Amuse-Biatch Photoessay: Padma Lakshmi Does Her Best with Wardrobe Choices to Make Sure That It *Is* Jacques Pépin’s Last Meal

No wonder the poor man kept looking to his left.

It reminds us of a terrible joke one of our high school teachers told us from his Mormon missionary days in France, and that Jacques might know: Pourquoi un soutien-gorge est-il comme le paradis? Parce que les seins y sont. (Why is a bra like Paradise? Because that’s where the breasts are.). It turns on the fact that the French word for saints, “saints” is pronounced very much like the French word for breasts, “seins.”

Anyway, Padma, for God’s sake, the man is 73. Oh wait, never mind, that’s her target age range.

Still, you’ll have to fight Carla, since she and Jacques are like this.

Nip/Tuck: A Braless Padma Lakshmi Demystifies the Esoteric Art of Walking for Justin Tuck: “Just Put One Foot in Front of the Other”

Amuse-Biatch Heterosexual Tuesday: Nips and Buds, or Nipping in the Buds: A Tribute to Padma Lakshmi

"Padma…is sulking magnificently. (She…, like all fish-lovers, dislikes other people knowing anything she doesn’t. Padma: strong, jolly, a consolation for my last days. But definitely a bitch-in-the-manger.)…. ‘But what is so precious,’ Padma demands, her right hand slicing the air updownup in exasperation, ‘to need all this writing-shiting?’….Poor Padma. Things are always getting her goat. Perhaps even her name: understandably enough, since her mother told her, when she was only small, that she had been named after the lotus goddess, whose most common appellation amongst village folk is ‘The One Who Possesses Dung.’

….

[P]erhaps our Padma will be useful, because it’s impossible to stop her being a critic. She is particularly angry with my remarks about her name. ‘What do you know, city boy?’ she cried—hand slicing the air. ‘In my village there is no shame in being named for the Dung Goddess. Write at once that you are wrong, completely.’ In accordance with my lotus’s wishes, I insert, forthwith, a brief paean to Dung.

Dung, that fertilizes and causes the crops to grow! Dung, which is patted into thin chapati-like cakes when still fresh and moist, and is sold to the village builders, who use it to secure and strengthen the walls of kachcha buildings made of mud! Dung, whose arrival from the nether end of cattle goes a long way towards explaining their divine and sacred status! Oh, yes, I was wrong, I admit I was prejudiced, no doubt because its unfortunate odours do have a way of offending my sensitive nose—how wonderful, how ineffably lovely it must be to be named for the Purveyor of Dung!"


From pages 26 and 36 of the Everyman’s Library edition of Salman Rushdie’s Booker Prize-winning Midnight’s Children, published 18 years before Sir Salman met the future Lady Rushdie in, of all places, Liberty Island. Oh the prophecies of art, possums!

Nipples and Bits and Bits and (Naughty) Bits: Amuse-Biatch Mourns the Loss of a Reader Over a Macademic Question

Possums, our Mama said there'd be days like this, and that there's many a slip 'twixt the B-cup and the nip, but we had no idea that there would be such a day or such a nip-slip as this.

Imagine our distress, possums, when, overnight, a Not-So-Gentle Reader anonymously posted this comment:

I was told to read this blog as the "funniest thing about Top Chef" so here I am but I find, instead, a celebrity gossip column whose readers get off by speculating about a woman's nipples and a man's "hidden assets." You people are low-life creeps. One visit is quite enough.

Possums, to the extent that you are responsible for Little Sheba's reaction, we are shocked, shocked. All along, our mission has been, and we have strived, to keep you abreast of the latest Top Chef news. Our veins o'erflow with the milk of human kindness, and we have been told there is an areola of goodness 'round our heads. Tittle-tattle and tit for tat simply aren't our style. We have never sought to make mountains out of molehills. Support for the show has been our only goal. Indeed, charity and love were e'er in our bosom, and we have never nursed a grievance, but, apparently, it has been for naught. We have failed Little Sheba, but we ask for her forgiveness. Come back, Little Sheba, come back, and let us clasp you to our, well, let us at any rate clasp your hand in friendship.

'Ray of Light' Pierces Amuse-Biatch's Dark Disco Night of the Soul

And no, for once we're not talking about Madonna's techno-flavored album.

As you may know, we've been most troubled since witnessing Marcel Vigneron's Immunity Dance. We spent a sleepless night, wringing our hands in their Borghese Moisture Restoring Gloves and shredding peacock feathers. How could we have been so wrong about Marcel? How could our gaydar lead us so far astray?

And then the voices of reason began to prevail. Reader (and self-avowed Gay) Laz cautioned caution--"let's not be hasty here." Both our pal Eric3000 and his Eric3001 reminded us that guest chef "Raphael [Lunetta] and Marcel are totally staring at each other like they are in love." Laz also pointed out that Marcel "was practically undressing guest chef Rafael with his eyes when he was declared the winner." Ms. Place, too, chimed in with practical Dutch wisdom.

Thus fortified, we reviewed the episode once more, and things began to pop out at us. The sisterly interpretative dance by the seashore, and Miss Elia Aboumrad's protectiveness of him on previous shows? We recognized it at once from high school. Why, of course, it was the "kooky, artsy girl protects fey fledgling homo from the bashing jocks until he realizes for himself that the pigskin bus should be pulling not into Tunatown but into Funkytown" scenario all over again. Elia is really acting in the best traditions of the Drosophila Sorority (darlings, we like our fruitflies to have their Latin tags).

And then there were Marcel's exchanges with the surfers, trying out his idea of "surfer" lingo, "brah" and "bro" and all the rest. Why, what was that, if not the classic "trying to butch it up by using the same words straight guys use"? And Marcel sounded just as convincing as all the other gay boys who try that. (Seriously, the next time a gay man greets us with, "'Sup, bro?", we are going to beat him senseless with his own Abercrombie & Fitch flipflop.)

And when we happened upon the above picture of Marcel's attempts to butch it up, the clouds parted and Madonna's "Ray of Light" began playing. Of the many sentiments to be read on his face, one was clear. We could tell he was a little sorry to be talking to the scrawny chap, and not to the other one, you know the one we mean, the one with the meaty pecs, the beau-laid proboscis, and perfect (if undersized) nipples. Yes, him, that's the one.

When we showed Miss XaXa the photograph, she said, "See? You had nothing to worry about." As she put it, "I don't know if what Marcel is doing with his hand is supposed to mean hang ten or hung 10", but it definitely involves digits. And with his pinkie up, it looks like he's drinking tea. And we all know what it means when you drink tea with your pinkie up.... "

"We do?" we asked rhetorically, hurriedly placing our Sèvres teacup on its saucer.

"You can ring my be-ee-ee-ee-ll, ring my bell," sang Miss XaXa in her sauciest Anita Ward imitation, wagging her pinkie at us.

And just like that, amidst much blushing, Amuse-Biatch's dark disco night of the soul came to an end.