Why is this turkey pink?

For years I’ve stared at the famous Norman Rockwell painting “Freedom from Want.” You know the one, the old lady presenting a golden brown turkey to her guests, her man standing proudly beside her, and the goofy guy in the lower right hand corner smiling in anticipation. I’ve often wondered about the people in this painting. I think of a freakishly warm Thanksgiving afternoon, the old lady who’s slaved in a kitchen for eight hours making yams and fluffy dinner rolls with lard, the turkey, undercooked, and her guests lined up in front of the bathroom a few hours later saying, “Well, that’s another Thanksgiving dinner Ma’s ruined.”

Undercooked poultry has been a long-standing Thanksgiving tradition in my family. I was probably in my thirties before I realized that turkey wasn't supposed to be pink on the inside. I could never figure out why some years, I spent the entire Friday after Thanksgiving sick in bed with a belly ache and the shits. One year, I threw up in my friend’s bushes and couldn’t figure out if I was hung over, sick with the flu or had food poisoning.

In recent years, my sister-in-law, God bless her, has commandeered the turkey, and we’ve had lovely, fully-cooked poultry ever since.

Like a lot of holidays, Thanksgiving has lost its meaning over the years. It used to be day where we thought about the Pilgrims, who fled here in pursuit of puritanical religious freedom. Now, we’re too busy trying to choose which celebrity wake-up call we should get so we can be sitting in the parking lot of some big box store at 4 a.m., waiting to trample our fellow man so we can grab one of six plasma TVs for some incredibly low price. I feel sorry for all those retail employees who have to prepare dinner for their families, wash the dishes, entertain their ungrateful relatives, and get up 2 a.m. so they can be at their posts when the doors open at dawn for Black Friday, making $8 an hour waiting on assholes. Whoever came up with the idea of opening stores this early should be shot.

A few days before Congress broke for the Thanksgiving holiday, both the House and Senate voted to give themselves a raise, the same day they voted to cut food stamps and extensions for unemployment benefits for the displaced middle-class. Who cares, right? As long as Chimpy and the rest of the First Family were able to enjoy their maple-whipped mashed taters and deep-fried turkey in Crawford, Texas. I wonder if Chimpy farted after dinner?

I think the best Thanksgivings I spent were the ones where I had to work. I’m happy to work on any major holiday. Hell, I’d be happy to work on any ordinary weekday, period. During the early 1990s, I was the public relations director for a non-profit organization in Chicago that took care of the elderly. Every Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter, we held big parties for hundreds of lonely and isolated seniors, and prepared home-cooked meals for volunteers to deliver to shut-ins. The food was good, too, not institutional cafeteria food.

My job was to drum up media coverage for the events, and secure volunteers to work the parties and deliver the food. One year I made up a bunch of fake statistics about the amount of food we’d be serving the elderly, like if we piled all the dinner rolls one on top of the other, it would be as high as the Sears Tower, or lined up all the turkeys, they would cover the entire twenty mile stretch of Lake Shore Drive. The media instantly picked up all my fake statistics and incorporated them into their newscasts and newspaper stories. You think someone would have questioned their validity, but unless a Metra train wipes out 15 cars at a train crossing, or the mayor of Chicago drops dead of a heart attack the day before Thanksgiving, it’s a pretty slow news day. Of course, the newscasters and ink-stained wretches repeated my fake statistics as if they thought them up themselves. I’m surprised I didn’t get fired. But everyone was happy, and the old people were always glad to get out of their horrible substandard housing for the afternoon.

But I moved on from that job and my holidays went back to being dysfunctional. Probably the most memorable Thanksgiving I spent was in 1996. I was flying out on Thanksgiving Day to visit my brother in Denver. We were going to surprise my niece and nephew, who were 6 and 3, and didn't know I was coming out. My friend Karol gave me a ride to O’Hare and we smoked a big fattie on the way. We were so stoned that we circled the airport three times before we figured out where the departure dropoff was. I was sitting on the plane and had already polished off the American Airlines Bistro turkey sandwich lunch before we even left the terminal. As we were about to taxi out to the runway, a flight attendant got on the p.a. system and told us there was a security threat on board the aircraft and we were to evacuate immediately. She told us to leave everything behind, purses, coats, carry-on bags, and get the hell off the plane.

I always wondered how I would respond in a life-or-death situation and now I know. I freaked out. I was sitting by the window and practically trampled the person next to me trying to get off the plane. The woman in front of me was struggling with her two toddlers. She was trying to pick both of them up and carry them off the plane. No way was I going to let this bitch hold up the evacuation. I yelled at her, “Give me your kid,” and grabbed her son. I was like one of those passengers on the Titanic that grabbed stray children and pretended they were their own kids so they could get a seat on one of the lifeboats.

All of the other passengers got out of our way so we could save the lives of these precious children. The mom and I ran like hell through the pedway, which was lined with Chicago cops and mean looking dogs. They told us to keep running. The woman with the two kids actually turned out to be pretty nice. We made it back out to the terminal and I had some money in my pocket, so I asked her if I could buy her a drink. It was funny because passengers were running off the plane and we all headed immediately to the bar.

Security told us we could retrieve our belongings, which had been taken off the plane and were lined up in the terminal. The strangest thing was that my coat, carry-on bag, purse, and unwrapped Christmas presents for my niece and nephew were all placed neatly in one spot together. Like, how did they know? The pilot came out and told us that someone had phoned in a bomb threat to the Chicago police department. I called my brother in Denver to let him know the plane had been delayed. His narcissistic bitch wife answered the phone and started screaming at me about how I fucked up her dinner. I’m sure it was a lot of work pouring water into the Stove Top stuffing, like it was my fault there had been terrorist threat made against the plane.

Everybody was in the bar getting smashed when Fox News showed up. It was just one camera guy so I went up to him and told him what had happened. He asked if he could get me on camera. Fortunately, I happened to look fantastic. I was even wearing makeup and this cool hat that looked like the one Ingrid Bergman wore in “Casablanca.” I didn’t look like shit the way I usually do. Fox cut out my best sound bite, when I said, “It was scary, and I used to live in a really bad neighborhood.” Instead, the news clip had me repeating, “It was really scary,” ten times in a row, and I sounded like a retard. A bunch of my friends saw it,and said I looked stoned. My dad taped it, so it’s on my reel.

We ended up taking off a few hours later after American Airlines got us another plane. I didn’t get into Denver until 10 o’clock that night. The original plane had departed from Puerto Rico that morning, so there was some concern that the FALN was responsible for the bomb threat, but I think it was some non-custodial parent who was pissed that his or her kids were flying off for the holiday. Anyway, we were lucky the plane didn’t blow up mid air.

Norman Rockwell would have loved it.