As I Lay Frying

by Fay Jacobs

  H. Doody, 51, entertainer. You didn’t see that in the obits.

  Now I hadn’t spent quality time with Howdy in years, unless you count the occasional glimpse of him in grainy pre-video kinescopes on TV retrospectives. About a year ago I saw a poster for a nostalgic Howdy Doody personal appearance show right here at the Rehoboth Convention Center. Frankly, it struck me as unseemly for a woman of my age to want to go to the show, so I never even mentioned it to anyone.

  But the truth is, Howdy meant a lot to me.

  At age five I got to go to the TV studio where the Howdy Doody show was broadcast and sit in the Peanut Gallery. It was my very first live theatrical experience. Depending on how I feel about my own show business career at any given instant, that day either inspired me or screwed me up for life.

  It was a seminal moment when I realized that the black and white Howdy I saw at home was actually a full color Howdy, who worked for a living. What’s more, Clarabell was an actor getting paid to do a job, albeit squirting kids with seltzer. That day in the Peanut Gallery formed the essence of my thinking that acting and directing were actually viable career choices. Howdy should have warned me.

  I was just getting over the shock of the Howdy thing when I heard about Lambchop. Man, that was pretty much all I could take. I loved Lambchop—the only good use I’d ever seen for a gym sock.

  And what a trouper! Other 50s superstars like Perry Como or Kukla, Fran & Ollie were long gone from our screens, but Lambchop and Shari Lewis (both of them still looking like a million bucks I might add) were still going head to head with the likes of Barney, not to mention Beavis and Butthead.

  Psychologists were all over the radio explaining to parents how to tell their children about the untimely death of Shari Lewis and I thought “who’s gonna explain it to me??”

  A sadistic friend gave me the book On Women Turning 50 for my forty-tenth birthday. While my inclination was to pitch it at her head, I actually found some valuable wisdom in it—like the news that my 40s were the old age of youth but my 50s are the youth of old age. I don’t know if that’s good, but it’s certainly catchy.

  And now that most of the icons from my first childhood can only be seen in the Smithsonian, I guess it’s time to start cultivating icons for my second childhood. But in the meantime, if I were Bozo, I’d start watching my cholesterol.

  August 1998

  THE WELL OF SCHMUCKINESS

  Once, when my father had one-too-many martinis, he laughed and said, “You and Bonnie are the only ones of my kids or step kids who have ever borrowed money and actually paid it back. You’re schmucks!”

  Now technically that can’t be, since the Yiddish word schmuck refers to a body part neither Bonnie nor I own, but in the vernacular, I guess it’s true.

  And lately, we’ve radiated world class schmuckdom—including giving up our boat two weeks earlier than planned, so the new owners could bond with the vessel before their honeymoon. Would non-schmucks have been so accommodating if they had to scurry for lodging with friends for three summer beach weekends?

  Meanwhile, back in Maryland, it was schmuckiness central, too.

  Scrambling for cash for our impending condo settlement, I juggled bank funds, and broke and entered the piggy bank. As I sat in a puddle of coins, stuffing, at best, about two hundred dollars into those irritating paper sleeves, the phone rang.

  “Hi! I’m calling for Whitman Walker Clinic. D.C. has cut our funding and we’ll have to drop clients unless....”

  “Put me down for $50,” I said and went back to rolling nickels. What’s wrong with this picture?

  Meanwhile, Bonnie had to work all night Monday because she took the day off to donate platelets at Johns Hopkins (“They needed my blood type, I couldn’t say no.”) Would that be giving blood figuratively and literally?

  On August 8 we drove to the beach just for the day. It was our very first Saturday-in-August arrival ever and my God! In the time it took to crawl down Route One from Red Mill to Rehoboth, the people in the mini-van next to us could have gestated a baby. I’ll bet there are documented cases of families needing an extra crib at check-in.

  Then, we drove home in the dead of night, fighting narcolepsy all the way, only to find a cat waiting on our doorstep. We don’t have a cat.

  Is there a sign on our roof saying “Schmucks live here, drop off your unwanted animals?”

  “Enough,” I said. “Don’t let him in.”

  “Meooowww.”

  “No!” I said, mostly to myself.

  So we put water out on the stoop and prayed the cat would be gone by morning. The following night he slept on the bed.

  The next day, too few of the young, limber softball players on Bonnie’s team showed up for a double header and she agreed to do home plate knee bends as catcher for both games. By Tuesday, Yogi Berra had to sleep on the sofa because she couldn’t lift her legs high enough to do the stairs.

  I was feeding her anti-inflammatories when the sellers of the soon-to-be-ours condo called. They couldn’t possibly settle on August 14 because they wanted another beach weekend. Non-schmucks certainly would have threatened “no deal.” I tried.

  “But we’re homeless, we have nowhere to...”

  “Impossible,” said the seller. “Monday the 17th or nothing.”

  Another weekend in purgatory. But the final straw was the grueling six-hour condo settlement. At the walk-through, when we went to check the stove, the sellers behaved as if we were asking them to put their heads in the oven to test it.

  Later, at settlement, we wished they had. At one point they were so nasty we got up from the table and fled the room, leaving our unflappable settlement attorney to deal with these sellers from hell.

  When the mortgage company faxed us the zillionth copy of the wrong loan papers, the evil sellers threatened to walk out entirely. At that point, Bonnie and I took the brilliant advice of the paralegal and fled across the street for a medicinal martini.

  Back at the Title company, the attorney convinced the irrational sellers to go away, leaving their signatures behind. If all the mortgage papers were laid end to end the square footage would be ten times the size of the apartment we were trying to buy.

  “I’m glad next week is my vacation,” said the clerk.

  “This is our vacation,” said the schmucks.

  By 7 p.m. we’d handed over our last dimes, got the keys, liberated the dogs from eight hours of maximum security at a friend’s house, and staggered to town for dinner. As we explained our glassy-eyed condition to friends, two gentlemen at an adjacent table couldn’t help overhearing our horror story.

  “Where did you buy?”

  We told them.

  “That’s where we are!” they said, asking us which apartment we bought.

  Hooray!!! The *%$*#&#* moved out!!!!”

  Hooray, the schmucks moved in!

  As we walked the half block home (I love it!), and settled into the condo for the night, we couldn’t believe that those petty sellers had returned before we took occupancy to turn off the air conditioning so we’d be sure to come home to a sweltering apartment.

  “Can you believe that! Well if we’re the schmucks and they’re not, I’d rather be us,” I said.

  “Me too,” Bonnie agreed.

  So we toasted to the bride and groom’s happiness aboard our former boat, set the alarm for 5 a.m., pushed the living room aside for the Murphy Bed and went to sleep. It was going to be a busy week. Somewhere between work, softball, and platelet donation we have to find a home for the cat.

  September 1998

  MUCH ADO ABOUT NOT SO MUCH

  “Did you complete your column?” Bonnie asked.

  “Well, taking a cue from President Clinton, it depends on your legal definition of the word complete,” I obfuscated. “I’ve been working on it, on and off, for a long time but since I haven’t printed it out yet, I’d say no, I did not do this thing.”

  And who can blame me? Just like everybody else I kn
ow, I’ve been busy reading the Starr Report about the President’s sex life. Well, come to think of it, that’s not legally true either. I had the newspaper read to me. Since I didn’t do the actual reading, I wasn’t the reader, I was just the readee, and therefore, I can legally state that although I now know the material intimately, I did not finish the whole report, so.…

  AUGGGHHHH!!!

  On Friday afternoon, when the technological revolution as we know it reached its zenith, and the Starr Report was posted on the Internet, all I could get from my internet provider was a busy signal. The blinding frustration I felt must have been something akin to that which the leader of the free world felt every time some pesky congressman rang up the oval office and caused Monica Interruptus.

  I sat at my desk, hearing my computer modem’s busy beep and thought that the Unibomber was right after all, and technology is evil.

  On the other hand, if the world’s collective race to read the smarmy details of one little tawdry office romance actually crashed the Internet, it could be just the thing to get teenagers back into reading newspapers.

  Thanks to a busy beach weekend, I never actually had time to consider reading the Starr Report until the drive home on Sunday. And since I’ve been known to get car sick from simply reading the nutritional information on the back of a Snickers bar, drastic action was required.

  “I’ll drive home,” I told Bonnie. “You can read the thing to me.”

  So she did. No offense to my spouse’s oral interp skills, but both dogs were asleep and I was starting to nod off by the time we got to fifteen minutes out.

  And that was during the reading of the more salacious stuff. Let’s face it. It cost Ken Starr 40 million of our dollars to produce something Sydney Sheldon could have knocked off in a weekend. I’m surprised Starr didn’t have Fabio on the cover of this bodice ripper.

  At one point, I started to sweat profusely and thought I was having some perverse nervous system event. I mean the stuff wasn’t that steamy. Truth was that the newspaper section was so heavy, when Bonnie laid part of it down she accidentally activated the seat warmers.

  By the time we got halfway home, Bonnie was getting a hoarse voice from reading, I was chugging caffeine to keep me on the road, and we were only up to the tenth time Monica accidentally loitered by the Oval Office. Just you or I try that and we’d be chained to the White House fence waiting for a SWAT Team to haul us off.

  Forty million dollars and this was the best prosecutors could come up with? Unless it was a Cuban Cigar, I don’t see anything impeachable here.

  Don’t get me wrong. I’m disgusted that Bill Clinton made such a foolish spectacle of himself. But this whole thing is a big case of TOO MUCH INFORMATION!!!!!!

  We’re having a national tizzy over a sophomoric office assignation that has turned the country into one big Jerry Springer Show. Elected officials all over the map are rushing up to the microphone to blurt out details of illicit affairs. Who asked them!

  Has anybody stopped to think exactly how many people wouldn’t be embarrassed to see the graphic details of their intimate romantic interludes (now matter how vanilla) in a special section of The New York Times?

  If there’s a sequel, who’s it going to be, Newt? Madeleine Albright? Boris Yeltsin?

  As for Ken Starr, give me a break. With those resources, and six years of investigating Clinton for everything from Whitewater to campaign financing, to come up with nothing more than Monica Lewinsky means he’s either the most inept prosecutor since Hamilton Burger faced Perry Mason, or...and here’s a novel thought...the Clinton Administration actually did nothing illegal.

  The way Congress is behaving you’d think that Clinton and Monica conspired to sell arms to Iran. Oh, that’s right, that wouldn’t be impeachable either.

  By the time we got home I had heard quite enough of the Starr Report and by 9 p.m. it was on the kitchen floor, under the puppy, where it belonged.

  So now what? Are elected officials (a few of which we actually still respect) going to have nationally televised impeachment hearings about this stuff?

  If I were a member of Congress I’d be embarrassed to suggest that our founding fathers meant the articles of impeachment to be used to judge this kind of behavior. If Ben Franklin warned Thomas Jefferson to stop fooling around with the servants, I have a feeling Jefferson would have told Franklin to go fly a kite.

  October 1998

  COUNTING BLESSINGS INSTEAD OF SHEEP

  I dropped my spouse off at the Johns Hopkins Sleep Clinic last Thursday. She was told to arrive with a good book and her pajamas. To tell you the truth, I was envious. She’d be snuggling up with Patricia Cornwell while I was home doing laundry and dog sitting.

  Sure, she was probably having little electrodes glued to her forehead as I was pulling into my driveway, but I was greeted by mounds of dirty laundry, the phone ringing with a computerized magazine solicitation, and a Schnauzer running through the backyard with a brassiere hanging out his mouth. Give me the electrodes. Please.

  After chasing down the laundry thief, I secured the hamper perimeter and collapsed on the sofa. Bonnie wants to know why she’s having trouble sleeping? Blue Cross should save big bucks and just ask me. She’s not sleeping because life is nuts.

  Our dog is old, the puppy’s an underwear klepto, my mother-in-law used our Visa Card at Bingo World, we’ve got a Hoover upright that doesn’t suck, and a White House intern that does. We should sleep?

  Maybe it’s that we’re trying to find affordable health insurance, they’ve recalled the Subaru, our lawn belongs in the Shock Trauma Burn Unit, the Redskins have the worst record since Lyndon Johnson was president, National-Boycott-the-Media-Day flopped since the press didn’t publicize it, oh-so- Special Prosecutor Ken Starr took another document dump, and we don’t know if the coming Y2K bug will kill our computers or just screw up our microwave popcorn.

  Is it any wonder we wake up six times a night hoping we turned off the sprinkler, mailed the taxes, and gave the pills to the right dog? If we were sleeping soundly, I’d worry we’d lost touch with reality.

  Actually, I have no idea how Bonnie will answer at the clinic when they ask why she’s not sleeping, because the truth is, it’s me who’s not sleeping.

  Now before I blab, please know I have a signed spousal release, giving me literary license for full disclosure without risking domestic tranquility. I’m discussing this on the chance readers might relate.

  My spouse snores.

  I’m doing 16 years to life with a nightly half hour of tossing and turning to what sounds like a squadron of Canada Honkers. Then I grab my pillow, one or more dogs and harumph off to the guest room. In hindsight, buying a cheap guestroom mattress, (“Heck, we don’t want guests to be comfortable for more than a day or two anyway”) was flawed logic.

  At any rate, my only respite from back spasms is to fall asleep first. But even if I do manage to drop off, I’m generally awakened several times a night by the QE II Fog Horn. Or Harpo Marx, back from the dead and in bed with us.

  Then, I wind up gently shaking Bonnie and whispering the most universally uttered marital phrase after “I Do.”

  “Honey, turn over, you’re snoring.” Failing to produce quiet, I resort to karate chops, after which Bonnie usually harumphs to the guest room.

  This being the case, I fail to see how the sleep clinic, despite high-tech video, audio and body sensor surveillance, can get the complete picture without monitoring my defensive sleeping skills. Heck, they’d have to wire up the dogs, too. Can’t you just see some HMO Administrator trying to preauthorize that.

  (Also in the spirit of full disclosure, I promised Bonnie I’d reveal that once I do fall sleep I’ve been known to exert flapjack-like flips with such force that we had to sell the waterbed because I regularly launched our late cat into the hall. No, that’s not what killed him. But Bonnie, I hope you’re happy.)

  Well, at least the clinic will be able to determine whether my significant sno
rer has something called Sleep Apnea. That’s where some people actually stop breathing during the night and wake themselves up gasping for air. It’s either Apnea or a nightmare about being made to sit through the musical Rent again.

  If she’s got Apnea, no wonder she feels lousy in the morning. My anxiety that she has it is just one more thing to keep me awake.

  Anyway, I pictured Bonnie at the clinic, enjoying her N.Y. Times Best Seller, then dropping off into REM sleep, fluttering eyelids observed on TV by hovering interns. The dogs and I turned off the lights, locked the door and went to bed.

  Why is it that the second I’m home alone, I hear Freddy Krueger shimmying up the A/C vents? I thought Sixty Minutes moved to midnight but it was just the bedside clock. It was so quiet in the bedroom I could do a traffic count on I-95, a road I had no idea was even in proximity. While the room was snoreless, it was a miserable, lonesome night.

  Bonnie arrived home the next evening with news that “they wired me up like Frankenstein, put a red light on my finger (ET, phone home), stuck a tube up my nose and told me to have a good night’s sleep.”

  “How could you?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said, “but I slept like a baby. Then they woke me up for cereal and a banana, told me to read a while, then asked me to take a nap, then woke me up and told me to watch Rosie, then told me it was naptime, then woke me up for lunch and Oprah, and.…”

  Was this a hospital or Canyon Ranch Spa?

  In honor of October 11, Coming Out Day, Bonnie answered questions accordingly:

  Doctor: “How long have you been having trouble sleeping?”

  Bonnie: “Actually, it’s my partner who’s having trouble sleeping.”

  Doctor: “Oh, what’s his problem?”

  Bonnie: “Well, she says.…”