This, from my mother in an email:

“…lunch at applebee’s which surprised me by being good… who knew? or am i really turning into country mouse, satisfied with barley? shoot me…!”

Well, I have heard that Applebee’s is the finest of the mall-parking-lot restaurants. I realize it’s a lot easier to be a city mouse when you actually live in the city. When I lived in Indiana, we got into eating this casserole that involved chicken breasts, blue-cheese dressing and a frozen pizza flopped upside down over the whole thing then stuck in the oven to bake. If that’s not rural American barley, I don’t know what is. Applebee’s, are you listening?

But I’m not too worried about my mother….wait, what about that day I took her to Krispy Kreme for the first time, and she was wild-eyed and raving “Go buy me another!” with a little fleck of ‘kreme’ (whipped hydrogenation) on her lip? An anomoly–and who wasn’t brought so low by their first KK, anyway? But the day she says something about margarine being just as good, well, that’s when I’ll send in the troops to bring her to Astoria.