Spammin' in Sticksville

I find it almost impossible to tell the story of my involvement in the radio Spam bake-off. For one thing, it all happened nearly 15 years ago and many of the finer details have faded into the dim and distant recesses of memory; for another, we were living in a wretched little town I'd rather not name because people there may still remember me, and while some of those people were pretty wonderful, others were not.

It was the kind of town--let's call it "Sticksville"--where nosy neighbors complained about "all those horrible weeds" growing beside our house, unaware that they were maligning a carefully tended bumper crop of horseradish and rhubarb; the town's most notable citizen (this is true) was the guy who invented the special blade used to transform potatoes into curly fries, and the highlight of my week might be taking the kids out to watch the highway department spread new asphalt.

The primary obstacle to proper storytelling, however, is the notable absence of all the elements that make a story interesting. Here it is in a nutshell: sometime in the early 1990's I appeared on a radio talk show in Fort Wayne, Indiana, as a panelist for a Spam bake-off, during which I uttered the memorable words, "Whatsa matta, Flash, cantcha cut it?" The story thus told is distinctly lacking in suspense, local color, and character development, but nevertheless the incident has earned a place of honor in our family's repertoire of oral narrative, along with the infamous teenaged Twinkie episode and the encounter with the pink toilet Buddha.

I suppose the best plan would be to begin at the beginning, but I'm not really sure exactly how I got involved in the radio Spam bake-off. I had called the radio station and made some sort of comment about a giant glowing lawn statue shaped like a can of Spam (don't ask me why) and it happened that the producers of the station's morning talk show were busily planning the Spam bake-off and needed participants. I was an unlikely choice because I cook with Spam about as often as I cook with styrofoam. In fact, I'm not entirely convinced that Spam is food. Animal, vegetable, or mineral? No clue.

But I eagerly accepted the opportunity to appear at the station with a Spam dish hand, and I did it for one reason: payback. Specifically, I wanted to make a guy named Jeff laugh.

Let's admit right up front here that I never really knew much about Jeff besides the persona he projected on the radio, but one thing I knew was that Jeff could make me laugh any day of the week, and at the time I desperately needed to laugh. I was living, remember, in Sticksville, a small town Theodore Dreiser had lauded in his 1913 travel book A Hoosier Holiday. Dreiser liked the town's plentiful bars and convivial residents, but he didn't have to live there--and if he had lived there, he would have spent too much time in the bars to worry about putting rhubarb and horseradish in the ground.

I, on the other hand, was just a small-town housewife trying to make a name as a free-lance writer while caring for two small children and a parade of foster kids with various special needs, with no television reception or Internet connection and not a penny in my pocket. Most of the time I needed a laugh, and the radio was my lifeline to laughter, and Jeff was the radio host who threw me that lifeline.

Jeff picked me up out of the doldrums so many times that I was determined to repay him for his generosity: someday, I told myself, I will make Jeff laugh. But how? Enter the Spam show.

So I found a recipe involving Spam, chicken breasts, cream of mushroom soup, and sour cream, thus conveying the maximum of salt and fat with the minimum of nutrition in a no-fuss dish I would not make again even if someone promised me a lifetime supply of Spam, which really would not be all that much Spam anyway because one can is more than enough for my lifetime. Now a few days before I took my less-than-delicious dish down to the radio station, Jeff told a story on the air about an adolescent experience working at a grocery store where the nasal-voiced manager kept berating him with the words, "Whatsa matta, Flash, cantcha cut it?" I kept these words in the back of my mind as I made my way to the radio station, Spam dish in hand, and I waited patiently for the right moment. Five or six of us were gathered around a table in the recording studio nibbling on bits of Spam dishes and commenting on their salient qualities ("Tastes like insulation") when Jeff had a little difficulty finding the words to express his feelings for a particular dish. My moment had arrived: I leaned toward the microphone, assumed an obnoxious nasal voice, and said, "Whatsa matta, Flash, cantcha cut it?"

The only thing that could have made the results more gratifying would be if Jeff had actually managed to spew Spam from his nostrils. Payback: he made me laugh, I made him laugh. Account balanced.

If this were a better story there would be some moment of transcendence here, a bit of character development in which I discover a profound understanding of my responsibility toward the Spam workers of the world, but this story doesn't work that way. I went on the show, I made Jeff laugh, and I went home. I think I took the leftover Spam dish home but I don't remember whether anyone ate it. A few months later, Jeff was killed in a car crash and he never made me laugh again except in retrospect. Every once in a while I'll utter that magical phrase "Whatsa matta, Flash, cantcha cut it?" No one ever knows what I'm talking about, but deep inside I'm thinking of Jeff and the Spam show--and you'd better believe I'm laughing.