What Sally Jessy Raphael Can’t Live Without

I think no one uses it anymore. In fact, if you go to a grocery store, it’s way down on the bottom shelf. But I have Clorox in every bathroom, because, No. 1, I can take any stain out of anything with a Q-tip and Clorox. No. 2, it’s great for mold on windowsills. And No. 3, I bet you didn’t know you can use Clorox in your water when you have flowers. You put it in the water when you get a bouquet. I also have long red hair that gets stuck in the drain of the sink. Some people use Drano or something like that. I just use Clorox, and the drain opens up and eats all the red hair stuck in there. That’s Clorox. It just does a ton of things.

I’m a rice girl, not a pasta girl. And I use soy sauce on meat, on vegetables, on just about anything. I use it as a substitute for salt, and it’s healthier. And I also have non-salty soy sauce. I’ll bet you didn’t know that you can put a few drops of it on vanilla ice cream and it gives a fabulous taste. I’m probably the only non-Asian with a gallon of soy sauce in my closet.

I’m a watch collector, and I have beautiful Vacheron Constantin and Patek Philippe watches. All these gorgeous watches. But I wear a $9 Timex that I got at CVS, because Timex has the patent on the watch lighting up at night. And no other watch has that. Even if you spend $20,000 on a watch, it won’t light up at night with a full dial.

This is the season forsandalsand ballet slippers. And I have a bunion. I also have corns. I use Scotch tape instead of Band-Aids, so that when you wear sandals, no one notices that you’ve got these big bunions or corns. And even if I get a cut, I use Scotch tape instead of Bandaids. I’m also painter. I do portraits, and I use Scotch tape to cut off background scenes and things that I don’t want to have. I use it for so much. I use it as a bookmark; I use it to hold my bra in shape.

Let me explain. The first thing people say when they see me is, “Oh my God, you’re so short.” This is terrible. I am slightly under five feet. This means that if I go to buy grown-up clothes in the store, everything is too long. Everything. Every skirt, every pair of jeans, it doesn’t matter what I pay or where I shop. So, I have pinking shears. Everything I own, I pink with the pinking shears. It doesn’t make sense for me to go to Kohl’s and buy $9 jeans and then send them to be hemmed for $30. In New York, that’s what it costs to hem. So I gave up on having anybody hem them. And I’m having trouble threading my sewing machine. So pinking shears do everything.

As a New Yorker, I have a lot of black clothes and black purses. They all have signs of wear on the corners. So I use a black permanent Sharpie. I use it for all my purses, and I use it for the television when it looks like the pixel is worn out. I use it for everything.

I don’t drink and I don’t smoke. So, cherry Coke Zero is my upper. When everybody is ordering cocktails and wine and a dirty martini, I have cherry Coke Zero. And I guess it’s not good for you. But you know what? When I asked my doctor, he said, “Sally, you’re 90 years old. If you drink soda and it hurts your liver or your kidneys, what difference does it make?” There comes a time in your life when you can’t eat for health. So that’s why I drink cherry Coke Zero, and when they don’t have it at a bar, I make them put maraschino cherry juice in a normal Coke.

I couldn’t live without travel. I’ll go anywhere in the world with anyone anytime. For my next trip, in two weeks, I’m going to Rome with a cousin. I was lucky enough to have been a foreign correspondent in the Caribbean. I speak six languages. So they used to send me to all kinds of places. I really have been almost everywhere twice. Well, that’s not true. I’ve never been to the Grand Canyon and I’ve never been to Alaska. And I’ve been all through Russia, but I’ve never been to Moscow. But I’ve been just about everywhere else, and I’ve learned that you don’t need a large suitcase. My husband was not a tall man. So we used the same suitcase, the same underwear, the same T-shirts and everything. Now that he’s passed on, I have a very small no-name cheap suitcase that will fit under the seat. I never check luggage, ever. If I need anything anywhere in the world, I buy it. It doesn’t make a lot of sense for me to travel with anything but my meds and a hairbrush. Nobody cares if you wear the same clothes day after day.