As Thanksgiving approaches, let's look back at our interview with the viral grandma who torched a pie and became a meme that starts circulating again every November.
Update, Nov. 23, 2022: A year later, we check in with Sharon to see how fame is treating her.
Memes come out of nowhere, and they don't take holidays off. On Thanksgiving 2021, a Georgia grandmother named Sharon Weiss burned a Marie Callender's pumpkin pie, and posted a photo to the food company's Facebook page, bitterly writing, "Thanks Marie Calendar for ruining Thanksgiving dessert."
But this was no ordinary holiday dinner mistake. The pie in the photo looked like it had been dug out of the ruins of Pompeii. The crust was black, the filling was black, and in a delightful addition, the top of the blackened filling had been broken to show the softer -- but still totally torched -- filling underneath.
Social-media users were quick to jump on the disaster, pointing out that even Yule logs don't get this burned, and they sit directly in the fireplace.
Here's the update you've been burning for. Sharon Weiss and Marie Callender's have made up, and Weiss told me she now knows why her pie ended up looking like it was thrown into Mount Doom from Lord of the Rings.
"When I first took the pie out and saw how burnt it was, I immediately thought there was something wrong with either the pie or the directions," Weiss told me. "My comment to Marie Callender's was impulsive."
Sharon Weiss has made up with Marie Callender's, and set her oven back to Fahrenheit. Sharon Weiss
But then Weiss tried to bake a Thanksgiving turkey breast, which also came out looking cremated, "leading me to realize it may be a problem with the oven," Weiss said.
Before calling an appliance repair shop, Weiss' husband, Josh, discovered the mistake was user error -- exactly as the internet had declared.
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