Dinner Will Be Televised
Helen Goldsmith
Word Count 448
It is 1977. I am a student at UC Berkeley. My father and mother are separated. A friend of my mother’s from nursing school invites my mother and me to their house for Thanksgiving. They live in Westlake, a sleepy suburb south of San Francisco. We will join my mother’s friend, her husband and two of their adult children.
My mother and I park in front of the house and walk up the steps to their home. There are strangers already on the stoop ringing the doorbell. One of the people looks vaguely familiar. It turns out to be a reporter from a local television station. They want to air a segment that evening about a quintessential family Thanksgiving.
Had the family volunteered to be in a pool of potential participants in local news stories? Had the reporter or crew randomly chosen their address from the telephone book? It turned out that the homes on their block provided unobstructed access to Sutro Tower, a telecommunications tower erected a few years earlier to provide improved television reception to the residents of hilly San Francisco. The crew had knocked on doors until they found a family willing to let them in.
The crew told us to enjoy our day, that we wouldn’t even notice they were there. Very hard to do with cameras, hot lights and wires everywhere! Not to mention needing to put off carving the turkey for at least an hour until it was time to air the live news segment. Having hosted dozens of my own Thanksgiving dinners over the past 40 years, I appreciate how frustrated our hostess must have been for the timing of her meal suddenly to be at the mercy of the media.
My mother had brought dessert, using a recipe for persimmon pudding that she’d found in the San Francisco Examiner. Persimmons were virtually unknown in those days. The recipe was called “Dr. Kinsey’s Persimmon Pudding,” created by the famous sex therapist who in an earlier life had been a cookbook author.
During the broadcast, the reporter turned to my mother and said: “Mrs. Goldsmith, I understand you brought dessert this evening?”
“Yes,” she replied. “I brought persimmon pudding.”
“And the recipe is from the sexologist Dr. Kinsey? Is it an aphrodisiac?”
My reserved, immigrant mother was speechless. She spent her entire life hiding in the background and avoiding prying eyes of strangers. However, when faced with a direct question on live television, somehow she found a few words to mumble in response. For once, it was impossible for her to stay out of the spotlight. As we drove home, she was embarrassed and uncomfortable, feeling no gratitude that day, doubtless thinking she’d never accept a dinner invitation again.
Helen is a writer and retired university administrator living in San Francisco. In 2017, she discovered a trove of family papers spanning over a century and began a blog about her family focusing on a different document each day. Her process includes integrating traditional storytelling and hand analysis, an occupation her Turkish grandfather pursued in Vienna in the 1930s. Helen holds degrees in French, counseling, and law.