We folks at the PBC&R have a confession to make: We have started watching Frankie & Grace, a series shown on Netflix which we know would cause some of our relatives to cringe. I mean Jane Fonda could be a “turn that off” trigger for one person quite close to us. In fact, he might just resign his charter membership in the Foo Bar in protest.

It is not as if we went out of our way to be annoying to some. It’s just that the show was frequently suggested and after awhile we looked at the synopsis and saw the blurb about two husbands of 40 years announcing that they had been gay lovers for 20 years and were leaving their wives to marry. And those two men were MARTIN SHEEN and SAM WATERSON.

Ah, you can’t really blame me for going “hmmmmm?” and pushing the play option. Well, maybe you can. Forget that; it’s over with; it’s been done. I stared at Sheen and Waterson for the first couple of episodes in a sort of stunned state. Then I started thinking that maybe the jokes were a little raw for me.

However, it was forbiddenly entertaining and I looked up reviews. Like me, the first season got a so-so rating with the remark that much of the script relied too much on off color references. HOWEVER . . . The next two seasons were judged to be much classier and “hilariously funny”. (And, actually, in the first season, I did really laugh at the yearly ritual of watching the National Spelling Contest, including the heckling from Lily Tomlin and Sam Waterson. Oh, and some of the words I had to look up for meaning, let alone spelling – that was a poke in the ribs.)

Well, I’ve confessed. I suppose there will be fallout. I have had practice with handling that. My father was very much a gentleman, but not a self-proclaimed censor and so when I visited there were some shows I was not welcome to watch in the main room. It went along with the recurring comment that began when I was in my early teens, “I don’t believe a lady should use words like that, Jody.”

I know I will probably have to sign into Netflix on the account not associated with Der Bingle to watch. That would be a problem at the apartment (The Ohio Redoubt) so I will have to binge here or rent DVDs.

I suppose it would have been smart not to have written about this at all.

I was scanning the “What’s Going On” column (otherwise known as Facebook) in the local paper stocked here at the Peanut Butter Cafe & Roadhouse and see that a friend of mine is in New Orleans with her husband and dining at Antoine’s. I have an old, old menu from there, courtesy of my Great Great Aunt Sara who lived the latter part of her life in that city.

I don’t think Aunt Sara had red hair until the day she died, but it was probably close. Aunt Sara always had red hair; well, maybe not as a girl or young woman, but from when I first met her when I was close to one and she was about 71. She was about three years older than my grandmother, being the youngest sister of Grandma’s father. So, in fact, they grew up more as sisters than aunt and niece – Sarah and Jessie. Both became teachers at the turn of the century – you know, the one before this one – but Aunt Sara parted with her “H” and Grandma remained Jessie.

Though Grandma had been at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, she didn’t travel much more and married and had a daughter. When that daughter was one, Aunt Sara, who was teaching in Kalamazoo, married an Encylcopedia Britannica salesman and traveled around the United States with him and . . . then, well, let’s just say there are lots of stories.

Should my friend who dined in Antoine’s be reading this, I must assure her that she and her husband probably blended in better than Aunt Sara. I can’t remember if I told her about my Aunt Sara or not – such as the time she had a big hat before (1915) that she couldn’t wear comfortably in my grandma’s old Buick, so she rode all the way into town with her head out the window. Fortunately, cars chugged along much slower then.

Bluto is starting out with a basic Wubba, a training model, if you will:

He will, no doubt, move onto those that have special powers, such as a Santa Wubba:

No matter how much serious stuff is going on in life, people seem to be able to find something actually unimportant to trigger obsession. I was wondering if I should get my hair trimmed or wait until the heat/humidity of summer had passed.

First I gathered my shortish hair in a mini ponytail in back. I probably am being generous in calling it a mini ponytail, for I’m almost certain a rubber band would not be able to hold it. I think what I am doing is scrunching hair toward the middle with my hands and discovering a little might stick out the hole in an adjustable baseball cap.

That is not what is on my mind now. A while ago, it was and then I happened to look in a mirror at the hair length and I thought, I believe my teeth are too short. You really should not try such thoughts at home for you have too much time to do something crazy, such as look up teeth measurement on the Internet.

Yes, I did that. Pages of technical articles, pages of cosmetic remarks and many, many images of smiles with before and after shots. I have yet to actually measure my front teeth, but I know I will. I am going to be 70 and I am concerned about tooth length; I think that is not senile – it goes straight to crazy.

However, I did come across two images that put me off the idea of thinking about my teeth. Now I am trying to get them out of my mind.

#1 PACIFIERS:

#2 BABY WITH PACIFIER:

And now it is time to return the favor.

Perhaps Bluto will want it played over and over again, as someone here did.

Ah, so this is my kingdom.

We received notice that LZP has a new furbaby; his name is Bluto Frankenstein. We think he is about 12 weeks old or thereabouts. And, if you are not an expert at recognizing breeds, he is a Saint Bernard. He is going to GROW. We think there will be lots of stories and we will be reporting.

THIS FELLOW

from all of us at

The PBC & R

and from

Dog Heaven

In the morning, I usually check the news and the weather and email, and maybe surf a bit. Today, I did the first three and then decided I wanted to check on a couple of books at Goodreads. And so I did; I was reading about one novel when I noticed a small insert on the side of the page. It included a small picture of three book covers (I am trying to give myself a reason for my misinterpretation here – hence the double use of the word “small”.) At any rate, the book in the middle was “A Cupboard Full of Goats” and my curiosity was piqued.

I’d watched the movie “Men Who Stare at Goats” so I thought, well, why not take a closer look at this book? As it turns out, the real title is “A Cupboard Full of Coats.” I was bummed. I know, I know: the book is probably a good one about a group of people – a family or bridge club or whatever who hang their coats together. All sorts of stories could come out of the cupboard.

But I was psyched for goats. Knowing me, I may have to designate a cupboard in my house as the Goat One. (I’d slam the barn door on that idea, but the horse is already out.) I’m getting too old for all this stuff for when I was younger, it made me eccentric, but now that I am hard onto my significant next birthday, I’m afraid it would be interpreted as “Oh, she’s in her dotage.”

A further complication: Why isn’t the cupboard called a closet if it holds coats? Are they folded and stored? Well, that introduces possibilities of a different plot. Still a personal type story, but addressing other, maybe sadder, plot developments. I’m going to have to look it up now, because I CAN NEVER JUST LEAVE WELL ENOUGH ALONE.

Still, I’m not giving up my Goat Cupboard.

It’s not that I locked myself out of the Peanut Butter Cafe & Roadhouse; it’s not that the power is out or we had a burst pipe in the Foo Bar. We’ve just been funking around and while funking can be restful for the funker, it would be boring to anyone having daily updates of it.

Perhaps after I had watched a couple of episodes of “Lost in Transition” which is about four married men transitioning into women, I found myself thinking, WHAT AM I DOING? HAVE I SUNK THIS LOW?  And the answer was, “Well, I guess so.”  I further realized I had been watching “600 Lb. Life” and Netflix shows about prisons. Der Bingle suggested that I needed to find one called “600 Lb. Transgender Criminals.” I felt like hanging my head. I have not exactly been on the Masterpiece Theater track.

Since I’m wandering down Confession Lane, I have to admit I have read three Kindle Unlimited escapist books, just bang, bang, bang. Ever so seldom, I would think I should do something productive, then I just pushed that out of my mind and kept doing the Kindle equivalent of flipping the pages.

If there is any news, it is that, although trying to lose weight, I have discovered Mushroom with Truffle Oil pizzas . . . and Goat Cheese Pizzas. I was fascinated by the names and had to try them; I am fairly certain I will not be fascinated by anything called Roadkill Pizza.