Mulligan!

Mulligan!!
I ran into this word, accidentally after many years of absence from my mental vocabulary. It happened by happenstance, whilst reading a post of a friend who accidentally had burned her soup, while cooking. Thank fully it was not one of my recipes.
“Mulligan!” she wrote, and I started to laugh.

“Such a wonderful little word!” I said to myself, one of those little jewels that pop back unannounced into the forefront of our minds.
Mulligan (i.e. Do Over) has such a wonderfully optimistic connotation. How beautiful life must be, for those of us, who actually get to experience it.
Imagine if anything you have ever done wrong in life, would be wiped clean by a simple…Do Over??!!
That would be beautiful!
But unfortunately, for most of us, life does not quite work that way.

Incidentally, I now remembered why I had obliterated that word out of my mental vocabulary. I knew there had to be reason as to why a word, with such a positive impact, had been eradicated from my memory.

It was about 10 years ago, I had been invited on the TODAY show. It was my first time and yet it was the most unnerving. What could go wrong… well let me count the ways!

Katie Couric was the host at that time. A truly delightful person. Everyone in the crew loved her and she was a pleasure to work with.
It was unfortunate for me, but as my segment was suddenly cut shorter, because of time I found myself panicking inside my head.
I was rushing to finish my dish and wondering : “What would 20 million people think of me, if I burn my food on national TV?”.
It soon became apparent that whilst there might only be one minute left, the poor unprepared sap,( “me” in this case) can still die a thousand deaths.

So it happen that as I was managing many pots and pans at once, trying to be as entertaining as possible , I noticed that my garlic in the pan had started to burn.
In other words it had gone from a pale beige, to a deep, dark, blackened tint, akin to charcoal.
I said a prayer or two in my mind, hoping that the TV camera was not going to focus on this and instead… BOOOM fullscreen!!!!
Now America was able to enjoy my version of garlic briquettes.

To my further shame this was something that Katie illustrated with great humor and panache.
Inside my head all I could hear was: “ Mulligan, please I need Mulligan!!!”
When Katie ask me,: “ Nick is the garlic supposed to be this black?” “
I coolly responded : “ Absolutely not, but I wanted America to see what could go wrong!” Whilst everyone around me laughed out loud , in reaction to my wit, I stood there with a frozen smile , still screaming inside my head: “ Mulligan, please, I want a Mulligan!’’

Suffices to say: “ I never got a Mulligan” but something must have gone right, because a month later ,I was asked on Good Morning America .
This time though, I did not burn the garlic!