Grocery Shopping

Well, Trader Joe's was hell, once again.

When this place used to be the Southern California that I romped all over with Ginger Rogers, whom we all used to call Troll before she gained all that weight and it became not so funny. . . anyway, during the golden years of Hollywood, big magical grapefruits and ham sandwiches so luscious you could use them to bribe a sultan just carpeted the tables and you could eat like a Maharani without even thinking twice about it. Of course, I never ate anything but the grapefruits, but even they were just as glorious and glamorous and red and sweet as anything you could ever hope would pass over your tongue. I remember a party at Mr. Mayer's house -- he had hired 75 young Oriental girls in Geisha dress to stand behind our chairs and spoon feed us the most incredible meal -- wild duck soup, imported Elephant steaks, something that Clark Gable told me was made of monkey -- all of it served on china that once belonged to a Tsar.

And now we have to just fight our way through the aisles of dirty little specialty groceries for a tiny crock of Greek yoghurt and a bag of turkey jurkey.

Of course, I blame myself, and I blame Ronnie. I think that when we left for Washington in 1980, we just up and took all the glamour with us, and it didn't survive in Washington, try as we might to keep it going.

(PS: That's a picture of me with the China I bought for the White House. They gave me hell for the expense even though what I found when I got there was a bunch of ticky-tacky-mismatch, and that'll give you an idea of how hard it was to live glamourously in Washington. It was like being given all the orchids in the hot house and being told to use them to decorate the ice-skating pond and keep them alive out there! I just thought of that metaphor, and boy, it is apt!)