Paula's Party

My wife watches a lot of the Food Network. One of her favorite program hosts is Paula Deen. She is a celebrity chef,the co-owner of two restaurants (The Lady and Sons and Uncle Bubba's Oyster House) in Savannah, Georgia, and the author of a number of cookbooks. Her programs are entitled Paula's Party and Paula's Home Cooking.

According to my wife, Mrs. Deen (actually the surname of her first husband) is authentic. She does not seem as if she is acting, or as if she is aware that she is in front of a camera (and that she'd better behave herself). Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that she understands many of the struggles her audience has gone through, because she herself has had to struggle to get where she is today.

In her memoir, It Ain't All About the Cookin;. she discusses many of those struggles. Born in the late 1940s, her family was not exactly rich (to put it mildly). That didn't stop her from hanging with the popular crowd; she was a cheerleader with many friends and a lover whom she dated steadily during her high school years. (This was back in the days when even if you had a physical relationship with your lover, you called him or her a boyfriend/girlfriend.) That was about when she met her first husband, Jimmy Deen - yes, his last name is pronounced the same way as entertainer Jimmy Dean's.

Her relationship with Mr. Deen amounted to a whirlwind romance; they married almost right after she got out of high school, contrary to the wishes of her father (who wanted her to train as a dental hygienist). It didn't take her long to realize her father might have been right about her hasty marriage after all. While she was married to him, she suffered debilitating panic attacks, and she also had agoraphobia (a condition which limited her to her house because she was so afraid of going out the door. She finally worked up the nerve to leave him after twenty-five years, two boys (Jamie and Bobby) and a mountain of debt and misery.