once upon a time, in a land not quite as far south as it seems in my head, i had something at a church potluck that was exceedingly yummy. i asked what it was, and someone told me it was cheesecake.

years later, after my tawdry, well-documented, oft-indulged lust affair with cheesecake was firmly established (as if there weren’t enough reasons to celebrate hallowe’en already, i have three or four pumpkin cheesecake recipes), i decided to try making a key lime cheesecake. i discovered that key lime pie in its most authentic incarnation does NOT have whipped cream or cream cheese or any of that nonsense in it, and since i’d lacked the foresight to buy either of those things along with my key lime juice and my pie crust, i made it according to the old limejuice&condensedmilk&eggs formula.

it tasted precisely like marvelle’s cheesecake, which transporting, nostalgic taste i’d been searching for all these long lonely years.

i mentioned this later and mom said, “what? marvelle never brought cheesecake to those things, she brought CHESS cake. most people called it chess pie, though.”

oh.

there was definitely citrus in them thar pies, though. and according to some website that i’ve now lost, key lime and chess pies DO have shared ancestry… especially if you’re using a recipe that calls for condensed milk. so you see why i was confused by the vanilla curve ball.

or maybe not.

ooo, one more thing for this already lengthy comment - when i eat certain types of cheesecake (mostly the really good varieties) or key lime/chess pie, my face gets hot. like, right now, burning, blood vessels doing odd thing HOT. what’s with that?

thanks

the pastor’s wife is a co-worker. she’s actually a wonderful person.

really.

well, now i wanna change jobs.

R, you are particularly imaginative today. Let’s think of ways to escape this dull life we’ve settled into!

Is it a home for pastor’s wives run by senior citizens?

I hope it is, because that would be fantastic!

“She couldn’t handle his incessant ramblings about Jesus, poor thing. She became a Satanist in the end, you know. And you know where that leads. Poor dear was nothing but a cliche. Embarrassing, really.”

words to live by just multiply like bunnies around here, don’t they?

When life is troubling, just think to yourself, “How far up my ass is my gravitas? Could a gerbil reach it if it had to?”

I keep my gravitas so far up my ass even a gerbil with a lightbulb can’t find it.

that is, what i mean to say is, i have that sickness, too. the visualizationy one, not the lost gravitas one.

i keep it in a box on the bookshelf.

(the gravitas, not the sickness.)