Donna Hay: the other woman

First published 12 May 2006

To paraphrase that infamous remark by Princess Diana, there were three of us in this marriage and it was getting a bit crowded.

I’m not in the habit of quoting the late royal, but her words do have a certain resonance with me these days. That’s because He Who Can’t be Named seems to have developed an obsession with another woman.

Her name is not Camilla, but I fear that I am at one with Diana in the crowded marriage department.

My own “trouble with three” started a week or so ago when He Who Can’t came home with a book written by the other woman. It’s a big classy publication with high-production values and explicit photographs, all in colour.

I knew we were in trouble when he sat down with his new book and started drooling over the breasts and thighs in the photographs. He kept muttering, things like “exquisite” and “mouth-watering.”

Whether he was referring to the artistry of the photography or the breasts and thighs, I do not know. It was probably better that way.

“Wow, look at that!” he trilled, as he happened upon a particularly fetching breast or thigh. “I’d really like to try that.”

Yes, I bet you would, Sunshine.

He was all over that book, dragging it around the house everywhere he went and sitting down with it in every spare moment. It was almost embarrassing.

“Is her book more amusing than my columns?” I asked one evening, hoping to snap him out of his spell. His absent-minded answer was “yes.” I suppose that could have been interpreted either way.

But then he piped up as if to continue the steam of his inner thoughts. “And do you know, it’s not just the content that amazes me. It’s the way she lays it all out. She’s a real stylist, you know.”

A stylist, too? What a little treasure this woman must be. Is there anything she doesn’t do?

And then things got worse. He started telling his male friends about his multi-talented other woman. And they, of course, responded as you might expect a male to respond to this sort of material. It was all ooohhs and ahhhs.

On one Sunday afternoon I caught him foisting the breast and thigh pictures on one of these male droolers who happened to drop in for a visit. If you could have seen the two of them cooing and salivating. There was no shame, so sense of impropriety, no attempt to hide their admiration for this woman from me. It was all drool. Honestly! Men!

That the woman obsessed over happens to be international cookery writer Donna Hay, and that the breasts and thighs in question at one time belonged to a chicken is of little significance.

As He Who Can’t put it: She’s a stylist. What this says to me is that I’m not a stylist. I guess that would be a reference to my exploding cup cakes in the oven. They aren’t good enough any more. And my overcooked chicken breasts and tough chicken thighs don’t go the distance.

My lack of – how shall we say it – interest in cooking has forced him into the recipes and pictures of Donna Hay and me into the role of jilted woman. We’re always the last to know, us women abandoned for the recipes, photos and food styling of cookery writers.

You know that expression hell hath no fury like a woman scorned? Well I’m going to put it another way: Hell hath no chicken simmered with juniper berries like a woman whose man is obsessed with Donna Hay.

Long live the other woman. Long live Donna Hay.

glethbridge@herald.ca


Visit the Chronicle-Herald website

How can a swan be gay?

It was one of those moments when you find yourself hopelessly straddled over the muddy ditch that separates then from now.

It happened one evening while I was reading to my Things. The book was The Trumpet of the Swan by EB White, famed writer of Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little.

First published in 1942, it’s the story Louis, the dysfunctional trumpeter swan who couldn’t trumpet like the other swans. It’s a sweet little tale packed with universal themes about fitting in, following your dreams and dealing with overachieving parents. (Apparently they existed in 40s-era swan communities too.)

All was going well with our story until we reached the troubling passage on page 74. It’s a quotation from Louis’s overachieving dad who’s responding to news that his son has been rebuffed by a girl swan. Louis’s dad is incensed. No son of his will be treated this way. Something will have to be done.

“I shall act,” Louis dad declares. “Louis is a Trumpeter Swan, noblest of all the waterfowl. He is gay, cheerful, strong, powerful …” The little speech continues, but my reading of is interrupted by my two gobsmacked Things.

“Excuse me?” exclaims Thing 1. “Did you say gay?”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Thing 2 says. “You’re not telling me they had gay swans back then? When was this book written?”

“It was written in 1942,” I reply, using that old politician’s trick of answering only the question that suits me. With that, I continue the reading. “He is gay, cheerful, strong, powerful, lusty, good…”

But my Things aren’t about to let this one go. “Mummy!” Thing 1 insists. “The book just said the swan was gay. What’s this book about?” At nine years old, she’s old enough to know, but not quite old enough to know better.

And so I put the book down and have one of those talks a parent occasionally has with a child. I explain that there was a time when the word gay meant happy and cheerful, but that over the years it’s evolved a new meaning, one that isn’t quite what EB White meant in 1942 when he wrote The Trumpet of the Swan.

“You mean gay didn’t mean gay back then?” said Thing 2. “What’s up with that?”

Well, my darlings, what’s up with that is the English language, that’s what.
I then went on to explain that there was also a time when Madonna was a Christian icon, not an identity-morphing pop icon who will go down in history for her external presentation of conicals.

There was a time when a mouse was a little rodent that scurried about your house causing certain people to stand on chairs and scream.

A queer person was an odd or unusual individual. A queer might also have been gay, but not in the sense of today. A hard drive was a long journey on a sweltering day in a car full of cranky kids.

A web was the weapon Spiderman used to fight the baddies. A wireless was something the whole family gathered round in wartime to hear news bulletins on our boys Europe.

And imagine this: There was a time when a thong was a mere poolside flip flop, nothing more, nothing less.

My Things were fascinated, amused and surprised by these antiquarian meanings. But to their great disappointment, the next word I introduced to our little discussion hasn’t evolved one bit: bedtime.


glethbridge@herald.ca