Heartburn Read Free Page B

anything else. Anyway, I don’t belong on a network. I have the kind of odd and interesting features that work out all right in life but not at all on the screen, so I’m far better off on public television, where the producers and cameramen are used to Julia Child and are pathetically grateful that I’m not quite as tall. Also, there’s my blink. I blink. “Hi, I’m Rachel Samstat”—saying that, looking directly at the camera, I blink fifty or sixty times minimum. It’s the looking at the camera that makes me do it; when I’m looking at a person, or a pork roast, my blinks go down to near normal.
    After we taped the first show and discovered the blink, Richard, my producer, suggested I go see a professional television coach, who specialized in voices but was willing to undertake a little eyelid work on the side. She kept telling me she’d never had a failure, probably to encourage me, but the effectwas to make me absolutely determined to be her first, which I was.
    “I don’t think I can fix the blink,” she told Richard after several sessions, “but I can probably do a little something with the voice.”
    “We like the voice,” said Richard, and thank God, because there wasn’t much left of me by then that someone hadn’t taken a swipe at, usually using the definite article. The voice. The blink. The hair. The chin. “She has a quality onscreen not unlike Howard Cosell,” someone high up at the station is supposed to have said, and even though I choose to think he meant it as a compliment—he meant I’m the sort of person you feel strongly about one way or another—Howard Cosell was not exactly what I had in mind. What I had in mind was Imogene Coca or Elaine May. Anyway, the important thing is that I do happen to have a funny voice, and it makes people laugh. It works on television, although there’s no way a voice coach would understand that, since her job is to teach everyone to sound like David Brinkley.
    It’s really because of Richard that the television show came up at all. I was on a talk show promoting
My Grandmother’s Cookies
when Richard saw me. Actually, it was Phil Donahue he saw me on. Richard is hooked on Phil Donahue. He says that if Sigmund Freud had watched Phil Donahue he would never have wondered what women want. There I was, fielding questions about piecrust and doing my Jewish prince routine, when Richard got the idea it might make a series—me and my relatives and my friends and a few famous strangers, talking about food, talking about the role food plays in life, doing a little cooking, a middlebrow Julia Child crossed with a highbrow Dinah Shore. How we got away with it I don’tknow, except that we threw Proust and his madeleines into the opening credits, and I managed to get Isaac Bashevis Singer to make noodle kugel on the pilot. Also, the show cost next to nothing to produce, and what little it cost was underwritten by an oil company where someone I used to date is now in charge of parceling out money to public television. I dated him when he was Jewish—now that he works at the oil company you can’t exactly tell. He was so Jewish when I dated him that he taught Hebrew school, and I, who at that point had had no Jewish education whatsoever, learned about Purim and good Queen Esther and the wicked Haman from him one night in a dormitory at Harvard while he stuck one and then two and then three fingers into me. This was before the discovery of the clitoris, when there was far too much sticking of fingers into things and not nearly enough playing around with the outsides; still, it was a nice enough introduction to the origins of Hamantaschen pastries, and I retain a special and absurd affection for Purim in spite of the fact that I have always hated Hamantaschen. That isn’t true. Mark’s Aunt Florence makes good Hamantaschen. Aunt Florence, who raised Mark, is a great cook; her triumph, which she serves on Thanksgiving along with the turkey, is a brisket cooked