Backstage with Julia by Nancy Verde Barr Page B

functional kitchens I ever worked in—except for the counters. Just as she always requested that her demonstration counters be higher than the norm, she'd had her home counters designed and built to accommodate her height. It was practical for her but a bear for me. I could manage most things at the awkward height, but I simply could not roll pastry on them. I was too short to get the leverage I needed, so Julia provided me with a child's stool to stand on. It was effective, but standing on the stool made me feel like a kid, and I couldn't help but laugh at myself as I pushed her massive rolling pin over sheets of pastry dough. Liz loved to emphasize my little-girl-in-Mama's-kitchen feeling by dragging into my vision a small sign that Julia kept in the counter corner. It read, "I wasn't there. I didn't do it. It was the little people."

    My sons, Brad and Andrew, at Julia's house in France with poussiquette Minou.
    The "little people" sign did not charm me nearly as much as the paintings and photos of cats that decorated the few smidgens of free wall space. When I asked Julia about them, she told me she loved poussiquettes . She didn't have one in Cambridge, just the wall images, but she had Minou in France, and she reached into her daybook and pulled out the cat's photo that she always carried with her. Some years later, I discovered why Julia was so fond of Minou. She was a lively ham of a cat. My sons and I stayed in Julia's house in France when she was not there, and poussiquette introduced herself to me in the middle of a pitch black night while I was sound asleep in Julia's bed. She entered the room from outside by leaping up to pull down the handle of the bedroom's French door and then pounced on me, frightening me nearly to death. I called Julia from France to tell her that her cat was diabolical; she told me to give her some fresh hamburger and she would stop assaulting me.
    Each trip to Julia's Cambridge house was like opening a surprise package that held another dimension of her personality. On one visit, when I walked into the hallway I immediately saw a very elderly, stooped woman walking up the stairs to the second floor. She had a firm hold on the banister and was obviously struggling with each step.
    "Should I help her?" I whispered to Julia, assuming she was an elderly relative.
    "No. That's my housekeeper. She's used to it." The woman had to be ninety! And she did the laundry, ironed, and dusted that enormous, three-story house with a small dust rag that she kept clutched in her arthritic hand. Julia had employed her for years and wouldn't for a minute let that loyal woman feel that she had outgrown her usefulness. Julia was much too kind to let her go because of details as insignificant as poor posture and a halting gait. She did hire a professional cleaning company, however, to come in on a regular basis to wipe up what that dear old woman missed.
    The two questions I am asked most frequently about Julia are "Did she ever see the Dan Aykroyd spoof of her on Saturday Night Live ?" and "What did she think about it?" An early visit to Julia's answered both: yes, she saw it and she loved it. She kept a videotape copy of Aykroyd's 1979 performance under the television in her kitchen so she could show it to anyone who had missed it. Usually when people ask me about the tape, they wonder if Aykroyd's stumbling about while taking swigs from a bottle of booze offended Julia. Not at all. She had a marvelous sense of humor that was expansive enough to include all well-done parodies about her. What never did amuse her were the countless attempts to imitate her voice, as impossible as it was to resist doing. Those she dismissed with a curt "I don't sound like that." In fact, most people's imitations sound more like Aykroyd than Child.
    When I admitted that I had never seen the tape, she immediately popped it into the VCR, and she and Paul laughed with me as though they were seeing it for the first time. When