Son of the South

Lives
Son of the South
By ROBERT LELEUX

When I was 16, my father left my mother and me for his pregnant mistress, who happened to be a jockey at the racetrack and didn’t ride sidesaddle, if you know what I mean. Well, we’re from Houston; off-color divorce is our municipal hobby. Mother’s first words after reading Daddy’s Dear Jane letter — “All that goes back tomorrow!” — referred to a cluster of shopping bags we collected earlier that day at Neiman’s and addressed the real problem for both of us: with my father gone, the gravy train was over.

What can I say about a gay boy’s love for his mother? Especially my mother, who’s outrageous, even by the standards of over-the-hill Southern belles. From the fitting room to the Costa Brava, our life was one long looping of “Suddenly, Last Summer.”

After Daddy left, Mother spent weeks in bed drinking Smirnoff out of Evian bottles before starting a campaign to win a new, rich husband — cruising Bible-study groups at the better-off Baptist churches, along with some Republican luncheon clubs. “But Mother,” I said, “you’re a registered Democrat.” “From now on, Robert,” Mother replied, “I vote with the Democrats, but I lunch with the Republicans.” Mother’s husband hunt was really the first thing we’d ever not done together. It wasn’t long before I figured out that a man doesn’t propose to a middle-aged jeune fille with another fellow’s son around. And it wasn’t long before Mother’s shoot-where-the-ducks-are strategy proved winning; she was soon off to California with a right-wing fiancé. More

BICYCLETTE

Shaken And Stirred
The Perfect Match With Pig’s Tails
By JONATHAN MILES
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BICYCLETTE Adapted from Fergus Henderson

2 ounces Campari.

1 ½ounces dry white wine.

Add Campari to a wine glass, fill 2/3 up the glass with ice and add wine. Stir, taste and adjust as desired.

Yield: 1 serving.

“A LOT of people don’t really like it, which I find rather strange,” Fergus Henderson said. One suspects that Mr. Henderson, the chef and owner of St. John Restaurant in London, has uttered this sentence before.

He rose to foodie fame as the progenitor of what he calls “nose to tail eating,” a culinary philosophy that exalts and glamorizes the neglected — and often fiercely disdained — bits of animals: offal, snouts, pig’s ears, trotters.

“Any time you see cheeks, tripe or marrow on a New York City menu,” the cookbook author and television host Anthony Bourdain has written, “you can feel the ripples of his influence.” But Mr. Henderson was not speaking of, say, lamb’s brains or braised squirrel (a staple of his wintertime menu). Rather, he was talking about a cocktail. More