Famous People #43: Ketchup cupcakes and ketchup radio

Kaitlyn: A few weeks ago, Andrew sent me a photo of Chris Farley and Keenan Thompson covered in ketchup, with a Comic Sans overlay: “Taste test different and interesting ketchups with your friends!” There was no indication of what time this event would be happening, but there was a photo of Andrew’s favorite pineapple ketchup and another of Nickelodeon slime-green ketchup, which was re-released as a limited edition last year, and Andrew’s bottle hasn’t expired yet, or so he says.

Well, last night, the time came. Lizzie was at a wedding in Philadelphia, so don’t even ask. Friday night, I prepared for the ketchup party by making ketchup cupcakes from a recipe Andrew sent me in Slack earlier in the week while I was panicking about what I could possibly contribute to a ketchup-themed party that already had a tasting menu of over 18 ketchups, plus several different kinds of potato. I thought a bucket of scrambled eggs would be funny, but how well do scrambled eggs travel across a borough and then hold their shape and texture on a roof? I’ll let you answer that question in your head! I thought about making the cornflake chicken fingers from the Beanie Babies cookbook — which my mom served at every one of my birthday parties from 1998 to present — but am I really going to buy chicken for an undisclosed number of people? And then touch all that raw chicken?

So, Andrew sent me the link to the cake. And I was like, “If you show this recipe to anyone else I’m never talking to you again!” I simply refuse to have competition.

The batter smelled like pure ketchup. It was actually ketchup, brown sugar, white flour, butter, eggs, and some spices. The recipe called for two tablespoons of red food coloring, which is more than is in a single bottle of food coloring, and briefly stained our butcher’s block a hideous shade of fresh blood. I can’t tell you how much Fantastik I used to address the situation or how many variations of an explanation to Stephanie about the ruination of the butcher’s block I ran through in my mind. While the cupcakes were baking, I panicked, shot off some texts that were all basically “My whole apartment smells like KETCHUP and I’ve dyed everything KETCHUP!! I have an ear infection!! Everyone thinks they’re baby but actually only I am baby!!!”

This was the truth. The ear infection is a by-product of the infection in my lingual tonsils, which I didn’t know about at first but is now obviously the reason I spent the whole week exerting more than the normal effort to move my tongue to form words. That infection could be caused by anything, Ashley’s ENT doctor told me Friday morning before handing me prescriptions for an antibiotic and a corticosteroid. He said, “You’re going to be fine, you just need a little help” and I started crying. I know what it was caused by! And there are at least two people who should be told about it who I no longer have any way to contact! I’m such a brat — I think everyone leads consequence-free lives except me, which makes this all seem very unfair.

Twelve hours before, I’d been standing in the rain in the park with James and Julia listening to the National and thinking “this is good for my health,” but actually it was aggravating my body to the point of near-collapse. This is not a metaphor for anything, I’m just saying. James was wearing his backpack on the front of his body when he jumped up and yelled — along with extremely hot dad Matt Berninger — “The motorcade will have to go around me!” and I was like, haha, he’s right, we’re so young. I’m a festival! I’m a parade! On Saturday, when I ran into Tamar and Katie in the street, I was wearing tie-dye shorts and a black crop top listening to the very same song, excited about my new abs, and as I stopped to kiss our girl on the forehead I said “You caught me.” I had been bopping. “I’m the child bride!” I yelled. “I’m a perfect piece of ass!” A horde of young parents parted in the middle to get around us as I said this, and I did not care. What were they going to do, contradict me?

Anyway, fast forward. This timeline is confusing and a halfway decent editor would say try again. All this brings us to Ashley’s deck, where I force-fed her an advanced review copy of the ketchup cupcakes to make sure they were acceptable for the public. We laid there for two hours talking about professional success, then we went to Key Food to buy lemon seltzer. Ultimately, Ashley forgot herself and left the lemon seltzer sitting on the corner of Cortelyou and 16th street, maybe improving someone else’s night or maybe triggering police action, we’ll never know.

Our car drove us past a Sears Roebuck headquarters with bizarre art deco fonts — apparently Eleanor Roosevelt shopped for baby shoes there. Personally, I find the strangeness of Flatbush to be under-examined, and I felt this even more when Ashley and I got stuck between floors in Andrew’s elevator.

We were the first ones at the party, and it was too windy on the roof. I asked Andrew if I could borrow a jacket and he brought me a red one. Ketchup! We tried all of the ketchup, including the Nickelodeon slime, which turned my tongue green, so I told everyone not to look at me for 30 minutes. Ashley liked the yellow pepper ketchup the best, but I liked the beet. What else is there to say? Andrew is a perfect host because he thinks of everything. He had a radio shaped like a classic Heinz bottle, and he played the Yankees game, then a news station talking about drones and missiles. He set up an “illustration station” where you could use a restaurant bottle of ketchup to draw pictures on paper plates. He made smiley face fries and sweet potato fries and provided little red shot glasses to put your ketchups in. I started to feel better after my 400th tater tot. A boy whose energy I find alarming and a little physically intimidating texted to ask if I want to do something this week and I was like, sorry, can’t, my viruses are diverse and mid-treatment! I ate my steroids at the table with potatoes and some chai curry ketchup.

The usual employees of Vox Media were there and we had the usual conversations, largely repeating gossip we had already said to each other two or three times before. I can’t say it was uplifting. I could hear myself being annoying, and couldn’t even blame it on alcohol because I’d only been drinking blueberry-tangerine seltzer. I yelled “He’s not even a good writer! I’m sorry, can I say it?” about a mutual acquaintance and everyone kind of looked at me like, get a hold of yourself, but I kept going. When I was done, I said “I can’t even blame this on alcohol.”

So I took myself home early, and of course the girls were all there, eating Funfetti in the living room. I cut a piece of cake directly into my hand and ate it over the sink. At the very least, I’m going to watch the US women’s national team today knowing that I’ve kept an extremely American diet all weekend. My body needs all the fortified flour it can get right now, what can I tell you? Essentially all processed food is actually very nutrient-rich, stuffed with supplements to make patriots into superheroes — I learned this while writing about expensive Instagram-bait vitamin brands. This is how we won World War II, supposedly. This is how we will win the World Cup.