If Life Is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits? (12 page)

"Now, turn the blouse inside out and it's a bathrobe. Turn down the cuffs on the slacks, take the belt off the overblouse and you're in your jammies.

“It certainly is versatile,” I stammered.

"Versatile! Look at the accessories. This elasticized halter can get you a sun tan, but when pulled down over the hips is a girdle. Now slip into the evening skirt, slip on this veil and you're ready to be married. Or slap a monogram on the jacket and you can pass for a member of the U.S. Olympic Chess team. The long skirt is plastic-lined. If you have to, you could convert it into a tent and live out of it for a week. Or snap out the sleeves in the over-blouse and it's a caftan.

“Take off the scarf, roll down the sleeves of the blouse, put it on backward, take off your underwear and it's a hospital gown. Trust me, there are enough combinations to mix and match for eighty days.”

I was ready for our adventure.

When people talk about these package tours, they are always impressed by the fact that they are a bargain. You do so much and see so much, yet they are able to offer it at prices far below domestic travels at home. In analyzing this phenomenon one morning, we both concluded one of the reasons has to be the Continental Breakfast.

The Continental Breakfast consists of a paper napkin, a knife, fork and spoon for which you have no use, a cup and saucer, a pot of coffee or tea and a container of marmalade dated, “PLEASE USE BEFORE JULY, 1936.” Finally, two four-letter words that have come to strike terror in the hearts of travelers everywhere... the HARD ROLL.

The Continental Breakfast (literal translation: Keep out of the reach of children) has a gradual but unmistakable effect on people who eat it for a period of ten days or more.

For the first several days, partakers of the hard roll will pretend it is just the thing they need or the Famine Is Fun number. Women will pinch their waists and say, “I've been eating too much on this trip. A light breakfast is just what I need.”

The truth is, the hard roll is not designed to take off weight. Even though eaten in small pieces, once in the body, it will form again in its original hard ball and build a solid wall across the hips and the stomach. After the eleventh day, hard rolls make you mean.

We had our first hard roll in Italy on July first. By July fifteenth, the group was irritable and non-communicative. On the seventeenth, while in Belgium, my husband, in a fit of violence, grabbed a hard roll, carved his initials in it, “WLB, 1977,” and sent it back to the kitchen.

By the nineteenth day, the prospect of a hard roll for breakfast forced some travelers to remain in their beds with their faces turned to the wall. Others used the hard roll to pry open their luggage, prop open their doors, or to rub stubborn stains from their shirt collars.

I seemed to be surviving the Hard Roll trauma, but I was fighting Montezuma II's revenge. (Few people realize this, but there were two Montezumas. Montezuma I is credited with lending his name to an urgency Americans refer to as the Green Apple Two-step. Montezuma II is generally known as the patron saint of gift shops. Both are unkind to foreigners.)

With Montezuma II's revenge, I would be in the country no longer than five minutes before I got severe stomach cramps, my right hand would stiffen into the shape of a credit card holder, my step would quicken and I'd rush out into the streets shouting, “How much? How much?”

Sometimes, early in the morning, I'd leave my room and wander through the hotel lobby mumbling, “I smell gift shops. I couldn't sleep.”

Somehow, I was like a woman obsessed. I bought a head scarf that when worn in the rain gave me a navy blue face. I bought a toilet tissue holder carved out of wood and held by a man with one tooth. I bought key rings, flags, bongo drums, patches, and a left-handed letter opener made out of reindeer antlers.

After a while, I couldn't sit on a sightseeing bus for longer than an hour or so before leaning over to the bus driver and saying, “Aren't we going to make a gift-shop stop soon?”

“Is it absolutely necessary?” he'd plead.

“Are you willing to take a chance it isn't?”

I bought boxes of matches, T-shirts, paperweights, pennants, and ships in bottles, small glass ducks, corkscrews, and rocks with the Lord's Prayer on them.

I bought a moose for my charm bracelet, a cocktail apron, three cheese slicers with fur handles, a Spanish doll for my bed, a small chicken coming out of a soapstone egg, ashtrays, a set of coasters, a linen calendar with months I couldn't translate, and a wild boar cookbook.

By the twenty-first day, we could barely board the plane.

Besides, I was carrying a papier-mâché donkey with a wire holder that was severing my ring finger.

I jammed a shopping bag of souvenirs under the seat in front of me.

“You're supposed to fold your snack tray up before we take off,” said my husband.

“This is not a snack tray. It's my stomach.”

The stewardess came by later with lunch. My husband picked up the hard roll and ran his fingers over it. There was WLB-1977 carved on the side.

We both agreed it was probably a coincidence.

13

The Trick
Is Knowing
When to Laugh...

A lot of people think I write humor.

But then I know a woman who thinks Marie Osmond and her relatives are depressed. As an observer of the human condition all I do is question it. I rarely find it funny,

For example, how come pens never have any ink in them except when they get in the washer by mistake and the entire laundry turns blue?

Why do they waste silicone on an ironing board cover?

How can an owner of a vicious dog look at his dog baring his teeth and know he is “smiling?”

Why is there a rectal thermometer in my sewing basket?

Why do I assume those two doves nuzzling in the trees are married? Maybe they're just fooling around.

How come the first thing I notice in a doctor's office is whether or not his plants are dead?

Okay, so maybe my threshold of laughter is low, but if you can find anything funny in the following items, I'll make a book out of 'em.

Microphones

If there is anything in this world as fiercely independent as a microphone, I don't know what it is.

I mean, imagine the year is 1775. At the Provincial Convention in Virginia, statesman Patrick Henry rises to his feet to make an impassioned plea for liberty or death. He approaches the microphone and as the entire assembly awaits his first words he asks, “Can everyone in the back hear me?”

Those seven words have preceded more speeches than the proverbial cocktail hour.

In ten years of lecturing, I have seen microphones go from an occasional passive screech to real screaming militancy. To begin with, microphones do not like to be touched by a union or otherwise. Because I am short, I tried to adjust one the other week. I gave it just a simple tweak, mind you, and it went as limp as a two-dollar permanent in a sauna. I gave the entire speech from a squatting sprinter's position.

Some microphones work great as long as you blow into them. So you stand there like an idiot blowing and saying, “Are we on? Can you hear me?” Everyone admits they can hear you blowing. It's only when you speak the microphone goes dead.

Others have a weird sense of humor. They're punch line poopers. You'll be sailing along with a three-minute story, building to a big pitch and just as you say, “So why isn't the dog drinking his daiquiri?” the microphone goes silent and you're left muttering, “Gee, I guess you had to have been there.”

Some speakers spend half their lives looking for the on/off switch of microphones. There aren't any. I've looked for them under the light, on the shelf, on the side, the gooseneck, offstage. I suspect most of them are triggered by a remote control in a 1936 pickup truck in a garage across from the auditorium.

I have been warned that microphones are supersensitive and you have to talk right into them to be heard. These are usually the ones that cross you up by picking up your entire luncheon conversation including, “My God, do you mean the management is charging you ten dollars for this lunch! Has he never heard of the Geneva Convention?”

Some speakers, more secure than I, have dared to make fun of microphones. Recently, book columnist and reviewer Bob Cromie spoke in our town and opened with the traditional, “Can everyone in the back hear me?”

When someone yelled, “no” he said, “Then how did you know what I asked?”

All night long that microphone floated toward the door. Didn't surprise me a bit.

No One Wins

Did you ever notice how in reporting sports no one ever “wins” a game?

They crush, stomp, triumph, trounce, bomb, outscore, outclass, overthrow, run over, edge out, hammer and victimize, but they never use the word “win.”

The other night after a sportscast where there were three assaults, four upsets, one humiliation, a squeaker, and a rout, I said to my husband, “These guys must be fed intravenously by a thesaurus each night to come up with all those words that mean 'win.' ”

“They have to,” he said. “You'd get bored hearing who 'won' all the time.”

“But that's not the way people talk,” I complained. “Can't you just see some two-hundred-thirty-pound guard being interviewed at halftime saying, 'We came to best Pittsburgh. At this moment, we're not overwhelming by as much as we had hoped, but sooner or later we hope to vanquish. After all, as Vince Lombard! said, 'subduing is everything.'”

“You should talk,” he said. “How come a woman on the society pages never 'gets married?' ”

“What are you talking about?”

“I've read those stories before. They 'exchange vows,' 'say nuptials' or 'pledge I do's,' but they never 'get married!' ”

“That's different.”

“Why different? We're talking about saying what we mean. When we got engaged I suppose you called up your best friend and said, 'Hey, Dottie, guess what. I'm going to plight my troth in August.'”

“I think plighting a troth is rather poetic. It's certainly not like the Raiders 'smothering' their opponents or the Jets 'clobbering' theirs.”

“Hey,” he grinned, “it might be fun if society pages showed as much imagination as they do on the sports pages. Can't you just imagine reading where 'Betty Schmidlapp cruised by four ugly bridesmaids Saturday to overpower her opponents and cap a victory in the Bridegroom Open in the upset of the year'?”

“This is a stupid argument,” I said. “And I don't want to continue it. Just say I won and we'll forget it.”

He sat there thinking.

“See,” I continued. “You haven't heard the word win in so long you can't even remember how it goes.”

“Let's see,” he said, “let's just say in the sports vernacular you 'persuaded your opponent it was in his best interest to lose.' ”

The Unmailed Letter

I found a letter to my sister the other day that I had forgotten to mail.

It just needed a little updating to send. After “The baby is...” I crossed out “toilet trained” and wrote in “graduating from high school this month.”

And in the P.S. where I had written “I found my first gray hair today,” I ran a line through gray and substituted “black.”

The rest of the letter was still current. “I am on a diet as my skin does not fit me anymore. The children are rotten and I am slipping away from reality. I am going to paint the bathroom and write to the rest of the family next week.”

The trouble with me is I don't like to write letters unless I have something exciting to report. I am intimidated by letter-writers whose correspondence electrifies you.

I have one group of friends who only write me once a year—from a cruise ship. They know it's going to make me spit up with jealousy and they write cute little messages that begin, “Luv: Thinking of you as we island-hop,” and end with: “Must dash. A Robert Redford look-alike has been chasing me all over the ship.”

Other pen-pals I can live without are the people whose children are overachievers. Their letters are filled with news of “Robbie” who just won a “Being” scholarship to Harvard. (He's so exceptional, all he has to do is sit there and breathe for four years.) There's also nine-year-old Rachel, who is competing in the Baton Olympics, makes all her own clothes, just sold her first story to Reader's Digest, and is going to spend her entire summer reading the Bible. And don't forget little Kenneth, who gets up during the night to change his own Pampers. (Does you-know-who still have a plastic liner in his football uniform?)

The letter-writers who really bug me, though, are the ones with the stationery whose paper matches the envelopes. Sure it's easy to write a letter when you have all the equipment, but for me, it's a real hassle finding clean paper, a pencil and a stamp.

I found a letter from my sister in the mailbox today. She had crossed out “I'm glad the war is over,” and substituted “Christmas.” She said they loved their new Edsel, which she ran a line through and added Datsun, and added she was going to clean her oven as we were approaching a month with R in it.

My sister and I are related through recessive Writer's Cramps.

Killing Your Mother

My son never fails to amaze me. At age twenty-one, he has come up with a new way to break his neck. It's called a skateboard.

Frankly, I'm tired. I've dedicated my entire life to keeping that kid whole and at a time of my life when I should be eating chocolate sandwiches and getting up at the crack of noon... I'm a bundle of nerves.

It started with the two-wheel bicycle. As I ran along beside him, clutching his sweater with one hand and the bicycle seat with the other, I yelled, “You could kill yourself on this thing.” Sure enough, my housecoat caught in the spokes and I almost made a wheel out of myself.

The Pogo stick was worse. As he sprung about the house, his head inches from the ceiling, I tried to shield him from falling into a lamp and he lost his balance... pinning me between the floor and his body, causing me severe pain.