Twinkle: Blame It All On My Roots, I Showed Up In Boots, and Ruined Your Erev Pesach Affair

You've all met my dour yankee SIL and her husband, the Smug Vegans. Well they're making their annual Passover visit in just a few short weeks. This always makes the already-draconian Passover restrictions even more unfun--who would have imagined it was possible?

So the deal with Passover is that you're supposed to go for eight days without eating any bread and lots of other stuff, too. Even fruits and veggies are restricted (no corn or legumes, and everything theoretically has to be able to be grown in Israel, or something) and any processed food has to be marked "Kosher for Passover." It's a big, expensive undertaking, and I suspect it's a racket perpetuated by the Manischewitz food company to sell their disgusting chocolate or potato chips or whatever that most people wouldn't eat throughout the rest of the year, but will buy for this one week just to have a little variety. (Just so y'all know; I never make it to the end of this and I don't even try). 

Anyway, you can imagine that if you had to go all that time without eating normal foods, you'd want your last meal before Passover to be a decadent blowout with all your favorite foods. (I'm totally on board for this meal, by the way). So I was happy to get an email from my SIL's lovely mother-in-law this morning, saying that she and her husband and a few other family members want to treat the whole family to a fun Erev Pesach (the night before Passover) meal, to thank the Louisville crew for our generosity throughout Passover. It was a kind gesture--my SIL's inlaws are lovely Southern Jews with good manners and a fun outlook on life that is so refreshing since Fun Sunk is usually running the show around here. They all come to town once a year at Passover and make the whole thing more bearable, and actually joyful. They drink and laugh and bring aunts and uncles and little kids. They even bring out the best side of Fun Sink, who cuts loose a little bit around them. I like when they're around.

So, yay, Erev Pesach meal--it's a Sunday night so it's not going to interfere with anything else fun that'll be going on; it'll be a big family meal with kids and grandparents and everyone. I was fine with it. And then I read the crucial sentence: "The Smug Vegans have suggested Roots." So, thanks to the Smug Vegans, we get to blow it out on Erev Pesach with bean sprouts and steamed banana leaves.

Mr. Twinks and I are appalled. Appalled. And it's not just because of the last-meal-before-Passover aspect of it. It's just so rude and presumptuous. At my count, there will be 18 people at this dinner, and three of them--three--are vegans. (Two are Smug Vegans and one, Mr. Fun Sink, is the much less common kind of vegan: the Nice Vegan Who Enjoys A Good Steak Every Now And Again). So three people out of the 18 want to eat bean sprouts, and now we're all going to Roots. Roots. How am I supposed to get drunk at Roots?

Also, what the hell are my children supposed to eat at Roots? We've taken them there before with the Nice Vegan Who Likes Steak, and here's the answer: nothing. They hate everything at Roots, as any normal redblooded Americans would. This will only make my children look worse, as I'm sure Sophie will be stuffing her face with the braised beets while my children rightly demand to know where the fuck they can get a bowl of mac and cheese. Similarly, I can't imagine that the inlaws' 90-year-old grandmother, Bubbie, is going to enjoy Roots. Bubbie owned a catering company in Memphis; Bubbie knew Elvis, OK? Bubbie is not down with bean sprouts. Even Fun Sink likes a fat chicken thigh every now and then.

The choice shows a complete disregard of other people's tastes or preferences. It's so typical of the Smug Vegans to try to force their aberrant lifestyle on the rest of us. It's the very worst kind of bad manners. It's the equivalent of me holding them down while Mr. Twinkle sprays a can of whipped cream into their mouths.