Dreams are a funny thing, especially when they belong to someone else.
I have always been a performer in one way or another. Whether it be from the pulpit or at a seminar, I have never been afraid to speak in public.
Truth is, I love the spotlight. I am the perennial ham and my friends forgive me for it. I love a good laugh, and when the joke is on me, I laugh the loudest.
Of course, there is a time and a place for everything. But that didn’t stop me from being the class clown, the jokester, or being “just plain silly” as my father would say.
Hogging the spotlight sometimes interfered with my schoolwork, and that was not a good thing. Auditions and play rehearsals always seem to get in the way of homework. To be precise, my math studies.
Multiplication tables, in particular.
My father was determined I would learn them. He bought flash cards, and we would spend hours trying to get those sequences into my head.
Not very practical, and frustrating for all involved. My sisters and brother would go running for cover every time they say the box of cardboard squares come out of the dining room dresser drawer.
We discovered that I am not a visual person, that I learn better by rote. The only way I could learn them was to repeat them, over and over, much like learning the lines in a play.
Or a comedy routine.
Sitting at the dinner table, I would have a mouthful of mashed potatoes when my father would yell out “6 times 4!” He was relentless, and he went through every table from 1-12 until I was correct. My sisters told me years later they learned them vicariously through me.
“24!” Yes! Got it right, that way I knew I would only have about 10 more outbursts during the night. He would be in the middle of a conversation with my mother, and then suddenly turn towards me and yell “7 times 5!”
Talking on the phones with my best friend, Ilene, I would get pulled aside and his big smiling face with assault me, a burning cigarette stick stuck in the side of his mouth like a maniacal Popeye.
“What’s 2 time 9?” and he wouldn’t let me finish the conversation until I answered.
“18”, and then I returned my attention to the task at hand, listening to the latest lament about a boy, wondering if her father was as goofy. I already knew the answer. Probably not.
Brushing my teeth before bed, he stuck his head in the bathroom – “9 times 9!”
“81”, I answered as I spit a mouthful of toothpaste into the sink.
It’s a great memory.
My husband/partner wrote most of our material when we performed together, although I am able to get in a few laughs on my own here and there; he orchestrates the ebb and flow of the words, creates the mood and the comeback lines for me. I am the proverbial straight man and zig to his every zag.
We are a good team.
I laugh when I get a comment now and then that “I’ve seen your act and it stinks” because truth be known, we haven’t done the act in over 2 years. We’ve been concentrating on other things, testing the waters of new life decisions, specifically for me the emergence of a writing career.
The time will come again when we will face the spotlight together. We continually write jokes and laugh at everyday situations, always on the lookout for the absurd and the ridiculous. People prove it to us everyday.
So it is not a surprise that he will turn to me when I have a mouthful of mashed potatoes and say “Why do you need all those shoes?” an opening line to a great joke.
I’ll be calm and collected, for I know the jokes by heart.
Just like my multiplication tables.
