I'm Bill Cosby's wife. I like to cook--which is good, because he won't at all. That's the wife's role. He's grown in a lot of ways since his childhood, but that's a side of him that I've just had to accept.

It's hard to cook today. They're installing a better stovetop for me, and I'm grateful, but it gets in the way of dinner. And he gets mad if it's not on time. I'm trying to cook pancakes on top of a single brick. Little tiny pancakes one by one--all I can do. Mind you, this tiny surface is not due to the construction. I've never had a wider surface! That's why they're here--Bill finally bought me a mini-stove with one burner. Nine inches wide! Wide enough for a whole cooking pot or a frying pan! What luxury!

Cos comes home. He IS annoyed about the delay but I assert myself for once--"Do you know how hard it is to create a new and different dinner every night? Foods vary, cooking times vary--it's like writing a poem to order every day, like standup with the material changed every night."

Cosby apologizes at last. He says this isn't the only kitchen improvement coming. He's going to buy me a real refrigerator at last, not just that little old icebox.

I wake up and find I'm not Bill Cosby's wife.

NOTES

Cosby meant a lot of different things as I grew up. I never saw him perform, but I heard his comedy routines on records. In the tall tales of his childhood, his parents had classic sex roles, and in his "adult" standup routines he describes his wife as if she's another species: a woman. A generic woman.

Do I have that inside me too? Seems so... only rather than seeing myself as the privileged husband, I act out the role of a classic good wife, meek and making do, grateful for crumbs from his millions...

Cosby also means to me a guy who advocated child-welfare causes yet was a flack for an empty, even toxic food: Jello. The dream plays on his willful ignorance about food, nutrition and cooking, an ignorance that let him push crap for money. A very guy thing, and the dream hints it has roots in his old-fashioned, never-quite-discarded picture of gender roles. Hey, I make the money, food's not my territory. But it is, Cos, if you push the stuff.

Cosby's rich. Is he stingy? I have no idea. But I am. I saved up all my money at my last job, invested it well, and have been living on the proceeds for over three years now. Free from the rat race! But at a price. I'm REALLY stingy. Won't spend even on essentials. Worsens my anorexia--a real struggle just to eat and stay warm, with thousands in the bank!

The tiny stove: I write my dream-stories every night, a couple of thousand words... with a cranky, slow, antique computer! The keys are starting to jam. And the keyboard's built into the CPU in these old Amigas, there's no tower. A miracle of compactness for the time, but it means when you've beaten the keys to death, the whole thing's useless. Yet I've put off buying a new one, when it's a working tool for me, as basic as a stove or fridge.

I had mixed feelings about Cosby's "family" TV show--why were the kids ALWAYS wrong? Nine times out of ten the kids had to make a mistake and learn their lesson. The show maintained a blackout on the darker issues that plague so many American kids: ignorant parents, abusive parents, or good old-fashioned well-meaning, narrow-minded, self-righteous parents, trying to instill their God, their values, their sexual orientation, their racism, and all their dysfunctions into their kids.

Family-values rape.

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