We were grounded this weekend with the rain and kids with coughs. By Sunday night, we needed outsiders to amuse us. So, we spontaneously organized a dinner party. My brother and his family and my buddy, Suze, were roped in with the promise of pork chops and mashed potatoes. Nothing brings the guests running like pig and potato. That's my little Martha Stewart tip for the day.
Martha's new daytime show was a topic of conversation this evening. I have had the luck to catch it a couple of times, which is odd because I usually don't watch daytime TV. It is so amazingly BAD that I was overjoyed to stumble upon it. When she isn't plugging her reality show or her magazine, she's making awkward conversation with celebrities or flubbing art projects. Suze saw her try to pipe in scrambled eggs into egg shells. First, you have to wonder why would someone do such a thing. But then there is the wonderful part of watching Martha realize that the eggs were too hot to pipe in. She and a celebrity buddy burned their fingers attempting this maneuver until she finally admitted that she had never made this dish before. I also saw her try to make styrofoam grave stones with John Lithgow and made a royal mess of things.
God, it's awesome. If you didn't hate her before, you most certainly will now.
From Martha, we turned to sexual harassment in the workplace. A friend of ours nearly got canned from a major financial firm last week for joking around with a friend. This joke was observed by a male secretary who reported him. Mountain. Mole hill. And the poor sap is in serious trouble. In the past six months, my husband has had to fire two temps who crossed the line. I'm forbidden to say anything more.
Suze said that the publishing world has much laxer standards than other industries. One guy she worked with showed other women in the office naked pictures of himself; I guess he thought they would be impressed. In this same office, there also was a long discussion about bringing in strippers into the office for some guy's birthday; some people thought that it was a fine idea.
Maybe we're jaded, but the incidents that have destroyed the careers of our friend and the two temps seem so trivial. (Wish I could say more). Nothing wrong with properly constructed double entrendre in the workplace, I say. Wink. Wink. Nudge. Nudge.
Then we also talked about gifted and talented education programs or classes for kids with pushy parents. In NYC, they are increasing the number of G and T schools in order to keep middle class parents in the city. Also the mainstreaming of special ed kids may also be leading to the rise of these program. We all had benefited from honors classes in our past. Tammy and Suze and I all remember pretending to be dumb in order to fit in. But we also have some reservations about how these programs unfairly monopolize resources.
My boys ate their cookies and staggered upstairs to play video games. Little Julia demanded her bottle. Suze had to catch the bus back to New York. The evening was done.