Chick Wit

• Cats and Dogs in 500 Square Feet August 17, 2025

  By Francesca Serritella

  Francesca’s new novel, FULL BLOOM, an Instant USA TODAY National Bestseller, is in stores now. Here is a Dear Reader guest column she wrote recently:

  

  I recently welcomed a puppy into my life. A roly-poly tricolor Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, with russet eyebrows that tilt with cartoonish expression and a penchant for belly rubs. I named him “Bobby Baby” after the Sondheim musical Company, because company is what I needed most.

  Especially after I’d lost my beloved dog Pip. I didn’t know if I’d ever feel ready to get another dog, until I heard about this puppy born on the one-year anniversary of Pip’s passing.

  I felt like he was heaven-sent.

  My eighteen-year-old cat Mimi disagrees.

  I thought hard about inflicting a puppy’s chaotic energy on Mimi’s golden years. But Mimi is aging like the feline Demi Moore.

  Click to read the full column on Francesca’s Website

  Copyright © Francesca Serritella | www.francescaserritella.com | @FrancescaSerritellaauthor | @fserritella

• Column Classic: Extra Extra Crispy August 10, 2025

  By Lisa Scottoline

  

  My faith in American ingenuity is restored.

  We just invented fried butter.

  Whew!

  You may have been worried that we didn’t have any more tricks up our sleeve, but you would be wrong.  We used to invent things like electricity, heart valves, and polio vaccines, but we’ve finally come up with something useful.

  Somebody at the Iowa State Fair developed a recipe for deep fried butter.

  It sold like hotcakes.

  Fried hotcakes.

  What an idea!  How else you gonna meet your daily cholesterol requirements?

  They make it by freezing a stick of butter, dipping it in batter with cinnamon and sugar, deep-frying it in vegetable oil at 375 degrees, then drizzling it with a honey glaze.

  You know you want one.

  The other bestsellers at the state fair were deep-fried pickles, deep-fried corn dogs, and deep-fried macaroni and cheese.

  I might move to Iowa.

  Land where the tall corn (dogs) grow.

  It’s not just state fairs, either.  My favorite fancy restaurant serves microgreens with fried goat cheese.  Guess which I eat first, the microgreens or the fried cheese?  Right, and thank God the fried cheese isn’t micro.

  Tell the truth.  Who hasn’t dived into a plate of fried mozzarella sticks?

  Bottom line, it’s time to concede that we love fried things.  French fries, fried onion rings, fried chicken.  And we don’t just love fried food, we even love the fried part, all by itself.

  Everybody on earth has nibbled the fry off of something.

  Case in point, me. 

  Back in my non-vegetarian days, I used to love Kentucky Fried Chicken, extra crispy.  Extra crispy was code for really really fried.  When there was no more chicken left, I ate the nuggets of really really fried.  Even after two days in the refrigerator, I ate delicious knots of crunchy, salty, really really fried. 

  The chicken was beside the point, because the only thing that mattered was the fried, and that’s true with every fried food. 

  It tastes the same. 

  Fried.

  Yay!

  This is why I order shrimp tempura at a Japanese restaurant.  Because all I taste is the fry, and I might as well be at Seafood Shanty.

  Tempura is Japanese for corn dog.

  We agree that frying will make a good thing better, but the truly amazing thing about frying is that it will make even disgusting things better.

  Example?

  Calamari.

  It’s a squid, for God’s sake.  Have you ever seen a squid?  If you had, you wouldn’t put it in your mouth. 

  But fry it, and people fight to get to it first. 

  Same thing with softshell crabs.  A softshell is a crab that has recently molted its shell, so that its exoskeleton is still soft.  You wouldn’t normally eat a soft exoskeleton, much less all the stuff that’s inside a crab, namely whatever he ate last. 

  Do you think crabs are picky eaters?

  I don’t.

  So you have to factor that in.

  Plus the eyes are still attached. 

  Enough said.

  If you had to eat a softshell crab as is, you would refuse.  Your better judgment would prevail.

  But fried?

  Everybody’s there.

  The proof is that people in Thailand eat fried bugs.

  Now you know why.

  Tastes like (fried) chicken.

  The next step is only logical.  If frying makes disgusting food delicious, there’s no reason to stop at food, at all.

  I’m not only thinking out of the box, I’m thinking out of the refrigerator.

  If you can fry squid, you can fry flip-flops.

  If you can fry butter, you can fry bark.

  If you can fry bugs, you can fry Crestor.

  And you’re gonna have to.

  Copyright © Lisa Scottoline

• Column Classic: Handygirl August 3, 2025

  By Lisa Scottoline

  

  I just put in a hundred perennials, which if you’re not familiar with gardening terms, means that I never have to do this again for the rest of my life.

  Because perennials are supposed to be automatic, in that they come back every summer.

  Like a yeast infection.

  It took me five days to plant a garden, because I made every rookie mistake possible. 

  First, let me just say that I had no idea that gardening is so much hard physical labor.  I toted sod, plants, and big rocks, in ninety degree heat.

  Gardening isn’t a hobby, it’s a chain gang.

  My back, legs, and shoulders ache, my leg is swollen from a sting, and I got scratches from rose bushes I bought when I was temporarily insane. 

  There can be no other explanation for buying a plant that bites.

  The problem with gardening is that the very term is a euphemism.

  It fools you into thinking that you’ll be swanning around a bunch of flowers.

  Wrong.

  Remember when you delivered a baby?  It was called labor for a reason, so you had fair warning.  Because it’s work.  There’s pushing and pulling and yanking and profanity.

  And that’s just conception.

  Sorry.

  Anyway, back to my mistakes.  Second mistake, I bought plants online because they were cheaper, then I found out that the nursery near me is going out of business and everything there was 40 percent off.

  What I had already spent.

  The online plants didn’t come when they were supposed to, so I started thinking I’d need more plants anyway, and I could get them cheap at the nursery. I read through my new perennials books, went to the nursery with my To Buy list, and they had none of them. 

  So I bought whatever perennials they had on sale.

  It’s the Going Out of Business Garden.

  And for what these plants cost, it’s going to put me out of business.

  Anyway, the books said I had to take the grass off and make a bed.

  I had no idea.  I thought you could just plant flowers in grass.  I should have known I’d screw up.  I never make my bed.

  Third mistake, I thought the garden was a big area, but I’m not good at eyeballing it, as my father always said.  Of course I know there are tape measures, but how would you know how many plumbago plants you need to fill a foot of garden?  Until yesterday I thought I plumbago was a back problem.

  Now plumbago is giving me a back problem.

  Bottom line, it’s a big garden, so I got a great handyman, Dale, to help me, which is what you do when you’re divorced. 

  You hire a husband.

  Anyway the first thing Dale said was, “there’s a machine that takes off sod.”

  Oh. 

  So we found out the machine was called a sod cutter, and we rented one right away and started cutting the sod, which is the garden equivalent of scalping your grass. 

  It took all day, cutting and hauling the sod, then raking the bed so no grass seeds were left.  Then we started putting in plants, with Dale doing the manly work of digging and me doing the girly work of putting in the potting soil and covering the hole.

  I was a cover girl.

  Yay!

  Next mistake, we used up all the plants I had bought on sale, and still had two thirds of the garden left.  The online plants still weren’t here, so I went back to the garden center and bought more plants.

  Three times.

  I no longer consulted the books. 

  I bought any perennial that wasn’t nailed down.

  I would have planted a file cabinet if they’d let me.

  But now I’m finished, and it looks beautiful, and it was worth all the trouble, like a brand new baby.

  Who remembers their labor anyway?

  Okay, I do.

  Copyright © 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.

  Copyright © Lisa Scottoline

• 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.

  Copyright © Lisa Scottoline