Please Try

Tonight, let's start with the Carson Christmas plate, part 2, in which we feature: Homemade Snickers!

This takes all day, sort of. You make it in four layers, taking time between each layer to let things set.

Chocolate Caramel Candy

Even better the second day. If they last that long.


I'm cheating on the Finished Book Pile, since it's taking me quite a long time to finish our featured selection: Model by Michael Gross. It's nonfiction, "the ugly business of beautiful women," weighing in at just under 500 pages.

The fun parts are the discovery stories of all these posing beauties; also a little bit about how modeling agencies started. John Robert Powers was an out-of-work actor who found himself running a clearing house for movie extras. He suddenly thought, "Hey, there are commercial photographers out there looking for models. And I know dozens of out-of-work actors and actresses. Why not bring them together?"

The book also details the wars between modeling agencies, stealing one another's girls. In fact, too much detail. Sometimes I get the feel that every paragraph equals an author's note card (must have been 3200 miles of note cards, laid end to end) and he tells me about agents, photographers, editors, names names names of people I never knew or needed to know.

But here I am, sticking with it. Right now, I'm in the '70s, where everybody is snorting coke while they work, although I notice that many of the real supermodels stayed away from the drugs, which seemed to contribute to the longevity of their careers. At any rate, a great deal of mischief goes on, but doesn't count as cow patties, because it is rendered such a reporter-like tone. And as the book progresses through the years, the pay rates keep going up, from $5/hr in the '30s to $25,000/day in the mid-'90s.

Even though I'm taken with the tarnished glamour of it all, I think one retired agent summed it up best when she said (and I paraphrase) We put these magazine pictures before the public and say, You will never look like this, but please try.