by Bill Cosby
Now, this was before social networking. As I write this piece in the year 2011 I wonder, if social networking had been available back then, what might have happened. Someone could have seen the dolls on a social-networking site and started counterfeiting them. Or maybe people would have written about how ugly this thing was and it wouldn’t have taken off. Because, as you can see on today’s social-networking pages, there’s an awful lot of profanity from an awful lot of people who seem to be very angry about something, although they may at times even make sense.
On the other hand, social networking could have tripled the maniacal “I want” of the children, and all kinds of things could have broken loose. We’ll never know. All we know is that through a commercial or whatever—I don’t remember Cabbage Patch commercials, but there must have been commercials—children heard about Cabbage Patch dolls and insanity broke out. An epidemic. The number of authentic Cabbage Patch dolls in each family—I think it came out to something like ninety-three million. Three times the population of Canada.
With some of the most gruesome faces I’ve ever seen, I don’t think anybody really loved these things as much as they just wanted to have them because somebody else had them. If only children were allowed to drive, they could have made the Edsel a huge success.
What happened with the Cabbage Patch dolls proved that, even without the Internet, the behavior of children can create a mass “I want.” One child says “I want” because another child says “I want,” and so forth and so on. And so this is really the expected behavior of a child: “I want.” But what about the behavior of people in charge of children? These are the people who really went way over the behavioral normal. Their behavior, to use another word, was not usual behavior.
Over the years, I’ve grown tired of people telling me what is normal or usual. Sometimes, when I pointed out that something was not normal, people would challenge me:
Well, what is usual? Where do we have normal?
Well, normal is when you’re coming down the street and people are coming from the opposite direction and nobody speaks and nobody smiles. That’s normal. What is not normal is walking down the street and looking at somebody, somebody you’ve never seen before, and this person smiles and nods as he walks by. That’s not normal.
To get on an elevator, four people are already standing there, and everybody’s pretending that they’re focused on the numbers, there’s no eye contact—that’s usual behavior. Not usual is when a person gets on an elevator with five other people, and nobody knows anybody, but then this person, whom you’ve never seen before in your life, makes eye contact and smiles. The person doesn’t want you romantically, doesn’t want long conversation, just kind of nods, and you nod back, and then you both go back to your numbers.
So I find that the word “usual” usually drives people away from what is usual. And usually the normal behavior after that is they argue about what is normal. But usually, as you go along and you look at things, you can throw the word “normal” around so they won’t catch it enough to challenge your normal. Or you can be prepared as I have prepared myself to defend normal. And then you get to abnormal.
To make them understand abnormal is very easy to do. You’re in a room, sitting, and a person comes into the room. You’re the only person in the room, and that other person just stands there and smiles at you. Every time you look up that person is still looking at you and smiling. That’s abnormal. And it will draw you out of your comfort zone into a number of emotions: fear, anger, and all the words in a thesaurus.
If they still don’t understand what abnormal behavior is, all you have to do is have someone attack them. Abnormal behavior is somebody coming in and you’re just sitting down and they start hitting you over the head with a bottle. And you’ll find that people have no counter for that; they’ll agree that someone hitting someone over the head with a bottle is abnormal. Then you’ll say to them, Okay, now what do you consider normal? And leave that up to them. Usually they’ll take their discussion away because they didn’t really want to get that deep. Especially about themselves. Plus, they don’t want to be hit in the head with a bottle.
The actions of the parents of children who wanted the Cabbage Patch doll was not usual, not normal; it was abnormal. They called it a frenzy. It was worse than that. It was grown people freeing themselves from all behavior of usualness. Deep-rooted things came out of human beings. People hurt other people. Yes, I’ve seen and heard about big sales, 20 percent off or whatever. And I am well aware of mob violence, people following the mob mentality, getting caught up in things.
I remember when word came that World War II had ended, and I remember being near the Booker Movie. And some kid was yelling, “The war is over and you can get in the Booker Movie for free.” Running when he said it—like he had found a hundred dollars. So a mob formed. But the owner or manager of the Booker Movie stopped this foolishness immediately by closing the door and standing out front. He didn’t even have security guards. He just closed the door and locked it and went into the booth that sells the tickets and yelled:
“This is not true. You cannot get in for free. It’s eight cents a ticket! It is not free. Congratulations on the war. The war is over. Now, all of you go home and get your eight cents.”
And it turned the mob around. Nobody was angry. They just said, “It’s not free, but the war is over.”
But nothing stopped the parents who wanted a Cabbage Patch doll for (as they claimed) their children.
It reminds me of when Jack Benny was confronted by a robber who put a gun in his back and said, “Your money or your life!” And Benny said nothing for a long, long time, maybe thirty seconds. So the robber repeated his demand: “Your money or your life!” And Benny said, “I’m thinking, I’m thinking.”
What were these mothers thinking? Whom did these people really buy this ugly doll for? What puts you in such a dire position of parenting that you absolutely have got to have this thing for your child? I want to walk away from the easiest explanation: that the doll was not for the child but it was for you. I also want to walk away from the easy one, which is you want to buy something that will make your child love you. No, I want to get into the complex reasons why you stormed the store.
So what was it that the doll represented to you? Why did this doll, this “thing” or “symbol” or whatever a psychiatrist might call it, cause you to look at these other people in the store as if they were your enemies? You parents stormed and fought and tore materials and boxes.
I will buy this because my child must have this!
And the mothers turned into witches from The Wizard of Oz. Or vicious queens shouting: “Off with their heads!” Rules changed.
Actually, there were no rules.
I saw it first!
Yes, but I got to it before you did!
Was it really love that drove people to this? I don’t think so. There was no law. Women fought and clawed.
The fairer sex? The little lady? The weaker sex? Hogwash!
Anybody with any sense or anyone who has ever watched the Discovery Channel realizes that there’s nothing weak about the female. For example, the female praying mantis, after sex, will bite the head off of the male. And I’ve never heard of a father bear tearing up some human being who got too close to the cubs. Okay, once in a while you’ll hear of a father bear tearing up some people who caught him going through their trash or busting open a locked freezer to get at frozen steaks. But basically all a father bear does is just sit on the riverbank and smack fish. Smacks salmon as they’re flying by. That’s about it. And then he goes to sleep.
Whoever made up this weaker-sex thing forgot that you don’t mess with a female anything. A female bird leaves the nest to scout an area where there are plenty of worms. And she has great eyesight from the air so she can also see human beings, or a snake, anything coming near her eggs or her young children. And she will attack. You don’t go near a bird’s nest when the baby birds are in there, because
the mama bird will fly down on top of you. A bird can cause a hunter to drop the gun and run away. It doesn’t have to be an eagle. And I’m not even talking about a crazed mother hawk. I’m talking about a wren. Even an upset mother wren can do damage. And they know exactly what to go for on a human being. They will go for your eardrum and take you out with that little beak.
Not long ago, Mrs. Cosby decided that we should have a bird feeder on our property. The birds fly into it and it has some wood sticking out for the birds to stand on. There are seeds inside, so the birds fly in and out. And it’s a wonderful thought to know that in the dead of winter you have this thing outside that’s feeding birds. You feel like you’re part of nature.
So I hung this nice wooden house for the birds on a branch, and pretty soon I found out that we had a blue jay in our area. Now, the blue jay, according to word of mouth, is a nasty, take-no-prisoners kind of bird. This bird is afraid of nobody.
One day, a squirrel came by and saw the bird feeder. It must have been a pretty smart squirrel because he immediately realized he could climb the tree, go out on the branch, eat the bird’s food, then jump out and go back on the branch.
This did not sit well with the blue jay.
What happened next, as I stood and watched, was one of the most bizarre events ever to occur in nature. If I hadn’t seen it for myself, and known what it was, I would have been unable to describe it and would have just said it was the strangest flying thing I had ever seen.
I saw the squirrel come down, work its way down to the feeder, and start eating the seeds meant for the birds. And I was not the only one seeing this. The blue jay was watching too.
I don’t know for sure if it was the mother blue jay or the father blue jay—I can’t tell the difference between a male and female blue jay—but whichever it was made a pass, saw the squirrel eating the seeds, then came around to the back entrance where the squirrel was hunched over with his tail up.
Well, the blue jay dives straight at the squirrel, and the blue jay’s head went right in. In other words, it was a giant goosing. A spectacular, never-been-seen-before, headfirst goosing.
The reaction of the squirrel was to leap off the feeder, with the head of the blue jay intact. Now the blue jay and the squirrel were airborne, with the blue jay’s head and shoulders inside the orifice of the squirrel. The blue jay started flapping its wings and soared back up to about seventy feet. It looked like the weirdest bird I had ever seen.
At an altitude of eighty or ninety feet, the blue jay dropped the squirrel into a wooded area. As the squirrel plummeted to the ground, the blue jay made a starboard banked turn, flew to a birdbath (which Mrs. Cosby also had me buy) and took a total bath. I could hear calls from different trees, and although I knew it had to be my mind, I swear I thought I could hear other birds applauding this blue jay. And I could hear woodpeckers pecking on the tree trunks in such perfect time, the Florida A&M drummers would have been very proud.
To this day I have never seen another squirrel near that bird feeder. Although I did see other birds circling, and there was one bird that somebody said looked like a loon. A loon? It looked like a duck to me. But that got me to wondering what a loon was. I’d heard expressions like “crazy as a loon” and words like “loony bin.” But why was this bird used to describe something crazy? So I went to the computer and started searching.
According to Wikipedia: “The loon is the size of a large duck or small goose, which it resembles in shape when swimming. Like ducks and geese, but unlike coots and grebes, the loon’s toes are connected by webbing.”
Coots? Like an “old coot”? What is a “coot”?
Well, more searching turned up the fact that a coot is a medium-sized water bird, but it didn’t say anything about why the word “coot” refers to an old person. And I still didn’t know why loons are crazy. Back to Wikipedia: “Flying loons resemble a plump goose with a seagull’s wings, relatively small in proportion to the bulky body.”
Resembling a plump goose could make you crazy. But there had to be another reason.
“Male and female loons have identical plumage.”
Aha! They can’t tell each other apart! That could be enough to make you crazy. But then I finally found out the real reason for the expression “crazy as a loon.” Apparently, the loon makes a weird, laughing call that sounds like a crazy person.
But wait! A very scholarly friend of mine pointed out a passage from Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale: “These dangerous unsafe lunes i’ the king, beshrew them!”
My friend said that the word “lune,” in Shakespeare’s time, was short for “lunatic.”
Since Adam named all the animals, and Adam was way before Shakespeare, I’m going with the weird, laughing sound.
Anyway, we were talking about females in the animal kingdom. But what about human females? And this is not to say that somebody set up a law where the male marries a female several years younger than he is. But that does happen often. Which means that later on you get to die before she does because you’re older than she is. It isn’t always the case, but females do tend to outlive the male, stick around ten, twenty years longer than the male. So all this weaker-sex stuff is just not true.
But I digress.
Let’s get back to the women who descended on the department store. When last seen, they were tearing into boxes and throwing things while they tried to grab one of these dolls. Who were these people, really?
And why did the department store allow this kind of behavior? What department store manager sits in a meeting and says to his staff:
I want something in here that, when we open the doors, is going to cause people to trample our merchandise and beat up our salespeople. It’ll be great for the business.
What do the department-store people think all these years later? Is it a wonderful memory? Or a painful one?
And the price of these dolls? I don’t know what the original price was, but today, when you look them up on eBay, they’re, like, fifty dollars. And somewhere in this world, there’s got to be at least three hundred people with injuries that they will—as old people say—go to the grave with. Broken limbs. Scars. Dislocated joints. And all over this ugly doll with a certificate that says, “Hi, my name is” and so forth and so on.
And what about the children that cried and screamed (like a loon) for these ugly dolls? Whose mothers went out, the human being mother went out, and took on hundreds of other human being mothers. These children now have to be at least twenty years old. Do they even remember what their parents went through to satisfy the “I want” part of their brain? I don’t think so. And when these mothers look back on these scars, physical and emotional, do they think it was worth it?
My wife and I have argued about these dolls. She thinks the pet rock was even worse.
THEY SHOULD DO THIS EVERY THREE MONTHS
Each year, the grandchildren and their parents come to our home in Massachusetts for Christmas. We are in the central part of the state, north of Springfield, so we live in an area of farmland.
I have heard U.S.-born people describe their first trip to Africa with the word “stink.” You have to remember, Africa is not the zoo. These animals are the indigenous animals. So if you are downwind, you will get a strong scent. The reason I’m saying this is for people to understand that we live in the dairy-farm part of Massachusetts. Many cows. And on a given summer day, with some four hundred cows, you will get a whiff of whatever those cows happen to be doing. Welcome to non-Africa, USA.
To get to our home, one comes off the interstate, and then there are fourteen miles of inland driving. Roads that have been smoothed out by wagons, cars, flat-footed elk, and heavy-pawed mountain lions. Trails of things that either travel in herds or packs or all those groups that animals and birds and fish travel in. Like a school of rabbits.
No, no, that’s fish.
And over the years there have been a gaggle of geese, a herd of cattle, and a pride of pigs—no, no, that’s lions.
“A thing of turkeys is not a flock; it’s called a rafter. A rafter of turkeys.”
And this seven-year-old female just kept walking and muttering something like: “Grandpoppy has lost it again.”
Then she went to my wife, who is Grandma, and said to her, “Grandpoppy is making up things again.”
My wife, who is the wordsmith of the house, without even being asked, came to me to find out why the grandchild had said “Grandpoppy is making things up again.”
Don’t ever make a mistake when you are using words with my wife. It’s better just to draw pictures. Because if you say anything to my wife, she will seek first of all to find out if you are using a real word or if it is not a real word. Then you can pronounce it two or three different ways, after which she will leave the dinner table and dig around to find out everything there is to know about that word.
So when I, through research, learned that a thing of turkeys is actually called a rafter, and then the grandchild went to my wife and said, “Grandpoppy is making things up again,” my wife came to me and said, “What are you teaching the children?”
Well, I could’ve seized the moment and attacked her by saying, “That is plural.”
And then she would say, “What is plural?”
