Don't open that door...

So last night when I was watching TV, I saw a commercial for this new baking soda thingy that goes in the refrigerator to keep it smelling fresh. Baking soda absorbs odors, the reasoning goes, so therefore any funky weird smells in the fridge will be eradicated. To prove the point, the commercial showed the baking soda thingy sitting inside a refrigerator, right next to a very large onion, an uncovered block of what looked like blue cheese, a few cloves of garlic, and a big parfait glass full of pudding. Pudding? I didn’t quite understand that one, until the commercial moved along and cut to a shot of a woman enjoying her baking-soda-fresh pudding parfait. To be honest, the whole commercial kinda made me feel sick. I mean, I don’t care HOW much baking soda is in my fridge – if my pudding is sitting right in the middle of a pile of onions, garlic, and stinky cheese, I’m NOT going to eat it. That’s just the way I am. And who leaves a big block of uncovered cheese sitting in the fridge anyway? That’s like a science experiment waiting to happen…

The worst refrigerator I ever happened upon belonged to my piano teacher Mrs. Bona – the one whose daughter I used to babysit on a weekly basis. I always had to open the fridge to retrieve whatever dinner was sitting on the shelf for her, but I hated going into that fridge. It was like opening Pandora’s box – pulling open that refrigerator door was like unleashing a hideous curse of bad smells and horribly unappetizing sights into the kitchen. Every time I heard the “wooosh” of the opening door, I would expect a frightening spirit to emerge and proclaim itself to be “the Ghost of Perishable Foods Past.” The plate of food I’d have to pull out for little Danielle would be half-covered with plastic wrap – which was, inevitably, slightly greasy and dotted with fingerprints. How many times had that same bit of plastic wrap been used? Did Mrs. Bona have butter on her hands when she wrapped the plate? Why could there never be a clean piece of plastic wrap in that stupid fridge??

One of my refrigerator nightmares occurred when I was living in my first apartment with my roommate Lori. Lori was an “aspiring model” (who, at 5 foot 4 and a size 6, was obviously never going to make it in the world of fashion – everyone knows you have to be 5’11’’ and a size zero…) and she was meticulous about her appearance. Every eyebrow hair had to be in place, every pair of shoes had to match every bag… the living room had to be perfect, because that’s the room people saw the most – and the couch, which was Lori’s couch, had to be treated with kid gloves. You could sit on it, but definitely not lay on it… and God forbid you allow a shoe to touch it – all Lori Hell would break loose. She always liked to brag that her couch was custom-made and it cost two thousand dollars… ugliest two thousand dollar couch I’ve ever seen. Some time I’ll have to tell the story about how Rick threw up on it when he had food poisoning. I never told her about that…

Anyway… Lori was careful about everything except the refrigerator. She would buy all kinds of fruits and vegetables, swearing for the millionth time that THIS time her diet would stick and she’d fit into a size four. But, after every one of her grocery trips, she’d end up ignoring the fruits and vegetables and eat nothing but Slim Fast for a few weeks. There was one particular time when I realized Lori’s vegetables had been sitting in the fridge for who-knows-how-long, and, with slight trepidation, I decided to open the drawer she used on the bottom of the fridge. Whatever those vegetables had been, they’d been rendered unrecognizable. The entire drawer was filled with a mushy, greenish-brown liquid. For someone who was so careful about being neat, the mush-filled vegetable drawer was like the worst offense I could think of. I would’ve MUCH rather seen Lori wearing a clashing shoe/bag combo. I ended up cleaning the whole thing myself, because I couldn’t stand the thought of that stuff sitting in the bottom of my fridge.

Ever since then, I’ve been careful about checking all the fruit and veggie drawers in my own refrigerator, just to make sure I haven’t left anything sitting around too long. And I’ve never needed any kind of nifty baking soda thingy to soak up weird smells, so I guess I’ve done a decent job. But if I ever want to surround my pudding with onion and garlic and cheese (eeeeewwwwww), I’ll know what has to be done…