I also wanted to try the Golden Fried Millionaire Pie (cream cheese, pineapple and pecans in a pie crust) and the Deep Fried King Ranch Casserole and some roasted corn on the cob and freshly squeezed lemonade and if I'm not puking by then, the Fried Avocado chips....
Next up on the reading challenge is
My Darling, My Hamburger by Paul Zindel.
Lizzie Skurnick puts this in the "Him She Loved" category but I would have been inclined to put it in the "Very Afterschool Specials." Not that I've ever seen an afterschool special.
In any event, the book is impossible to classify. It's about teenage love and parental disappointment, and it stars Paul Zindel's usual cast of characters--a smart boy with a father who doesn't seem to know or care anything about being a father. A pretty girl with a wimpy mother and a borderline-abusive stepfather. An ordinary boy suffering the agonies of the dating sceen. And an ordinary girl with decent, but clueless, parents.
Published in 1969 and so much a book of the times--the adults just don't get it. It--anything--ever--it. They never understand and don't seem to want to try. Was this normal for adults of the time?
Possibly. It makes me want to find a book about social history of America from the fifties to the millennium. A book like Only Yesterday and Since Yesterday, books about the 20s and 30s, but set in modern times. The parents in Paul Zindel's book were post-baby boon generation, older than me but younger than my parents. My parents considered me and my brother as the star players of their lives--it was all about us. We made them laugh; we fulfilled them; our triumphs were their triumphs. Maybe they cared too much, but we always knew they cared.
The attitude of parents in Zindel's books is more like, kids are just something I have because everyone else has them. They're cute when they're little, but embarrassing as heck when guests come over--I'm going to put them outside until they're housebroken.
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