Hola, Sneakers! Welcome to Episode 577 of the podcast that jingle jangles!
This week: goosing up the show; new old classics; Muppet history; too cool to fool; Waggoner train; the existential humour of Carol Burnett; window pain; don’t break the Chan; Christmas disasters; the red-headed stepchild; children aren’t dogs; perfect parenting prevents prevaricating; tough darts; awkward Christmas tree; unfamous artists; a Clowes call; Weirdo for weirdos; sweeping up the Crumbs; diary of an older artist; snow jobs; winter of discontent; keep on gobblin’; Ian says Pinocchi-no and Dave says Pinocchi-yes; Dave looks at Looking for Her; Ian defends Brit rom coms; Dork Shadows: Big Stakes: Question of the Week – Sneakers respond: addressing dressing; Bob and Doug and Rick and Dave; box opening; saying goodbye to food; the candy challenge; and, finally, awkward Christmas greetings.
Question of the Week: What is something weird that your family did when you were growing up?
Sub-question of the Week: What is a food dish that you think about all the time, but can never have again?
Thanks for listening. The happiest of happy holidays to all of you out there in Sneakerdom!
Dept. of Clarifications:
After checking on line, it has been discovered that there is now a Jackie Chan Stunt Team t-shirt available on Red Bubble! Interested? Check it out here!
Thanks again to Mick for the Christmas treats! You can see his card and a couple of bags of treats we’ll be munching on next week!
And also, thank you for the wallet, Mick!
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My go-to dish for special occasions used to be the Salmon Wellington at The Cannery Restaurant which closed in 2010. I’d use an Entertainment Book coupon to defray the cost. The recipe has been published and my sister made it once but it was a lot of work. It’s a salmon fillet inside puff pastry, stuffed with mushrooms, shrimp, foie gras and a salmon mousse. It’s served with a pinot noir sauce. A former Cannery chef still makes it at his Pink Peppercorn Restaurant on Kingsway near Knight Street. But it’s quite pricey. Including tax and tip, you’re looking at around $50 for just the entrée and there’s no spectacular view of Burrard Inlet and the North Shore Mountains to distract you from the total on your bill.
I didn’t mind the flawed leading character in The Happiest Season but I get what Dave is talking about. So I’ll recommend an earlier movie that has both the “gay couple passing as straight friends” and the “fake fiancée to fool the parents” tropes and that’s Ang Lee’s “The Wedding Banquet” from 1993. A hetero “fake date” rom-com from this year that I enjoyed on Netflix was The Wedding Season. Our former improv colleague Veena has a big role as one of the match-making parents whose meddling drives a man and a woman to agree to be each other’s Plus 1 during the long summer wedding season in the South Asian community. Each wedding they attend has its own venue and theme, so you get to see a wide array of colourful décor and wedding attire.
Happy last podcast of 2022!
Greetings from the void of holiday limbo or as Ian called it, “Holiday Taint.” It was a sad Christmas this year since we had COVID and couldn’t have anyone over or go anywhere but they say whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger… I get to finally see my folks and kids tomorrow while my daughter is still in town, better late that never with what little Christmas spirit we all have left. The entire house has tested negative, so we’re just kind of picking up the pieces around here as we ready to ring in the new year.
Other than any weird or strange “wive’s tales” or family superstitions my Mom believed in as I was growing up, we really were a normal and basis family unit. The holidays were all by the book, we got to open one gift on Christmas Eve before Mass and the rest we opened Christmas morning. I know my Dad had his share of putting together races tracks, trains and pedal cars together late into the hours of Christmas Eve. We emptied our stockings first then opened gifts in rotation. I remember that my best friend down the street got to open all their gifts from one another on Christmas Eve, I was so jealous of that! Then on Christmas morning at his house they woke up to the gifts that Santa left. Our families went to Christmas Eve Mass together, so I knew that right after that his family was going home to open gifts! And we got to open one. We all did the milk & cookies for Santa thing, set up the tree right after Thanksgiving and drove around looking at Christmas lights….eh, pretty normal. I do remember one thing someone gave my kids when they were little, it was a bag of reindeer food. The idea was to sprinkle it outside for Santa’s reindeer to eat while he was delivering toys. The stuff the reindeer food was made from was supposed to dissolve overnight outside from the dew and look as if the reindeer ate it, so when the kids looked outside, it was miraculously gone! Eaten by the reindeer! Do you remember this stuff at all? Seriously, I think armadillos ate the stuff.
Speaking of eating… (pause for Ian)
I can think of several specific recipes that I will go to my grave without and they all belong to my Grandma Mary Draganski. Grandma Mary kept all her secrets of cooking in her head and they died with her. My cousin Christine, her only granddaughter, was given all her recipes but none of them are the same as we remember. I’ve told you about the snow apple recipes before that my Grandma made, apple slices, applesauce and strudel, I’ll never have those from her kitchen again. The way my Grandma made pasta sauce (or gravy as she called it) was so much her own that I’ll never have anything close ever again. She did this thing where she added parmesan & Romano cheese to the gravy at the last minute to thicken it up right before adding it to the pasta. It was like magic and nobody can replicate the exact way she did this.
Grandma also made these cookies she called “Yeast Cookies” and it burns my Mom to this day that she can’t duplicate the recipe as her Mother-In-Law did for years. They were my favorite and when I went home to Chicago for my Grandmother’s funeral, my great Aunt, (Grandma’s Sister) took me out to a freezer in my Grandmother’s garage and dug out a tin from the deep freeze. “These are for you, your Grandma was saving them for you.” They were the last of the yeast cookies from my late Grandma’s kitchen and I had the last tin of them. There was a sticker on the lid with the date they were made and written underneath it said, “Save for Eddie.” My Great Aunt said, “Take these home, they’re yours and don’t share them with anyone, your Grandma made them just for you.” I took my time eating them over the next year because I knew it was the last food I’d ever enjoy from her.
That’s enough for now, I get to finally celebrate some Christmas tomorrow! All my friends and Sneakers out there enjoy the New Year as we celebrate it this coming weekend, good cheer and health to all!!
I may have to buy one of those Jackie Chan Stunt T-Shirts! Those are great, thanks for posting it…
Hey gents,
Thanks for the shout out! Glad that the festive treats reached Canada in time.
I disagree with David (sorry!) that the Brits don’t produce good romcoms. For me, Four Weddings is still the go-to as a template to which all romcoms should aspire – even with Andie Macdowell’s clanger of a final line (‘Is it still raining? I hadn’t noticed.’) I also thought that ‘Your Christmas or Mine’ was one of the best of the genre for this year’s Festive rom-coms. It had a lot of heart which is the element missing from so many in the Christmas rom-com genre.
Something weird that my family – or at least my dad – did growing up was uncensored farting when there were guests around. He didn’t seem to have any inhibition about letting loose a full volume trumpeter no matter who was visiting. So awkward when we had friends over.
I could list the endless summary of other weirdnesses, but best leave them in the past for now.