by Andy Simmons
This class went better than the first. “Le Second Mortgage” was a keeper, the octopus gag was chum.
D. found another problem. “What’s with your delivery?” he asked. “You sound like Alan King.”
He was right! I had an old-timey way of telling jokes, like some vaudevillian opening for a trained seal act. Up-and-coming comics fall back on the shtick they were reared on. Growing up in the ’60s and ’70s, I guess I saw myself on stage in Vegas, wearing a tux and pinky rings, holding a scotch, and opening for Vic Damone. D. wanted me to be myself. One problem—I didn’t know what that was.
So I went home to practice my material in front of a mirror. Maybe I’d find myself there.
“A pal of mine got pulled over for DUI,” I said to my appreciative audience. “Yeah, he’s a multitasker. He can drink, drive, and crash all at the same time.”
Working in front of a mirror didn’t help. All I could think was, I have Grandpa’s nose hairs! I spent the next fifteen minutes trimming nose hairs before phoning Eddie Brill. If I wanted to be a comic, I needed to know what all the great ones had in common. Eddie—the guy who warms up Letterman’s audience—was the man to tell me.
“There are three things great comics share,” he said. “They’re honest, vulnerable, and they’re not looking for approval.”
I had the vulnerability part down in spades. As for honesty, to paraphrase George Burns, I can fake that.
“But what about the audience?” I whined. “I crave their approval.”
“If you have fun, they’ll have fun,” Eddie said. “And if they talk during your set, do what I do. Lean over and say, ‘Don’t you hate it when you come here for a chat and they build a comedy club around you?’”
My classmates and I watched anxiously as the club filled up. Earlier, D. had warned me against overly high expectations. “Don’t expect to kill,” he said, using comedyspeak for doing boffo. “I’ll be happy if you go up there, don’t trip, don’t forget the material, and get even one laugh.” Frankly, I’d set loftier goals for myself than not tripping.
Andrew was up first and immediately forgot half his act. But he turned that into his act and the audience ate it up. Mike followed, and the audience reacted warmly. Then it was my turn.
Hearing my name, I waded through the room, where I passed an old friend. He smiled and gave me a thumbs-up. I climbed onto the stage. The crowd seemed friendly enough, at least those who were paying attention. (What was it Eddie told me to say?) “You know,” I sputtered, “you really have to be a people person to be a bathroom attendant.” For some reason they found that funny.
What they didn’t find funny was the riff about drinking wine at my expensive restaurant: “The wine was just pressed. It was so fresh you could still taste the feet.” And by the time I’d tossed in a line about illegal aliens, the audience had transformed into a roomful of Edvard Munch models, their silent screams begging for someone to give me the hook and then bash me over the head with it.
As I left the stage to polite applause, my friend handed me a drink. “Drown your sorrows,” he said.
Here’s the checklist: I didn’t blow my lines, not most of them, anyway. I didn’t sound like Alan King. I didn’t fidget, flop sweat, or sob for my mother. I got through it. But I didn’t kill. I know D. said not to worry about it, but let’s face it, “killing” is why we took this class.
The fact is I don’t belong on stage. I prefer telling jokes from the safety of my computer keyboard. This way, if I bomb, I won’t have to hear about it until I get fired. It’s better to get fired once than a thousand times on stage.
Welcome to My Life
“Why would anyone possibly want to read about me?” I asked my boss.
She had just asked me to fill in as a guest writer for Mary Roach who, needing to take a break from ragging on her home life, was on hiatus from her humor column, “My Planet.”
“I doubt they would be, but we can’t publish a magazine with blank pages,” she said. And thus began my writing career at Reader’s Digest.
Okay, she didn’t really put it that way, but that was the impression I got. Fine by me, I thought. Everyone’s convinced that their family is crazier than everyone else’s, and I’m no different. Time to settle some scores! But where to begin? The fact that my wife and I choose foods based on their vitamin content? (She’s a folate fan while I lean toward riboflavin because it sounds like it should taste better.) Or maybe it’s the fact that my nine-year-old daughter, Quinn, still doesn’t know how to close the Chinese take-out containers so that my Singapore mai fun doesn’t end up cold. Or my father’s insistence on sending unsolicited advice to the New York Mets front office. Or my biggest bugaboo: presents.
Ahh!
An eBay survey states that sixty percent of Americans receive unwanted or unneeded gifts during the holidays. Personal experience tells me that figure is low. My family loves to give presents; we just don’t know how.
For example, my sister is the queen of what we’ve termed inconsequentia—gifts you never knew existed, needed, wanted, or knew what to do with. We have her to thank for our olive de-pimento-izer.
“A what?” I asked, turning it this way and that, and back to this again.
“An olive de-pimento-izer. Some people don’t like pimentos in their olives. This tool will remove the pimento.
“Why not just buy olives without pimentos?”
“That’s a lot of bother when this will do it for you. Don’t get it too close to your face, it may also remove eyes.”
It’s not so much that she’s giving us gifts; it’s as if she’s giving gifts to our attic.
At least my sister spends time searching for a gift for us to forget about. Not so with my brother, who annually takes home the trophy for Laziest Gift Giver. He never knows what to get anyone, so he pokes around your home and buys you something you already have—this way he knows you’ll like it. Last year he bought me the book Freakonomics. “I know you liked it when you read it before,” he told me. “So I got you another copy.”
My attic is now reading it.
When it comes to our daughter, I like to get her educational gifts, or at the very least something that points her in the right direction in life—like a doctor’s kit or a My First Goldman Sachs CEO Corner-Office Play Set. Not so my wife. She’s of the opinion that our daughter ought to enjoy the present she gets, which is why this year she let Quinn pick one out herself—a pint-sized cleaning cart. It came complete with mop, bucket, feather duster, broom, and rags, fulfilling every father’s dream that their daughter wants to grow up to become a hotel maid.
Of course, no one is harder to buy a gift for than my wife—the experience is fraught with traps. For example, Jennifer looks cute in hats. But if I were to buy her one, there’s a good chance she will mistake my intention and assume there is something wrong with her hair that requires it to be hidden. If I buy her a gift certificate for a massage, she might interpret that to mean I think she’s so fat that I don’t want to put my hands on her. In the end, I get so flustered I get her an olive de-pimento-izer and am done with my shopping.
In fact, the only person in my entire family who gives a gift of any real worth is my grandmother, who still cuts me a $10 check every birthday.
Most of the following pieces in this chapter have appeared in the magazine, while some have never seen the light of day. But they each have something in common: my family. After all, as I’ve said previously, they’re my greatest source of amusement.
Macho, Macho Man
What timing! I’d just worn a hole through my silk shirt and used up the last of my lavender-infused shaving gel when I got the memo that “metrosexual” was out and “machosexual” was in.
Women, it seems, have tired of men with hairless chests, so they’ve changed the rules: The old macho is back in vogue. From now on, guys need to look and act tough—at a minimum, tough enough to open jelly jars without having to run them under hot water.
Taking my mar
ching orders, the first thing I did was exhale for the first time in three years—letting my belly settle back into its natural position draped over my belt. I then canceled my membership in the Tiramisu-of-the-Month club.
Gone, too, was the easy sympathy I doled out to my three-year-old daughter after she pulled the head off her Polly Pocket doll for the twelfth time. “Now it’s a Marie Antoinette doll,” I told Quinn, knowing that tough love was the best love.
Gone was my simple acquiescence when my wife, Jennifer, informed me we’d be watching the Melissa Gilbert retrospective on Lifetime Television.
“Sorry,” I told her, “this TV has been reserved for a special edition of Killing Cattle with Mike Ditka.”
Part of the machosexual compact is to fulfill traditional male roles—to be the rock, the decision-maker. So as commander in chief of our little tribe, I canceled our family trip to Hersheypark. “Machosexuals,” I explained, “don’t have chocolaty good times. We have adventures.” But being a benevolent dictator, I presented an alternative.
“Who wants to go bareback rhino racing in Zimbabwe?” I asked.
Machosexuals are a patient lot, so when Jennifer said, “No, we’re going to Hersheypark,” I knew that perseverance was in order.
“Wanna take a steam bath in an active volcano in Indonesia?”
“No.”
“Fly a MiG-29 at Mach 3 over Moscow, going sixty-thousand feet straight up in the air at a ninety-degree angle until the engine stalls and we tumble back to earth in a free fall, coming just ten feet off the ground before pulling up?”
“No.”
“Kayak down Victoria Falls? Go skinny-dipping in the Arctic? Walk over to the mini-mart and eat five-day-old sushi?”
No, no, and no.
“You don’t like to have fun, do you?”
Click! Jennifer turned on the TV and raised the volume until Melissa Gilbert’s voice drowned mine out.
Then, after much wrestling over the remote, we agreed that I should be kicked out of the house.
So off I stomped to the nearest watering hole to be with my fellow bulls. I was glad to see everyone had read the same memo as me. Gone were the cosmopolitans and chocolate martinis. In their place was only one choice: “Barkeep,” I said, “gimme a Milwaukee’s Best!” A cold, frothy one appeared before me.
There was backslapping, swearing, and a quick debate on wearing helmets while motorcycling. (Everyone was against it.) And we used the old bar-food favorite, edamame beans, to throw at a poster of Brad Pitt.
After raising a glass to the machosexuals of yore—Bogie, Duke Wayne, Attila the Hun—we took out our knives and whittled some sticks before calling it a night.
Back home, I snuck into the house to avoid Jennifer. We machosexuals pick our battles and in so doing know that tiptoeing is not the same as retreating.
In the living room, I found Quinn crying over her headless doll as Jennifer struggled with duct tape.
I grabbed some glue, and Jennifer handed me the doll. I reattached the head as best I could. It slipped a bit before drying, giving it that cock-eyed, self-assured look that’s so attractive in a plastic doll. Quinn climbed into my lap, and the three of us played with her Polly Pockets.
Who knew playing with dolls could be so much fun?
The “F” Word
Honesty is overrated.
A few years back, I came home to find my wife, Jennifer, in tears.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Quinn used the ‘F’ word.” She was referring to our foul-mouthed three-year-old.
“You mean—”
“Yes. She called me fat!” Jennifer is not overweight, but like most women I know, she has an inflated view of her body. She cautiously walked over to a full-length mirror and sighed. “Great, the only part of me that’s trim is my breasts. Be honest…” Uh-oh. “Am I fat?”
“Not particularly.” I tried to catch the words and stuff them back into my mouth, but they were quick, juking and jiving from my grasp until they landed with a thud inside her ears.
“Listen, Slim, you could stand to lose a few tons yourself!” she said as she stomped off toward the kitchen.
“I like my fat!” I said. “And remember, I’ve known it longer than I’ve known you. What are you doing?” The refrigerator door was open, and she was flinging pizzas, Hot Pockets, frozen waffles, and ice cream out the window.
“I’m going on a diet, and I’m dragging this family with me!”
“No, not the Chun King!” Too late.
The next morning, we waddled off to the bookstore, where the sheer volume of diet books demanded that we split up. I took the books between forty-one degrees longitude, fifty-five degrees latitude and forty-three degrees longitude, fifty-seven degrees latitude. Jennifer covered the rest.
There were low-fat diets, high-protein diets, low-calorie diets, high-fiber diets, water diets, vegan diets, fish diets, fruit-juice diets. There were books on portion control and books that screamed, “EAT LIKE A PIG!” on the cover. Overwhelmed, we settled for just one shelf’s worth. We’d try a different diet every day for a month until one worked. We dubbed it the Diet-a-Day Diet.
First up was the color diet. You can eat all the food you want, as long as it’s one hue.
“Let’s try brown,” I said. “We can have steak, fried mozzarella sticks, stout ale, hash browns, and chocolate cake. As long as we don’t eat a salad, we’re fine.”
Jennifer thought choosing brown smacked of cheating. She countered with red. I said that red meant beets, and beets were good for one thing: throwing out. Since we couldn’t agree, we left it to chance. I grabbed Quinn’s box of sixty-four Crayola crayons, closed my eyes, and picked.
“What color did you get?”
“Gray.” We dined on skim milk.
The color diet book joined the Chun King in the backyard and was replaced by a high-protein diet. Jennifer’s not much of a meat eater, so I was surprised.
“You’re allowed one glass of wine a day,” she explained.
“One glass, or one vase per day?” I asked, noting the King Henry VIII–size goblet she had chosen.
“Dieting is stressful,” she said.
“Well, in that case, I’m having a piece of bread.”
Whoosh! Out the window went the high-protein diet book. By week’s end, the only thing growing in our garden was the pile of diet books.
The first one to fold was Quinn. She might be only three, but it doesn’t take a four-year-old to know dieting cuts into one’s ice cream allotment.
After putting her to bed with promises of chocolate bars and more cheese than a mouse would want in a lifetime, I came back into the living room. There, in front of the TV, I found Jennifer, miserable, watching the movie The Mummy.
“She’s so beautiful and so thin,” she said of the star, Rachel Weisz.
“You look like her,” I said.
“Put your glasses on, Simmons.” It was the first time she’d laughed in a week.
“I’m serious.” I was, too, and it wasn’t just the starvation talking. “I’ve got the diet for us.”
She groaned. “It’s called the denial diet,” I said. “We pretend we’re perfect physical specimens and go on with our lives. You enjoy your wine, and I’ll consume all the brown foods I want.”
Jennifer liked my idea so much that we celebrated by eating all of Quinn’s chocolates. That’ll teach her to call us fat.
Ode to My Puppy #1
Oh dear, what can that odor be,
Oh dear, what can that odor be,
Oh dear, what can that odor be?
Something smells terribly foul.
Is the toilet backed up?
Is it sour ketchup?
Is the garbage pail full
Of rotting old bull?
Is it moldy old socks? Sweaty rank jocks?
Are the nose-plugs fully stocked?
Oh dear, what can that odor be,
Oh dear, what can that odor be,
&nb
sp; Oh dear, what can that odor be?
It’s only my puppy’s breath.
Lord of the Dance
After about the forty-seventh night in a row of sitting in front of the tube with my wife, watching HGTV, I had a stunning revelation: “I gotta get out of this house!”
Ever since the birth of our daughter, Quinn, Jennifer and I had become housebound. I missed our nights out together. Quinn was old enough now so that we should be able to venture out occasionally. The question was where. I didn’t want to go to the theater to watch an Ang Lee film, and hanging around a bar watching the Mets and screaming epithets at the team’s owners wasn’t tops on her list. Friends had taken dance classes and loved it. The last time I’d danced was years ago in college. And that was on top of a table, gyrating to Blondie.
“Wanna take dance classes?” I asked.
After the initial guffaws, she actually considered it. We’re not exactly the dancing type. Jennifer had sworn off anything physical after her days as a high school soccer player when she used to sit on the bench holding the other players’ jewelry. But she, too, longed to get out. The problem was that she was busy with a big project at work, and she didn’t want to be away from Quinn any more than she had to. We decided I’d stick my toe in the water, and if I liked it, she’d join later.
So, I tippety-tapped my way to Dance New York in Westchester, my local ballroom dance school. I signed up for the beginner’s class, a set of five two-hour sessions, where I hoped to come away Phi Beta Kappa in the fox-trot, merengue, swing, and salsa.
As my classmates and I waited to begin, some exchanged work shoes in favor of dance shoes. There was a nod, a quick “hi,” but little mingling. We almost seemed embarrassed, we grown-ups, about going back to school.
My class of thirty ranged from recent college grads to card-carrying AARP members. Some could probably trace their ancestry to the Mayflower; for others English was a second language. There were people in good shape and people without a shape. My class consisted mostly of couples, with a few single women. I was the lone unaccompanied male.