Barbecue Beans
Hear No Evil / Speak No Evil / See No Evil
Me and my sister with Cousin Sara Alther (center) at Conesus Lake. 1979?
I think this might be my first grade photo from Glenwood Elementary School. Someone posted it on Facebook and Mom and I jinxed each other by both saying at the same time “what the hell was I / were you wearing?!”. Mom said she wouldn’t have let me go to school in that. LOL. But it was the 70s. My best friend Robin Brown in the red.
Misc. ridiculous school photos from Glenwood Elementary School. Most people are surprised to find out that I went through a many year long preppy phase. Although the Lacoste sweater in the bottom was a fake. Mom and I kept cutting off that alligator and sewing it to new (not Izod) clothes. Necessity if the mother of invention!
Me in my softball shirt with Mom looking pretty in pink and Dad apparently going to graduation. In our back yard – Chapel Hill sometime in the 70s. (Behind us is Mom’s native wildflower garden which gets a mention below.)
The Reed ladies in front of the Watauga St. house in Kingsport, TN. Mom, me, Jane, Grandma & Lisa. That short haircut of mine was not a good idea on me. Mom looks foxy.
Elisabeth with her cat, Tessa, in my bedroom. The cats liked to hang out in the dollhouse that Mom & Nonnie built us. I don’t remember having a plant in my room??? Mom must have watered that thing.
This was from 9th grade when Mom, Dad & I went to Chicago and stayed with our friends, the Breens, in Evanston. Mom took me shopping and bought me some amazing ankle boots and my first Norma Kamali skirt. Despite the side eye given in this photo I had a great time. I always thought this plaid cape of Mom’s was COOL. Where is it now?!
BELOW: 3 different ridiculous 80s looks. AKA a wannabe fashionista in North Carolina pre-internet!
(To be honest I would still wear all 3 today. ha ha)
This is the weirdest Reed family photo ever taken. It looks like we’re in a cult. Not sure why I’m glowing but I wish I still had that sweater. Taken on the front porch of our Mallette St. house. I was in junior high.
Me visiting my big sis when she was at Oberlin. I think I was in 10th grade (and wearing “Hammer pants”).
BELOW: My room 2 ways. Me in 9th grade / Elisabeth looking JAUNTY AF in maybe her senior year of high school? Those are stacks of Women’s Wear Daily magazines underneath me. Mom made sure I had all of the cool subscriptions. Also, we collected china from a young age. I picked blue and my sister picked red. We would get pieces for our collection for birthdays and Christmas. I wasn’t that into it at the time but now I cherish my blue china. And, that’s Mom’s old Madame Alexander doll looking like Chucky’s Bride at the top of my bookshelf. Mom sent her off to get a makeover a while back and she’s doing much better.
This is our beautiful Mallette St. living room which was home to that terrifying “party” when my parents were in India. You can see why I was concerned.
Mom and Nonnie. Not sure where/when but I had that jacket of Mom’s for years.
Christmas in Kingsport, TN in 1989. Elisabeth and I are both in head to toe Modern Times clothing (the boutique where I used to work after school and in the summers).
The back of this photos says this was a celebration for Mom & Dad’s 25th anniversary with their dear friends the Turchis and the Foldas. Look what a babe Mom was. She always had that classy bob. At one point Dad started cutting it for her for some reason (I guess because they were traveling?) so we took to calling him “Mr. John”.
An anniversary dinner party that I had for my parents with their friends the Foldas and the Reeses. The arrow points to the “locked” liquor cabinet in the pantry.
Me with my friend Hynden (who wrote the generation quiz mentioned below) in my horribly messy 11th grade dorm room at the North Carolina School of the Arts. I just moved my kid into her dorm room at the University of Texas last week and was telling her what a terrible roommate I used to be. I love that Catherine Aird quote, “If you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning.” Words to live by.
Fripp Island, SC – location of my baked bean story below.
Beautiful Nonnie in her Fripp Island house.
I sure have written a lot of sad sack stuff recently. It’s time for a fun post. Well, traumatic, but entertaining. How about that?!
Let’s talk about Bus 50. Bus 50 was the school bus that my sister and I took to and from Glenwood Elementary School in the 70s. We would walk to the bus stop – usually about a block from our house – some years on the corner of Kenan St. and Cameron Ave, some years in front of the Chi Psi house. Regardless of where the pickup was, our company was guaranteed to be kids from “Treehouse”, the home for wayward youth that was located directly across the street from our Mallette St. house. I’ve written before about one Treehouse kid stealing my Dad’s motorcycle (previously owned by Andy Warhol!) out of our garage. That sucked. But not all of the residents were bad, some of them just had been dealt tough hands. One guy had a crush on my sister and brought over an album of the William Tell Overture or something like that with strings for her to listen to since she was a cellist. (Sweet but weird.) So, on school mornings we would sit on the curb or the wall or wherever we could, waiting for Bus 50 to come into view. The Treehouse kids liked to smoke, so they would be puffing away on their cigs. Sometimes one of the girls would braid my hair. I don’t really remember being asked if I wanted my hair braided but it would just happen. I think I figured positive attention was better than negative.
Now, these Treehouse kids were the least of our problems. Once on the bus we got bullied constantly by the kids from the earlier neighborhoods. Like really crazy, completely unacceptable bullying. We got called names, we got hit and groped, it was pure misery but it happened to all of us, so somehow that made it better? My mom’s piano students used to have to ride the bus home with me in the afternoons and they dreaded Bus 50, too. One time, in a pathetic effort to exert some authority, my best friend Robin and I wore our Safety Patrol badges on the bus, thinking we would finally command some respect. How do you think that went over?! LOL
Our bus driver was a HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT. Let that sink in! Her name was Theresa. She told us to call her “Mother Theresa” and she was always covered in hickeys. One time we were riding the bus and a cyclist did something that pissed Theresa off. I can’t remember what but I’m sure it was minor given the difference in scale between a bicycle and a school bus. Well, Theresa was not going to let that infraction go. She whipped that bus around in a U-turn and told us to “get her” so all 30 or so of us kids rolled down our windows, leaned out, and gave the poor cyclist the finger and yelled unspeakable things. Oh, the 70s!
Cyclist heckling aside, I was so miserable riding Bus 50 that I actually went to the school’s principal to try to enact some change. Poor old Robin went with me for support. It was hugely embarrassing to fess up to being constantly bullied but I thought nothing would happen if I didn’t say anything. So, I did. And still nothing happened. The principal listened to my complaints and then didn’t do anything. She didn’t even call my parents. Can you imagine!? In today’s climate there would be a law suit. But, back then, it got shoved under the rug and I just bided my time until I changed schools and had a new bus.
I don’t really have any recollections of my junior high bus, so I guess that’s positive. And in high school I made sure to hook up with my older neighbor Heath’s carpool. That was much more fun than a bus. We would listen to Love & Rockets and if there was time in the mornings we would stop at Hardee’s for biscuits and fried potato rounds. One of my carpool-mates, Drew Tulchin, went on to become the CFO of Meow Wolf, so I was in way cooler company than the old Bus 50 days.
I guess Mom and Dad never knew what was going on with the bus situation, making this a classic Gen X story. A few years ago my friend Hynden wrote a quiz determining different generations. As I recall all of the answers for Gen X were “you fucking handled it”. Pretty much.
When I was 15 and a sophomore in high school my parents went to India for something like a month. Dad had received a Fulbright which required him to tour the country giving lectures. It was too good an opportunity for my parents to pass up, I get it. My sister was in college so she couldn’t watch me. Instead, we got her best friend, Erin, to stay with me for a few weeks and then Dad enlisted the help of a grad student who would monitor me for the remainder of the time. I have no recollection of this grad student. It was a woman and, as I recall, I rarely saw her. As you might predict, in typical Gen X John Hughes movie style I had a party. Well, it’s a stretch to call it a party. I basically went downtown and told people my parents were out of town and a handful of them came back to my house. Mom used to buy those frozen Bacardi mixers in the can so I thought I would be sophisticated and make daiquiris. The question was which liquor would be the last noticeable for me to “borrow”. We had a locked cabinet in our pantry where the good silver and booze was kept. What’s funny is that the key was always in the lock. Using my best reasoning I determined that a rusty mason jar of moonshine was my best option. Someone had given it to my parents as a (joke?) gift. They would never notice! So, I cooked up some tasty batches of moonshine daiquiris in our blender to serve to my guests. It turns out that moonshine and high school kids are a bad mix. Who would have guessed? After a few rounds someone put cat food in our cereal, another person set themselves on fire and “stopped, dropped, and rolled” through my mother’s native wildflower garden, and I finally had to say “my sitter is coming home!” (which was decidedly uncool) when a guy started to flood the downstairs bathtub. I fucking handled it.
For today’s recipe I was looking for something kind of old school and 70s. I remember my Nonnie making these beans once for a potluck when we were visiting her at Fripp Island. She put them in an elaborate ceramic tureen with a lid which was very Nonnie (and hilarious since they include low rent ingredients like Pork & Beans). She was worried she hadn’t made enough so I was under strict instructions not to eat any at the dinner, which sucked because I had been smelling them all afternoon. It turned out that people brought a ton of food to the potluck and, while the beans were appreciated and enjoyed, they did not totally disappear as Nonnie had predicted. I remember sitting at the table later with a big bowl of beans and a smug look on my face. Ah, the 70s.
BARBECUE BEANS
1 can red kidney beans, drained and rinsed
1 can pork and beans, drained and rinsed
1 can small lima beans, drained
½ c brown sugar
¼ cup vinegar
½ c catsup
3 onions, chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
1 tsp mustard
½ tsp salt
½ tsp pepper
4 Tbsp bacon drippings.
Brown onions and garlic in drippings. Cut up bacon on top.
Bake 350 for 45 min.
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