It only hurts when I laugh

We've all been asked the question.

Some of us take no time in coming up with the answer.  Some have several choices for their reply. Others have to really think about it, but eventually can find a suitable response.  Very few are stumped.

What is your most embarrassing moment?

The question is typically asked in a group setting, usually a party, so you have to choose your response carefully so you don't reveal too much about what causes you embarrassment (it might backfire on you later), or tell something you've done that you might not be proud of, or share part of your character that you might not want people who you're not very well acquainted with to know about you.

I have a few responses, but it's more a list of embarrassing things that I've said than done.  And now, faithful blog reader, you're preparing yourself for a humorous accounting of the gaffes, faux pas, blunders, and misspeaks that have rolled off my impetuous tongue in the course of these long years of adulthood.

Not a chance.

I think that inappropriate laughing is a better topic for this blog entry. Really!  Think about it. How many times have you been asked the question at a cocktail party?

"When was the worst time that you laughed inappropriately?" 

Imagine it, several of you are gathered around someone's living room with a drink, a small napkin with a puff pastry or stuffed mushroom that's too hot to eat--you know it, because the last one you ate scorched the roof of your mouth and you've been nursing it with an ice-cube from your drink for several minutes. People exchange topics about the work that they do, their kids' comings and goings, travels they've made--some guests you may know, some you're just getting acquainted with.

You've probably already pegged some of those who you don't know very well.

Type A:  The person who asks you a question, and before you've finished your response, they're answering it for you with the answer that they really wanted to give if you'd asked THEM the question.  For example,  "Have you ever been to California?" and you respond with "Well, funny you should ask, I've just been a few months ago, and found it to be much colder than I expected for this time of yea...." but they interrupt, and begin to tell you about their experiences in California, and you realize they really didn't care about your answer at all--they just had an agenda to start non-stop talking.

Type B:  The person who is everyone's very best friend, and knows everyone else in the room.  They find out something about you in some capacity, feign genuine interest in something that you're discussing, and promise you something in the future like:
a follow-up lunch
a book they'll put in the mail about the subject your discussing that they picked up at a yard sale but can't quite finish.
a telephone call with some information that would be pertinent for you to pursue

but you never hear from them again and you realize they are a big phony--so by now you spot them early on.

C:  The know-it-all.  Enough said.  Some esoteric subject has been brought up that piques your interest, and perhaps you know a few facts, but big mouth in the room, knows-it-all.  Or does he?

D:  Drinky McGluggerton.  He's just there for the alcohol;  he's actually amusing until he's had too many, at which point he becomes a little grouchy and frumps himself down in the Barcalounger (tm) in the corner and watches everyone else with a combative eye as the evening drags on.

But then the question is popped.  Has it ever before?  I doubt it.  Let's pretend it just has.
  
"When did you last laugh most inappropriately?"


My mother was a terrible offender.  But to her defense, and probably for most of us, an outburst of inappropriate laughter is usually an involuntary expression of stress or relief--(see The Jugular Vein blog entry)  --but not always.

When my mother was in a grocery store parking lot one cold wintry day after a freezing rain, she spied a woman who was pushing her heavily laden grocery cart out of the store to her vehicle.  The unaware woman hit a patch of ice, and the cart went wayward, while her feet went out from under her causing her to fall to her knees while keeping her grip on the cart.  The poor woman slid the entire length of the parking aisle flailing her legs to try regain her footing on the icy-slick pavement, but with no success.  By the time the cart came to a stop, and the woman could stand again, with torn stockings and bloodied knees, my mother was hysterical laughing.

Many years ago, we'd gone out to Bennett Lake in Fundy National Park.  We had an absolutely gorgeous wooden combination canoe-sail-row boat.  The Aphrodite.  It was very heavy, but the three of us (I was 13 at the time) could manage it well, and my parents could manage it with a bit of a struggle between the two of them.  Wally, would bark commands expecting an immediate and efficient response in action, while unloading the canoe and all its accessories from the top of the car until finally launching it into the water.  After several outings, we had a pretty good routine, each of us executing our job with the timely precision of a military mission.

Until one afternoon at the water's edge.  We were going sailing.  While I was setting the leeboards, Dad was righting the mast, and my mother tied the boom.  Something happened at this point, and the boom came down on Dad's head with an audible, and sharp CRACK!  Expletives were abundant, and my mother was immediately convulsed with laughter, which elicited even more expletives. 

After the tweety-birds stopped circling around Dad's head, we resumed our duties, and Dad returned to the rigging, when

CRACK!

it happened again.  Loud.  Hard. The angry sailor's vicious vocabulary was considerably more verbose.  My mother was unable to catch her breath from uncontrollable laughter.  It wasn't that she thought that it was funny, I'm quite sure it just was her coping mechanism. 

In our early days of home ownership in Omaha, we had a large Linden tree in the front yard that had several large, broken, and dangerous limbs that needed to be brought down.  At the time, we didn't have the standard set of homeowner tools like a tall ladder, a chain saw, or other necessary equipment to do the job safely or properly, but we were concerned that some of the dangling branches might come down and hurt someone.  Stephen drove our car up into the yard and stood on the roof to get a better look at them, and indeed, they were precarious limbs.

I advised him to just jump off the roof of the car, grab hold of the branch, and drop down with it as it should easily break off.  This was not good advice.

Stephen sprang off the roof of the car with the grace of an Olympic parallel-bar athlete, grabbed the diseased tree branch with both hands and stopped in time and motion for a few seconds when

SNAP!

the branch did break easily, but poor Stephen fell to the ground FAST and landed on his back completely knocking the wind out of him rendering him breathless and dizzy.  My immediate response should have been to rush to his side for assistance, but I didn't simply because I became helpless with a fit of manic hysterical laughter that I absolutely could not control.  Stephen was not amused.

(Remember when Mary Tyler Moore couldn't help herself at the funeral for Chuckles The Clown? )

Then there was a time when Olivia was in the hospital.  It was just one of several lengthy and successive stays when she was most sick several years ago.  The nursing staff knew us, and enjoyed Olivia--she was a model patient; she didn't cry, scream, or struggle during painful and invasive treatments, didn't demand toys or television or games, and tolerated the needles better than most adults.

An unfamiliar nurse came into her room one afternoon with a series of hypodermic needles to draw blood, and administer several medications through Olivia's IV.  She set the lot of the needles on Olivia's bedside table and turned her back to set up the procedural equipment when Olivia took on of the syringes and inadvertently inserted it directly through her hand---syringe on her palm side, the needle poking out the back of her hand.  Olivia calmly looked up at me from her bed and in a quiet monotone voice recognizing trouble held out her hand and said, "mummy?"

I laughed at first, because it was so incredulous that the thoughtless, careless, nurse would leave these syringes within Olivia's reach, and also because it looked so bazaar!  This strange anachronism of a small child's hand run through and through with a gleaming hypodermic needle filled with poison.  Certainly, not a laughing matter.

I think the next time I'm asked "What was your most embarrassing moment?" I'll return with the question "First, tell me when was the last time you laughed inappropriately?"  I think it will be a better conversation.

Either that, or I'll reply, "A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pants." And see what happens.

Fun is cheap--entertainment is expensive.

My folks always worked hard. Very hard. Pat and Wally's work ethic is one I've never seen matched. But they played hard, too. They laughed easily, could usually laugh at themselves, and enjoyed seeing if others could or would laugh and, I think, saw such as a reflection of character.

In his teens, in the early 50's, Dad worked at a gas station in Brookline, Massachusetts, on Cypress and Boylston streets pumping gas, checking oil, greasing joints, and washing cars. He was trusted with cash and he was reliable so he sometimes worked at any one of the three stations that the owner operated in the area. In Brookline, there was a Pontiac car dealership across the street and frequently Wally would see the salesman out on the lot among the cars. Since a lot of time was spent out of the building dealing with customers who were inspecting or choosing a car, the dealership telephone was hooked up to ring a bell outside as well as inside for incoming calls.

This is in the days long before cell phones, so telephones were simple, and phone booths were common. The gas station had its own booth, and like everything else in that generation, a call cost a nickel. Somehow, known only to dad, the phone at the gas station had a short in the coin receiver, so it could be jiggled without losing a nickel to place a call.

Wally had the number for the car dealership across the street. When he saw the salesman far out into the lot away from the building, he'd jiggle the coin receiver, place a free call and watch. The salesman would perk up when he heard that outdoor phone bell ringing and run back to the the building, dash inside and catch the phone just as Dad would disconnect.

"Oh! so close!"

Of course, this is also the days way before caller ID, *69, voice mail, answering machines or any other calling feature. It was just a heavy black desk phone, so it was a lost call--and potentially, for that eager salesman, a lost sale.

Dejected, the salesman would head back out to the lot, resume his duties among the cars or customers, and Dad would jiggle the line again, and hearing that ring the hapless fellow would run back to catch the call--but faster this time, and with each subsequent ring his determination increased.

Dad continued this taunt, timing the frequency and duration of the calls with the distance the salesman would put between him and the phone to the point that eventually the fellow would just stand in the doorway, waiting for the phone to chime. He'd get closer and closer with each failed connection until he ultimately stood next to the desk, hand hovering over the phone ready to snatch the handset off the receiver at the first chirp of a jingle. No connection ever made.

It was mostly a harmless prank, and it amused Dad as he watched the salesman shake his angry fist at the telephone and see his shouts, silent from the interior of the showroom. For most teens those days the fad was stuffing themselves by the dozen into phone booths, but that seems so corny--somehow Dad's chicanery satisfies on an entirely different level.

Dad and his pal, Arthur, used that same phone booth to place a free call to his mother. Posing as agents from New England Bell Telephone, they explained that it was time for the annual 'blowing of the lines' and they were calling Bell customers as a courtesy to alert them. They described the necessary process of forcing jets of compressed air through all the phone lines to clean them and avoid the annoying cracking and static in the connection during conversations.

"Mrs. West, if you'd just take a paper sack, and set the entire receiver in the bag, when we blow the lines, none of the dirt and dust that will blast out of the handset will get into your home. You'll just be able to throw the full bag of dirt away when we're done."

Mildred certainly appreciated the advance notice and promptly put the phone in a sack as advised. When Wally and Arthur came back to the house, there it sat wrapped up tightly in a brown bag.

Dad continued these harmless pranks over the years. My mother was often the victim. In the 70's, we'd moved to a new home in Michigan. As with all of our frequent moves, my mother served as forward infantry. Before the moving van would arrive her operations began in an empty house that she would scour, freshly paint, wallpaper, shine, polish and wax floors, and bring all bathrooms and the kitchen to operating-room sterility before we settled in.

Knowing my mother was eager to replace a room full of dated shag carpeting, my father rolled up several feet of the carpet, and laid down several denominations of paper currency, then unrolled the carpet back into place.

Later, when it was time to actually remove the carpet, they knelt side by side to evenly roll it up and out of the house. As each row of bills was revealed, she shrieked and whooped. Thinking that some previous owner had stashed away a small fortune she snatched up the bills while pushing at the carpet roll with the newfound strength a mother would employ to lift a car that had just pinned her child underneath. It took her a few minutes to catch on since Dad didn't join her, but stood watching and laughing, making fun until they were joined by the family who all shared the hilarity.

But she fell for it again when we moved years later, returning to Massachusetts in the late 70's. This new house was in rural central Mass. and had several acres of woodland, complemented with a pond, stone walls, and a babbling brook. To find the septic system Dad purchased a sophisticated metal detector and tromped around the woods on weekends adjusting buttons and knobs listening keenly to various beeps and alerts the machine would offer for whatever was hidden just beneath the earth.

Anticipating a new discovery in Pat's company some day, Dad took a rusty tin can and stuffed it with paper money and coin. He buried it keeping its location in mind for just the right opportunity. Not long after, they walked side by side in the woods, and the telltale alarm was sounded. My mother, prepared with trowel in hand, pounced on the spot and dug to quickly reveal the latest treasure find, the notion of new-found riches erased all memory of having fallen victim to a similar prank.

Maybe it's a generational thing. Our pal Paul's dad, Dwight, seems to be of the same stock.

Paul shared the story with us all about when his native Nebraskan parents were on a trip with another couple. Each couple checked into their separate hotel rooms and as soon as Dwight and Gladys settled in to theirs, Dwight went into the bathroom and unscrewed the light bulb from its fixture, rendering the bathroom pitch black when the door was closed. He then filled the ice bucket with tap water and set it off to the side.

When the traveling couples re-convened in Dwight and Gladys' room to plan the evening's activities, Dwight excused himself to the bathroom, flipped the light switch several times and poked his head back out to explain the faulty bulb, and ask forgiveness for needing to leave the door slightly ajar in order to see in the darkened bathroom.

He then proceeded to slowly and deliberately pour the contents of the bucket in a steady stream from several feet above the toilet bowl creating a clearly audible image of the activity within. Taking several more moments than would naturally occur for even a capacious full bladder, Dwight continued to empty the bucket until half the contents were spent. Then he stopped, paused for a second, and then resumed pouring the remaining water into the toilet.

Emerging from the bathroom, deadpan, they all went off to supper.

I think Dwight and Wally could be very good friends.