Born to Be Brad (4 page)

Dessert Oasis

GRANDMA RUBY’S RECIPE FOR FRENCH SILK PIE

TO MAKE THE FILLING

1 cup sugar

¾ cup butter, cut up

3 squares of unsweetened chocolate, melted and heated through

1½ teaspoons vanilla

3 eggs

1 pie shell, baked and cooled (recipe below)

Cool Whip for the top (optional)

Using a steel-blade processor, combine sugar and butter until very smooth and light, stopping to scrape down the sides of the bowl. Leave the processor running, and add chocolate and vanilla through the feed tube. Add eggs one at a time through the tube and process until the mixture is smooth. Turn into cooled pie shell and chill several hours or overnight.

TO MAKE THE PIE SHELL

5 cups flour

2 tablespoons sugar

1 teaspoon salt

1 pound lard (Tenderflake preferably)

1 egg

Water

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Mix flour, sugar, and salt together, then cut in lard. Beat egg slightly in measuring cup, then add water to measure 1 cup of liquid. Mix together and roll into a 9-inch pie pan. Bake for 30 to 35 minutes.

My sister never took a guitar lesson, but she certainly loved to wear the damn thing around her neck. I have my own favorite accessory here: a Barbie doll. She’s naked because she’s changing outfits.

Ruby’s most important contribution might have been Marilyn Monroe. Our local supermarket, the Value Mart, was selling black-and-white photographs of Hollywood stars like Humphrey Bogart and the Three Stooges. But one day, there she was. I was twelve years old and holding this photo of her in a silver plastic frame with this border that was supposed to look like the lights of a dressing room mirror. I became obsessed with Marilyn—with her look, with her skin—yet I hadn’t seen any of her movies. So Ruby plopped me down in front of the television, put on
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,
and taught me to appreciate a good movie musical. All I needed to see was Marilyn in the pink dress singing “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” From then on, I was obsessed with blondes. When my aunt Kim got married, I refused to dance with anyone who didn’t have doll-colored hair.

Which sort of explains what happened next. In grade eight, my English teacher asked everyone in the class to prepare a presentation on someone we admired. You can guess who I chose. By now, photos of the late icon covered my bedroom walls. I had a Marilyn Monroe commemorative plate from the Franklin Mint hanging by my bed. Of course I couldn’t do just any presentation. I wanted to put on something as dramatic as, and worthy of, her life. And so I produced a video presentation, which my sister and I shot on my uncle’s video camera—the kind that was like a VCR with a lens attached to it. It was a two-day shoot, and my sister did all of the camera work. She’d complain, “My shoulder hurts.” And I’d shout, “Keep filming!” It was going to be my masterpiece, my homage to Marilyn if you will.

I was heavily invested in the project, which was something of a low-budget Ken Burns knockoff. My sister would zoom in on photos of Marilyn—first with Joe DiMaggio, then with Arthur Miller—and I’d narrate the story. “Her wide eyes, her moist lips, the soft curves of her body,” I said, reading off a script I’d typed up, trying to make eye contact with the camera. Later, viewers saw me, an overweight, prepubescent Brad Goreski, drinking ginger ale out of a wineglass—it was supposed to be champagne—toasting the actress’s glamorous life. The video was all kinds of inappropriate. I styled my cousin as Marilyn, in a wig we had left over from some Halloween costume and an evening dress hanging in my mom’s closet, which I don’t think she ever wore but was perfect here. I also included a naked photograph of Marilyn. I talked about her rough years in explicit, ridiculous detail. “She did not receive the love that every child receives,” I said, “so as a teenager she was a prostitute.” A
prostitute.
I felt like a major success that day. Until another girl in class had the audacity to make a video presentation, too. I sat in class thinking, Mine’s definitely better.

You’re the One That I Want!

GREAT FASHION MOMENTS IN MOVIE MUSICAL HISTORY

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
(1953)
Everyone knows the pink, strapless dress Marilyn wears to sing “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” But what’s maybe even more impressive is the film’s opening, where Marilyn and Jane Russell sing “Two Little Girls from Little Rock.” The long-sleeved gowns with the plunging neckline make this the most fabulous opening to a movie ever.

Summer Stock
(1950)
Judy Garland sings “Get Happy” wearing the iconic blazer with the hat, the hose, and the pumps—every designer has done their version of that look ever since. But it’s really about the red lip. And who doesn’t love this song? I didn’t think you could improve on this song until she and Barbra Streisand did a duet of it on
The Judy Garland Show
in 1963. Perfection.

Cabaret
(1972)
Yes, there was Liza Minnelli’s amazing performance as Sally Bowles, and the makeup and the hair. But to me, this is all about the green nails. It’s such a strange character choice and something that comes up in fashion over and over again. As I write this, it’s all about the jade nail. Liza did it first.

West Side Story
(1961)
Whenever I try something on and feel beautiful, I want to dance around the dressing room like Natalie Wood as Maria, singing “I Feel Pretty” in that simple white dress.

Grease
(1978)
I often feel like Olivia Newton-John’s character Sandy, who is reminiscent of Sandra Dee. She’s the goody-two-shoes, and so put-together with her cardigans. But we all have another side to our personalities—a more daring, sexy side. I’ve always been obsessed with her at the end of
Grease.
As a kid, I’d wait for that moment when she comes out as dressed in the leather jacket and the high-waisted pants with her hair blown out big. Everybody has a wild side, and this is a reference I come back to again and again.

Top Hat
(1935)
Ginger Rogers wearing the feather dress, with the perfect flow that floats on air and barely exists in our world? The combination of this light chiffon gown and Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire dancing together is a match made in heaven. I could watch that dress move as much as I could watch her dance.

But Ruby loved the video presentation, not for its aesthetics but for what it represented. Because all Grandma Ruby ever wanted was for me to be myself. She was perceptive in that way—a truth sayer and see-er for both of us Goreski kids. My sister dated a boy in high school, and when they broke up, Ruby said to her, “He wasn’t right for you. He never looked me in the eye. He would have held you back.”

Everything I Know About Fashion I Learned When I Was Five

PLAYING DRESS-UP ISN’T JUST FOR KIDS

The first question we ask ourselves in the morning is always the same: “What am I going to wear today?” Why is that? Because what we wear is our armor—it announces our identity while protecting us from the stresses life throws at us daily.

I am known for wearing bow ties, and I have something like 150 in my collection. Believe it or not, the bow tie started as a joke. My boyfriend bought me the first one while he was on vacation in London. We were going out one night with some old friends to a straight bar, and I thought I’d test it out, pairing a bow tie with a cardigan and a dress shirt—just to see what the reaction would be. Well, I found it was a conversation piece. In a good way. Strangers were coming up to me all night telling me how much they liked it.

“Believe it or not, the bow tie started as a joke.”

I was living in Los Angeles at the time, and the bow tie became a reaction to the laid-back, casual cool of L.A. It was a way to get noticed in a sea of people all trying to be noticed. And something was in the air. Labels like Thom Browne and Band of Outsiders were playing with shrunken proportions, and the bow tie seemed to go along with the playful silhouettes. There was a sense of humor to dressing up that I appreciated. For a while I was wearing tennis sweaters to the office. I’d sit there in a polka-dot tie and tennis whites wondering, Why am I dressed like this? In a way, it was a return to my roots, to the classic American, Ralph Lauren look I wore in the third grade. I realized I was playing a character.

“It was a way to get noticed in a sea of people all trying to be noticed.”

That changed the way I approached styling and style: Dressing up isn’t just for kids. We’re all playing characters—in the office, out with our loved ones. And style inspiration can come from anywhere. The other day I saw a box of Crayola crayons at the supermarket, which later inspired an outfit. I put on a candy-striped, rainbow polo shirt; a navy blazer; white jeans; and bright green high-top sneakers. Some days I wake up and feel like a chorus boy from the movie
Grease
. Some days I’m Danny Zuko, some days I’m Sandra Olsen. After a particularly long week I’m sometimes feeling the sad clown look—pairing a shawl-collared jacket with a sloppy Lanvin bow tie. Life is more fun when you’re playing different characters and not locking yourself into a look. Why be the goth girl all the time? Step outside of your comfort zone and don’t get locked into a uniform.

“Step outside of your comfort zone and don’t get locked into a uniform.”

“When I grow up,” I told Ruby, “I want to be either a makeup artist or a window dresser.” She didn’t flinch. Ruby only said, “Be a makeup artist. They make more money.”

I
had less-practical advice from my father. Though he was always around, he spent a lot of time in the garage. He was the kind of dad that was always building something, busy with the table saw. He enjoyed chopping wood in the forest near our house and then falling asleep in a chair in front of the TV. He wasn’t some weird mountain man. He was incredibly talented. He built the house we lived in from the ground up. I think part of that was just his wanting to get away from the stresses of home but also wanting to provide a beautiful place for his family to live. It was his way of showing us that he loved us. When he and my mother briefly split up, she went to Toronto and we remained with our father in Apple Valley. When I was getting dressed to go to a family event or a movie, he’d yell up to me from the stuck-in-the-seventies kitchen with its mustard-yellow appliances, “It’s not a fashion show! Hurry up!” But he was wrong. For me, every day was a fashion show.

“For me, every day was a fashion show.”

My father didn’t care much about what he wore. He had a mustache. He dressed in sweatpants and duck boots and if he was going out at night with my mom, it was polo shirts and blue jeans. There wasn’t a lot of variation. He was conservative in his beliefs, and quiet, too. With me, anyway. He and my sister seemed to understand each other. He played in a slow-pitch baseball league on Monday nights and my sister went to every game with him up until she went off to university. My mother and I—we had our own routine. On Thursday nights, we’d go food shopping and she’d buy fashion magazines for me, which I smuggled back to my room. Why the secrecy? Yes, my father had taken me trick-or-treating as Madonna. But I think he preferred the illusion. When I was too out front, too obvious with my first loves, he acted out. I came home from school one day to find that my Barbie dolls were gone, and it was no mystery what happened to them. More than once when Grandma Ruby would take me to the toy store, I’d pull a Barbie doll down from the shelf, and she’d smile at me and say, “We’ll have to sneak this one.”