Off My Noodle

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

I Feel a Column Coming On

(For permission to reprint online or in print—if any print media still exist—contact .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)). 

I’m a mild-mannered female, not even 5’ 4” tall. I don’t sport tattoos or serial facial piercings. And yet, some people view me with suspicion.

This is because, several years ago and completely by accident, I became a humor writer. All writers hunt relentlessly for material, but humor writers hunt for people and situations to parody. Material is bountiful, from the supermarket (an excellent source, especially after they installed talking, self-check out registers) to the Kiddush after synagogue services, where you best clear a path between the elderly women and the herring. No place or person has been safe from my prying eyes.

This may explain why some friends have been leery of hanging out with me. One night at a dinner party, my host suddenly froze during the soup course, his spoon poised halfway between the bowl and his mouth. “Is this dinner going to end up in one of your columns?” he asked.

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I shrugged and grinned cagily, while waiting impatiently for someone to spill something, even an embarrassing family secret, thus setting into motion a funny chain of events. My host grimaced a little, even though the soup was delicious. 
Fortunately, most friends like it when I write about them. My friend Esther, for example, is a professional organizer. Her militaristic zeal for color-coded file folders and “methods” for opening mail scare me half to death, yet I still hired her when I had hit rock bottom in my organizationally challenged lifestyle. My feeble excuse, “I’m not messy, I’m a genius!” held no water with her as she forced me to practice the “touch it once” rule on paperwork beloved by professional organizers. I coped with my feelings of inadequacy by writing about our encounter, and tweaking her for her perfectly coiffed hair, expertly painted nails (how did she keep them like that with six kids?), and appearance that put me to shame. She took it like a woman, and happily used the article as PR with clients for years to come. These are good friends to have.


Strangers can be difficult to win over when all they know about you is that you traffic in human foibles. A man I met recently paused momentarily when he heard my name, then asked, “You write about your kids a lot, don’t you?” It didn’t sound like a compliment.
I defended myself by asserting that all my kids still spoke to me, and not only when they needed cash. Frankly, I can think of few things sadder than a humor columnist without a family to exploit. Some time back, I met a humorist at a writer’s conference who told me he was getting a divorce. My heart sank for him. What was he going to write about now?


My family has gone along sportingly with all this, though it’s maddening not to write about some of most hilarious things that happen around here. (Respect for privacy can be a real nuisance.) However, perhaps they mind more than they let on - why else have the eldest kids had their bags packed for the East Coast within minutes of high school graduation? At least our dog Ken has no plans to graduate from high school any time soon and move east. Honestly, in the past few years, he’s provided more salable material than the kids have, and he has fewer privacy concerns, too. 

Writing humor has trained me to look for the good even in lousy situations, such as when my car was mercilessly towed away seconds after the “no parking” time kicked in; the nightmarish bathroom remodel perpetrated by a gang of goons who made the Three Stooges look like engineering geniuses; the maddening failure to figure out what magic words to scream into the phone to get to a live “customer service” representative; and the tragedy of discovering just how paltry three ounces of lean protein appear on a plate. (Hint: It looks a lot bigger if you put it on Little Tikes tea party dishware.) “At least I can spin this into a column,” I comfort myself during such dark moments. 

Pay for this work is often modest, so I am thrilled when my work has delivered the laughs. “Thank God I’m not the only one who has an 11-year-old who still eats with his fingers,” one woman unburdened herself to me one day. “Join the sisterhood, girlfriend,” I said, patting her on the shoulder. “I feel your pain.” And let’s be honest: There aren’t many professions when hearing that something you wrote made someone spit their coffee from laughter and ruin their keyboard, but I savor these anecdotes with perverse pride. Is that wrong?

Laughter isn’t a luxury - it’s a vital life tool to see us through the difficult moments, such as when you have exited the women’s restroom and are blithely marching through a department store when a stranger runs up to you and says, “Let me just help you pull your skirt out of your pantyhose in back,” or when your husband makes the fatal error of parading around in his wedding pants on your 20th anniversary to announce, “They still fit!” The trauma is temporary, but the column that results will last forever! 

So have no fear when you see me; just try to say something amusing, embarrassing, or scintillating and nobody gets hurt.

Posted by judy @ 12:19 PM • (1) Comments