Coming Home

Hair. Make-up. Clothes.

Tiffany Kirk, a 25-year old single mother living in Houston, Texas, is getting “date-ready”. The whole thing can take close to an hour, yet there is no gentleman caller to pick her up when she is done.

There is no dinner and movie on her agenda. It’s just a 12-hour bar shift.

The date-ready outfit is her nightly uniform of shorts and a tank top – not exactly a typical nine-to-five work outfit.

I dressed in tight and short clothes and flirted my ass off to pay rent.  When people get righteous about women who make it stripping in college I always think "They were just more honest about it than we were."

The good part? My dad stopped hitting on young waitresses when he realized it was happening to me on a daily basis. 

Also, as an FYI, asking an older gentleman, "Don't you have a daughter about my age?" is a good way to make it stop asap and get a bigger tip. 

I’ve never put so much damn butter in a cake but I do not regret it.

Please don’t think about the calories. This bundt cake is worth trying because it has ginger beer and rum — just like a Dark & Stormy cocktail.

Old Crow Medicine Show plays loud, fast and loose, while remaining in complete control of every ramshackle moment.

As a kid I was naked quite often. Regardless of the time of year. However, being naked was more likely to happen during the Summer months. These Summer weekend days of my youth were spent outside all day often till dinner.

My parents realized that this decree of staying out of the house till dinner came with some drawbacks with one of the most notable being that a neighbor might call, “Your daughter appears to have forgotten her clothing again. Don’t you think she’s a little old for that?” I did this until I was 10. It was the beginning of the end, these phone calls.

At the time there was a 50/50 chance that the clothes came off as soon as I rounded the corner but at some point during the day the clothes were coming off.

I knew I was on to something grand, I was smarter. There was no need to suffer humidity induced chaffing or ill fitting sweaty clothes, just go naked. It was that simple. I’d grab my bike + parade all around the neighborhood, barefoot with only underwear. Those were the Summer glory days.

So it is this time of year when the heat + humidity are especially oppressive that I imagine, that everyone is imagining themselves, naked. Giant folds of flesh walking down the streets + quietly tending to our Summer vegetable gardens, naked. It’s also this time of year that Summer vegetable gardens produce fruit at a the rate of sound + while the thought of canning tomato sauce is not exactly an appealing one however a fairly simple pie with a crust similar to that of cracker, thickly sliced tomatoes, bacon + a fair amount of feta cheese sounds like a good bit of temptation, that is too hard to resist.