1,000 Unforgettable Senior Moments

by Tom Friedman

OH, I THOUGHT MOZART GOT IT FROM ME

  Once, while in London, singer-songwriter Neil Diamond heard some familiar music and mentioned it was from his hit “Song Sung Blue.” His companion quickly corrected him, saying, “No, they’re playing Mozart.” “Oh,” said Diamond, who had conveniently forgotten he borrowed the music from Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21.

  BEWARE THE WRATH OF GOOGLE

  Lindsay Diaz’s house in Rowlett, Texas, managed to survive a ferocious tornado in 2015. But while her home could withstand the fury of nature, it couldn’t survive the power of an app. Instead of directing a demolition crew to the right place—a condemned duplex a block away—Google Maps led them to Diaz’s front door. Forgetting to recheck the address, the crew members proceeded to turn her house into rubble. Then, not wanting to waste valuable time apologizing, they doubled back and tore down the condemned duplex.

  LET’S HAVE HIM OVER FOR DINNER AS SOON AS POSSIBLE

  The names of friends and acquaintances often escaped the mind of playwright Howard Lindsay (one of the authors of the stage version of The Sound of Music). Sometimes this had unexpected consequences, as when he was engaged in a long, bitter feud with a particular actor. For years he refused to stay in the same room with him when they accidentally met, but one evening Lindsay’s wife was astonished to find her husband engaged in a warm conversation with his nemesis at a Hollywood dinner party. The conversation ended with a burst of laughter, and after Lindsay slapped the actor on the back, he came over to his wife and whispered in her ear, “Who was that fellow I was just talking to, anyhow?”

  WHERE WAS THE INVISIBLE HAND WHEN HE NEEDED IT?

  Adam Smith, the founding father of modern economics and the author of The Wealth of Nations, was notoriously absentminded. He once put bread and butter into a teapot and, after tasting the result, declared it to be the worst cup of tea he had ever had.

  JUST DON’T SIT TOO CLOSE TO THE HEAD

  Members of the Georgia State Game Commission were going back and forth considering the merits of an item on their agenda: the regulation of alligator rides. There were some testy exchanges before one alert official—obviously the only alert one in the room—realized that thanks to an assistant’s typo, they were discussing a nonexistent recreation instead of the real agenda item: a discussion about regulating the sale of alligator hides.

  NEXT YEAR LET’S ASSIGN HIM TO THE POLE VAULT

  It was the 1932 Olympics, and competitors in the 3,000-meter race were coming around the bend for the final lap. Unfortunately, an official was gazing in the wrong direction and therefore neglected to ring the bell to signal the last lap. After the athletes crossed what should have been the finish line, they just kept on running. The favorite to win, a Finn named Volmari Iso-Hollo, wound up first, but because he ran an extra 450 meters before the official snapped out of his senior moment, he registered the slowest-ever time for the 3,000.

  THIS SURE IS ONE SATISFYING BILDUNGSROMAN

  The Russian critic and philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin was working on a major new work about the “bildungsroman” genre (a bildungsroman is a coming-of-age novel of spiritual, moral, or psychological development). Working furiously to finish it, Bakhtin, a heavy smoker, suddenly found himself without any rolling paper to make cigarettes, an intolerable situation. Not having money to spare, he absentmindedly looked around his room for a substitute and grabbed the first thing at hand, thus managing, over the next couple of hours, to smoke away several drafts of his manuscript.

  NO, NO, NOT THE OTTOMAN!

  For a scene she was shooting for the classic movie Some Like It Hot, Marilyn Monroe was supposed to enter a room, walk to a dresser, rummage through the drawers, find a bottle of bourbon, and ask for a drink. She blew the line fifty-two times in a row—although far from her earlier record of eighty-two takes. “On the fifty-third take,” recalled director Billy Wilder, “I told her we had put the line on pieces of paper, and they were in every drawer she would open.” However, added Wilder, “she went to the wrong piece of furniture.”

  I’LL TAKE THE FORTIES, TOO, IF YOU GOT ’EM

  An out-of-work shoe salesman, who was trying to make ends meet, decided to rob a bank in Queens, New York. The beginning of the note he handed to the teller demonstrated a keen recall of U.S. currency denominations: “Give me all your tens, twenties . . . ,” it began. But then his memory failed him: “. . . and thirties,” the note concluded.

  FURTHERMORE, WE SHALL FIGHT THEM ON THE BEACHES!

  The Baroness Trumpington of Sandwich stood up and began addressing the House of Lords about the wages paid to babysitters and nannies. “There has been much confusion on this matter,” she declared, more accurately than she knew. After five minutes of an increasingly heated speech, she suddenly stopped and said, “My lords, I have been speaking on the wrong subject.” Members of the House had been debating an amendment to a social security bill when the baroness took the floor and began reading from the wrong notes.

  AND THE ONE ABOUT “FOUR SCORE AND SEVEN YEARS AGO”—THAT WAS MINE, TOO

  Sometimes prentending you had a senior moment can save the day. Raconteur and Republican senator from New York Chauncey M. Depew was chosen to speak after Mark Twain at a banquet. As Depew watched, Twain delivered an uproarious talk. Depew walked to the dais, waited until the laughter and applause had died down, and then cannily feigned forgetfulness. “Mr. Toastmaster and Ladies and Gentlemen,” he announced, “before this dinner Mark Twain and myself agreed to trade speeches. He has just delivered my speech, and I am gratified for the pleasant way in which you received it. I regret to say that I have lost the notes of his speech and cannot remember anything he was to say. Thank you.”

  “HOPE YOU LIKE IT!”

  English clergyman and writer William Lisle Bowles once gave a parishioner a copy of the Bible as a birthday present. When she asked him to write an inscription, he signed it “From the Author.”

  DOES THAT MEAN I DON’T HAVE YOUR VOTE?

  The late Tennessee senator Howard Baker was once walking from the Senate floor to his office when a group of tourists stopped him. One man said, “Say, I know who you are. Don’t tell me. Let me remember. I’ll get it in a minute.” Baker waited patiently for the man’s memory to return. Finally, the senator said, “Howard Baker.” The tourist shook his head, still in the grip of his senior moment: “No, that’s not it.”

  SACRE BLEU! IS NOTHING . . . SACRE?

  Changing the French language is such a sensitive subject (at least in France) that when the French broadcaster TF1 reported in 2016 that the spelling and/or accent marks of some 2,400 words might be altered in an attempt to modernize them, there was a fierce outcry. The Académie française’s last complete dictionary came out in 1935, and work on the “new” edition had only reached the letter R, so it wasn’t surprising that any change at all would make waves. One critic called it “the true beginning of anarchy.” But even the most fervent believers in the power of tradition didn’t reckon on the even greater power of absentmindedness. In a widely circulated petition, a national group of university students accused the education minister, who had authorized the spelling changes, of abusing her power. The outraged students must have forgotten to check their Académie française dictionary. They misspelled the verb “to authorize.”

  ON SECOND THOUGHT, DON’T BRING HIM BACK

  They say that sequels are never as good as the original, but rarely are they as bad as Bring Back Birdie, the follow-up to the classic musical Bye Bye Birdie. Legendary song-and-dance man Donald O’Connor was picked to play former teen idol Conrad Birdie 20 years after the events of the first play. Birdie was now supposed to be a middle-aged small-town mayor who had just been talked into making a comeback. But one night during the show’s short (very short) run—four performances in all—O’Connor forgot all the words to one song. He stood silently on stage, miserable and disgus
ted with both himself and the play, and said to the musicians in the pit, “You sing it. I hate this song anyway,” and then walked off.

  OR WOULD YOU PREFER “ROBERT”?

  Once, the hopelessly absentminded jazz great Benny Goodman telephoned George Simon, a famous editor of a jazz magazine. Goodman admitted to him sheepishly, “Whenever I call your house, I’m always embarrassed if your wife answers because I can’t remember her last name.” Then Goodman asked George for help. “What is her name, Bob?”

  AND, WHILE YOU’RE AT IT, DO YOU MIND LOOKING AT MY TOASTER OVEN?

  During a meeting of county commissioners, the controller in Reading, Pennsylvania, complained that her computer hadn’t worked in two years, and that during the entire time she had been forced to use a typewriter for all her letters and memos. She probably would have had grounds for some legal action had it not been for the discovery soon after that she had forgotten to plug in her computer.

  NEXT TIME I’LL WEAR A COAT WITH A ZIPPER

  Essayist Charles Lamb encountered Samuel Coleridge one day on Hampstead Heath in London. Coleridge took hold of one of the buttons on Lamb’s coat, pulled him aside, and began to expound on a subject that was on his mind. A short time later, Lamb remembered that he was due elsewhere. Seeing no other means of escape, he took out his pocketknife and cut off the button that Coleridge was still clutching, leaving it in the poet’s hand. Some hours later, Lamb returned to find Coleridge in the same spot, talking to himself on the same subject. Lamb then took up his former position while Coleridge, with the button still in his hand, continued to hold forth, apparently not having noticed his friend’s absence.

  YES, BUT LANDLORDS LOVE ME

  Thomas De Quincey, the author of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, was so absentminded that he often had trouble with the most straightforward tasks. He needed help dressing himself, and while looking over manuscripts by candlelight, he sometimes forgot what he was doing and set fire to his hair. A prodigious collector of books, he would stuff his apartment with them until every last nook and cranny was filled, at which point he would resort to an ingenious solution: He would abandon the entire collection and move to another apartment.

  EVERYONE SING ALONG: “LET’S GET FISCAL, FISCAL! I WANNA GET FISCAL!”

  It’s frustrating when the wrong word or pronunciation slips out of your mouth before you can catch it. Now imagine if you had to experience these verbal slips day after day, coming from dozens of other people. When Tracy McCreery, a state representative from St. Louis, couldn’t take it anymore, she filed a resolution in 2016 begging her colleagues in the Missouri legislature to stop saying “physical” when they meant to say “fiscal.” It’s like “nails on a chalkboard,” she told the Riverfront Times. “There are a lot of reasons to be depressed about the Missouri legislature, and this just kind of piles on.”

  B = SECOND SHELF FROM TOP2

  Photographer Ernst Haas took a famous picture of Albert Einstein, which shows the great physicist thoughtfully rubbing his chin, as if he were pondering the mysteries of the universe. But in fact, the picture was taken right after Haas asked Einstein where on the shelf he had put a particular book.

  YOU MEAN WE’RE GOING TO A REAL JAIL?

  A man attempting to rob a Bank of America branch in Merced, California, didn’t have a gun, so he tried what he thought was the next best thing: He stuck his finger in his jacket pocket and pointed it at the teller. The man then experienced an incredible senior moment: He took his finger out of his pocket and pointed it at the teller, demanding money. He even cocked his thumb. The teller, trying not to laugh, told him to wait and called the police, who arrested him—using real handcuffs.

  INCIDENTALLY, WHO’S THE PIANIST THIS EVENING?

  One evening at a concert, the Polish-born pianist Josef Casimir Hofmann sat down at his piano with a look of confusion. The other members of the orchestra waited, becoming increasingly alarmed. Finally, Hofmann leaned toward a woman in the first row of the audience and whispered, “May I please see your program, madam? I forget what comes first.”

  AT LEAST THEY DIDN’T BRING FILTHY LUCRE

  What better way to make an advertisement stand out in a crowded marketplace than to use some colorful, imaginative slang? That, at least, was the hope of Silo, a discount electronics chain that ran a TV commercial in Seattle and El Paso offering a stereo system for the low, low price of “299 bananas.” What the chain forgot was that some people have no imagination—or maybe too much. Dozens of people lined up outside the stores, not with dollars, but with bags of bananas. Silo was forced to honor the offer, and lost thousands of dollars before they were finally able to cancel the ad.

  NEXT WEEK WE’LL BE HONORING SERGEANT WOOLWORTHS

  Britain’s greatest World War II general, Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery, was attending a 1946 dinner given in his honor in Hollywood by MGM’s Samuel Goldwyn. Famous for his senior moments, Goldwyn began his introduction ably: “It gives me great pleasure tonight to welcome to Hollywood a very distinguished soldier.” He then raised his glass and said to the gathering of celebrities, “Ladies and gentlemen, I propose a toast to . . . Marshall Field Montgomery.” There was a stunned silence, since Marshall Field was and is a famous department store in Chicago. Into the breach came another mogul with a bad memory, Jack Warner of Warner Bros., who called out helpfully, “Montgomery Ward, you mean.”

  ROYALLY SCREWED UP

  Sometimes a senior moment that should have led to an utter debacle is neatly handled by quick thinking and hard earned experience. Lawrence Barrett, a great 19th-century actor and theater manager, was forced to hire an elderly friend at the last minute to replace someone in the important role of the king. The friend’s role was to shout out orders to Barrett, but when the time came for the old actor to begin, the senior citizen experienced a very senior moment. At a loss, he ad-libbed to Barrett, “Come here!” Expecting the worst, Barrett walked over to the throne. His friend whispered into his ear that he couldn’t remember a single line. At a complete loss, Barrett bowed and headed off stage. But just as Barrett approached the wings, he heard a royal command from his old friend: “Forget nothing I have told you!” The audience never suspected that anything was wrong.

  THE SECOND ANNUAL G. K. CHESTERTON AWARD FOR ABSENTMINDEDNESS GOES TO. . . G. K. CHESTERTON!

  One day British writer G. K. Chesterton was hurrying down the street, late for a critically important appointment. But first, finding himself thirsty, he stopped off for some refreshment, a glass of milk at the local dairy that he had visited as a child. Next, he bought a revolver at a gunsmith’s shop, which he had been meaning to do for some time. Only then did he manage to remember where he was supposed to be going—his own wedding.

  AT LEAST I THINK HE’S DEAD

  Senator Bob Dole’s speech-making ability wasn’t helped by his lapses of memory. He once sought to explain the difficulty faced by politicians who were intent on keeping their private lives private. “You read what Disraeli had to say,” he declared, and then paused at some length. “I don’t remember what he said. He said something.” Another pause, then, “He’s no longer with us.”

  AT LEAST IT WAS PADDED

  One evening, Hans Hotter, the bass-baritone whose most famous role was Wotan, the German god, in Wagner’s opera Die Walküre, was getting ready to make his grand entrance in Act III. He absentmindedly grabbed his cloak from his dressing room, flung it around his shoulders, and strode onto the stage, whereupon the audience began to snicker. Sticking out of the back of the cloak was the padded pink coat hanger it had been hanging on.

  WAIT TILL YOU SEE WHAT I’M GETTING FOR YOU NEXT WEEK

  When he was the Democratic Senate majority leader, Lyndon Johnson ran into New Hampshire Republican Norris Cotton in the Senate elevator. “Norris,” cried LBJ, “I’ve been looking for you. Come into my office.” Johnson
took a small box from his desk and presented it to Cotton with great fanfare. “Norris, when I was in Mexico recently, I had some cuff links made to give to a few personal friends in the Senate, and this is the first opportunity I have had to present them to you.” Cotton told Johnson he was touched and would always cherish them. About three weeks later, Cotton bumped into LBJ again. Johnson grabbed him and cried, “Norris, I’ve been looking for you. Come into my office.” For the second time, Johnson presented him with a small box. It was another pair of cuff links. “Norris,” he said, “when I was in Mexico recently, I had some cuff links made to give to a few personal friends in the Senate . . . ”

  AND THE GUY STANDING NEXT TO YOU IS MARC ANTONY

  Twentieth Century Fox Studios chief Spyros Skouras had a terrible memory for names. One day on the set of Cleopatra, a female cast member came up to him and said, “You don’t know my name, do you?” “Yes, I do,” he lied. The beautiful actress taunted him. “You’re paying me $1 million and you can’t remember my name! Spyros, tell me my name! I’ll give you half the money back!” said Elizabeth Taylor. Skouras struggled to remember. “Ehh . . . ehh . . . you are Cleopatra!”

  LET’S SEE, THAT WOULD MAKE IT FOUR-THIRTY IN JERUSALEM

  In Cecil B. DeMille’s film The Crusades, Henry Wilcoxon, who played King Richard the Lionhearted, forgot what century he was in. When he tossed back his cloak, the audience got a good look at his wristwatch.

  WE HATE TO THINK WHAT SHE PUTS IN HER TEA

  Elizabeth Morrow, poet, educator, and wife of Senator Dwight Morrow, invited the all-powerful banker J. P. Morgan to tea one day. Morgan possessed a huge, purple-hued nose that was almost as celebrated as his great wealth. Mrs. Morrow carefully coached her daughters not to comment on it, no matter how odd it might look to them. She was especially worried about what her daughter Anne might say. Anne, who later married Charles Lindbergh and became a bestselling writer, was known for speaking her mind. Anne couldn’t take her eyes off Morgan’s nose, but she and the other girls were quickly introduced to Morgan and ushered out of the room before they could do any damage. It was only then that Elizabeth Morrow relaxed her guard. “So, Mr. Morgan,” she asked the esteemed guest, “will you have cream or lemon in your nose?”