Corn Dogs: Savior on a Stick
Can faith be found in humble state-fair fare?
June 1988. I stood on the front porch of my friend Patty’s Arlington, Texas, home with suitcases in hand, not unlike Felix Unger in the opening credits of “The Odd Couple.” Like him, I was being thrown out–not out of a tiny Upper East Side classic six–but rather a sprawling six-bedroom casa, complete with pool, three-car garage, automatic sprinkler system, and, what I would miss most, a freezer full of corn dogs. As Patty’s lawyer–a bowling ball with legs who had skin like tobacco-colored crepe paper–put it, I was an “unnecessary risk.”
Patty and her husband, Dan, were getting divorced. While he was shacking up with his dental assistant, I was living non-conjugally with his wife and three kids after I had, for the nth time, denounced New York City. The greater Dallas area was my new home, I told myself, and I embraced it with all the excitement and innocence of Kennedy in 1963.
I chose Dallas because Patty and her two friends, Laverne and Maxine (clearly, not their real names), were planning to open a spiritual center and wanted me to join as an advisor. (This was during the time known as the Great Shirley MacLaine Epoch, so forgive any star-blinded lapse in judgment.) I was no more qualified to rope and brand a Texas longhorn than I was to advise these under-sexed, overpaid housewives. But we had met at a conference for the great spiritually unwashed and took a shine to each other. Plus, I’d sublet my apartment for three months as a first step in escaping my strangled existence in NYC.
When Dan, who was looking for any reason to unseat Patty from the house he financed, discovered a “light-in-the-loafers city slicker” mixing with his impressionable children, I was on the porch within an hour.
No home. Few prospects. Little money.
Of the three Lone Star Andrews Sisters, Laverne was the most compassionate.
Over time I took to thinking of corn dogs as my own personal savior, which I know can–at first blush–appear blasphemous. But I meant it with all the reverence and fervor of a tent revival convert.
“Let’s move you in with CarolJean,” she said, patting the seat of her pickup as I tossed my bags into the back. CarolJean was her 21-year-old daughter trying the living-on-my-own gig, and none too successfully. She was a retired high-school baton twirling champion who, after the glittery sequins unraveled from the costumes that I later discovered she still wore around the house, gave up and took to life on the couch.
When we entered her apartment, she was, as predicted, prone on the sofa–in each fist a baton twirling like a propeller. The slam of the door startled her, and, misjudging the height of the ceiling, she scuffed it. Apparently, she must have suffered from significant depth-perception problems: the ceiling everywhere was punctuated with a riot of eraser-gray commas.