Written by Nancy Johnson | 14 April 2010

I am not fond of surprises. One of my least favourite surprises occurred while in Los Angeles. The date was January 17, 1994 and I lay snuggled in my bed. Not a person in LA will argue the moment the Northridge earthquake rattled through the city like a runaway locomotive. In nearly every home, clocks fell off the wall and broke at precisely the same moment, leaving us with a lasting souvenir of one of the worst moments in LA’s checkered history. It was exactly 4:31 in the morning.

And what, you may ask, was the first thing we Angelenos did after the world stopped heaving and bucking? We ran to the store where we stocked up on bottled water and Twinkies. We filled our carts with cookies, cakes, pies and potato chips. We bought cheese curls, corn chips, chocolate; you name it. We grabbed any carbohydrate-rich, calorie-dense snackage we could find.

Mind you, LA is a city where residents are cast into frantic self-loathing at the very hint of an extra ounce on the hip. And yet, in the weeks following the quake, while the number of aftershocks climbed, shaking our inner ears like a tot shakes a snow globe, we ate. And we ate. And then we ate some more. We dragged melting food from our electricity-deprived freezers and threw it on the barbie. We invited neighbours to sup with us at large makeshift picnics — some we had never even acknowledged prior to our shared fright night.

Written by Nancy Johnson | 23 February 2010

Celebrations don’t always have to be grandiose affairs. One of the nicest holiday dinners I ever had consisted of a simple beef stew with salad and a loaf of homemade bread. The food was delicious, but what made the evening special was the great conversation and laughter shared among good friends.
To me “simple” means either a long, slow and savoury braise or a fast and furious sauté. With the former, dinner goes into the oven and you settle back with a glass of wine. With the latter, your guests come right into the kitchen to help with the preparation. Either way, the focus is on fun and good food, not cooking and cleanup.

Written by Nancy Johnson | 15 January 2010

Allow me to be the first female on the planet to admit that I shop too much. There, I’ve said it. And now I feel like shopping.

What is it about shopping? Shoe shopping, clothes shopping, lingerie shopping, shopping for bling — I do it all and with the focus and agility of an Olympic athlete. Seriously, I could be a trainer for fledgling shoppers like my granddaughter Paige who didn’t have the word ‘spree’ in her vocabulary until I taught her the absolute exhilaration of using her little arms for showcasing prestigious retail bags.

And now with Internet shopping, the universe is my mall, open 24/7. Bad dream? Boyfriend trouble? Indigestion? No problem. Retail therapy is just a click away.

Written by Nancy Johnson | 02 December 2009

Sometimes I think I’ve lived my whole life as a side dish. I’m neither light enough to be the appetizer nor meaty enough to be the entrée — and I’m most definitely not sweet enough to be dessert.

If I were in a sitcom, I’d be the wise-cracking, slightly wacky next door neighbour — Ethel rather than Lucy, Rhoda rather than Mary, Kramer rather than Seinfeld. Slightly plump, rumpled and frazzled, and always funny.

My second banana suspicions were confirmed when I joined community theatre. I was universally cast as the silly sidekick. Either the feisty Ado Annie in Oklahoma, the flittering stripper Tessie Tura in Gypsy and the bowlegged, pipe-smoking Mammy Yokum in Lil Abner. And so it goes.