My O-bitch-uary

My living Obituary - family and friends bitching about me.

Jane Mundy: When she’s bad, she’s better?

Jane, being the oldest of five, was always in charge – she bossed everyone around. Jackie, 18 months younger than Jane, got the brunt of it. “She was always putting me in danger to protect herself — whenever we got caught, Jane always blamed me,” Jackie whines, even today. After watching The Blob, a 1958 horror movie, Jane made Jackie look under their shared bed every night for monsters.

Jackie goes on. “I was about six when Jane told me to feel the inside of a vice grip in our friend’s garden shed. She tightened the clamp and left me for dead.

“We had to do the dishes every night. Jane insisted on washing and I dried everything. But when I washed, Jane made me dry pots and pans because it was part of the washing up. Why didn’t she ever dry pots and pans? And she blamed me for everything. Like the time we cut all the sunflowers in the neighbour’s front garden. It was her idea. She was just nasty.”

Jane was also entrepreneurial as a child. “She made me and some neighbourhood kids memorize Mary Poppins songs and charged their parents to see the show. Around that same time, she had an early morning paper route and made me go along with her. I don’t remember ever getting paid.”

From an early age, Jane was also a little criminal. When they moved to Canada from England, Jane and Jackie canvassed their ‘hood for sponsors on the “Miles for Millions” walk. They completed 26 blistering miles, but Jane apparently pocketed the loot.

The girls were always outside. They got kicked out of the house after breakfast and told not to return until tea time – 4 p.m. “We spent a lot of time poking around ponds, netting anything that moved. Jane caught sticklebacks, but made me take them out of the net – I always got stabbed by sticklebacks,” remembers Jackie.

Most kids growing up in 1950s England knew this nursery rhyme, but Jackie thought it was written for Jane.

There was a little girl who had a little curl
right in the middle of her forehead.
When she was good, she was very, very good
but when she was bad, she was horrid.

Their dad doted on Jane. When she was a baby, he entered Jane into “most beautiful baby” contests and proudly displayed trophies on the mantelpiece next to her photos with a head full of blonde curls. Another example? He only took her, not his wife Pam or the other kids, to the James Bond movie Goldfinger – Jane was 10 years old. Jackie wanted a dog, but was never allowed. “Dad got Jane a dog for her 13th birthday. I walked him all the time, Jane just played with him,” Jackie complains.

Wait, there are more complaints. “Mum found Lima beans under the dinner table and Jane said I put them there. She hated Lima beans. If one of us didn’t own up we both had to stand in the corner, faces to the wall for what seemed like hours. And if we didn’t eat our dinner, we got it for breakfast.” Jackie notes their mother was a terrible cook and that’s likely why Jane became a great cook.

“My big sister left home when I was a kid, but I have fond memories of her visits back to Ottawa, like the time we went to my cottage,” says Jill, the youngest sister. “Jane was a foodie, a chef and a food critic, and on this occasion, she was a vegetarian. But after partying around the campfire all night, I caught her eating a hotdog.

Jane and Jill

“Another time Jane flew home [to Ottawa from Vancouver] to cater my wedding for 120 guests, no sweat for her despite going downtown with my brother for several cocktails the night before my big day. Apparently, she was showing off years of practicing yoga by doing the limbo. Yet she still managed to pull off my fantastic wedding dinner all by herself: my friends, who were supposed to help, didn’t because they were all scared of her. Love her to the moon and back, especially when we’re partying.“

Jane always wanted to be a writer, but cooking also got in the way. She left home just after her sixteenth birthday, saved enough money for a flight to England and hitch-hiked to Turkey and back. During that time she honed her cooking skills at a taverna in Greece. Back in Canada, and after several career changes, including dental assistant and vintage clothing store proprietor, she funded her literary education at the University of Victoria by continuing a cooking career. After moving to Vancouver in 1986, she landed a job at Reel Appetites. In typical Jane fashion, five years later she bought it and grew the business into the biggest film catering company in Canada.

Denys, one of her 40 or so employees, remembers parties at Jane’s house. “She’s always a great hostess, whether a dinner party, a cocktail party or just a party-party — she always goes all out. She’s generous, fun and quick-witted. We were a crazy bunch of misfits, prone to drinking too much and laughing too loud. In that regard, Jane always led the pack. She loves her cocktails and loves to laugh, and she has an explosive personality (read temper). At the time, it was all fun and games until someone crossed her. Her laugh was open-mouthed and much like a short scream. A cackle is exactly what it was, what you imagine a witch would sound like before she killed you!

Boss lady

I remember one such party. We had all congregated at Jane’s for no particular reason, might have been because it was Friday, TGIF! We needed no better reason than that. There were about 10 or 12 of us mingling throughout the house. Jane was in the kitchen whipping up some sort of “new amazing appetizer” that she had just discovered in the bottom of her freezer! No, that was another party. She was doling out chocolate cake, it was somebody’s birthday. Whatever, by this point we were advanced to party-party drinking level.

There was a new member to our tasteful group of ragtags. This was not unusual because Jane had just discovered online dating and I really always admired how she could so easily lower her standards in order to find “company.”

Jane always loved other animals too and had many dogs – real ones. At the time, Spike and Daisy, two slightly crazed Jack Russell terriers, were the cheins de saisons. I had gone out on the back porch to join a bunch of us, drinking, smoking and laughing.

When Jane came outside she saw that her new beau was feeding chocolate cake to Spike, her “main man” pooch. Big mistake, buddy! (For those not in the know chocolate is bad for pups.) She flipped, both up and down! Poor guy didn’t know what hit him. After a few minutes of screaming he was exiting the garden gate. We were all a bit stunned by the suddenness of her reaction, but not surprised. The whole mad ‘zero-to-sixty in 10 seconds’ of it. But at the same time, we were amused, and we loved drama, especially when it didn’t stop the party. Our concern for Jane’s emotional state was immediately extinguished when, as soon as he was gone, she announced, ‘Good riddance, I was over him anyway.’ Then with her signature maniacal laugh and her eyes back, ever so slightly, she exclaimed, ‘Who needs a drink’?”

On her doctor’s advice (stress), in 2000 Jane gave up Reel Appetites and reinvented herself again, this time realizing her dream. She met the editor of Vancouver Magazine at a writing class, got a few food articles published and within a few years became a full-time freelance writer. Jane branched out to travel writing – talk about a dream job. She met Joanne Blain at a travel writer event, they discovered a mutual love of dogs and became best pals. Over the next ten years, they travelled the world together on various assignments.

According to Joanne, “Jane’s good friends know that she has many virtues. You never go hungry or thirsty even if you dropped in on her unannounced — you’d have a drink in your hand and something to nibble on within two minutes of walking through the door. She was kind to all animals and most people, with the notable exception of animal-control officers on the prowl for off-leash dogs and grocery-store employees stocking the shelves with California produce when the local stuff was in season.”

Joanne describes Jane as, “pretty much a one-woman show in the kitchen.”

“On the rare occasions when she accepted an offer of help, you were best to think of yourself as a lowly and obsequious prep cook — do exactly what you were told, exactly the way she told you to do it, and say “yes, chef” a lot (she likes that). Usually, though, you wouldn’t be pressed into service. Even when she was making bouillabaisse in a friend’s kitchen in France, swearing a blue streak as she tried to gut spiny fish with dull knives, she didn’t make anyone else suffer with her. ‘Just make me a gin and tonic!’ she said loudly, when help was offered.”

Patience, however, is not one of her virtues, adds Joanne. “She speaks rapidly and often in shorthand, too impatient to add the context that would make her utterances comprehensible to all but psychics and good friends who already know the back story. This gets worse when she’s excited about something, like the time she saw her first cookbook, newly released, on the shelves of a bookstore in the Okanagan. She snatched up a copy, ran over to the sales clerk and said, ‘Do you want me to sign this?’ The clerk froze, wondering why this crazy woman wanted to scrawl her name in a book she hadn’t bought. Luckily, a good friend was there to say, ‘Jane, perhaps you should mention that you wrote the book,’ at which point the clerk exhaled and gathered up all the copies in the store for her to sign.

Her temper, once lit, burns like a Roman candle, red-hot and fast. If she ever greets you with a casual ‘hey, buddy’ while walking rapidly towards you with a glint of steel in her eyes, you’re in big trouble and about to get a blast of fire-breathing scorn. You would be well advised to run like hell and not look back. Whatever you did, you were definitely wrong.”

Then one day that little girl
Brushed away that little curl
Away from the middle of her forehead
Now she is good
She is very, very good
And nobody thinks she is horrid!

Well, maybe that last line isn’t true. More like this quote from Mae West: When I’m good I’m very good, but when I’m bad I’m better.