People give Joan Crawford a bad rap. I hate wire hangers just as much as she did, maybe even more. Thankfully, they never come into my house because I never go to the dry cleaner. Once when I was helping a friend sort out her closet, she had wire hangers mixed in with puffy ones. I don’t know which was worse.

“Your puffy hangers are taking up too much room and I can’t even touch these wire ones. You must throw these all away and let’s go to Ikea and get the wooden ones,” I stated.

“But my mother made these ones,” she protested, holding up one of the puffy hangers. It was then I realized they were just wire hangers dressed up in a peach satin outfit. They even had bows that only a mad housewife would think to put on as a finishing touch. I remember my best friend had a “teddy bear” her grandma made that was basically a wine bottle with crocheted cosy for a body and a pom-pom for a head. She called it Cuddles. The head could come off, and another bottle could be put inside. Form and function. This is my kind of craft. Get with the program, ladies.

I didn’t hit her over the head with those fug-assed wire peach puffs or anything like that, but I did convince her that a full closet with all the same kind of wooden hangers would be a good thing. And she lit up a blunt and concurred.

Speaking of a “good thing,” Martha Stewart’s daughter just put out a “Mommie Dearest” style book about her. Now one thing you might not know about me is that I worship Martha Stewart. I think we are both misunderstood in many ways. Some think Martha is a heinous Type A beeyutch-slash-criminal but I find her inspiring. She is all about labour intensive domestic chores because it is the journey not the destination that makes the story. Time consuming chores keep the fingers nimble. I, too, dabble in domestic artistry. Sometimes this shocks people who know me. I remember running into a colleague at Loblaws and he had that WTF look on his face like he just saw a frog on the highway.

“I wouldn’t think to see you here, Peterson, I thought you would have someone to do this sort of thing for you,” he said with geniune surprise. Yes, I cook. I also have the crafting gene. I can knit, sew, and weave bacon. I have followed my mentor and made pumpkin pie, not from a can, but from the gourd placenta that I roasted in the oven and then mashed it up with my bare hands. I made Christmas twig balls, Valentine”s cards, and mayonnaise. Doing laundry is my porn. I am more systematic about it than you are when you troll all the NSFW sites on your laptop at Starbucks. My washing machine is my bitch. I use the cold setting, boost with Borax, and hang dry everything on a rack in my bedroom. This is what keeps my skin moist by the way. I have not used a dryer in years. I am sure that Martha would be proud and bestow upon me a gold star made out of shortbread from Amish butter for a job well done.

I was happy to hear that Martha’s take on her daughter’s book was that it was all in fun and “irreverent” with really great pictures. The “bad things” include: Martha pees with the door open. I pee on the porch when I open the door! Same, same! Every thing must be from scratch. I must scratch everything! She likes to dig in the dirt. I like to dig for dirt! We are sistahs! Except for one thing. Halloween. I love Halloween, it is the High Holy Day in my family. I decorate the house and make costumes. Then I sit on the porch, turn on the smoke machine, drink cheap wine, and give out candy to all the kids Apparently Martha and her daughter thought it was great fun to turn off the lights and pretend not to be home. Perhaps this is where she went too far with her control freakery. There is no way she would buy a pre-packaged Oh Henry bar when she can make her own nougat, peanut and caramel dipped in chocolate creation with a possible razor blade embedded inside. This is the one time you cannot do scratch. Stupid media propaganda. I bet there was never a razor blade in any candy. It was just something Nestle made up so that you had to buy their product.

Which is why she probably sits it out. Or so I’m telling myself. Either that or she hates children. But I’m not crazy for them either. Wait scratch that, it’s not children I hate, it’s those parents who talk loudly in the third person so everyone can hear their stellar parenting: “Now Piper, Mommy wants you to get in the Lexus so we can go to Kumon to pick up your twin brothers, Finn and Cooper. Later on we can go to the park and then when Daddy gets home he can braid your hair.” Modern daddies do all the crappy crafting nowadays, they are pussy whipped by their feckless wives who think it’s cute that they can’t even make toast. You know the type. I’m not sure what their MO is but I think they just want to keep their husbands extra-busy so they don’t have time to fuck around with their extracurricular activities. Bitches!

Martha and I have no time to enslave our men, we are too busy folding sheets: