I Still Have It. . . I Just Can't Remember Where I Put It (3 page)

“Because I shouldn’t have to. I’ve raised a daughter, I’ve been a lawyer. Last year, when the last full-service island closed downtown, I even learned how to pump my own gas. I should be able to open a bag of nuts.”

“So what did you eat on the plane?”

My father looked at me in amazement.

“Honey, have you not been listening? I had no time to eat. This was a full-time job.”

We had arrived at the car, and I noticed my father reach for the door handle twice before he actually made contact.

“And what did you have to drink?”

“Three martinis.”

“Three martinis? Why did you have three martinis?”

“I never gave up hope. I kept thinking I could unlock the secret to the bag, and if I ordered one more martini, I could have the peanuts I deserved with my alcoholic beverage.”

“But it never happened and you just tugged at the bag and drank? You didn’t tell anyone you were my father, did you?”

“I had no time. Especially after the flight attendant passed out the bag of pretzels.”

“Again no perforation?”

“No perforation, but I eventually found a weaker side and opened the pretzels.”

“Thank the Lord.”

“Unfortunately, I don’t like pretzels. I think they’re nothing but burnt bits of bread. I don’t understand why people eat them. I think they’re more suited for packing material than for munching. It just encouraged me. It gave me a false sense of my own strength and ability and I went back to my original mission.”

“Where are the peanuts now?”

“I don’t really know.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know? What did you do with them?”

“Ifflusshdem,” he mumbled.

“What?”

“I flushed them.”

“You flushed the peanuts down the airplane toilet?”

“Not immediately.”

“You didn’t,” I barked, picturing my seventy-eight-year-old father urinating on a bag of peanuts.

“Yes, I did,” my father replied, leaning his head back against the car seat and smiling contentedly. “It was what they deserved.”

Future Reality Shows

Who Wants to Eat a Cow Dung Sandwich?

Lucky contestants have to eat a cow dung sandwich. We see the actual cows creating the contents of the sandwiches and watch the sandwiches being made. Who can eat it the fastest? The winner gets a million dollars.

Who Will Shoot My Mother?

You explain on national television why you hate her, and the lucky winner gets to have someone shoot her. You choose where and how. You win a million dollars.

Who Wants to Marry a Serial Killer?

Serial killers fall in love too. Six lucky women get to spend time with a hardened criminal on death row…but only one of them gets to marry him, have sex with him, and be present for the execution. You win a million dollars.

Who Wants to Be a Shmillionaire?

This is just a logical monetary progression of the actual game show. You win a shmillion dollars.

Who Wants to Smash Their High-Definition Flat-Screen Television Set?

I do. Keep your million dollars.

A Hole in Eight

W
HEN
I
WAS IN MY TWENTIES AND A DANCER ON
Broadway, the thought of me holding a golf club was as likely as Eleanor Roosevelt wearing a bikini. To me, golf wasn’t even a sport; it was an excuse for older people to wear loud clothing. However, after straining a deltoid muscle playing tennis, tearing an Achilles tendon jogging, and dislocating a disc in my back performing a grande jeté, the concept of golf began to make sense to me.

In our middle age, my husband (whom I shall refer to as Martin because that is his name) and I have spent many a pleasantly frustrating afternoon whacking a small white ball across unforgiving sod. Golf reveals quite a bit about a person’s personality; for instance, I have learned that my husband is a perfectionist and that I am totally out of touch with reality.

Here is a typical verbal exchange:

“Good shot,” I say to Martin as I watch his golf ball fly high into the sky, swerve horizontally to the right, and land in a massively wooded area.

“Why do you say that? It’s not a good shot. It landed in a forest,” he replies.

“It looked good to me. It went forward.”

“Well, it was seven different types of crap,” he exclaims, not using the word
crap
.

“That’s not true. There are so many other things that could have gone wrong. You didn’t hit a house, you kept hold of the club right to the end, and, as I’ve proven many times, it is very possible to miss the ball entirely. You have many things to be grateful for.”

It is at this moment I shall impart to you my secret to happiness. It can be summed up in two words: low expectations. If you expect to be excellent at something, you will no doubt be disappointed. If you expect to be terrible, you can thrill yourself by actually being almost competent. You cannot low-expectate about everything, however, otherwise you will never make any money and you will have to live outside. I’m talking about things that don’t really matter in the long run, and unless you are or are aspiring to be a professional golfer, golf would certainly fall into that category. That’s why I have a good time playing and Martin is continually frustrated.

As frustrated as he is with himself, it is no match for how frustrated he is with me. A few birthdays ago I made the mistake of buying him golf binoculars. This is a contraption that allows you to see how far you are from your ball’s destination. If you line it up with the flag, it will give you the correct yardage. If you mistakenly line it up with the mountain behind the flag, it will cause you to swear uncontrollably, choose the wrong club, and ask if you can hit the shot again because it wasn’t your fault, it was those damn golf binoculars that your wife bought for you.

I am unable to line up these binoculars correctly, so I am not allowed to touch them.

“How far away from the hole am I?” I asked Martin, estimating myself to be maybe one hundred yards at the most.

Martin picked up the binoculars, squinted, and thought for a second.

“Twenty minutes,” he replied.

This was cruel but funny and also correct.

I play with pink balls. This habit immediately warns the poor, unsuspecting people who get paired with me to expect more than a few appalling shots. They are also pleasantly surprised when I land a ball on the fairway. I’ve heard many players whisper, “We’re going to be all right. She’s not as bad as I thought she was going to be.”

Here is another secret to my golf happiness. The equipment I play with is usually on sale at Target. It seems very few people want to be seen with pink balls. My husband plays with the expensive, super-duper balls that are surgically wrapped around a titanium core and are scientifically proven to go farther and faster, thereby making him apoplectic when he hits them in the water.

Never practice before starting a round. My husband spends at least half an hour practicing his drive, his second shot, his pitch, his chip, his sand shot, and his putt before he tees off, thereby increasing his anger at himself when he is on the course.

“I practiced that shot at the driving range and it was perfect,” I hear him moan constantly.

Well, more fool he. If I hit a good shot, I’m thrilled, and if I don’t…well, what do I care? It’s not like I practiced.

The maximum amount of strokes I can take on any given hole is eight. Martin actually instituted this rule in an effort to allow us to finish a round before dark. As a result, I no longer have to play the par fives. I just sit in the cart and write down an eight. I don’t inconvenience other players and I rest up for the next hole.

I don’t ever compare myself to the professionals. I figure they can’t tell jokes, I can’t hit a ball three hundred yards—we’re even.

What other nuggets of golfing wisdom can I impart? Don’t drink and drive. “I just need to loosen up a little bit” is something I’ve heard from a variety of men. Very often I’ll see a male foursome drinking beer and then trying to hit a ball. As far as I know, there is no scientific proof that alcohol improves aim.

Enjoy just being outside. I always say to myself, “I might have lost a ball, but I’ve seen a bunny.” It’s a privilege just to be able to look at a mountain while other people are working in an office.

If nobody sees you take a shot in the sand where the ball moves two inches, forget about it. Many politicians have forgotten things of far greater importance and gotten away with them. Eventually you will achieve a “good out,” as they call it. Just count that one.

Sometimes you will be paired with the most annoying people on earth. Put a cell phone to your ear and announce you have to leave because of a family emergency. This always works. Many people have done this to stop playing with me.

Never take a lesson. Just position yourself next to someone who is taking a lesson. This way, if you become worse, you can forget what you overheard, and if you become better, you have had free instruction.

Always aim for the gardener to ensure you won’t hit him.

When a new miracle club is advertised on television, don’t buy it. It will work, but only the first two times you swing it. It will never work again and you will always be trying to re-create your first two swings.

Try not to become too frustrated when playing behind slow players. Very old people sometimes get together to play golf. In fact, when I first heard the little boy in the movie say, “I see dead people,” I thought he was envisioning being behind a senior foursome. Bring along a pack of cards and play a hand if the course gets backed up.

Always keep the cart on the path or on the fairway. Do not attempt to bypass players. You do not—I repeat,
Do not
—know what is waiting for you over the hill. Once my husband became impatient with a foursome in front of us who not only were terrible but were attempting to play from the bionic tees. It was a new cart and the brakes were good, but they were no match for gravity. We ended up asking two young brave boys who worked in the golf shop to haul our formerly new cart out of a lake. It still beeps intermittently, reminding us of what we put it through, and Martin’s wallet still smells of fish.

In conclusion, enjoy the good shots and forget the bad; it doesn’t matter. I may be out of touch with reality, but I’m having a good time.

I bought a new wrinkle cream. If you use it once a day, you look younger in a month. Twice a day, you look younger in two weeks. I ate it.

At What Price?

H
OW FAR SHOULD PEOPLE GO TO ACHIEVE FAME,
and more important, why do they want it? In the past few years we’ve seen Nick and Jessica ruin their marriage, Whitney and Bobby proudly peddle their dysfunctional relationship, and Anna Nicole film her day-to-day diary of madness that climaxed in her expiring from an overdose.

The habit of exposing intimate details of a life to garner attention has become rampant in our culture. If there is one thought I will drum into my daughter, it is that fame for fame’s sake is a completely empty experience. Fame should be a by-product (and not necessarily a good one) of achieving something extraordinary. It can then sometimes, if you’re very lucky, become a useful tool to help you achieve something even more extraordinary.

Paris Hilton would not be nearly as popular a figure if her explicit sex video had not flooded the Internet. I’m not saying she released the footage on purpose, but I do think if she had to do it all over again she would have smiled more. Am I wrong in thinking that a sizable portion of the new generation of celebrities can’t do anything? Madonna was my generation’s Paris Hilton, but at least she could almost sing.

Speaking of Madonna, remember the release of her book that consisted of nothing but naked pictures of herself? Remember the attention that it drew at the time? It all seems rather mild now. Madonna was the bad girl of the late twentieth century and even she has to be saying, “Could these young girls at least stay sober long enough to put on underwear?”

I have a friend who has recently become immensely famous because he is an excellent actor in a very good television show. He is no longer able to open the curtains to his bedroom because of telescopic camera lenses aimed through his windows that can photograph him at any time. His personal life is public speculation in the tabloids, and the majority of the information contained therein is incorrect. A modest amount of media attention is undeniably fun, but as Princess Diana discovered, when you can’t turn it off, it can turn deadly.

Let’s talk about the camera phone. Not only is it unnecessary, I’ve never seen a picture of myself on a camera phone where I didn’t resemble a German shepherd. Web sites that show photos of celebrities in compromising situations and, even worse, coming home from the dentist are the newspapers of today. These sites are so ubiquitous that the gossipers themselves are now fodder for gossip. They have gossiped so well they are now famous.

Andy Warhol once said, “In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.” Rita says, “Make that ten.” Becoming a television star is now no longer limited to people who have honed their craft and studied for years. Television stars now include people who can stand on a post for hours while holding a dead fish in their mouth.

Even vanity takes a backseat to the opportunity to be on television. Footage of both women and men undergoing plastic surgery proliferates on cable. I cannot remember an evening when I’ve flipped through channels and haven’t seen at least one comatose person having their skin severed with a scalpel by a shower-capped, white-toothed, fame-seeking surgeon. I understand that many of the patients on these shows receive their enhancements for free, but I still think the results might be better had the surgeon not been concerned with operating while showing his good side.