Chick Wit Archives – Lisa Scottoline

Column Classic: Airport Insecurity

July 27, 2025

By Lisa Scottoline

You may have heard about the airline that charges passengers according to how much they weigh, which I think is a great idea.

Because airline travel isn’t humiliating enough.

Never mind that when you stand in the security line, you have to undress in front of perfect strangers.

First you take off your shoes, so you can stand there awkwardly in your bare feet. You lose three inches, but you gain ringworm.

Next you have to take off your belt. It is not embarrassing at all to have to lift up your shirt and unfasten your belt, especially if you have to suck in your belly.

Not that I would know.

I have a belly, of course.

I just don’t bother sucking it in.

Then you unfasten your belt, and try not to make eye contact with the man in front of you as you slide it slowly through your belt loops.

I’ve had marriages with less sexual chemistry.

Fifty Shades of Delta.

Finally you take off your coat and your sweater, stripping down to your T-shirt. Nobody throws any dollar bills at you, and there’s not even a pole. It’s the Terminal A striptease, and believe me, I’ve seen some of those businessmen in line and I know their wheels are going up.

Next you proceed to the full-body scanner and lift your arms over your head, so the machine projects a life-size image of your bra to everybody in the tri-state area.

With some women, it’s free porn.

In my case, it’s comic relief.

Plus I read recently that some of these machines use x-rays, and all I have to say is, TSA is in deep trouble if my breasts glow in the dark.

Whose side are you on, Marie Curie?

Let’s not forget that when you’re in the full-body scanner, you have to put your feet in the yellow outlines on the mat. But I’m short, and I can never reach the outlines with my feet. The other day, a TSA guy actually said to me, “Lady, you have to move your legs farther apart.”

Dude. No, I don’t.

Although I’m a sucker for a man in uniform.

With a big wand.

Besides, I don’t think my legs go farther apart, anymore. They like to be close together, all the time. In fact, they might have grown together, so when I travel, I’m a mermaid, with carry-on.

But let’s be real, ladies. Which machine is more embarrassing – a full-body scanner or a mammography machine?

How about a show of hands?

Or something else…

Obviously, I’m all for airlines charging us by weight. Our self-esteem can be dangerously high at times. So by all means, why not put a big scale right next to the gate? Make sure it has a large, blinking display, so that everybody can read it clearly. Better yet, announce it on the loudspeaker systems.

WELCOME TO PHILADELPHIA. LISA SCOTTOLINE WEIGHS 132 POUNDS. ALSO HER LEGS NO LONGER SEPARATE. SHE MAY EVEN HAVE A HYMEN, WHO KNOWS?

And why stop there, in terms of humiliation? Get an overhead projector and show the world our W-2s.

And by the way, the airline charges overweight baggage at the same rate as the passenger’s “personal weight.”

Cruel.

You know what I think?

The weight of this old bag is none of your business.

And I feel the same way about my luggage.

Column Classic: Mother Mary and The Retirement Village

July 20, 2025

By Lisa Scottoline

Sooner or later, most families will deal with the question of whether an aging mom or dad should move to a retirement community. The pamphlets say it’s not an easy decision, and they never met Mother Mary.

We begin with some background.

As you may know, my mother lives with Brother Frank in South Beach, and lately they’ve been talking about selling their house.

By lately, I mean the past twenty years.

The Flying Scottolines move slowly. So slowly, in fact, that we try to sell houses in the worst recession of all time, in which the real estate prices are at an all-time low. If you need investment advice, just ask us. We hear that tech stocks are superhot.

If Mother Mary and Brother Frank sell their house, the question becomes whether they should continue to live together, or whether Mother Mary should move to a retirement village.

It takes a village to raise Mother Mary.

And I wish it luck.

Anyway, they can’t decide what to do. They love living together. He’s gay, and his gay friends love their moms, so they’re all living in a happy circle of fragrant stereotypes.

And Frank takes wonderful care of her, taking her to all of her doctor’s appointments, grocery store runs, and occasional dinners out. There’s a special place in heaven reserved for people who take such great care of their parents, and once my brother gets there, he’ll not only get a free pass, he’ll be allowed to park anywhere.

By the way, Mother Mary doesn’t want to live with me, because Pennsylvania is too cold. Plus she always says, “All you do is read and write.”

To which I plead guilty.

And though we prefer her to live with family, we all know that Frank might not always be able to take care of her, and that even though she’s in great health now, she might not always be. So we’re all confused, and I decided that we should go visit a retirement village, since none of us had ever seen one. In fact, we’re so old-school that we kept calling it a “nursing home,” which is the last term that applies.

On the contrary, it’s paradise.

We were shown through a lovely building, complete with two restaurants and a “pub,” which serves drinks in front of a big TV. We read a daily menu that included trout almandine, duck with wild rice, and baked Alaska. We toured a gym that had a Jacuzzi and an indoor pool. We saw a beautiful one-bedroom apartment with freshly painted walls, cushy wool rugs, and maid service. We got brochures on discount trips to Egypt and London. And they have a computer class, a book club, canasta, bridge, and pinochle clubs, plus yoga, aerobics, free weights, and “seated” exercise.

So you know where this is going:

I’m ready to move in.

Now.

Say the word.

Retire me.

I’m old enough, at least I feel old enough.

They had me at “seated exercise.” Exercising while seated is my kind of exercise. It’s a piece a cake.

Just do it.

For example, I’m seated right now, watching football on TV, which I gather is “unseated exercise.” How conventional. All that moving around.

Who needs it?

But to stay on point, I fell in love with the place, and so did Brother Frank. It even had a huge model train set, which he began playing with immediately, pressing the button to make the toy locomotive chug through the fake forest, until it derailed, careened off the track, and vanished into some fake shrubbery.

He walked away quickly.

I blamed it on my mother.

Why not? It’s the American way.

And I bet you think you know what Mother Mary thought of the place.

She loved it.

Surprise!

I think they got her thinking at “maid service.”

She’s hasn’t decided she wants to move there, and they’re going back to Florida to let it sink in. We’ll see what happens, and I’ll let you know. I’m just happy that’s she didn’t reject the idea outright.

Or throw food at anybody.

Column Classic: Just Desserts

July 13, 2025

By Lisa Scottoline

It can be a problem when your kid comes home to visit. You’re not used to living together, and even the littlest thing can cause a fuss.

For Daughter Francesca and me, it was dessert.

We’re finally on the same page, food-wise, which is a nice way of saying that we’re both trying to lose weight, so we’re eating healthy foods. She’s home this weekend, so for dinner I made politically-correct pasta. By which I mean, I sautéed a few tomatoes in olive oil with whole cloves of garlic, and when the mixture got soft, I took it out of the pan and dumped it on top of whole wheat spaghetti.

By the way, the best thing about this recipe, which I invented, is that it uses garlic without having to chop it up. I hate it when my fingers smell like garlic, and I don’t buy garlic already chopped, because that’s cheating. But this way, if you toss whole cloves in the pan, they get mushy, and you can mash them with a fork. Mashing is more fun than chopping, and doesn’t involve your fingers.

You pay nothing extra for these culinary tips.

Go with God.

And before I tell you about the fight, let me mention also that I’m working on portion control. I know that’s my main problem. This should have been a reasonable-calorie dinner, even though it’s pasta, but I always up the ante by getting a second and a third helping. You might ask, why do you make so much food in the first place, Lisa? The answer is simple.

I’m Italian.

Actually the truth is, I like to make extra of everything, like scrambled eggs, so I can give some to the dogs. Every morning, I make six eggs, knowing that I’ll eat two and give them the rest. They wait patiently during my breakfast, knowing that their eggs will come. It’s all very easy.

But I was doing the same thing with whole wheat pasta, making extra for the dogs, until I realized I was using them as my portion control beard.

I busted myself and stopped.

To stay on point, I made a delightful spaghetti meal, and Francesca made a side salad. We had a fun dinner, yapping away and trying not to eat more helpings of pasta, even though it was calling to us from the colander. When we finished our meal, I wanted dessert.

This, I can’t help.

I love to eat dessert right after dinner. And when I say right, I mean immediately. Timing is everything. It doesn’t have to be a lot of something, just a taste. It’s not my fault, and I figured out why this is so:

It’s because dessert sounds so much like deserve. Also, we say that people get their just desserts, which means they get what they deserve. So, ipso fatso, I feel as if I deserve dessert.

Right now.

But Francesca doesn’t like dessert right after dinner. She can wait, which I consider a four-letter word.

This is a long-standing battle we have, because I like us to eat together, and the conversation usually goes like this: I ask her, “Want some dessert?”

She answers, “No, thanks. We just ate.”

“But don’t you want something sweet? I’m having mine now.”

“No, I’m not hungry for dessert yet.”

I get cranky. “When do you think you’ll want dessert?”

“I don’t know. Later.”

“Sooner later or later later?”

Okay, so usually I don’t eat my dessert then, and we retire to the family room, where we watch TV and work, and I spend the rest of the night asking her, “Is it later yet?”

Just like she used to ask me, “Are we there yet?”

Payback, no?

So last night, I figured I’d solve this problem. All I wanted was a small helping of vanilla ice cream, with a banana. And because I wanted it right after dinner, I decided to have it then. If I had to eat alone, so be it. Plus, this way I’d have more time to burn off the calories, by reaching for the remote throughout the evening.

So I had my ice cream and banana.

Delicious.

Column Classic: Dressy

July 6, 2025

By Lisa Scottoline

I’m getting ready to launch THE UNRAVELING OF JULIA on book tour, so I’ll be running Classic Columns for a month.

Details about my signings are on my website, and I hope you’ll come see me on the road! Thanks so much for the love and support! I’m grateful for each and every one of you!

Guess what I got for my birthday?

A dress with a bra already sown into it.

You didn’t know that was a thing?

Or rather, two things?

I didn’t either.

But my bestie Franca did, and not only do I thank her for the dress, but I got this column out of it, which is awesome.

To explain, I’ve seen tank tops that are for yoga, which have a bra sewn in, and that I understand. But I’m talking about a flowery cotton shift that was otherwise normal except for two massive foamy cups, sewn into the front of the dress.

I packed the dress for book tour, not realizing there was a bra inside until I tried it on in the hotel room, then looked at myself in the mirror.

D’oh.

The dress fit great except that the foam cups were way bigger than my breasts, which are your basic B.

For Boobs.

The cups were like a C or maybe even a D, which is a terrible grade in anything but mammaries.

I don’t know who wears these bra dresses.

Strippers who love florals.

So you get the idea.

My cups were half-empty.

Or half-full, for you optimists.

Either way, they gave my chest a pair of dimples far lower than they’re supposed to be.

Plus the pads were higher than my breasts, so I had double-decker nipples, which is not a good look even on dogs.

Evidently, the world thinks our breasts should be earrings.

I didn’t get it. Then I realized that maybe the dress wasn’t for my age group. It was a size eight, not size sixty-two.

But I hadn’t packed another dress for the book signing.

What’s an author to do?

I took off the dress and examined the seams to see if I could take the pads out, but I couldn’t. I put the dress back on and tried to figure out what to do with my breasts. I pushed them up into the cups, but they wouldn’t stay there because there was nothing to hold them up, like elastic or an underwire.

Or a suspension cable.

Or a crane.

Gravity is real, people.

I took the dress off again, put on a bra, and put the dress back on. Of course the only bra I had with me was my good bra, since that’s what I save for book tour.

Every woman has a good bra.

You know it’s the good bra because it’s new and cost too much.

“New” means bought less than five years ago. If you have mustard older than your bra, your bra is new.

Also a good bra has lace, because women think men care about lace.

When they have boobs in front of their face.

Guess again.

Or the good bra is a sexy color, like red.

For harlots.

Or black.

For harlots with class.

I go with black.

I have aspirations.

And my good bra is padded because my breasts want to sell a lot of books.

They want to be breast-sellers.

Sorry.

So back to the story, I put my bra and the dress on, which meant I was wearing a padded bra with a padded bra dress.

You’re thinking I looked bad?

On the contrary.

I looked great!

Okay, I had a bad case of boob sweat, but you have to look for the silver lining.

In the dress lining.

I would sell tons of books if my audience were composed mostly of men or the blind.

Because you could be blind and still see my chest, which had turned into The Continental Shelf.

I mean, you could use my chest as a bookcase.

Or a bar, if you want to rest a beer and a bowl of chips.

I turned to look at myself, and my breasts were so sticking out so far they bumped into the wall.

Luckily I felt nothing.

I bounced back.

It was like wearing a trampoline.

I feel pretty sure I would be flotation device.

Or a bulletproof vest.

In any event, I wore the dress and I sold plenty of books, so my grades improved from D to A+.

And here is my question:

Why stop at bras?

If we’re going to start sewing underwear into dresses, why not sew in a pair of panties, too?

Then you could just jump in from above and be ready for the day.

Like Supergirl, with implants.

Column Classic: Love Boat

June 29, 2025

By Lisa Scottoline

I’m getting ready to launch THE UNRAVELING OF JULIA on book tour, so I’ll be running Classic Columns for a month.

Details about my signings are on my website, and I hope you’ll come see me on the road! Thanks so much for the love and support! I’m grateful for each and every one of you!

It’s everybody’s favorite time of year again.

My birthday!

That’s how I feel about my birthday, and that’s how I feel about yours, too.

I celebrate your birthday in my head, so I hope you’re celebrating mine your head.

It’s cheaper that way.

Also we don’t get drunk.

Well, maybe I do.

But this birthday felt different to me, in a good way.

I feel super happy just to be alive.

Let’s pause a moment.

I know that sounds kind of Splenda, but it’s really true. And the fact is, absolutely nothing has changed from last year.

In fact that’s exactly what is making me happy.

It really is a good thing to be grateful sometimes that you’re still living.

I get constant reminders of this, and I had one just this weekend, with Francesca. We were scheduled to give a speech about our collections of funny stories like these, the newest of which is out this July 11, entitled I NEED A LIFEGUARD EVERYWHERE BUT THE POOL.

Actually I need a lifeguard at the pool, too.

But that’s another story.

Literally.

Anyway we were supposed to speak at the American Library Association conference in Chicago, and we were both excited because we love librarians.

Hug your librarian the next time you see him or her.

They don’t get enough hugs.

Nobody does.

See what I mean?

Splenda!

Anyway, when I go on a business trip, I fly out, do my gig, and fly right back. I don’t do anything other than the gig, because it’s business.

But Francesca had a different idea. “Mom, I’ve never been to Chicago,” she said. “Why don’t we go sightseeing and leave later that night?”

I rolled my eyes. Inwardly.

Don’t roll your eyes outwardly if you’re a mother.

You’ll get in a lot of trouble.

But I said yes, and Francesca went online, researching the things you could do in Chicago, which I heard about with an inward eyeroll.

Because I didn’t think you were supposed to have fun on a business trip.

And before I knew it, we were in Chicago, we did our gig, talked about our book, and gave a lot of hugs, then we woke up the next day, ready for tourist fun in the sun.

What did we do?

We saw the cool bean statue at Millennium Park.

Cool beans!

And we went to the gorgeous Buckingham Fountain, which is next to a body of water they say is a lake but anybody from Philly would call an ocean.

But the best thing we did was take a boat ride with a billion other tourists down the Chicago River, with a volunteer telling us the architectural history of the skyscrapers.

Inward eyeroll?

Same here, but I was wrong.

It was awesome.

Because this amazing volunteer knew everything about architecture and gave us almost two hours of her time simply because she loves architecture and her city.

And because we learned everything about the brilliant architects and engineers who imagined and then built a slew of incredible buildings, each of them a tribute to human ingenuity and hard work.

And even because people on the bank waved to our boat as we floated by, and Francesca and I waved back, even though we had no idea who they were, or they us.

In fact, we waved at people on the riverbanks the whole damn boat trip, and people on the riverbanks waved back, and that made Francesca and I tear up, unaccountably.

Okay, accountably, since we’re Italian-American.

We cry all the time.

That’s how you know we’re happy.

The boat trip was a reminder of the simple truth that we’re all just human beings, floating down some river, waving at each other as we go by.

And when I thought of the architects, the engineers, the volunteers, and the librarians, I felt awed by all of us, just normal people, filled with so much vision and heart, following whichever endeavor we choose, our passion or our job and sometimes both. With just ourselves, we build communities, cities, and even countries.

Like this one.

And by the end of the day, I remembered I was happy to be alive.

You probably already know this lesson, but in my life, I need to teach it to myself from time to time.

Which is to go slower.

Enjoy yourself.

Feel the sun on your face.

Wave.

And do really touristy things, because there’s a reason so many people like to do the same things, wherever they go.

Because people are basically the same, everywhere you go.

We’re all tourists in this life, aren’t we?

None of us is from here.

And none of us is staying.

And so my biggest birthday present was that I got another year on my trip.

I pray that will be your present, too.

Happy birthday to us.

And of course, to America.

Classic Column: Love Bites

July 1, 2025June 22, 2025

by Francesca Serritella

Bust out the citronella candles, it’s mosquito season! Here’s a Classic Column about feeling favored by the summer pest and what these bloodsuckers might have to teach us about attraction. Tell me, do mosquitos like you, or love you?

Mosquitos love me.

I’ve always believed I get an inordinate number of mosquito bites, but I never said it out loud. Everyone feels this way. Brandish a bottle of OFF! at any summer barbeque, and five people will proclaim that mosquitos love them with equal parts self-pity and pride. It’s almost a humble-brag, as if mosquitos are real aesthetes, the blood-sucking playboys of the insect world.

The subtext is: “There’s just something about my exposed skin that attracts all species, whatta hassle!”

Then I recently came across an article explaining mosquitos actually do have a “type:” they’re most attracted to humans with the blood type O.

My blood type.

I wasn’t imagining it, it wasn’t some messed up version of vanity, it was science!

Click to read the full column on Francesca’s Website

Column Classic: Greased Lightning

June 15, 2025

By Lisa Scottoline

I’m a big fan of combinations, like soup-and-sandwich. Peanut butter-and-jelly. Spaghetti-and-meatballs.

You may detect a pattern.

Carbohydrates are the leitmotif.

Or maybe the heavy-motif.

One combination I never thought of is jeans-and-moisturizer. Lucky for women, marketing has thought of that for us!

You may have read the news story which reported that Wrangler is selling a line of jeans that embeds microcapsules of moisturizer in the fabric, which evidently explode on impact with your thighs and moisturize them.

I think this is an awesome idea. I often fantasize about things that would explode on impact with my thighs, such as Bradley Cooper.

It gives new meaning to the term thunder thighs.

The line of jeans is called Denim Spa, which is quite a combination, right there. Denim and Spa are two words I have never experienced together.

Like love-and-marriage.

But to stay on point, Wrangler markets three types of moisturizer jeans. One comes embedded with Aloe Vera and another with Olive Oil, but choosing between the two is a no-brainer for me. I wouldn’t pick Aloe Vera, because she sounds like someone I went to high school with and I don’t share jeans.

I’d leave the aloe alone.

Instead I’d pick the olive oil. If I added balsamic, those jeans would be delicious.

But only extra virgins can wear them.

Count me out.

Come to think of it, if I were going to infuse jeans with food, I would go with Cinnabons.

Extra frosting is more fun than extra virgin.

The moisturizer in the jeans lasts up to fifteen days, but Wrangler also offers a “reload spray” that you can squirt your pants with. I’m not sure I’d buy the spray. It would be cheaper to pour olive oil on my pants, like a salad. I’d dress them properly, before I got dressed.

But the third type of moisturizer jeans is my favorite, and it’s called Smooth Legs.

I need Smooth Legs. I have only Scaly Legs and Hairy Legs, or a combination of the two, which is Scary Legs.

The amazing thing about the Smooth Legs jeans is that they not only moisturize your legs, they fight cellulite.

Wow!

According to the website, the way they do this is by a “special formula” embedded in the jeans, which contains “caffeine, retinol, and algae extract.”

Which contains mayonnaise.

Why fight jeans that fight cellulite?

I wouldn’t. I’d be scared. They can “reload.” I wouldn’t buy them without a background check.

If you ask me, fighting cellulite is a lot to ask from a pair of pants, much less clothing in general, and you’ve got to hand it to Wrangler, which charges a mere $150 for a pair of these hard-working jeans. That’s only $75 per leg or approximately $.03 per cellulite dimple, if you have 2,928,474,747 million dimples, like me.

In fact, I just got another 4,928,749, in the time you took to read that last sentence.

In my experience, cellulite comes only in packs of 4,928,749.

I wouldn’t mind having a pair of pants that fought cellulite for me, which would be like having a lawyer for my butt.

This is because I don’t spend any time fighting my cellulite. On the contrary, my cellulite and I have an arrangement. My cellulite agrees to stay on the back of my legs, thighs, and tushie, and I agree not to look at myself from behind.

This turns out to be easy. Because I always move forward and never look back.

Metaphor not included.

In truth, I’ve come to accept and enjoy my cellulite. I can amuse myself by playing connect the dots on my thighs or finding constellations on my butt. For example, my left rump sports not only the Big and Little Dippers, but also The Serving Spoon, The Soup Ladle, and The Cake Knife.

The best thing about the moisturizer jeans is that all that grease must make them easier to get on. But being menopausal, I might need more lubrication.

Like motor oil.

Come to think of it, I won’t be buying the moisturizer dungarees.

They’re not worth dung.

Big-Ass Night Table

June 8, 2025

by Lisa Scottoline

Size matters in only one thing.

Night tables.

I’m on a quest for the perfect night table.

This quest began forty-odd years ago.

I’ve looked for the perfect night table longer than I’ve looked for the perfect man.

Honestly, only one is essential in a bedroom.

Let me explain.

I started life with a really small night table, and I would put my glasses on the night table and they would fall off instantly, usually face down.

I scratched glasses nonstop.

I would pick them up if I was still awake, but if I was too tired, I would leave them there. And step on them on my way to the bathroom.

Plus I never had enough room for a real-sized lamp, which I needed to read.

The night lamp is itself a quandary.

If you get one that’s big enough to read by, you won’t be able to reach the knob and turn it off when you want to go to sleep.

And if you get one that’s too small, you’ll stop reading because it’s too hard on your eyes, then you’ll start scrolling Instagram and end up hating yourself.

The only thing instant about Instagram is self-hate.

I actually don’t know if the pretty shiny people on Instagram are real.

If they are, do they scroll Instagram and end up hating their lives, too?

To return to point, in time I learned that lamp size didn’t matter because inevitably, the dog would fall asleep on my arm and I didn’t have the heart to move him to turn off the lamp anyway.

I’d lie wake in the brightly-lit bedroom, only one of us snoring.

Any true dog lover knows to stay put when your dog falls asleep on you.

Like, our dogs teach us to stay.

The other bad thing about my too-small night table was that I had to stack my books on the floor, where they would be ready for me to slip on when I went to the bathroom.

It wasn’t a bedroom, it was a booby trap.

And I was the booby, trapped.

So at some point I started using a big-ass night table, which was actually an antique card table I had for years.

At first I was excited. I could put all my books on it, and a big-ass lamp, a big-ass Yeti of ice water, and a big-ass jug of Cetaphil. My phone charger would be closest to the bed, plus the lint roller in case I found a tick on a dog before bedtime.

What, you don’t lint-roll your dog for ticks before bed?

Must be nice.

To return to point, I just fell out of love with my big-ass night table.

It was so big that I would hit my hip on it every time I got up to go to the bathroom. Not only that, but what I learned from having the big-ass night table is that you use only the three inches closest to the bed.

The rest is just clutter you can’t reach anyway.

A night table that you makes you get up defeats the purpose.

Also the dog told you to stay.

So the quest continues.

Column Classic: Upgrading the Macaroni Necklace

May 31, 2025

by Francesca Serritella

My mom’s birthday is a month away, and I’m wracking my brain about what to get her—but really, it’s my favorite thing to obsess over. Here’s a Classic Column, which might be new to you as it never ran in the Inquirer, about birthday shopping for my favorite person.

When it comes to giving a gift to your mother, kids get a pass for a long time. But when your mother has a milestone birthday like sixty, a macaroni necklace will not do.

It was time for me to get my mother a grown-up gift.

This is not to say that I haven’t gotten her nice things in the past, but this year I wanted it to be really special. Maybe because I know that my mom is single, I wanted to get her a gift as nice as a husband would get.

Not one of her husbands—a really good husband.

I got in my head that it had to be jewelry.

I’d never bought a piece of fine jewelry before. First, I studied. For months leading up to her birthday, every moment of procrastination was spent searching the websites of jewelers and department stores for every item within my budget.

Since I couldn’t afford ninety percent of their inventory, this took less time than you might think.

After obsessively zeroing in on a few favorite options, I decided to make a trip to Cartier. Embarrassingly, I’d dressed up for the occasion. I wore a shirtdress that I thought said, “I use ‘summer’ as a verb.”

Click to read the full column on Francesca’s Website

Forza Mother Mary

May 25, 2025

By Lisa Scottoline

I’m turning into my mother.

But only in the weird ways.

Let’s begin with the ways I’m not turning into her.

I cannot make her tomato sauce.

Which honestly, we called gravy.

It’s a South Philly thing.

In my early books, I would write about gravy, and the copyeditor would replace it with tomato sauce, to which I would reply stet, which is bookspeak for back off.

Her gravy was unbelievable. It was rich, but not heavy, with incredible taste.

Never mind that she didn’t use a single fresh ingredient.

The tomatoes were canned, the paste was canned, and she added garlic salt and onion salt.

Nothing had to be washed or diced for her gravy.

Which is proof that it didn’t matter.

I guarantee this was the best gravy on the planet. We ate spaghetti in some form almost every night, whether it was regular pasta or her homemade gnocchis and ravioli, which were also out of this world, but the gravy made everything great.

You could put that gravy on cardboard and never stop eating.

I remember asking her what the recipe was, and she said, “You’re not getting it.” Which is pure Mother Mary.

I never thought to question it, because like all kids, I never imagined her dying.

But then she did, and of course I miss her, but you know what else I miss?

Correct.

So fast-forward to the rest of my life, when I try to make the gravy and fail miserably. Then I try a variety of jarred gravy that would make any card-carrying Italian-American shudder, but I do it anyway and I hit upon Rao’s.

Which is the closest to my mother’s but honestly, hers was even better.

So now I have pasta with an inferior gravy and think: “Mom, really?”

So fast-forward again to me in my dotage when I watch everything on Netflix, and for some reason I get hooked on Drive to Survive, which is all about F1 racing and I like it because I’ve always liked cars. And I’m lucky enough to be able to write about what interests me, so I find myself sneaking cars into my novels, then I find myself going to car events.

And last weekend I went to one and bought something my mother would’ve bought.

You may remember that Mother Mary always wore a lab coat.

She’s still the only person to have checked into a hospital in a lab coat.

She got them at the Dollar Store and she liked them because they had pockets for crossword puzzle and her cigarettes.

In any event, fast-forward to me, finding myself at an exotic car event and shopping at the stands where they sell shammy clothes and ceramic wax to more serious gearheads than I am, and I see a thing of beauty.

A Ferrari technician’s jacket.

It’s authentically Italian, and real Ferrari mechanics wear them when they work on real Ferraris.

I put it on, fell in love, and bought it, then realized it was a lab coat, only red.

The color of Ferraris.

And gravy.

It even has pockets on either side, for my cell phone and my dog treats.

So I can’t make the gravy, but now I have a gravy-colored lab coat.

Thanks, Mom.

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