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October 17, 2005
My Mom's Cooler Than Yours, I Think...
In Chinatown yesterday, J and I were browsing through this one store we always go to after dim sum.
It’s one of those crazy packed stores full of all kinds of Chinese furniture, statues, all kinds of shit.
On my way out, I spotted a porcelain figure. A lady on her back with her legs spread wide open and a gigantic hole where her stuff would be and a tiny hole under that. I said, “J, look at this awesome incense holder!”
J snatched it out of my hand and said, “We’re buying it…” and I thought to myself, Oh no, now whenever anyone comes over, he’s going to say I picked it out. I did pick it out but I didn’t say let’s buy it. I did want to own it. There was a tiny part of me that liked the nasty sculpture but it’s like, do I have to put it away when my mom comes to visit? I will definitely have to put it up when J’s mother comes over. She certainly won’t think it’s funny. She thinks this gigantic iron statue of the goddess of fertility that we have in the window is terrible but I think it’s absolutely beautiful. It wasn’t beautiful getting that bitch into the truck, but it is beautiful.
I’m burning incense out of the lady’s stuff right now. Someone had the nerve to paint hair on her stuff and I think that she’s actually supposed to be attached to another sculpture because there’s a tiny piece rolling around in her hollow body and I looked in there and it looks like a little ding dong that may have broken off of another sculpture. Gross. It’s so not an incense holder. And I’m really gross, but whatever.
This is crazy.
My sister took my mother to a bachelorette party this past weekend. Now, the girl that’s getting married is a longtime childhood friend of my sister’s. Her friend’s father was stationed in all the places my dad was stationed. They were two half-black half-Filipino sisters and our parents hung out so all of us, the daughters, hung out. I was the youngest though so I just mostly got ignored.
Anyway, one of the girls is getting married and my sister and her sister planned a bachelorette party for her.
The invitation said that at 7 o’clock the party’s vibe would be changing. I forgot how it was worded, but it was ghetto and basically implied that all the older Filipina ladies should leave at that time because a nasty stripper would be showing up.
Now, my mom hates to be excluded from anything where there are any Filipinos in attendance so she just didn’t leave. She had her little feet massaged by the in-house pedicurist they hired. She ate a bunch of pansit. Drank a lot of Diet Coke. Mingled with all the Filipina ladies which I know she just loved.
When the clock hit 7, they brought out the other dessert. It was a gigantic cake in the shape of a penis. Remember, they all suggested my mom should leave.
Maybe I haven’t really explained my sister well enough for you to understand the Howard insanity. She’s one of those southern girls. My sister likes booty rap music. Like, Too Short is a favorite of hers. Shit, I like Too Short too. That doesn’t affect the fact that she’s a mother of two and a court reporter and totally into Jesus. She’s just southern like that. She wears French tips. She wears suits by day and sparkly one-shouldered blouses by night. She picks her kids up from school. She rummages through their backpacks to make sure they do their homework. She gets into in-depth conversations with them about life and zits and sticking up for yourself. She does a daily cuddle session with her daughter. She likes bass. Not the fish. I’m talking the cars that go boom. She’s meticulous about her hair. She wears it short like I did on the Real World. She eats grits. She’s just southern. She’s a cool person. She’s different. She’s interesting. Oh, and she wears patchouli so now you have a picture of just how interesting this woman is.
So they bring out the cake.
Mercy looked at the cake and said, “Oh, dat is a cute cake. Where you get dat one?”
Marlene, my sister, was like, “You think that’s cute, Mom?”
“Yeah, issa cute but it looks like doo doo. Like a doo doo cake,” my mom said.
“It’s a penis, mom. It’s not a giant piece of shit,” my sister told her.
“Ooooh,” my mom replied, raising an eyebrow as if to imply she was in on the nasty joke even though seconds earlier she thought it was a gigantic turd and that the gigantic turd was “cute”.
My mother ate a piece of the penis cake even though she knew full well she wasn’t allowed to have any more sugar that day. Sometimes Marlene is too lenient with the whole diabetes thing. I say snatch it from her and yell at her. Marlene’s really nice and says okay and she even takes her to her diabetes classes but she still lets her get away with stuff because my mother has mastered this puppy dog face. My mom is really hardcore Philippines. She has no desire to be more Americanized and asking the woman to full-on change her diet is like telling her to go kill herself. Rice, carbs, sugar -- this is it for this woman.
Now, the stripper showed up and this wasn’t any old stripper. It wasn’t like one of the Chippendale type dudes that comes over and takes off little bits of clothing piece by piece and says corny shit. No, this was as my sister explained, “a black stripper, the kind that does the simulation stuff…”
“And mom was there!” I screamed into the phone, “What the fuck, Marlene!”
“I told her to leave but she’s nosy and insisted on staying so don’t yell at me, and besides Mom had fun,” she said.
Fun? Oh really, what kind of fun was MY mother having with a down-low brotha slash stripper.
Well, it turns out my sister gave my mother -- a woman who stays up late to watch SoapNet even though she has TiVo, a woman who paints the nails of elderly women dying in the nursing home so that they feel pretty, a woman who reads four romance novels a week, a woman who collects any and all trinkets and puts them on display in her China hutch including McDonald’s happy meal toys, an adorable innocent woman that calls my dad “Short” instead of Shorty when she’d mad, a precious woman who cherishes any and all Real World autographs I can get for her and her dying patients that don’t even watch MTV -- a dollar to put in the man’s thong.
Mercy took the dollar, and not only did she put it in the man’s thong, but she also slapped his bare butt and giggled her face off.
What else you say? Well, you have to know that my mother was in the corner of the room in a Filipino style sitting position. It’s not a squat (which she also does and I do too) and it’s not an Indian style seated position. It’s Indian style but instead of your legs crossed in an X toward each other, her calves go out to each side and her feet are flat on the ground so her legs look like chicken wings on each side. I don’t know how to explain it. She sits this way when she plays Solitaire, with real cards, on the floor in the room where we can’t touch anything.
So she’s sitting there all Filipino like in the corner cracking up at the stripper. My sister was giving the partiers dollar bills to hand out and my mother snatched the whole stash of bills so she could put them in the thong. My sister did have the sense to take the dollars from her, but still. I asked my sister if my mom’s drink was spiked. She said no. My mother has never tasted alcohol in her life. Did you know that?
Mercy! My Mercy! Thongs and butts and gyrating all around her. How could this be?
Well, my mom had been sad for the past couple of weeks. She’d gotten bad news about her family. And she just had a cataract removed where she said, “Meleesa, they gib me da Stevie Wonder glasses to wear apter dee surgery because they don’t want me to scratch it, you know…” I mean, she deserved to have a wonderful time. But strippers, Marlene?
Maybe instead of waiting for Thanksgiving, I’ll send for my mother to come and stay the weekend with me and J. I’ll leave the nasty incense holder out since she thinks penis cakes are cute. And we’ll see just who this Mercy character has become. Isn’t it bizarre that there are aspects of our parents’ personalities that we have no idea about? My mother had a blast at a stripper party?
I wonder if my daddy knows anything about this stripper business.
I’ll keep you posted.
Posted by melissah at October 17, 2005 04:11 PM