The Dinner Files

I’ve been meaning to bake bran muffins. Not of course, because I like bran muffins but because I’ve been wanting to write about them.

That is the life of a food writer — or at least this food writer – in a nutshell.

I wanted to bake bran muffins so I could write about strip clubs. Canadian strip clubs; or, to be fair and accurate, a Canadian strip club. So after procrastinating on the bran muffins for weeks because, honestly, no one in this house really likes muffins all that much, if at all, I figured I’d bake rhubarb coffee cake that everyone in this house wanted to eat and just tell you the bran muffin story.

I suppose you could bake the batter in muffin format and have a rhubarb-moistened crumb-laden muffin (cue Betty White joke here), but for the recipe to really segue into the story, the rhubarb cake would need to somehow morph into a bran muffin, which it just isn’t going to do in my hands, so I’ll need you to forgive and indulge me.

If it weren’t for the fact that I was carried down a mountain, the most interesting thing about my last trip to Canada would have been the fact that I went to a strip club. With my cousin. And a couple of French dudes (yes, they were total dudes). And a former member of the U.S. ski team. And an amazingly tall lady from Boston.

So I went to the strip club in a small town in the middle of nowhere British Columbia. Seriously. It was half way between Vancouver and Calgary. Check out a map. Go ahead, I’ll wait. See? Middle of nowhere.

The former U.S. ski team member and the amazingly tall lady from Boston were most persuasive. Just one beer, they said. It’s too early, they cajoled. You can’t even ski tomorrow, they pointed out. Don’t you want to drown your sorrows, they asked.

So I hobbled around the corner on my bum knee, watched with awe and amazement as my cousin talked the doorman out of making us pay the cover charge (he’s a charmer, my cousin), took the beer the amazingly tall lady from Boston handed me, and looked around.

There were videos of snow-mobile jumps and tricks projected on walls and a small square stage in the corner, but no dancing and most certainly no stripping. It seemed like a regular bar, and I’m going to guess that the male-female ratio of patrons was 60-40.

After about 10 minutes someone took the mic and announced that I-couldn’t-make-out-the-name was going to take the stage. Then a glittery-bikini-clad young lady emerged from the door behind the bar and made her way through the crowd to the stage. She started her sexy dance, up and down and around the pole, taking off her bikini top at some point along the way, and the mood in the room… well, the best way to describe it is like she was the wild neighborhood girl who’d gotten drunk at the block party and started taking her clothes off and no one quite knew what to do so they pretended it wasn’t happening and tried not to stare and kept watching the snow-mobile video playing on the opposite wall. Seriously. It was all so very Canadian, in ways admirable and troubling.

Of course, for all I know she was the nice neighborhood girl and the crowd was slightly embarrassed. What I know for sure is that no one was tipping her, which seemed really out of the purpose and principle of a strip club as far as a dancer would be concerned, so my cousin took up a collection and brought it up to her.

It was all very much not what it’s like in the movies, that’s for sure.

Since I was in said small British Columbia town for several days with nothing to do but nurse my injured knee, I made some friends at the hotel and at the public pool and at the corner café. I asked about the strip club, if the vibe was always like that, if anything about the place seemed odd.

No, people said as they looked at me like I was the crazy one, it’s always like that.

In the course of my investigations I then learned this fascinating fact: the club was fined last year. They are a bar without license to serve food and it seems the strippers baked bran muffins which they held between their legs and sold onstage, so the place was fined. For serving food.

Yes, you heard me right. Not cupcakes, not even sugar-topped blueberry muffins. The strippers baked bran muffins and sold them during their show.

The strippers held a bake sale.

I can’t help but think they would have fared better if they’d baked up a heavily crumbed rhubarb coffee cake, but that’s just me.

When I was a kid I once complained about Mothers Day to my mother (that’s her above, sipping coffee the day before I was born – draw whatever conclusions you like about my high-strung nature – in her short shorts and nautical stripes, proving fashion really does come in cycles). I thought it was unfair. There is Mothers Day and Fathers Day; I thought there should be a Kids Day, too. She promptly and quite sternly informed me that everyday was kids day. That tells you 1) a lot about the kind of kid I was and 2) a lot about the kind of mom I have.

I was the kind of kid who was really quite extraordinarily self-centered. Perhaps as all children are. Or, at least, perhaps as all first-born children who aren’t put to work as soon as they can walk as they were in the oldey-timey days tend to be. I sort of, semi grew out of it (a little bit?). I was also the kind of kid who mainly saw black and white; fair and unfair. Any whiff of unfairness enraged me. I could get myself worked up into quite a lather over the principle of the matter, even — or, rather, especially — as a child.

And my mom? She’s the kind of mom who is fun and nice enough so that you think to tell her that you think there should be a Kids Day. She is also hard-core enough to shut that nonsense down.

I see gray better than I ever used to, but it still isn’t my very best skill. On the subject of Mothers Day my assessment has shifted, but not as one might think considering that I am a mother.

I think Mothers Day is bunk. Pure and simple. It seems, much like Valentine’s Day, designed to make a whole lot of people feel bad and to sell a bunch of crap. But it makes other people happy, you may well argue. I don’t know, I guess. My sense it that if a mom doesn’t feel loved and appreciated in a general sense, a day of wilting flowers, burnt pancakes, or overpriced hotel brunches isn’t going to do much… and if it does, well, I find that sad.

So this Mothers Day I have a few hopes and dreams:

• I hope my friend who seems to – despite being told the full and unadulterated story of motherhood from many reliable sources – really, really want a child feels bright and hopeful today because when she has that child she will be the most awesomest mom ever. I also hope she will call me many, many times to say “oh, this is what you were talking about.”
• I hope my friend whose mother died an untimely and extra-sad death (yes, there are such things) knows what a kick-ass mom and friend she had become and enjoys an extra bite of dim sum for me today.
• I hope anyone who might have reason to feel less than joyful about Mothers Day can go to a movie or take a drive or somehow bury their head in the sand because the second Sunday of May comes around every single year.
• I hope my mom reads this and sees how much gray she has taught me to see, because I will call and cheerfully wish her a happy Mothers Day, plain and simple, no soapbox involved.
• I hope my mother-in-law enjoys her day with son and grandson; their temporary absence is really the best gift a mom with young kid(s) at home could ask for.
• I hope my son reads this someday and realizes that the degree to which I oohed and aahed over his mothers day cards and trinkets and pretended like the day meant something to me was in full and complete reflection of his own excitement at having a chance to make me feel special.

That’s what being a mother really teaches you about Mothers Day: just like all the other days, it’s about the kids. If he wants to sew up a felt pillow at school and write “I Love You Mama” in sharpie on it and wrap it in tissue paper and hand it to me with a brilliant smile on his face, jumping up and down with excitement, I’m not going to tell him Mothers Day is bunk. I’m not a monster. I’m going to smile and tell him I love it. And, amazingly to me, I’m going to mean it.