Is My Bow Too Big? How I Went From Saturday Night Live to the Tea Party (31 page)

Jesus love me this I know

For the Bible tells me so

Little ones to Him belong

They are weak but He is strong

Now I’m ready to die

And in the corner of my eye

I see my uke sitting in someone else’s lap

The girl is strumming along, making up a song

’Cause she thinks I am taking a nap.

I think she has a clue

What me and my uke have been through

And I think that she will handle us with care

I think that she will handle us with care

I think that she will handle us with care

I learned almost everything I know from the sweaty, vinyl, seatbeltless back seat of my Dad’s gold Buick, where the long road trips to gymnastic meets gave him ample opportunity to fill up our little team minds with philosophy (Socrates’ “know thyself,” and Kant’s “nothing exists”), comedy (Dad’s Liberace impression), history (Dad’s WWII stint in Japan kissing Japanese girls), and the Bible (it’s poetic, metaphoric, and scientifically, archaeologically, historically, and prophetically accurate).

Long car trips are a good bonding experience for married people too. Paul and I spent many hours driving to his Mom’s orange grove in central Florida. I kind of liked it because I had a captive audience, literally. Paul’s side of the car was immaculate because he’s anal-retentive: a good quality for a cop. He can always find his bullets and the key to the handcuffs, but he’s so organized that he has a list in his wallet of “things to do,” that he checks every day. On the list, it even says, “Make list!” He has categories underlined: groceries, car, personal…

I said, “What’s personal? Brushing teeth, going to the bathroom? You have to remind yourself to do that?” He never answered me. One time, I snuck into his wallet and made a new category. I wrote “wife,” and underlined it. I wrote under it, “Boink her brains out!” And it worked! So now, I sneak into his wallet twice a month and write it in there. Yeah!
Twice a month
, and he says I’m a nymphomaniac!

I say, “I don’t like to do it to dead people!”

He says, “I didn’t say necrophiliac!”

I say, “Good, because I’ve never stolen anything in my life!”

I think he uses big words because he’s threatened by my intellect. For real. He knows I skipped second grade, but he says, “Everything you need to know you learn in second grade.” He knows my Dad took me to the University of Miami when I was twelve for an IQ test, and they wouldn’t give us the score because they said it would affect our lives forever!

My side of the car Paul calls “a mound of rubble.” I have yellow pads, pens, a laptop, magazines, Diet Coke, sunflower seeds, CDs (Bob Dylan, Chris Rice, Carolyn Arends, Sara Groves, and a “speaking in tongues” sermon), my “book” I’m working on, a gardenia floating in water in the beverage holder, and a halfeaten Sugar Daddy, because it’s half the calories that way. I say, “Paul, can we adopt some babies?”

Paul growls, “Vicki, look at you and your careless, haphazard lifestyle! You can’t even take care of yourself. Put your safety belt on! You’re the kind of person who’ll end up pushing a grocery cart under the freeway, with your laptop and your ‘book’ in it, and the other bums will say, ‘There goes the neighborhood.’ ”

I steal a lick off the Sugar Daddy and lay it down on its wrapper, next to the pile of sunflower seed shells on the floor mat, and say, “We should adopt some boy babies because we already have two girls, and if there are any more, it will be like feminine hygiene products up the ying yang!”

“Vicki! I can’t believe some of the things you say! They’re going to stick in my head forever! Someday I’m going to be in a nursing home with drool coming down my face and every once in a while, out of nowhere I’ll shout, ‘feminine hygiene products up the ying yang!’ and the nurses will shake their heads and say, ‘I think that was from his second wife.’ ”

I say, “Paul, I bring wonderful mayhem into your orderly rut of a life!”

He says, “Vicki, the only realistic outcome to our marriage is that one of us, whichever slips into dementia first, will be victimized by the other from years of pent up rage and retaliation.”

I say, “That’s a good line,” and type it into my computer.

There’s a lot of crime in Miami. That’s why Paul likes it there. I point and say, “Oh no, that car next to us has hoodlums in it!”

Paul says, “Vicki, they can read your lips!”

“Oh no, they could shoot my brains out!”

“It would take some marksman to hit that BB!”

Yes, that’s how we talk to each other. I think that’s his way of flirting.

We took the Chuck Colson course at church,
How Now Shall We Live?
It was so difficult. We had to memorize stuff like Nietzche and Darwin. I said, “Paul, this is so hard, my brain is going to explode!”

Paul said, “If your brain exploded, it would sound like this:
pfft
!”

“Hey, that’s good! How do you spell
pfft
?” I typed it into my laptop.

Paul said, “Look at the beautiful sunset.”

“Isn’t it interesting how the sun goes so slow all day,” I say. “But right when it’s at the horizon it goes so fast, if you blink, you’ll miss it?”

I thought,
Hey I must be at the sunset of my life, because time is going so fast right now and it used to go so slow. Like in the first grade, walking past the mean dog took forever, and the bell rang forever, and the announcements, and watching Carl eat his crayons, and Mrs. Cassiotis’ arm fat jiggle when she wrote on the blackboard
(whoosh, whoosh)
, and watching Carl try to sound out
Dick and Jane,
the word “the,”
ta-hee
, and falling off your skateboard and getting excruciating pain in your coccyx that lasted an eternity, and “You can’t leave the table ’til you eat your last five peas!” …and the last pea took forever. And now, I wake up and watch five minutes of Fox News, make three phone calls, and it’s the next day. How does that happen?

I must be at the sunset of my life.

The week I invited him to dinner to thank him for my career, Jim McCawley died. Then Phil Hartman was murdered, and Chris Farley died. Then went Johnny Carson, Maureen Fowler, Jack Lemon, and my eighty-year-old math professor, Gerard Leddy, who designed the first rocket sent into space, but was teaching me Math 101 at PBA. I was the oldest student in a class full of disrespectful eighteen-year-olds. I stood up and scolded the brats one day, and Gerard and I were best friends after that. My comic friend, Kelly Moran, died, as did forty-year-old Judy Toll, the writer of
Casual Sex?,
then Sweet Lee Barnett, David Rodriguez, and Andrew Breitbart. Soon, you and me. So I wrote a song about it.

A Nice Ukulele

You can’t buy talent in a guitar store,

You can’t buy talent in a guitar store,

But you can buy lots of guitar strings,

And lots of curvy wooden things,

You can’t buy talent in a guitar store,

But you can buy a nice ukulele.

I got my kids a hamster the other day,

They “loved him to death” you could say,

I told ’em, hold ’em gentle,

But they made him do ballet,

You can’t buy a hamster that knows ballet,

But you can buy a nice ukulele.

My husband said just the other day,

Look at the sunset going down that way,

It seems to go slow the whole day long,

But it goes much faster when it’s near the horizon.

   (Hey,
you
try to rhyme those two words!)

   Why does it do that and what does it mean?

   I just played my nice ukulele.

   I called my friend up the other day,

   Invited him to dinner in the usual way,

   He said he couldn’t come ’cause he was in the hospital.

   I said, “What do you have?” He said, “I’m terminal.”

   We both paused and I started to pray,

   I didn’t wanna play my nice ukulele.

   Now the Bible has a word or two,

   About me and about you,

   It seems to say o’er and o’er again,

   The horizon is not the end of our lifespan.

   So I’ll speed up my song the horizon’s near,

   And tell my kids our hamster’s in heaven,

   With my friend I hold so dear,

   And I’ll grin and play ’til the end of the day,

   On my nice ukulele.

   You can’t buy eternal life in a guitar store,

   But you can buy a Bible in a Bible store.

   Or get one for free in a hotel room drawer,

   Or borrow one from me and read John 3:16 o’er and o’er,

   But don’t talk about Jesus ’cause people get sore.

   Just play your nice ukulele.

_______________

¹
See
Appendix II
: Is Jesus God?

²
See
Appendix III
: Messianic Prophecies Fulfilled by Jesus.

Epiloguer

W
hen I finish singing
A Nice Ukulele
, an intern approaches and the nurse rolls my gurney into a room. The intern starts to take care of me because he doesn’t recognize me yet. He gives me a shot for pain and pours antiseptic right into the wound. He gives me temporary stitches and says, “You’re going to need tendon surgery. This is very deep. We can’t do that here.” He’s young and cute. “What do you do?” he asks.

“Well, I’m a housewife now.”

He smiles at my dirty-faced three-year-old.

I mumble, “I just hope I can do a handstand again.”

“A what?”