Pelosi and Boehner Meet, Talk Turkey
11.18.07

WASHINGTON DC -- The Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi (D-California), met this past Friday with her congressional counterpart, Republican Leader, John Boehner, to talk turkey. They met at the Fife and Rum Tavern, a seedy establishment known more for its pickled eggs and fifty-cent hotdogs than as a meeting place for Washington power brokers and cute boy pages.  Pelosi and Boehner wanted to establish that neither was an establishment kind of politician. They were just a couple of Eighth Congressional District representatives, though Boehmer won humility points being that his Eighth is in agricultural Ohio, while Pelosi’s Eighth is located in upscale San Francisco, with its fancy coffee shops and real estate so expensive that the price of one house could feed all of Cincinnati.

That was neither here nor there, as they had come to talk turkey. Pelosi opened with a sepia-tinted account of Thanksgiving in her childhood Italian home in Baltimore, the mayor of which was her beloved father, Thomas D’Alesandro Jr..  Her mama made Italian sausage stuffing that underlined Pelosi’s commitment to multiculturalism.

“You can imagine how exquisite Italian sausage stuffing tasted after being cooked in il tacchino…”

“Ill-what?” interposed Boehner, while throwing down a shot of Jack Daniels.

“Il tacchino – Italian for turkey, you rube.”

“Well, excuse me, Madame Speaker, for being just a simple country boy representing the real America – the America of apple pie, which, mind you, was served after every Thanksgiving meal at the Boehner house.”

“Fine,” snipped Pelosi, “have your bland Midwestern slop, but you can’t beat a zucca e aranci torta.”

“English, please. This is America.”

“Okay, Mr. Homogeneity. Zucca e aranci torta stands for pumpkin and orange tart.”

“And what’s so refined about pumpkins and oranges? That’s the problem with you liberal elites. You’re all talk, no substance.”

There ensued a debate about which congressperson was more family oriented, with Pelosi not helping her cause by using the term la famiglia, which had more connotations of mafia murder plots than quaint All-American Thanksgiving dinners. Boelhner increased the heat -- to a perfect 170 degrees for the turkey breast and 180 degrees for the thighs -- by reminding every patron in the bar that he had come from a family of 12 kids.

“Now that’s a family!” he bellowed.

Pelosi swallowed a pickled egg, and then went into the same Queen Bitch mode that had brought her to the top of the Capital Hill.

“No, representative Boehner, that’s a total lack of self-control. Christ, was there anything left of your mother’s uterus?”

“Hey, that’s my mother…”

“Shut up, you fool. If big families are so great, how come you only produced two daughters, hah? I gave birth to five children, the emphasis being that I was the one who carried them around for nine months and squeezed them out in the end. You like turkey so much? Try pushing five twenty-pound turkeys through your asshole, buddy, and then talk to me about…la famiglia.”

At this point, they were both feeling the effects of all the shots and beer. Pelosi and Boehner are both happy drunks, and so the conversation now reached a lighter, more amiable tone. They began to discuss the nuts and bolts of preparing a turkey, and how they both remembered the days when trussing the bird was done by hand instead of nowadays when the bird is bought with a hook and extra skin to allow the drumsticks to be easily tucked inside.  They both agreed that one should not overstuff the turkey, much how both parties tended to overstuff budgets with their pet projects, something Boehner had made a career of trying to keep under control. Sure Pelosi pushed to double the budget of the NIH, but, hell, this was no time to bring that up and ruin everyone’s good time at the Fife and Rum.  Also, one should create a self-basting turkey using flavored herb butter – a pull-yourself-up-the-boot-straps kind of seasoning technique.  But in the end, the trick was to know when to pull the bird from the oven, as there seemed to be no middle ground between a tasty, moist turkey and a dry, stringy one.

This was when the tipsy leaders of the 110th Congress leaned into each other and promised that their two parties would learn from the art of cooking a turkey about how to find that middle ground between the Democrats and the Republicans, and not to overcook the American government.