the jelly donut variations

My family has a lot of weird catch-phrases and quotes and things, like any other family. Right now, tonight, I am thinking of two lines we’ve all traded on and off, over the years, in various and probably inaccurate incarnations:
“Thirty dollars worth of Chinese food! I can’t believe you ate thirty dollars worth of Chinese food!”
“Have you ever taken a jelly donut, and you suck out all the jelly, and then you put a Reese’s peanut-butter cup in the middle, and you put that in the oven until the peanut butter cup melts?”
The lines (or something like them) are both from the same movie, which I think none of us has seen more than once, but it became one of those family things.
The story about this movie, Fatso, is essentially the same story about my family and Harry and Walter Go to New York, to the point where I am probably mixing the two stories up, but no one else remembers either so it doesn’t matter. We were on vacation in Destin, Florida, watching TV one night … or else maybe we were home watching TV and semi-napping one rainy Sunday afternoon. I might have been 13, or 15. The details aren’t important.
My dad and I were flipping channels (manually … these were the bad old days before TV remotes) and found a Dom DeLuise movie on one of the independent UHF channels. My dad loves Dom DeLuise movies almost as much as he loves John Candy movies. (I think I’ve already mentioned the thing with The Cannonball Run and the Captain America mask.) Dom DeLuise was sitting around a kitchen table with several other large men, and the cabinets and refrigerator in the background were chained and padlocked.
My dad asked me to keep it on that channel for a minute, just so he could see, this looked funny. And it was … the guys were all on some diet program where they were supposed to keep one another from eating anything. But then they started talking about jelly donuts. Did you ever suck the jelly out of one and fill it with chocolate ice cream? No, wait, I got something better. You ever suck the jelly out of a donut and put a peanut-butter cup … and so on. Eventually the biggest guy goes crazy and ends up ripping all the chains and doors off the cabinets and fridge and I don’t remember if they actually found donuts but my dad and I were laughing our asses off. Also, we wanted to try the thing with the peanut-butter cup.
(We never did, although we did find out that you can put a triple-decker chocolate Moon Pie in the microwave very, very briefly so the marshmallow filling gets warm and the chocolate coating melts a bit and then you eat it with a fork and mmmmm.)
I don’t remember much about the rest of Fatso although we watched it until the end. Poor Dom DeLuise wanted to lose weight, he was in love with some pretty blonde woman he wanted to impress. His sister kept nagging him and yelling at him to lose weight because his fat cousin died of a heart attack. He tried and tried and eventually he gave up after picking up his large Italian family’s huge order of Chinese food and eating the entire thing (thus the line about the thirty dollars of Chinese food). He still ends up with the pretty blonde thing and they have lots of kids and we see from snapshots at the end that he doesn’t get any thinner. Very cute. Very sweet. The humor seemed a little Mel Brooks-ish at times, but that wasn’t a bad thing.
A few years later, when I got the film-geek bug, I looked up Fatso and found out that, surprisingly, it had been scripted and directed by a woman … the actress who played Dom DeLuise’s sister in the movie, Anne Bancroft.
I’ve read a bunch of articles and weblog entries about Anne Bancroft’s recent death and they all mention The Graduate, some mention The Miracle Worker, and a few mention various other supporting actress roles in films or even her stage work. But weirdly enough, when I heard about her death, I thought about the one movie she wrote and directed, unmemorable as it might seem otherwise. There weren’t many female directors in 1980 or even now for that matter, so even if the film wasn’t a success, I feel that deserves some recognition.
Besides, thanks to Ms. Bancroft, no one in my immediate family sees jelly donuts in quite the same way.