Scarbrough Mark - Goat: meat, milk, cheese

I LIED AND I WAS WEARING MAKEUP.

Not a lot. Just concealer and foundation. No lipstick, for heavens sake.

First off, its a bit ironicor funny or tragic or somethingthat I, a gay guy who tried to play it straight for years, ended up in a career where Im expected to wear makeup whenever the cameras are rolling and the lights, blaring.

Truth be told, Ive never really gotten comfortable with the spackle. I dont do drag. Dont go to drag shows. Dont even like them. Maybe it was all those years I spent in the closet. I dont need to pretend Im something Im not. I already did that. With a wife and six-course-dinner parties. To great success.

These days, I do my best. Picture this: me, behind the scenes of some national TV show, sitting in front of some makeup artist with blemish pencils and greasepaint trowels wedged between her lips, getting pasty gunk dabbed on my face, all the while jumpy as hell that whatever is in the skillet out on the set is going to burst into flames any minute.

Around me in the dressing room, serried in front of klieg light mirrors, are the shows celebrities. I swear to God, theyre usually reading about themselves in the tabloids. Did they forget where they had dinner last night? I once saw one highlighting passages with a yellow marker.

Bruce usually tells me to settle down, but this much I know: no amount of makeup can cover up words. An age spot? Oh, sure. Claiming to be sixty when youre really a hundred and thirty-seven? You bet. But a lie gets caught by the mikes.

Mine did. Heres how it happened. About five years ago, Bruce and I sold a TV show. Sold it, I might add, without ever shooting a pilot. Sold it with nothing but a pitch on a piece of paper: a show all about the process of what it takes to write a cookbook, the successes and failures.

Sounds great, no? But heres the problem: When you sell something with just words, you eventually have to produce said thing in the flesh. You know, like with online dating. Somebody eventually has to show up at the door. And theyd better be good, what with all that buildup. More like, theyd better have been accurate.

As I had to be that morning. I found myself makeupped and standing under the lights, desperate to vindicate the words wed used. Despite the pressure, our executive producer was a kind man, a Borscht Belt comic with a clipboardand not what Id imagined producers were like. Id been trained on I Love Lucy, on Dore Schary.

You sure youre OK with this? he said with a chuckle.

The lie, that is. Because it was. And we all knew it. But it was a little late to back out, what with all the directors, editors, assistants, sound guys, and cameramen.

I glanced at Bruce for support.

Hey, its reality TV, he said.

Oh, right. Still created and crafted, just not by a formal script. They rely on run-of-the-mill liars.

Of which I am not one. I grew up under the heel of Southern Protestants. As I had been told repeatedly, the worst thing would be to be caught with a lie in your mouth at the moment of the rapture. One minute youre telling someone you just love that pink chenille sweater and then in midsentence youre telling it to Jesus.

Im not an actor. (Well, except for those thirty-five years where I pretended to be straight.) But we had to build a story for the cameras about writing a cookbook. So we came up with this doozy: Bruce and I had already finished The Ultimate Cook Booknine hundred brand-new recipesbut wed somehow forgotten to put a brownie recipe in it.

Mind you, those were those heady days before Facebook, Twitter, and the rest. Back then, cookbooks were trying to compete with the Internet by being the Internet: a zillion recipes packed tight on the pages. If you could get everything in there, people wouldnt go online. Shoot, we had to have put a brownie recipe in there just to get them out of the chat rooms.

Whats more, Bruce and I had already written a brownie book. Why would we forget such a recipe when it came to writing our so-called ultimate book?

And then there was this niggling detail: There were brownie recipes in the book.

With all that in mind, here was the scenario: Bruce was being the happy homemaker, throwing together a quick lunch of poached salmon in a dill-cucumber-yogurt sauce for our ever-so-fabulous life, and I was writing away at the kitchen table. Suddenly, I stood up, horrified. I fluttered the page proofs at him, pointed to my laptop, and declaimed, Bruce, I just realized we forgot to include a brownie recipe in the book!

I said it. And said it again. And said it again. Because it sounded like a lie. To me, to Bruce, to everyone. We watched it over and over on playback. It was wrong. And it was already midmorning.

I sidled up to the producer. You know what? There are brownie recipes in the book.

So Ive heard. He smiled. Again and again.

I know, I know. But listen: Theres no goat in the book.

He said nothing.

I laughed.

He still said nothing.

Because thered already been way too many discussions about it.

First, between Bruce and me. When we started to write that big book, we pitched back and forth about including goat. How could it be the ultimate cookbook if there was no goat? Wed written a recipe for seared foie gras, for Petes sake. But no goat meat. Or goat milk.

Second, thered been discussions with this very producer. The day Id pitched goat to him for the first episode, he reared back and looked at me over his glasses. Were not airing this in Egypt.

But...

Mark, people love brownies.

People love goat.

Where?

Across the world. The Caribbean. South America. Asia. More and more, right here at home. I thought Id risk it. Hell, I love goat.

He eyed me, then laughed. Oh, you goyim with your ideas. No goat. Brownies.

But...

Brow... nies.

Even if he was turning into Mr. Mooney, I could have continued to argue my point. Certainly, the last decade had watched goat cheese come into its own. It was no longer just a fancy, Frenchified product, adored by culinary snobs.

And goat milk? It was in almost every supermarket, thanks mostly to the tireless efforts of a handful of producers.

Even the meat was coming into its own, served high and low in restaurants and some home kitchens across the United States.

But not that day on the set. We did the brownies. And I could feel the lie rankle the back of my neck, like wool in August. There was a truth behind the lie: Wed forgotten goat. It was what was missing.