You Can’t Drink All Day if You Don’t Start in the Morning Read Online Free Page A

overrated. These are truths we hold dear in the South, where we embrace imperfection for the gift that it is. Y’all can say “amen” now.
    Here’s a recipe that I’ve made in my own lovingly seasoned cast-iron skillet, which I keep in the oven 365 days a year, where Duh will
never
find it.
    Sure, you could catch your own crabs down at the dock with some string and a chicken neck or two, but it’s OK to cheat and buy it at the fish house. Serve this with shredded slaw and hush puppies. The recipe comes from actor Robert Duvall, who bragged about them on
Oprah
one day many years ago, and I’ve been making them ever since. When he came to film
Rambling Rose
in our town, I got to interview him for the newspaper. Nice guy, fabulous crabcakes . . .
ROBERT DUVALL’S MAMA’S CRABCAKES
1 pound backfin crabmeat
1 tablespoon mayonnaise (Duke’s, if possible)
2 eggs, lightly beaten
½ teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
½ teaspoon cayenne pepper
¼ teaspoon salt
½ onion, grated
½ tablespoon dry mustard
18 Ritz crackers, smashed up (I like to put them inside a Ziploc bag and then roll over them with the rolling pin a few times)
     
    Combine everything in a big bowl. Form into six patties. Fry in enough butter to keep everything from sticking, over medium-high heat for about 10 minutes per side. Garnish with lemon and tartar sauce.

4
High School Musical
Triumphs: Dreams 1, Snot 0
    As we settled into our seats for the second act of a splashy stage production of Disney’s
High School Musical
we’d driven 150 miles to see, I did the math: two mezzanine tickets, plus gas, $140; one oversized peanut-butter cookie and chocolate Dippin’ Dots shared in the lobby before the show, $6; one youth medium-size
HSM
T-shirt, $20; sitting among kids and grown-ups who spent the entire two-and-a-half hours obsessively text-messaging and ignoring the show, priceless.
    Yes, I get it. You have the attention span of a gnat and rather than enjoying the show, it was
very
important that you tell someone, perhaps even the media, where you were and what you were doing.
    Oh! This just in: No one cares.
    To tell the truth, I was a little surprised to see the tweenstexting their friends. It wasn’t like parents were demanding that their kids sit through all eighteen hours of Wagner’s
The Ring
, now was it? So, yes, I was a little disappointed that the target audience spent the show staring glassy-eyed at the little blue screens in their palms instead of savoring the real world in front of them.
    That said, I accept that kids are put on the planet to confound us and steal our liquor.
    My beef’s with the grown-ups. If you’re bored with what’s on stage, why don’t you haul your rude butt out into the lobby and text yourself into an exhausted puddle? Text until the paramedics have to come and sew your stupid thumbs back on. But don’t pretend you’re doing something important. You aren’t punching in missile launch codes; you just told your husband to pick up dog food at Costco. You are a moron.
    Throughout the play, the woman beside me feverishly text-messaged while her tween looked over her shoulder to read, giggle, and offer (in a loud, annoying whisper) suggestions for other people to text. They were so cool. They were at the
HSM
stage show. Except they weren’t. The woman was well into her forties and was letting her kid know that (a) performers really don’t deserve attention or respect after months of rehearsals and (b) I repeat, she was a moron.
    This wasn’t Broadway, but that was lucky for the audience, the way I saw it. If you pulled this junk in New York,they’d toss you out of the theater and onto 42nd Street before you even had a chance to pretend you were just checking on your dying grandma.
    I’m a little sensitive, maybe, about all things
high school musical.
If you must know, I have such an awesome crush on Zac Efron. Not in some creepy Mary Kay Letourneau let-me-have-your-baby-you-man-boy way, but in an