A Pizza Party Funeral

My sister and I have a death pact.

Susan has vowed that, should I predecease her, she will not allow the funeral cosmetologist to put me in blue eye shadow. Every makeup artist in my makeover history has wanted to streak my eyes in shades ranging from cerulean to indigo. Hello, I’m not Molly Ringwald, my life is not “Pretty in Pink,” and it’s not 1986. More importantly, blue eye shadow looks unbelievably awful on me –truly horrendous– and I don’t want that to be the last memory people have of me.

Should Susan predecease me, I am assigned the job of wailer. Since this edict comes from my dramatic sister, the one who should have a comedy show just for being herself, this is not to be your run-of-the-mill lament. No, I have strict instructions to wail mournfully throughout the service and at a volume that requires the preacher to shout to be heard. At the graveside, just as her casket is being lowered into the ground, I am to hurl myself onto her eternal resting place with a cry of anguish. (I secretly hope to outlive her just so I can grant her wish.)

Of course, this heart-wrenching scene will be meaningless without an audience to talk about it for years to come, and after attending a funeral together last week, we hit upon a strategy to attract people to her funeral.

“You’d have to give away free pizza to get this many people at my funeral,” Susan observed of the standing-room only church, her tone rife with self-pity.

“Should I add serving pizza to my to-do list for when you die?” I asked. The offer brightened her mood considerably, and we agreed this would be our ticket to ensuring a big crowd of mourners at her funeral.

Susan has specific ideas about the pizza she would like to be served at her funeral. Pepperoni, of course, because it’s a crowd pleaser. Cheese for the finicky. Meat-lovers because it’s her personal favorite. And one without sauce for her husband Mike. Which got me wondering: would Mike only attend his wife’s funeral if he could have sauceless pizza?

I seem to be the go-to person in my family for meeting post-death desires. My brother asked me to write his obituary. I’m honored he asked me but also very surprised. Doesn’t he know I have a lot to say about him, much of which he probably doesn’t want the world to know? I did, after all, have several years when he went away to college to snoop around his bedroom.

My mother asked me to write and deliver her eulogy around a theme she calls “The Four G’s.” The four most important things in her life are God, grandchildren, garage sales and gardening. Mama, bless her heart, has been talking about her funeral for years. I think it’s because she is surrounded by older friends who have one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel.

With everyone in the family giving me instructions, I feared my sister Connie had a request she had not shared. So I asked her at our last family dinner what she wanted me to do for her. Without hesitating even a millisecond, the sister 13 years my senior answered, “Die before me.”

Even my six-year-old daughter, it seems, has ideas about my death. Overhearing my husband and me discuss my desire to be cremated –a decision I made recently when I realized it solved my blue eye shadow fears– Isabella asked me what cremation is. I explained it the best I could, telling her it’s when someone chooses to have her body burned into ash instead of put into the ground. With a solemn face, Isabella reassured me.

“Don’t worry, Mommy,” she said. “I’ll burn you in the fire.”

Please, Lord, let her wait until I’m dead. 

This originally appeared in my column in the May 16, 2012 issue of "The Pilot" newspaper.

Digging the Pig

I’m obsessed with pigs, and it started with the best pig of all time: Miss Piggy.

I had the Miss Piggy puppet, cookie jar, pajamas, lamp and well, it’s safe to say I had the works. Purple was my favorite color because it was The Pig’s favorite. My love for Miss Piggy endured even when I was supposedly too old (so my friends told me) to dig the pig.

I begged my parents to let me paint my room purple, something they weren’t too keen on in the days when mauve and peach were the trend. They finally relented after I caught our kitchen on fire.

It was a bustling morning because it was the most important day in the life of a seventh grader: school picture day. After popping some bread in the toaster, I rushed to my closet to don my purple outfit. I had special permission to wear makeup (purple mascara!) and pantyhose. I was fighting the pantyhose, one leg in and one leg half in, when the fire detector shrilled. I ran-hopped into the kitchen. My dad had beaten me to the source of the fire, the toaster, where he was batting with a kitchen towel the flames licking the ceiling.

My parents were very cool about the whole fire thing. How was I to know, they reasoned, that one should not put toast back into the toaster after slathering it with butter?

Though it was only our kitchen that was destroyed, I got lucky. Thanks to the smoke damage, we had to redo the whole house. Woo hoo, I got my purple room, which unbelievably, is still purple to this day. Bella gets a kick out of sleeping in my old bed surrounded by relics of The Pig.

My dad was into pigs, too, but he liked the real ones. He decided to raise one of his own, built a pen and brought home an adorable pink thing whose oinks sounded more like squeaks. I named her Petunia, and my sister and I walked her around our yard on a leash. After she grew up and was too heavy to frolic with a little girl, I visited her in her pen and petted her as I scooped food into her trough.

You know the fate Petunia met, of course. Daddy, a butcher by trade, made bacon out of her. That’s when I first heard the old chicken and pig joke. In a bacon-and-egg breakfast, what’s the difference between the chicken and the pig? The chicken is involved but the pig is committed.

Hmm, come to think of it, there may be a link between the trauma of eating my pet and becoming a vegetarian later in life. But I sure do miss bacon.

Years later, when I went to college, my dad decided the perfect cure for empty nesters was a pot-bellied pig. And he wanted it to live in the house. My poor mother didn’t even want dogs inside, but she indulged him. Daddy named his new pet after himself. Rudolph tended to the needs of Rudy like a doting father. He worked hard to litter train Rudy and was successful. He bottle-fed Rudy long past when Rudy needed it, and Daddy was downright begrudging about giving up bottle-feeding to me when I was home on breaks.

Alas, I have no living pigs in my life now, but thanks to the Muppet movie that came out a few months ago, I’ve reconnected with the pig that started it all. Bella didn’t understand why I cried during “The Muppets.” I couldn’t explain to her that it was like reuniting with an old friend. And this friend was on the big screen in all her glory!

Now that the movie is out on DVD, I have unlimited access to Miss Piggy, and the obsession is back with a vengeance. Maybe I should paint a room in our house purple. 

But this time, I’m going to do it without a fire.

This column originally appeared in the April 25, 2012 issue of "The Pilot" newspaper in Southern Pines, N.C.

It Ain't a Word til Somebody Done Did Say It

I'm headed to the North Stanly High School class of 1991 reunion this weekend. In honor of my hometown, I'm posting my column from the November 23, 2001 issue of "The Pilot."

My mother told me she was befuzzled. “Do you mean befuddled? Or maybe bedazzled?” I asked helpfully, not wanting to tell the woman who taught me to speak that, hello, befuzzled isn’t a word.

“Yes,” she said. “Both.” I bit the bullet and corrected her. “But Mom, ‘befuzzled’ isn’t a word.”

“Oh, good! Then I just coined a new one!” she said, clearly pleased with herself, then added, “If Sarah Palin can do it, then so can I.”

I can’t decide if I like this new free-wheeling Patricia Stepp who is so cavalier about breaking language rules. When I was a child, she constantly interrupted me to correct my grammar. The new Patricia says things like, “Oh, honey, it don’t matter,” when I ask if she wants to eat at my native town’s Pat & Mick’s Fish Camp or Blue Bay Seafood. (The right answer is always Pat & Mick’s. Anybody can tell you that. Blue Bay is just too new, having been around a mere 25 years or so.)

Where did my mother go? When I call her on it, she waves me away and gives the lame explanation that she has “just lived in Stanly County too long.” I can’t argue with that either. I’m quite fond of my home county just 50 miles west of here, but the county seat of Albemarle will forever be colored by associations with the cute, talented but seemingly dimwitted Kellie Pickler.

I watched “American Idol” for the first and only time that year to support our hometown girl. But I shuddered when she pronounced the “L” in salmon and went on to compare her first spinach salad to “just like pickin’ leaves off a bush.” Her first spinach salad? Right. Then she pretended never to have heard of calamari! Girl, a stroll down Albemarle’s main street reveals not one, but two, restaurants with calamari on the menu.

Don’t get me wrong; I love our Southern idiosyncrasies, especially when it comes to how we talk. I’m tickled pink when my nephew Daniel says, “Do what?” as a way of expressing surprise. And I enjoy channeling all the beehived church ladies of my childhood by spurting out an occasional “I swannee.”

But to intentionally sound stupid? Come on, Kellie. You done rurnt us all (that’s “you ruined us” in countrified, as opposed to genteel, Southern speak) when you pretended Albemarle was a hillbilly town. Are there rednecks? Yes. But I do declare, even rednecks have high-functioning brains in those mulleted heads.

So where was I? Oh, yes, I’m befuzzled. I can lose track sometimes since my “rememberer,” as my uncle David calls it, is on the fritz.

Embracing language changes is difficult for this word girl, but I’m not the only one. Even my sweet husband, who usually doesn’t share my word nerd tendencies, came home the other night shaking his head. “It’s the end,” he said. “There’s no respect for the language anymore.” I waited. “I heard ‘indexes’ instead of ‘indices’ is becoming accepted,” he said with a hangdog expression on his face. “That’s ok, sweetie. It ain’t a big deal,” I said, using a word that, Lord help me, was deemed acceptable by Webster’s third edition in 1961.

That was the edition that argued almost anything goes as long as somebody uses it. I have to say I’m downright befuzzled that the learned folks at Webster’s would be so careless about what constitutes acceptable language. But since it opens the door to all kinds of made-up words, I think I’m on board. Bring on the befuzzlement.