I climb aboard Airtran flight 215 with all the other New Yorkers flying home for Memorial Day weekend.   When I land in Ohio, I will be struck, as I always am, by how white and how fat everyone is at the airport.  Then I will immediately head to the nearest Arby’s.

While I allow myself to eat like an Ohio native,  I  must acknowledge that my family and I are doing our best to shake up the racial dynamic.  I am, as you probably know, engaged to an African American.  Meanwhile, my younger sister lives with her Asian-American boyfriend, and my older sister charmingly named her first-born son Issac Breitzmann, so to outsiders it may appear that we have a Jew.  Prior to all this mixing I never paid much attention to the homogeny of my home state, but, as my fiance would say, “My eyes have been opened,” and they can’t be shut now.

However, I have yet to land in Akron because intermittent thunderstorms have delayed our flight and we sit on the tarmac for an hour, then two.  The flight attendants pass out lemonade and I thumb through the latest edition of Real Simple, looking for recipes.  My relatives who are hosting me this weekend– and throwing me my first bridal shower–  have  decided that Saturday night’s dinner should be a pot luck.  All of us– even out of towners!–  have to provide a side dish.

I get this news in an e-mail, which I read, then promptly dismiss to the back of my mind.  I’ll buy chips or something.  But in a later conversation with my cousin, I  find out  this is unacceptable.

“Can you make a dip or something?” she asks in a tone which suggests I am killing the fun.

“I can buy a dip,” I thought.  But then I remembered my New Favorite Recipe.  “Oh!  I can make cucumber soup.  Do you have a food processor?  Okay, then all I need is sour cream, cucumbers and rice wine vinegar.  And mint, but that’s optional.  Do you have a little cayenne pepper?”

“Well,” she replies reluctantly.  “It’s just that we’re grilling brats and hamburgers and, I mean, cucumber soup is just a bit…”

I am a disgrace to the Midwest.  Not only have I brought home a black fiance, but I’ve lost touch with what people eat at cookouts.

“It’s a cold soup,” I protest, knowing the battle is lost.

“Katie’s making cole slaw,” Sara suggests.

“Katie is not making cole slaw,” I reply.  “Derrick is making cole slaw .”  Derrick, her boyfriend, heads an underground supper club in New York and is currently dry-aging wild boar in his apartment.  His making cole slaw is like my making ice.  I decide to level with her.

“Look, I realize everyone else in this family loves to cook, but I don’t.  Unless it has to do with a crock pot or baking.  And I know Yvonne’s sending a cake.  Can’t I just sit this one out?”

“How about a nice fruit salad?”

I’m not sure how we became these people.  I’m not sure how Sara became the mother of three suggesting I make fruit salad, while I became the person with the ethnic fiance offering to make, as I did in the next breath, an Indy 500 cocktail.  In the next breath I realized I couldn’t afford to buy booze for upwards of 30 people.  I turned to the fiance for guidance.

“When you go home, you don’t have to make anything,” I said.

“That’s true.”  He’s from the South, and when we go to his  home there are flapjacks and sausage waiting for you at breakfast and his mother makes us biscuits out of honest-to-God lard.

“Why don’t you make rice?,” he suggests.  “You could put a bullion cube in it.”

We’d be hopeless in Ohio.

As it turns out, I used my time on the plane to dig up a lovely recipe for green beans in the magazine, which featured “29 Effortless Summer Recipes.”  And when we landed in Ohio, I saw four people of color at the gate along with one midget, so it shows that times, they are a-changing.  Unfortunately, all five were still obese.  We’ll see how the rest of the weekend goes.

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