampton. She loves Ina’s terrific sense of humor. She loves her plumpness and her frequent acknowledgement of using too much butter (“Why does eveything always start with a half a pound of butter? I’m getting a bad reputation…”) but how she uses it anyway (“I know it’s a lot of butter but it’s a lot of pecan squares”). She loves her shiny hair and her black coat and green scarf she wears to go shopping in town. She loves her key phrases — “How easy is that?” and “How fabulous is that?” and can’t get enough of her perfect mixture of sophistication and self-deprecation. And she loves that it makes her slightly uncomfortable and grossed out to see how adoring she is of her husband Jeffrey.
[Jeffrey Garten promotional/press photo.]
Laura thought long and hard about why she was developing such a crush on this woman, not just because it was increasing exponentially by the day like a giant rising mushroom cloud, but also because Laura doesn’t usually develop crushes on celebrities (okay, except for Hugh Jackman and Nia Vardalos, but she’s admitted that before: see “Who’s Laura?” website page), let alone on chefs, mainly because Laura hardly ever cooks (it’s a long story, which will be told in a future brant). Episode after episode, rerun after rerun, Laura watched and self-analyzed until finally she understood what it was that she was truly responding to:
Ina Garten’s devotion to making her friends and family (Jeffrey) reallllly happy with realllllly good food.
This selflessness and single-minded goal to focus on making other people happy was a novel concept to Laura. Most people in general — and television chefs in particular — are full of ego, and while they can cook (well, Laura’s not too sure if what that creepy Sandra Lee does on her “Semi Homemade Cooking” show officially constitutes cooking), they are usually more pre-occupied with the attention they’re getting than with the attention they’re giving.
Needless to say, it didn’t take long before Laura developed a full-blown obsession with Ina Garten and her Happiness-Making-Mission and wished there were a way for her to meet Ina and become part of her life so that Ina would cook for her. The more she thought about their non-existent friendship — how much she and Ina had in common since Ina had left her career years ago as a White House nuclear policy analyst to try something completely new and different and life-altering for which she’d had no prior experience — buying and running an established gourmet store in the Hamptons — and Laura had left her career as a publicist to try something new (having a life) and different (having a bedroom) and life-altering (moving to Washington to have a 9 to 5 government desk job) for which she’d had no prior experience — she realized finally what goes on in the minds of celebrity-obsessed-people: they truly begin to believe that they and the celebrity would be “best friends” if only they could meet.
This realization scared Laura — she’d not only never thought like that about anyone, but certainly never about a “celebrity” — and she decided to try to ground herself and contain her crush by going through proper channels — namely, Ina Garten’s website. It didn’t take long for Laura to see that she was not alone in her demented wish-fulfillment fantasy disorder because when she clicked on the “Questions and Answers” section, there were lots and lots and lots of similarly infantile people ahead of her desperately wanting in with Ina. The first two questions that Laura focused on were bad enough:
and:
“I’m coming to East Hampton. Where should I stay?”
(Is Laura crazy or does that last one sound like a threat?). But the third question is the one that really showed Laura how [creepily] “devoted” Ina’s fans are to her:
Q: How can I be a guest on the show?
A: As you probably know, all the guests on the show are really my good friends. Many people have asked to be guests, but my producer and I feel that it’s more authentic if the guests continue to be my friends. Since the show is filmed in my kitchen in East Hampton, unfortunately, there’s no extra room for an audience.
While Laura marvels at the graciousness of Ina’s response, Laura knows that her crush must remain that way — just a crush. Laura still watches Ina Garten on TV as she cooks for all her friends, and she still wishes she were one of them so that Ina would cook for her, but Laura knows the limitations (boundaries) of her crush and where the firm lines of reality and fantasy must be drawn: She will brant endlessly about having a crush on Ina Garten, but she would never be so pathetic as to ask if she could be a guest on her show.
