Chick Wit

People People

by Lisa Scottoline

I love people.

I’m what people used to call a people person.

As in, I hug you whether you want me to or not.

And lately, everybody wants to be my friend.

Normally this would make me happy, but not this way.

Let me explain.

Like everybody, I’m on various apps for various reasons. For example, I have a Peloton and when the weather’s too crummy to go outside, I hop on my Peloton bike and pedal away, listening to a twenty-year-old instructor yell “put on your crown, girl!”

Which I find surprisingly encouraging.

And the Peloton screen has so-called leaderboard that has a list of people in order of who’s working out the best.

I’m usually number 2038487392033.

I’m not exercising to compete.

I’m exercising to stay alive.

The only person I want to beat is the Grim Reaper.

Sometimes, somebody will give me a virtual high five, so I give a virtual high five back.

Peloton wants me to add this person as a friend but I don’t.

Because I don’t want to compete with a friend.

That would make me their enemy.

Duolingo is the same way.

Duolingo is an app I’m on to learn Italian, since I’m about to start a novel set in Tuscany, so I’m going there soon for research.

Nice work if you can get it.

And you can get it if you try.

I mean, if I can, anybody can.

Anyway, I’m learning Italian before the trip because it would be nice to be able to ask for the bathroom in Italian.

That’s all a middle-aged woman needs to know.

I don’t care about the train station anymore.

There’s only one room I’m interested in.

Il bagno.

I got on the Duolingo app because Daughter Francesca told me about it and she really loves it. She already speaks Italian and French, but got on Duolingo to learn Spanish, so right there, you know that mother and daughter are different.

If I knew Italian and French, I’d say, enough already.

I don’t need that many words.

I’m good with spaghetti, couch, and book.

Okay, dog, cat, and pony.

Plus bathroom.

Francesca added me as her friend on Duolingo, so I added her back as my friend, only because I actually gave birth to her.

They don’t have a section for that, but they should.

They could call it the C section.

I didn’t want to compete with her, because I love her.

Also, I knew I’d lose.

I raised her to be diligent and hardworking.

Unfortunately, she is.

Francesca’s on Duolingo practicing Spanish every single day. In fact, she’s currently on a 113-day streak.

My streak lasted 2 days.

It ended when I found out where the bathroom was.

But since I added Francesca as a friend, she can send me a virtual “nudge” to get back on the app.

Which I “ignore.”

I used to check on whether she was doing her homework.

Now she’s checking on whether I’m doing mine.

If that wasn’t bad enough, I’m getting email from Duolingo: “Hi Lisa! Keep your two-day Italian streak going!”

I didn’t answer, so they sent another email:

“Hi Lisa! Duo missed you yesterday!”

It took me a minute to realize who Duo was, then I realized it was the corporate owl.

He’s never going to be my friend.

I don’t give a virtual hoot.

Copyright 2023 Lisa Scottoline

Column Classic: You Say Tomato

by Lisa Scottoline

Did you hear about this?

I read in the newspaper that somebody noticed that red tomatoes sell better than greenish ones, so food engineers started changing the genetic makeup of tomatoes to make them redder, except that it also took out the taste.

I learned so much from this that I don’t know where to begin.

Number one, food has engineers?

I thought trains had engineers, and food had cooks.

I just went from choo-choo to chew-chew.

In fact, I thought you had to have an engine to have an engineer, but no.

If you ask me, this opens new job opportunities for engineers. For example, I see a lot of trees that could use a good engineer. They aren’t green enough, especially in fall, when they turn a lot of crazy colors that don’t match.

I mean, let’s be real. Yellow and red? Nobody looks good in yellow and red, except Ronald MacDonald.

He’s single for a reason.

Worse, in winter, the leaves on the trees actually fall off. That’s definitely an engineering problem. I feel pretty sure a tree engineer would fix that, no sweat.

Also, the sun. 

Don’t get me started on the sun. It’s supposed to be yellow, but it’s too bright to tell the color. In fact, it’s so bright that we have to buy dark glasses to even be around it.

Also, the sun is hot, which can be a bummer. It makes us feel listless and uncomfortable, then we have to turn on the air conditioning, or at least decide whether or not to, which can be a problematic choice for certain people, involving money and self-esteem, oddly intertwined.

Not that I know anyone like that.

And also in winter, the sky could use a good engineer. There are times when it changes from blue to a very boring whitish-gray, then actually breaks up and falls to the ground in tiny, cold pieces that we all have to clean up.

Needs work.

Sky engineers should get on it. It’s like the sky doesn’t even stay up, which is a major engineering defect. Cantilevers, buttressing, and scaffolding may be required, and lots of it.

Really, lots.

Or worse, sometimes the sky loses its blue color, turns gray, but doesn’t break up and fall to the ground, right after I spent hundreds of dollars on a green machine to help me clean up the pieces.

That’s a lot of green, even for a green machine.

Who knew that colors required so much engineering? If you ask me, green is the color most in need of engineering. I wish those engineers who were trying to fix the tomatoes would fix the economy, but never mind, what do I know?

Let’s move on to my second point.

Having been astounded to learn that tomatoes have engineers, I was also amazed to learn that they had genes, too.

Who knew tomatoes were so busy?

I grow tomatoes, and I haven’t given them the credit they deserve for their rich inner lives.

To be honest, I had no idea that food had genes, at all. Just like I thought you needed an engine to have an engineer, I thought you needed, like, blood and a heart to have genes.

It’s hard enough for me to remember that a tomato is a fruit, not a vegetable, but now I’m expected to know it has DNA, as well?

Bottom line, I’m bad at biology. Anyone who’s slept with me will tell you that.

But now we know that tomatoes have genes, this opens up new job opportunities, namely for actors. Think of all the new TV shows this could create, like CSI: Tomatoes, where they collect tomato DNA to catch the killer tomato.

In fact, we could have murders for every fruit, then spin it off to vegetables, too.

To Catch A Salad Shooter. 

© Copyright Lisa Scottoline

Column Classic: Mother Mary Flunks Time Magazine

By Lisa Scottoline

You may have read the article in Time magazine, entitled “The Five Things Your Kids Will Remember About You.”  It was predictably sweetness and light, but none of it reminded me of Mother Mary, who was anything but sweetness and light. She’s been gone almost two years now, and she was more olive oil and vinegar.

In fact, I considered the five things that Time set forth and compared them to Mother Mary, to see how she measured up, magazine-wise.

You can play along, with your mother.

Or if you’ve read the previous books in this series, you could probably fill in the same blanks with Mother Mary stories.

But no spoilers.

So don’t tell anyone about the time Mother Mary refused to use the discount Batman bedsheets because she didn’t want a life-size Batman laying on top of her.

Or the time she took to wearing a lab coat because it gave her an air of authority, plus pockets for her cell phone and back scratcher.

Or the time she grabbed her doctor’s butt to prove that she was ready for cardiac rehab.

Nobody would believe those stories, anyway.

So, to stay on point about the Time magazine article, the first thing that your children are alleged to remember about you is “the times you made them feel safe.”

Awww.

How sweet.

Except that with Mother Mary, what I remember are the times she made me feel unsafe.

Because those were truly memorable.

And my general safety was a given, if less dramatic.

For example, when Brother Frank and I were little, we used to fight, which drove my mother crazy. I remember, one day, she yelled at us to stop fighting and we ignored her, so that she took off her shoe and threw it at us.

She missed, but that didn’t stop her.

Because she had another foot with another shoe.

So she took that shoe off and threw it at us, but she missed with that one, too.

We stopped fighting.

You’re probably thinking that she missed us intentionally, and I’ll let you think that, but you didn’t know Mother Mary.  She loved us in a fiercely Italian-American sort of way, which meant that motherhood and minor personal injury weren’t mutually exclusive.

So lighten up, Time.

The second thing in the article was that your children will supposedly remember “the times you gave them your undivided attention,” and the magazine advised parents to “stop what you’re doing to have a tea party” with your kids.

Again, growing up, I had no doubt that I had my mother’s attention, but it was never undivided and she wasn’t into tea parties.

But she chain-smoked.

Does that count?

Mother Mary was a real mom, busy doing laundry, cooking dinner, and cleaning the house, and though she was always available, she wasn’t staring deeply into our blue eyes.  But every night, the Flying Scottolines would sit on the couch and watch TV, giving it our undivided attention.

We all loved TV, so by the property of association, we all loved each other.

Good enough for me.

The third thing was, your kids will remember “the way you interacted with your children’s spouse.”

This doesn’t apply to The Flying Scottolines, since the statement assumes that the parents interacted.

You can’t win them all.

My parents barely talked to each other, but at least they never fought and nobody was surprised when they divorced. But happily, they both loved us to the marrow, and my brother and I knew that.

What I learned from growing up in a house with an unhappy marriage is that divorce is better.

And so I’m divorced twice.

Which I think is the good news, considering the alternative.

If I can’t have a happy marriage, I’ll have a happy house.

The fourth factor was, you kids will remember “your words of affirmation and your words of criticism.”

I don’t know if Italian-American families have things that can be characterized as words of affirmation, except “I love you.”

And as a child, I heard that at least ten times a day.

But I also heard, “Don’t be so fresh.”

So I grew up thinking that I was lovable and fresh, which might be true.

The last thing in the article was that children would remember “family traditions,” like vacation spots and/or game nights.

The Scottolines weren’t the kind to have “game nights,” but every summer, we did go on vacation to the same brick rowhouse in Atlantic City, New Jersey. All day long, we played on the beach while my parents smoked, and at night we sat on the front porch while assorted relatives dropped by and the adults talked, drank beer, and smoked into the night. When the mosquitoes got too bad, we all trundled inside the house, where the adults played pinochle until my brother and I fell asleep on the couch, to the sound of their gossiping and laughter, breathing in the smoke from their Pall Malls and unfiltered Camels.

We had no oxygen, but a lot of love.

And it wasn’t Norman Rockwell.

But it was perfect.

Looking back, I wouldn’t change a moment.

Thanks, Mom and Dad.

I love you.

And I’m still fresh.

Copyright Lisa Scottoline

Manhunt

by Lisa Scottoline

I live in Chester County, Pennsylvania, the location of a recent manhunt.

I’m not referring to my social life.

Me, I stopped manhunting.

I hung up my push-ups.

Now everything is falling down.

But I think of it as falling into place.

Anyway, the manhunt I‘m referring to is for Danelo Cavalcante, a convicted murderer who escaped from Chester County Prison, which is not far from me. He’s been captured, but it’s been an interesting two weeks for a woman who lives in a wooded area.

It’s a suburban horror story, like parallel parking.

As soon as Cavalcante escaped, the manhunt was on.

And so were the critics.

“How could the prison let that happen?”“Quick, who can we blame?”

Coincidentally, I’ve been at Chester County Prison to research a novel I wrote. Its title was Daddy‘s Girl, and it was about a law professor from Penn who happened to be at the prison when there was an escape.

Frankly, it didn’t look easy to me.

I staged a fictional escape by having the convict dig a tunnel.

I didn’t think anybody could crabwalk up a wall, like Cavalcante.

Truth is stranger than fiction.

At least my fiction.

I’d get fired if I wrote something that crazy, so who could imagine it?

Bottom line, everybody’s job is harder than it looks.

And everything’s easier said than done.

The same goes with the manhunt.

After Cavalcante escaped, state and federal law enforcement searched for him around the clock, but after the first few days, it was the critics who came out of hiding.

“Why haven’t they caught him yet?” “What’s taking so long?”

Allow me to explain.

I moved here because Chester County is beautifully rural. I live on a farm among open pastures, vast cornfields, and a slew of outbuildings.

This is a perfect locale for writers.

Also fugitives.

And by the way, the manhunt took place during the worst weather, with pouring rain.

I can’t see in rain. Can you?

That’s why they have windshield wipers.

Anyway, as the search wore on, I hoped they would find Cavalcante, but I understood why they hadn’t yet.

I’m sure plenty of critics can find a needle in a haystack.

But guess what, Chester County even has haystacks.

I myself have haystacks.

In fact, ten years ago, somebody set fire to a whole bunch of haystacks in the pasture next to me.

They never caught the guy.

You know why?

He hid in Chester County.

Plus it’s easy for a guy to hide when he’s five feet tall.

I’m about five feet tall.

The first thing I thought when I read Cavalcante’s description is that he’s my goal weight.

And I’m not.

Teddy Roosevelt was right when he said, “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena….”

Bully!

While some manhunt, others blame-hunt.

I’m not against free speech, but I’m acutely aware that people put their lives on the line to protect me.

And in the end, amazingly, they found the needle in the haystack!

They caught Cavalcante without harm to any resident, law enforcement, or even the felon himself, which makes me happy.

I believe in law, and he’ll go back to jail where he belongs.

So I won’t throw stones, especially after such a happy ending.

What I’m throwing is flowers.

Copyright Lisa Scottoline 2023

Everything New is New Again

By Lisa Scottoline

You’re not getting older, you’re getting golder.

At least, according to ABC-TV.

I’m talking, of course, about The Golden Bachelor, which is the latest entry in this insanely successful TV series in which people meet and get married after three dates, a large helping of projection, and a scary helicopter ride.

This is yet another description of my second marriage.

Only we never got anywhere near a helicopter.

It just felt that way, pitching and yawing high up in the air, with too much noise.

Ain’t love grand?

Actually, it is, provided that you get it right, and that’s what people are trying to do in these TV shows, to meet a guy or a gal in real time and get married with a ring that somebody bought for them.

Honestly, maybe that’s where I went wrong.

I should’ve married Neil Lane.

If you watch the show, you know that he’s the jeweler to the wannabe stars.

If you don’t watch the show, congratulations.

You have better judgment than I do.

In any event, ABC is just launching the golden bachelor and the pitch is that a 72-year-old man is looking for love among a beautiful array of women, all of whom are in their sixties and seventies.

So right there, you know it’s fiction.

Most seventy-year-olds think thirty-year-olds are a good start.

Hats off to ABC-TV for the whole concept, but for starters, I’m wondering where the golden part comes in.

You may remember a TV show called Golden Girls, in which one of the women was in her eighties and the others were in their fifties.

Back then, the fifties were considered your golden years.

That’s changed, thank God, and for a scientific reason.

People who write television shows are getting older.

They think they’re aging like fine wine rather than avocados.

I do, too, so let the fiction begin.

That’s why these days the sequel to Sex & The City, entitled And Just Like that, features a bunch of fifty-year-olds who are the same age as the Golden Girls used to be, but those crazy kids are having the time of their lives, back-sliding with boyfriends, wearing statement jewelry, and looking better-dressed that any sixty-something I know.

Okay, me.

But then again, who wants a TV show about a lady in a T-shirt and Patagonia shorts.

And those are my dress shorts.

You don’t even wanna know my normal shorts.

Anyway, I can’t wait for the Golden Batchelor show, which brought me to wonder, would I want to be on the show?

After all, I’m golden.

In fact, I’ve been golden all my life, and so have you.

Joni Mitchell said so.

We are stardust, we are golden, and that’s the story I’m going with.

In any event, I’m famously celibate, I mean, single, but I don’t know if I’m single enough to go on television and wait to be picked by some guy.

Frankly it’s not the TV-part that bothers me. And I wouldn’t be embarrassed because I’m hardly ever embarrassed anymore, by anything.

If you ask me, that’s a gift of old age.

We stop worrying about what people think of us, which leads to normal shorts.

But I don’t think I would like the wait-to-be-picked part.

When I look back at my life, I think my problem was that I waited to be picked rather than doing the picking.

It was like being asked to dance only it ended up in a post-nup.

Another term we had back then was wallflower, and that was the girl who stood along the wall because nobody was picking her.

I’m hoping that term will become as obsolete as bachelorette.

Oh, wait a minute.

In my day, girls had to wait to be asked for a date or to the prom, and in fact, at my high school, there was a Sadie Hawkins Day, in which the girls were supposed to ask the boys to the dance.

So one day of the year you had agency.

The other 364 were up for grabs.

I’m not the type of woman who sits in a chair and ways to be handed a rose anymore.

I would think, just one?

And in the words of the immortal Miley Cyrus, I can buy my own flowers.

Obviously the rules of romance are changing, and the great thing is there’s no rules. You can make them go up as you go along, and you probably should. The only thing I’ve learned is that they should be your rules, not somebody else’s.

Love is not one size fits all.

If this Golden Bachelor continues, next will be a show starring Platinum Bachelors, who are age eighty and over.

I personally have no problem with any of this.

I’ll take experience over youth any day, in any situation.

And as a logical matter, it means the marriages that will last the longest are the ones made on the Golden Bachelor.

But those of the exact people who have the least time.

Ironic, no?

That’s not something that even science can fix.

Yet.  

copyright Lisa Scottoline 2023

Waiting Room

By Lisa Scottoline

They say the country is polarized, but I think it depends on where you go.

Follow me.

Into the waiting room for your mammogram.

Before I begin, let me first state the obvious.

Breast cancer is a serious subject and I don’t mean to make light of it.

However, my job is to brighten your day.

So with that in mind, read on.

And don’t think I’m a boob.

So let’s go into the waiting room for a mammogram, where there are Republicans, Democrats, and Independents, but none of us is wearing our red or blue team colors. We’ve put our clothes away in a locker and we’re all wearing the same thing, like a uniform for a school you never wanted to go to.

It’s not the silky black robe that they give you at the hair salon.

Or the paper gown they give you at the gynecologist.

I’ve mastered only one of these items of apparel.

Every time I go to the gynecologist, the nurse hands me a paper gown, tells me to get changed, and rattles off the directions. Then she leaves the room and I have no idea what to do.

Bra off?

Underwear off?

Does the opening go in the front or the back?

I mean the opening of the gown.

I know the location of the other opening.

I’m not that dumb.

Anyway in the early days, I took everything off and put the paper gown on with the opening in the front, which seemed to make the most sense.

Then the doctor came in with her nurse, and they tried not to laugh.

I was like, What?

I looked like the star of the worst porno ever.

You would never pay to see my porno.

Somebody would have to pay you to see my porno.

Title?

Pap Porn.

I do better with the hair-salon robe, but I always drop the belt it in the toilet.

Please tell me I’m not alone in this.

I can’t be around a belt of any kind.

My waist is allergic.

To return to point, the most luxurious robe you will ever get is the one for your mammogram. The one I had was a soft and gray, which was chic, but too on-the-nose for a mammogram.

Like, am I going to live, die, or somewhere in the middle?

Especially those of us who have dense breasts.

By the way, this is every single woman I know. I don’t think there’s a woman on the planet who does not have dense breasts.

And I’m not really sure what having dense breasts means except that you’re going to have to take the mammogram two or three times, which is no fun but may also cause what happened to me the other day.

Which was a waiting room party.

Because I was stuck in the little room of dense-breasted women who were on their second or third try, like retake day for school pictures without the free comb.

And I started making conversation because I don’t get out enough.

I said something like I was nervous, and then we all started talking about how we were nervous, and we shared all the hopeful and scary stories we knew, and when each one of us got called out to retake the mammogram, we waited in suspense for her to come back.

Luckily we all got good news, and each time, we burst into relieved applause and cheers for each other.

A group of total strangers, who had nothing in common except breasts.

And hearts.

Because we know that every day, some women are not so lucky.

All human beings are subject to the same fears and joys.

And when you strip us down and put us in a robe, we can find that commonality.

And not just in a mammogram waiting room.

Because in truth, we’re all of us in a waiting room, all the time.

Whether we’re female or male.

We’re all going to get bad news someday, and if you keep that in mind, then you see that life is in one big waiting room.

It’s not about the mammogram.

It’s about the big picture.

Copyright Lisa Scottoline 2023

Plucky

By Lisa Scottoline

My dog is on Viagra.

And she’s a girl.

I don’t know where to begin.

But she does.

She knows everything.

This is the effect of Viagra on dogs.

They become queens.

Or kings.

Maybe I should take one?

First, let me say I’m not a vet and this is not veterinary advice, so don’t go asking your vet for Viagra.

For your dog.

(Yeah, right.)

What happened is that my little Peach, a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, was diagnosed with congestive heart disease. Sadly, the diagnosis wasn’t unexpected because she’s twelve years old and heart disease is not uncommon in the breed. In fact, she’s my second cavalier, so I even have a veterinary cardiologist.

By the way, my pony has an equine dentist, and my chickens have an avian vet.I have a wallet.

Honestly, I’m not complaining about vet bills. My pets are members of my family, and I don’t mind taking care of my family, even when it costs me.

It’s still less than tuition.

Plus anybody who has a pet knows they’re expensive, and smart owners get pet insurance.

Not me.

Meanwhile my cat costs me nothing.

My cat Vivi is fifteen years old and has never been sick a day in her life.

Cats rock.

Someday I’ll get pet insurance, but every time I look into it online, the veterinary healthcare system is as confusing as the human-being healthcare system.

Maybe cats should take it over.

They’d know what to do.

To return to point, Peach was already on two medications for her heart, but she seemed listless, and when I took her to the vet, he suggested that we put her on Sildenafil citrate, a small white pill.

And then I looked up her medication online and found that it contained the same thing as Viagra.

Who knew?

And honestly, who cares?

If it makes her happier and healthier, I’m all for it.

So Peach started taking a quarter of a tab.

And she perked up.

Like, a lot.

She’s always been plucky, but she was pluckier than ever. My other two dogs Boone and Kit are her sons, and she started chasing them around the house.

I’m not sure what she had in mind.

She’s not that kind of dog.

Let’s just say it was good, clean family fun and (probably) not sexual harassment.

Anyway I touched base with the vet, and he was happy to hear that Peach had more energy. He did some tests that showed her heart was doing better, too, so we increased her dosage to half a tab.

Then she got even pluckier.

Her sons thought she was too plucky.

I didn’t. Peach was like a puppy again, running around the backyard and chasing squirrels.

So the squirrels agreed with her sons.

She had energy!

I bet if we increase her dosage, she’d paint the house.

I might be fine with that.

Now I get why men take Viagra.

Life is short.

But not everything else has to be.

Have fun!

In fact, I find myself taking a second look at Peach’s pills.

You gotta wonder what effect they’d have on me.

I looked online to learn how Viagra affected women, and the articles seemed to suggest that it increased female sexual arousal.

That, I don’t need.

Why dress up if you’re not going anywhere?

Meanwhile I couldn’t be pluckier than I am.

I’m so plucky I’m divorced twice.

Turns out some men can’t handle pluck.

Pluck them!

Copyright Lisa Scottoline 2023

Doing Nothing? Nothing Doing.

By Lisa Scottoline

I need a vacation.

From my staycation.

Let me explain.

I love my job, but as filmmaker Lawrence Kasdan has said, “Being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life.”

Kinda true.

And if you write books, you have a book on your brain every day until you write The End.

Yesterday, I wrote The End.

In other words, I finished my homework.

Yay!

I handed in my 36th novel, a domestic thriller entitled THE TRUTH ABOUT THE DEVLINS.

So I find myself free at the end of August, when a smarter person would’ve planned a vacation.

So I’m having a staycation.

Which I’m actually excited about.

The truth about me is that I love being home.

Plus it’s hot and I’m lucky enough to have a pool.

So I brought five books out to the pool, which is my idea of an excellent time.

Why five?

I can’t decide which one to read first.

I won’t know until I get there.

From the house to the backyard, I could change my mind.

For a plane flight, I pack four books.

For a train trip, three.

And in my bathroom, I have a bookshelf.

Please tell me I’m not alone.

I didn’t mean in the bathroom, I mean in the reading habits.

Meanwhile I’m never alone in the bathroom.

I have three dogs.

One will usually follow me in.

The second or third wait outside the door.

They can’t decide which goes in until they get there, either.

Anyway I have a bunch of research books to read for the book I’m about to start writing after my staycation is over.

So I climb in the pool and do what I always do, which is get out the float, pick a book, and put it on the float next to a notepad and pen.

It’s a floating office.

Obviously designed by a person who has no idea how to do nothing.

That’s what I thought when I looked at it with new eyes, because it was supposed to be my staycation.

And technically, research reading is work.

Which is when I realized that doing nothing is harder than it looks.

In fact, it’s work.

I’m not sure how many people can actually do nothing, especially women.

We’re always doing something, and usually we’re doing many things at once, so to stop all of a sudden seems well, like, nothing.

It’s not like I’m so superproductive all the time, but I’m wondering if I’m multitasking too much. And maybe it’s not so great?

For example, if I’m going to have a long phone call, I’ll start walking the dogs. Some days I’m on the phone so much that the dogs are exhausted.

They’re like, get off the phone.

Also, don’t you have to go to the bathroom?

I used to get my phone calls done in the car, but I’m on a phone diet in the car.

I’m hoping it will be more successful than my other diets.

At least I won’t eat my phone.

Anyway to return to point, I resolved to do something else in the pool.

Then I remembered I don’t know how to swim.

But I noticed the water had a lot of bugs on the surface, and there was a dead caterpillar curled up on the bottom, and I realized the pool needs cleaning.

That’s not officially work, is it?

If you can do it in a bathing suit, it’s not work.

Unless you’re a model, and I don’t qualify.

So I get out, find the skimmer, and get busy.

No dead bug escapes my net, and I even save a frog, which is my reward.

I hate when my pool kills things.

I even have fake lilypads around the side so the frogs can get out, but instead they keep swimming around.

They don’t like doing nothing either.

How do you do nothing?

Stare into space?

Eventually you know you’re going to think about Bradley Cooper.

Then you’re doing something.

At least in your mind.

So I moved the books off the float, climbed on, and closed my eyes.

Floating away on a dream.

Copyright Lisa Scottoline 2023

I Gotta Crow

By Lisa Scottoline


Bradley Chicken Cooper (left) Goldie the Hen (right)

It’s not Hot Girl Summer, it’s Hot Girlpower Summer.

And I’m here for it.

Let me explain.

We begin at home.

Or rather, in my henhouse.

I have a flock of ten hens and a rooster named Bradley Chicken Cooper.

I mean, why not?

By the way, I didn’t want a rooster because they don’t lay eggs. In fact, in the upside-down world of poultry, everybody wants hens and nobody wants roosters.

Roosters are Just Ken.

I ended up with a rooster because I got him as a chick and they mistakenly thought he was a girl.

Which ruffled his feathers.

To return to point, everything was fine in the chicken coop, where Bradley Chicken Cooper crows every morning.

If you saw A Star is Born, you know he has a great voice.

But the other day, I noticed that his crowing sounded different, so I went to the coop and discovered that it wasn’t him crowing, but one of the hens.

Hens don’t crow, they cluck, but the crowing hen was Goldie, an otherwise docile Buff Orpington, which is a breed with pretty golden feathers. Anyway I looked it up online and found out that hens will crow to assert new dominance in the pecking order.

Goldie’s still crowing, and I don’t know if she’ll stop.

Would you?

So it turns out we girls can do anything.

Who knew?

Answer: Barbie.

Barbie is the first movie to gross $1 billion made by a woman, Greta Gerwig, proving not only that women make great directors but also buy tons of tickets.

If you didn’t see Barbie, go.

It’s not a movie, it’s a religious experience.

I cried at the end, leaking the last of my estrogen.

The theater was packed with women of all generations, and there was even a gigantic Barbie box in the lobby, in which I took a selfie with my best friend Franca Barbie.

We had to wait in line behind eight-year-olds.

Which was tough because our bedtime is earlier.

The movie isn’t only about women, but also about how traditional views don’t do men any favors, as illustrated by Ryan Gosling as Ken.

I know, I need to get a goose to name Ryan Gosling.

Another example of Hot Girlpower Summer is Taylor Swift, whose Seattle concert got so many women shaking it off that they actually caused an earthquake.

Yikes! I mean, Yay!

Taylor Swift even gave massive bonuses to everyone who works on her tour, so she’s Straight-up Goddess Barbie.

And it’s no coincidence that this summer also saw the appearance of a female roundworm that had been dormant in Siberia for 46,000 years, then suddenly came to life and started having babies. She’d been living in a frozen hole 130 feet below the surface, which coincidentally is a description of my second marriage.

Scientists can’t explain how this happened, but I can.

She finally woke up.

I feel you, girl.

Better late than never.

I think something is happening this summer, in that the world is finally opening up for women, hens, and roundworms.

We’ve been at the bottom of the pecking order for a long time, and we’re finally making our way to the top.

I know there’s a backlash of misogyny, but I guarantee you, it’s not going to win in the long run.

It’s a new day, and we girls are learning to crow.

And you know what?

We sound great.

Copyright 2023 Lisa Scottoline

Column Classic: Mother Mary Gets An Idea

By Lisa Scottoline

Certain smells bring back memories of Mother Mary.

Among these are Estée Lauder Youth Dew perfume, More 100’s cigarette smoke – and mozzarella.

Not exactly sentimental, but there you have it.

You can trust that all the memories of The Flying Scottolines will be relate to carbohydrates.

Let me explain.

The other day, I was walking through the food court in the mall and I caught a width of a distinctive aroma.

Bad pizza.

Specifically, frozen pizza.

By way of background, my mother was a terrific cook, especially of Italian food. She made us homemade spaghetti, ravioli, and gnocchi from scratch. As a child, I spent hours watching her.

And it took hours.

If you’ve ever watched anybody make homemade spaghetti, it’s a domestic miracle. A loaf of dough that somehow ends up being rolled out and then fed into a spaghetti maker, coming out like flour-y tinsel.

Same with ravioli, because she mixed the ricotta cheese and seasonings according to her own secret recipe that had a tangy cheesy salty taste I could never duplicate and wouldn’t even try.

And when she made gnocchi’s, she started with the dough, but rolled it out into long skinny tubes, cut it into little chunks, and then floured her fingers and pinched each chunk, making the special dimpling that marks the best gnocchis – made by hand, dimpled by fingertips.

The problem was pizza.

When we were growing up, I wanted to be like the other kids, who got pizza delivered or had somebody go pick up pizza and brought it home. We never did that, because Mother Mary felt that since it was Italian food, it would be heresy to buy it at a restaurant. But she had no interest in making homemade pizza, and who could blame her, so she would buy it frozen at the Acme.

Or as we say in South Philly, the Ac-a-me.

She bought a no-name brand in a plastic bag, with ten small pizzas stacked on each other, as appetizing as hockey pucks.

She cooked it at home.

For three hours.

Okay, I’m exaggerating, but she overcooked the pizza every time, refusing to follow the directions. She wouldn’t even let me follow the directions. It was her kitchen, so she did the cooking, which meant that our pizza always sucked.

And let’s be real, back then, it was the dark ages of frozen pizza.

In fairness to Mother Mary, overcooking was the only chance that frozen pizza had of drying out, otherwise the crust stayed soggy and the tomato sauce distilled to hot ketchup.

So as I entered high school, I ended up at a friend’s house and they ordered pizza from a great neighborhood pizza place, Marrone’s.

I was hooked.

So one night, when Mother Mary wanted to make frozen pizza, I told her about the magic of store-bought pizza at Marrone’s, but she wasn’t having any. We fussed about it, but amazingly I persuaded her to give it a try.

Mother Mary was delightfully stubborn. You could move the Mummers up Broad Street easier.

So I went to Marrone’s, bought an actual take-out pizza, and brought it home.

Mother Mary opened the box, and we all waited in suspense while she slid out the first piece and cut the mozzarella strings with the gravity of a surgeon servering an umbilical cord. She took a bite, chewed, swallowed, and then said with a wink:

“I knew it would be better than frozen.”

From that day forward, we ordered from Marrone’s.

And I forgot all about that story until I walked through the mall the other day, and smelled the mozzarella.

I knew that somewhere, Mother Mary was winking.

Grief is funny that way, bringing back the good and the bad, the funny foods and the dumb fights.

And most of all, the love.

That never goes away.

And the best of it is homemade.

Copyright Lisa Scottoline