05 Lost in the Kitchen
an essay by Dave Barry
Men are still basically scum when it comes to helping out in the kitchen. This is one of the two insights I had last Thanksgiving, the other one being that Thanksgiving night must be the slowest night of the year in terms of human sexual activity. Nobody wants to engage in human sexual activity with somebody who smells vaguely like yams and is covered with a thin layer of turkey grease, which describes pretty much everybody in the United States on Thanksgiving except the Detroit Lions, who traditionally play football that day and would therefore be too tired. But that, as far as I can tell, is not my point. My point is that despite all that has been said in the past 20 years or so about sexual equality, most men make themselves as useful around in the kitchen as ill-trained Labrador retrievers. This is not just my opinion: It is a scientific finding based on an exhaustive study of what happened last Thanksgiving when my family had dinner at the home of friends named Arlene and Gene. Picture a typical Thanksgiving scene: On the floor, three small children and a dog who long ago had her brain eaten by fleas are running as fast as they can directly into things, trying to injure themselves.
On the television, the Detroit Lions are doing pretty much the same thing. In the kitchen, Arlene, a prosecuting attorney responsible for a large staff, is doing something with those repulsive organs that are placed in little surprise packets inside turkeys, apparently as a joke. Surrounding Arlene are thousands of steaming cooking containers. I would no more enter that kitchen than I would attempt to park a nuclear aircraft carrier, but my wife, who runs her own business, glides in very casually and picks up EXACTLY the right kitchen implement and starts doing EXACTLY the right thing without receiving any instructions whatsoever. She quickly becomes enshrouded in steam. So Gene and I, feeling like the scum we are, finally bumble over and ask what we can do to help, and from behind the steam comes Arlene’s patient voice asking us to please keep an eye on the children. Which we try to do. But there is a famous law of physics that goes: “You cannot watch small children and the Detroit Lions at the same time, and let’s face it, the Detroit Lions are more interesting.” So we would start out watching the children, and then one of us would sneak a peek at the TV and say, “Hey! Look at this tackle!” And then we’d have to watch for a while to see the replay and find
The Essay on Detroit Lions Team Man Barry
The Detroit lions have done better in their new season in the NFL, now that they don't have Barry sanders in their team. Without the man that holds the 2 nd highest rushing record in the league, the team of Detroit that has always started their season bad, has started with a 2-0 which hasn't happened in a long time, which is outstanding for the team rating. This for me is way of the charts, ...
C:Documents and SettingsOwnerMy DocumentsDeannaA–GAP 7 Essay50 Essays 5 Barry Lost in the Kitchen Rev. 12.05.doc 1
First, in Barry’s piece, carefully focus on hyperbole, stereotypes, irony, understatement, and comic effect. Second, reflect on your notes and thoughts; think aloud on paper; reconsider your notes; ask questions; and think about your thinking.
out whether the tackled person was dead or just permanently disabled. By then, the children would have succeeded in injuring themselves or the dog, and this voice from behind the kitchen steam would call, VERY patiently, “Gene, PLEASE watch the children.” I realize this is awful. I realize this sounds just like Ozzie and Harriet. I also realize that there are some males out there, with hyphenated last names, who have advanced much farther than Gene and I have, who are not afraid to stay home full time and get coated with baby vomit while their wives work as test pilots, and who go into the kitchen on a daily basis to prepare food for other people, as opposed to going in there to get a beer and maybe some peanut butter on a spoon. But I think Gene and I are fairly typical. I think most males rarely prepare food for others, and when they do, they have their one specialty dish (spaghetti, in my case) that they prepare maybe twice a year in a very elaborate production, for which they expect to be praised as if they had developed, right there in the kitchen, a cure for heart disease. In defense of men, let me say this: Women do not make it easy to learn. Let’s say a woman is in the kitchen, working away after having been at her job all day, and the man, feeling guilty, finally shuffles in and offers to help.
The Essay on Women Vs Men
(Or Thats Just What We Let Them Think) Call me Sybil. I have two personalities. One is the helpless, quivering mass that men like to call vulnerable and female and the other is pure Paige. The latter is in your face, pull the bootstraps up and take the bull by the horns. This duality has occurred by necessity, not by choice. For years men have been allowed to think that they are the dominant ...
So the woman says something like: “Well, you can cut up the turnips.” Now to the WOMAN, who had all this sexist Home Economics training back in the pre-feminism era, this is a very simple instruction. It is the absolute simplest thing she can think of. I asked my wife to read this and tell me what she thought. This is what she said: She said before Women’s Liberation, men took care of the cars and women took care of the kitchen, whereas now that we have Women’s Liberation, men no longer feel obligated to take care of the cars. This seemed pretty accurate to me, so I thought I’d just tack it on to the end here, while she makes waffles.
Barry, Dave. “Lost in the Kitchen.” 2 May 1986. 4 Dec. 2005 .
C:Documents and SettingsOwnerMy DocumentsDeannaA–GAP 7 Essay50 Essays 5 Barry Lost in the Kitchen Rev. 12.05.doc
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