Lesbians and Toaster Ovens.

Most people who visit our home realize very quickly that this is really and truly OUR home. There’s a bust of Cortez on the dining room table, a velvet Elvis card on the mantel, “house hippos” all over the place, and a Polaroid of my best friend Deb with her own nipple in her mouth on the fridge door. Did I mention that we have two fridges in our kitchen – a black one and a white one – and that they’re both covered in magnets and multiple magnetic poetry kits? There are dog toys all over the floor, computers and cables on every surface, and ten boxes of cereal on the shelf in the kitchen. There’s a story for absolutely everything, and it’s always interesting to see what item(s) people are immediately drawn to ask about – whether it’s Deb’s half-nekkid self or the rude poetry, or the name plate (stolen from a hotel) that reads “COFFEE” in block letters.

Given the other oddities of our home (the trunk from Iraq, the rock collection on the floor by the window, the dust-cover Christmas tree angel that sits on top of the entertainment unit all year ’round), referring to the toaster oven as my “lesbian membership toaster” seems perfectly normal to me – and certainly not the one thing that someone would pick to question.

Regardless, here’s the story:

A long while ago, one of the girls on WNET was talking about menstrual cramps and mentioned that she’d consider a mastectomy to remedy it. This spawned many jokes about how shocking it was for a lesbian (the person who made the statement) to not know about ‘the equipment’, since a mastectomy isn’t likely to get rid of cramps (though a hysterectomy would). The original writer said she was super tired and misspoke, then commented that, “The lesbians were here yesterday to take away my membership card and my toaster oven!” Being a lesbian is much like opening a bank account, you see.

A while later, I convinced Coffee that we needed a toaster oven – with just the two of us in the house, it doesn’t always make sense to fire up the gigantic oven to cook three little fish sticks (or whatever) and a toaster oven would be quicker to heat up, too. So we pulled together some wedding gift money and headed out to purchase one, and it’s been happily sitting on my counter ever since. Our lesbian membership toaster oven, purchased with the wedding money received at our very hetero wedding. Welcome to my world.