The setting: Labor Day 2003 in Niagara Falls, home of outlet shopping, Italian food, and those who believe the Falls is their personal log flume.

The controversy: Both Mom and Grammy are determined to bake a cheesecake for our small Labor Day gathering at my parents’ house.

Let me describe the combatants.

My mother is a middle age gross anatomist who’s IQ is exponentially increasing and is currently being read by The National Debt Meter. The problem is Mother is so very intelligent, but has several issues effectively communicating with other members of homo sapien descent. For example, it has been brought to my attention that Mom is under the delusion the index finger is the finger one should use to gesture in anger instead of the more popular choice, the middle finger. This amused my family a great deal, though I’m sure it titillated no one more than people who pissed her off in traffic and are wondering why she is signaling that they are No. 1. This apparent miscommunication disorder is at the terminal stage around her mother. When I suggested to Mom to tell Grammy that a second cheesecake is not necessary as we are not expecting an overwhelming number of individuals from Ecuador to be in attendance, I was given a look like I spontaneously grew the 4 heads of Mount Rushmore from my neck.

My grandmother is a Polish woman who grew up during The Great Depression when the food supply was very scarce. Therefore, she only feels comfortable when a family gathering looks like a dinner party at Buckingham Palace and every fridge in the vicinity resembles storage space for the local chapter of The Food Bank. My grandparents and my parents are surely the only 2 person households in America with multiple filled-to-capacity, full size freezers fully capable of being loaded on a 747 and dropped into India completely ceasing the human rights snafu known as world hunger. Me, the living in solitude granddaughter, has also been forced to buy a freezer as my grandmother often makes me 4 dozen blueberry muffins on a whim, which is a greater muffin inventory than found on a random morning at your local Dunkin Donuts. It is a family tradition that my grandmother makes all the pies for Thanksgiving. While they are delectable beyond comparison, we generally have between 15-35 different pies for a 9 person gathering. Most families have to get creative with their turkey leftovers; we have to get creative with our pie leftovers. Feel free to email me for any of the following recipes: apple pie and turkey casserole, huckleberry extra chunky stew, and, my personal favorite, the open faced lemon meringue sandwich.

Since we have a woman who can’t communicate "no," and another woman who feels we only have enough food when the gathering looks like SYSCO’s headquarters, it seemed pretty apparent that we were going to have 2 cheesecakes to contend with. Which would be fine, except my family takes "everything in moderation" very literally, as we generally serve every imaginable type of food stuff available in the Milky Way Galaxy. I personally knew we were in trouble for our Labor Day gathering when Mom bought paper plates that resembled disposable swine feeding troughs. That day we were serving cheese stuffed hamburgers. Looking at these patties, I could only conclude that they were made from livestock wooly mammoths as no amount of growth hormone could make a cow yield this much meat. Just in case someone was on the Atkins diet, we were also serving hot dogs (appropriately named as they were the size of a midsize canine), and sausage (as we are Polish, and that is the law). I was told we held this event in the kitchen, however I can’t confirm this as the 13 five gallon drums containing our side dishes obstructed my view.

I’m not exaggerating when I say that all of us after dinner resembled Mr. Big in the final scene of Live and Let Die. In fact, around halfway through the meal, most of us started inserting food in alternative orifices as our esophaguses were currently full. However, our ordeal wasn’t over. We still had to have the cheesecake. As both my grandmother and my mother have slightly bipolar mood swings, especially toward anything they baked, stewed or flambéed, phrases such as "I’ll take my cheesecake home," "I’ll have one piece now, and the other later," or "That last helping of pasta salad has caused internal bleeding," are disregarded. So, we are presented with new trough of two cheesecake slices that could cause flashbacks in an Everest summitter. So, we started the slow and painful mountain erosion via our plastic forks knowing full well that both cheesecakes must be eaten completely in the interest of familial peace. If even a crumb of one cheesecake remains, it would mean that you liked the other woman’s cheesecake better. The punishment would be a vicious glare from the scorned woman which can cause immediate castration, and a top place at that woman’s Shit List for the next 6 months. Both of the above punishments are relatively undesirable, especially with the upcoming holiday season.

I’m proud to say that I have recently passed my last graham cracker crust stone, and the aneurysms in my duodenum have almost healed. With the holiday season upcoming, I have already started preparing my gastric system by incorporating a diet of laxatives and volcano black bean dip in order to gain a new level in "I‘m running on an empty stomach." Make sure you stay tuned for my post-Thanksgiving article, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to My Stomach Pumping.

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