by Erma Bombeck
My son turned to me and asked, “What did his brother give?”
The Gang’s All Here
Entertaining—November 18, 1965
SOME NAIVE BOOK PUBLISHER has just sent me an advance copy of a new book called Company’s Coming.
It’s a beautiful white ledger that tells me the secret to gracious entertaining is planning, organization and relaxation. In the back of the book is an index card for frequent guests, listing their food preferences, allergies, children’s names, what they were served the last time they were guests and what the hostess wore. This may be “utterly utt” for the woman who takes her entertaining seriously, but, my friend, you are dealing with the Tugboat Annie of Lower Suburbia!
There is only one reason uppermost in our minds when we stage a party—it’s an incentive to clean and patch up the house.
When we reach a point where we can no longer dig out, we simply announce, “Let’s give a party.” My husband knocks out a wall or two, gives the baseboard that long-promised second coat, changes the furnace filter, replaces lightbulbs where there has been no light for five years, squirts glazing compound into holes and wall cracks, and hot mops the driveway.
The children are in charge of scouting the sandbox and toy chests for good silverware, hauling away the debris under their beds, disposing of a garage full of bottles and returning the library books.
I have my own busywork. I discard all the jelly glasses and replace them with matched crystal, exchange all the dead house plants for new ones from the nursery and, of course, plan a menu and guest list.
This I try to keep simple (the guests, not the menu). I always invite a few live ones, like the man who has it on good authority that Santa Claus is a subversive and a rebellious neighbor who is advancing a theory that the local PTA is a private-key Bunny Club with a good “cover.”
The afternoon of the party goes like clockwork. The kids eat all the olives and leave bite marks in the canapés. I trim these back to their original shape with a pair of sharp scissors (which my son announces he cut his toenails with the night before). Someone always remembers to close the draft in the fireplace. This is a must at our parties. We build a roaring fire and then herd our guests into the cold street to watch the fire trucks provide an evening of entertainment.
Another tradition at our parties is the wet picture frame. We always manage to paint or varnish one at the eleventh hour, and invariably a guest becomes stuck to it. (They are cut away with the same scissors used for the toenails and canapés.)
The evening of the party, however, is perfection itself. As I take the key off my belt to unlock the hall bath (which has been off limits since the previous Tuesday), I smile easily and ask, “Where are the kids?”
“I mailed them to my mother in Orlando,” says my husband.
“Good thinking.” I sigh, relaxing in a chair...just like the book says.
Mouse in the Pump Organ—January 13, 1971
We’ve never given a party in our lives that something (or someone) didn’t crawl inside our house and die.
It’s the price you pay for rustic, rural living.
In my mind, I visualize a group of mice meeting in a cornfield and one of them says to the other, “Bufford, you don’t look too good.”
“Oh, I’ll be all right,” says Bufford. “It’s just a head cold.”
“Nevertheless,” says the leader, “why don’t you check in at Bombeck’s wall?”
The night of our last party, Bufford didn’t make it to the wall. He staggered into our old pump organ and kicked off.
My husband came into the house, sank to his knees and gasped, “Not again! Where this time?”
“In the pump organ,” I said.
“Can’t we get rid of the odor?”
“Only if you want to paint the living room.”
“We mustn’t panic,” he said, patting his wrists with a deodorizer wick. “We’re just going to have to make sure that no one plays the organ tonight.” We both nodded.
The party was in high gear when Max Marx sat down at the organ. I grabbed a can of deodorizer and followed him.
“What are you doing?” he asked, annoyed.
I turned the deodorizer on myself. “It’s Skinny Dip,” I said feebly, “to make me irresistible.”
I watched in horror as he pulled out the stops on the organ and started to pump. As the bellows wheezed in and out, spreading misery through the house, three women fainted and one man put out his pipe.
“I say,” he said, pausing, “do you have a dog?”
“We have three of them, but they’re outside.”
He began to play again, then stopped and sniffed. “Is someone in the apartment cooking sauerkraut or making sulfur with a junior chemistry set?”
“We don’t live in an apartment.”
“Is someone wearing old gym shoes?” he asked.
His wife came over at the moment and leaned over his shoulder.
“Max, your music stinks.”
“Is that it?” he said, and moved on to the kitchen for a stronger drink.
My Husband Builds a Fire—December 1971
There are elements of human nature I will never understand.
A careless camper will flip a match during a rainstorm, and seconds later the entire forest will be in flames.
We will give a party and my husband will “lay a fire” using 30 pounds of paper, a mound of brittle kindling and a seasoned log with a guarantee stapled on the side. Within minutes, an entire party will be driven into the streets by smoke.
He’s the only man I know who had a fireplace with a gas lighter go out on him.
“Why don’t you forget the fire tonight?” I said, collaring him before a party.
“Nonsense,” he said, “I’ve got the secret. I just have to use more paper and get it started early. That’s the secret. Start it early and get a bed of hot coals. Then just feed it logs all night.”
At 6:30 P.M., he burned the evening paper, which I had not read.
At 6:35, he emptied three trash cans into the fireplace and created another small flame.
At 7:05, he emerged from the garage with a wagon full of papers I had been saving for the last three months for the Boy Scout paper drive.
The guests began to arrive.
At 7:45, he burned all the calendars in the house, plus five napkins that he was able to snatch away from guests.
At 7:50, he frantically tore the plastic bags off the dry cleaning in the hall closet and burned a drawer full of brown-paper grocery bags I save for garbage.
At 8:05, with the living room snowing with flying fragments of soot, he began emptying shoe boxes and wedging them under the log.
At 9:00 he was reduced to lighting unpaid bills with a match and throwing them in on the smoldering log. I collared him. “Look, Smokey Bear, will you forget about the lousy fire and pay some attention to your guests?”
“I almost got it,” he said feverishly. “Just a few more pieces of paper.” He ran to the cedar chest and emerged with the baby books, our wedding pictures and our marriage license.
At 1 A.M. he grabbed me by the shoulder. “It’s going,” he said. “It’s really blazing. Remember those cereal boxes with only a little cereal left? I threw it away and the boxes did it!”
“Wonderful,” I said, pulling the covers around my neck. “Now will you put it out and come to bed? We’ve got a big day ahead of us tomorrow. I am having you committed.”
“Come Casual”—April 1975
I wish to heaven Emily Post would spell out what “come casual” to a party means.
Casual in my dictionary reads, “A thing that is accidental. Not planned or sought.” When I go to a party casual that’s exactly what I am, an unplanned, unsought accident.
My husband’s idea of casual is going to bed without a necktie. If he would back me up in whatever style I chose, it wouldn’t be so bad. But it never fails. We never match. I emerge from the closet where I am dressing and look at him for th
e first time.
“What are you doing?” I shout. “You look like the groom on top of a wedding cake.”
“What are you supposed to be?” he grimaces. “Hansel or Gretel?”
“Look,” I said. “The hostess made a big point of telling me to ‘Come super casual.’ ”
“That doesn’t mean wearing a gym suit with a whistle around your neck.”
“This is not a gym suit. Why don’t you at least take off your tie?”
“I’ll take off my tie if you wear a skirt.”
“I got it. You change to a sport shirt and I’ll put on slacks.”
“I’ve got a better idea. You wear a dress and I’ll wear a sport coat.”
I retire to the closet again and come out a few minutes later in a sleeveless basic black and heels.
In the meantime, he has changed to a pair of baggy pants and a sweatshirt.
“She said casual, not destitute,” I said.
“Then why are you dressed up like a dining room hostess? I am going back and change.”
After several trips to the closet, I finally decide on my original outfit and he goes back to his original selection.
At the party it becomes obvious that no one knew what “casual” meant. All the women are formally attired, as are all the men.
As I pass by a group, I hear my dapper husband explain, “I just picked Erma up at the gym and she didn’t have time to change.”
Boy, is he going to get a “casual” punch in the mouth on the way home!
Party Hostess Loneliest Person in the World—September 1975
A line in a sermon got me to thinking the other week. It posed the question, “Whom do you consider the loneliest person in the world?”
The candidates began to fill my mind like a free lunch at a bar. Unquestionably they were:
The man with 800 slides of his vacation.
A kid at camp with measles.
An obscene phone caller who has only one dime.
The owner of a Laundromat in a nudist colony.
The vice president of anything.
The woman who bleaches her hair at home.
Chaperones on a field trip to Passion Park.
Then it hit me. Maybe I don’t speak for anyone else, but for me the loneliest moment in my life is when I have a living room full of guests and I am in the kitchen checking on a new recipe: Chicken Wonderment.
There is no other moment to match it.
The guests have been smiling for two and half hours and are so bored they’re discussing their dental appointments...the snacks, so colorful and appetizing when the guests arrived, now have the appeal of a cage that hasn’t been cleaned in a while...and everyone is anxiously facing the kitchen as if anticipating the Second Coming.
In the kitchen I approach the oven like a pitcher going to the mound in the bottom of the ninth with men on first and third and the count three balls and two strikes.
I am alone. I summon my best friend, Mayva, who says, “You’d better snap it up. They’re starting to organize rescue parties.”
I am alone. My husband, without a hint of compassion, says, “For crying out loud...another twenty minutes and I can’t guarantee the safety of our parakeet.”
I am alone. I summon God and He puts me on hold.
Loneliness. It’s that moment when you take the lid off the roaster and the sour cream that was supposed to thicken into a rich sauce didn’t. And the chicken that was supposed to cook to plump tenderness is as hard as Billie Jean King’s thigh. And the peas have drowned in their own butter and are lying in the pan like the creek dried up...and the rolls spill over their pans and are heading for the other wall, and the candles have reached the end of their wicks and are sputtering in their own wax.
The guests have stopped talking now to conserve energy. That’s loneliness.
College Reunion—November 3, 1977
I never go to a college reunion that I don’t come away feeling sorry for all those paunchy balding jocks trying to hang onto youth.
I feel sorry for the men too.
Mayva and I always sit together. We seem to be the only two in the class who have fought the battle of middle age and won.
“How do we do it?” I whispered, watching the class of ’49 dance away in merciful darkness. “I feel like Marie Osmond at a Prune Festival.”
“I know what you’re saying,” said Mayva. “Look at Ginger Horwich. Can you believe she’s wearing glasses this thick? Blind as a bat.”
“Where?” I asked, digging in my purse and holding my bifocals to my nose like a lorgnette.
“And what about Marci Miller? Who is she fooling with that caftan?”
“Mayva, as I have always said, ‘You show me a woman in a caftan, and I’ll show you a lot of fat that doesn’t fit.’ Incidentally isn’t that caftan a lot like yours?”
“No,” said Mayva irritably, “mine has no waist. Oh, my goodness, would you look at who just came in: Mary Moosebaum, with hair as white as the driven snow. Who does she remind you of?”
“Thomas Edison.”
“Exactly. Of course, we shouldn’t laugh. Someday our hair will start to turn and we’ll no longer be—”
“Henna number four. Hey, look at the next table. It’s the class success, Barbara Judson, our newly elected senator. They’re sure making a big fuss over her, but I respect her. If you have to work to make ends meet, you have to work. Besides, it might lead to something big. At least she’s not like Paula Pringle.”
“That vicious old broad,” said Mayva. “Never has a kind word to say about anyone. I’m going over and tell her how much I’ve missed her.”
As Mayva left the table, I couldn’t help remarking to my husband, “Mayva looks old. Wonder how long it will take me to start showing my age?”
Trip to the Rest Room—October 25, 1979
We were eating in a Spanish restaurant the other night when my friend and I excused ourselves and went to the rest room.
Since both of us are farsighted, she arrived at the first door, pressed her nose two inches from it, and with her hands traced the outline of what she thought to be a hooped skirt.
It turned out to be the cape of a bullfighter, and we found ourselves in the men’s room. The two of us hid in a booth until it was prudent to come out.
Naturally, we do not consider ourselves authorities on men’s rooms, but since few women have visited this last bastion of male dominance, we made some observations on the subject.
Men go to the rest room alone. I don’t know why they do this, but I have yet to see a man stand up in a room, announce where he is going and ask if any other man at the table would like to go with him. With women it’s a social outing, something you share. My husband calls it the ark connection. Women go into the rest room two-by-two and come out the same way.
Men whistle. Without fail, every man who came into the rest room whistled and didn’t stop until he left. Women, on the other hand, never whistle. They talk. There is everything to talk about: Why there are no towels. Why there is no soap. Why the hand blower doesn’t work. Why there is a toll charge for using the bathroom. I have established more meaningful relationships from holding the door of a pay booth open than you can imagine. In fact, a lot of us still correspond.
Men return from the facilities and seem embarrassed to discuss where they’ve been. They never hear any gossip. Never see any celebrities. Never find out if the fish on the menu is frozen or that the blond waitress is married to the drummer, who is jealous.
To women, a rest room is an adventure. Where men instinctively check out the location before they sit down, women buzz around asking the bartender, the cashier or the maître d’ and end up wandering around the kitchen, going through the doors that lead to the parking lot and giggling in a dark corridor about whether or not a unicorn is male or female.
I don’t know how to explain any of this. Maybe women just don’t get out a lot.
Pepper Mill Experience—December 18, 1983
I
t’s hard to go to a restaurant anymore and not go through the Black Pepper Experience.
For some reason, pepper has gone from a table staple to wine status. Restaurants will serve no pepper before its time.
It’s a ceremony comparable to the presentation of Eliza Doolittle to society.
First, a waiter will poise over you with a pepper mill the size of a piano leg (the bigger the pepper mill, the larger the check). Then he will sing out, “Pepper?” All conversation comes to a halt. For reasons that no one can explain, it’s something you have to think about.
As long as people have been stalking me with a pepper mill, you would think I would have made up my mind as to whether I want more. I never do. For a moment, I ponder. Then I clear my throat and say, “Yes.” He watches my hand, waiting for me to orchestrate how much and the precise moment to stop.
Now here’s the weird part. Not one grain of pepper comes out of the mill. In fact, no one has ever seen pepper come out of the mill.
If it did, wouldn’t the entire table be sneezing?
The Pepper Experience is nothing more than a ritual without meaning, like watching the first piece of luggage come off a carousel in airport baggage. Ever see anyone claim it? Of course you don’t. Because it doesn’t belong to anyone, that’s why. It’s just an exercise to give you hope that more luggage is on the way.
Maybe it’s the same with pepper. People need little visits from their waiter occasionally to know that he is still with you and has not left town for the weekend. They need to know that he loves you and cares about you and wants to be by your side.
Let the word go out: People do not need help with their pepper! For most of us, it’s something we can handle. If you waiters want to make yourselves useful, hold a flashlight while we read the menus, assist with easy financing when we pick up the bill for a party of eight or help us as we valiantly try to rescue a square of frozen butter from the ice age.