U-Turns
by Your Diva, Robin Pastorio-Newman

Recently, Your Darling Your Diva, Your One True Love was tooling around town with Larry, the little black cat bent on stealing your soul, though Larry was less inclined to view the excursion as a grand tour than as a terrifying and distasteful visit to the vet, and he would just as soon have done without it.
 
Route 27 crosses the Raritan River at the Albany Street Bridge and traffic glides up a steep incline to a traffic light near the crest of the hill. As Your Cherries Jubilee approached and passed through this intersection from the Highland Park side, she noticed an SUV placed at an odd angle blocking oncoming lanes. A glance into the rearview mirror produced an explanation: as soon as the light changed, that SUV hung itself a U-turn and headed back into New Brunswick. Larry was unimpressed.
 
Sometimes if we're smart we realize we have to acknowledge we've changed our minds. For the longest time, when one returned home from an evening of full-blown fabulousness and judiciously applied long-wearing lipstick, music-related television was strictly teeny-bopper in nature and not worth our time or on PBS during pledge drives and highly repetitive. One night, we discover Sundance Channel's Gigantic: A Tale of Two Johns. In the time it takes to transform oneself from Life Of the Party to the Very Soul of Somnolescence, the viewer learns that people he loves love They Might Be Giants. Thought you were alone in your love of songs about nightlights and obscure presidents? No, you are not. Andy Richter, Sarah Vowell and Michael McKeon disclose their secret passions, sometimes in recitation form, raising the Cool Factor exponentially. So maybe our relationship with televised music is on the mend?
 
Suppose you've spent your life ignoring any recipe that did not begin with "Take one can of condensed soup…" You've sworn off cooking and swear you'll never learn how. It's too complicated! It involves numbers! All this swearing has led you to a life of take-out Chinese and delivery pizza, not to mention moral sloth. Your Crepe Suzette would like to encourage you to purchase one basic cookbook, The All New Joy of Cooking. You can learn basic techniques by reading a paragraph or two. You can take the delivery boy off his weekly allowance. You can save civilization as we know it. Witness: Your frantic neighbor rings your doorbell and begs your help.
 
Frantic Neighbor:
I've got to roast this duck to crisp perfection in four hours or aliens will overrun our cities and destroy the Egyptian bakeries! Can it be done?
 
Because you have The All New Joy of Cooking, you know that you must ask one crucial question:
 
You:
Is it thawed?
 
If your frantic neighbor says...
 
Frantic Neighbor:
Yes!
 
...Egyptian bakeries stand a chance, and the aliens will probably have to take a number like everyone else. However if your frantic neighbor says...
 
Frantic Neighbor:
No!
 
...Don your foil helmet; the invasion begins. Hey - in life, there are no guarantees but there can be very quick orange sauce and if there's an Orange Sauce Emergency, can you afford to be ill prepared? No, you cannot. You think you'll go it alone, but like a New Yorker driving his ML-500 up a narrow Jersey main drag, sometimes you've just got to turn and go the other way.
 

©2004 Robin Pastorio-Newman