Cantankerously Yours

Humor. And Women

By Wendell Abern

Dear Readers,

In late March, Anne Smith, the beautiful young choir director at River of Grass (my Unitarian Universalist congregation), came to congratulate me on my just-announced birthday. After an affectionate hug, she said, “So you’re now 83?”

“It’s a great age. It’s the new 37.”

She chuckled and said, “You’re probably one of the few men who knows that the real way to a woman’s heart is with humor.”

“Hasn’t worked with you.”

“But you’re 83. And I’m 27.”

“Ah, so you don’t like older men.”

“I do like older men. Some older men.”

Note how she graciously avoided the word, “ancient.”

That conversation triggered many memories (most of them unwanted), and helped bring into focus a reality about men and the endless pursuit of women: we all recognize in ourselves a bit of Charlie Brown and the little red-headed girl.

In my case, I’m like Charlie Brown on steroids.

When I was fifteen years old, I fell hopelessly in love with Marlene Goldman. It was a case study in what every young teen-age boy goes through at least once: Boy meets girl in school. They talk frequently. Flirt. Confide. Reveal secrets. Whisper wanton longings. Complain about teachers. Call each other on phone, daily. Boy falls madly in love. Calls girl and asks her on a date.

She says, “It would be like going out with my brother.”

Devastated when Marlene told me this, I spiraled into a severe depression that lasted for at least one day. Then, like all good friends who had been rejected because they had become good friends, I decided to use Marlene as my romantic adviser and confidante, secretly hoping she would eventually feel differently about me. (Spoiler: she never did.)

One night I called her and said I was thinking of asking out Karen Katz,

“Good idea!” she said. “I think she’s terrific. And remember one thing my mom told my brother: the way to a girl’s heart is through humor.”

(Ah! Reverse déjà vu: she preempted Anne by 68 years.)

I took Karen out the following Saturday night, and Sunday morning Marlene called me.

“You idiot!” she yelled. “How could you do that?”

“Wait. Wait. You were the one who told me to use humor; you were the one who said all the guys liked Karen’s dad because he was a funny guy.”

“So you don’t insult him!”

“He thought it was funny!”

“Karen didn’t!”

“Marlene, he egged me on! They were all dressed to go to some big fancy party. He was wearing a tux; Karen’s mom had on a great gown. He asked Karen how he looked and she said, ‘Like a movie star.’”

“Right. Then Motormouth jumped in.”

“He prodded me! He wanted me to say something funny! He said, ‘How about you, young man? What do you think? And by the way, looking like a penguin doesn’t count.’ So I said, ‘Okay, you look like a greeter at a funeral parlor.’ And he laughed. And his wife laughed.’”

“Yes, but you weren’t going out with them, and you won’t be going out with Karen again, either.”

After the Karen fiasco, however, Marlene became an invaluable personal counselor to me. All through high school. I had no idea the way girls thought. They anticipated things! They knew things instinctively! They manipulated! They were incredibly cunning!

They were always a mystery to me, and using humor – which I tried constantly – almost always backfired. I stopped telling Marlene about my pathetic efforts after hearing, for the nine millionth time, “How could you think that was funny?”

I did keep one incident a secret from Marlene.

By the time I was a junior in high school, I kept hearing about this older woman who liked young guys. Much older. Around 35 years old. She was the talk of the locker room. Some guys bragged about having slept with this lady; others laughed at their claims, insisting she didn’t even exist.

Her name was Ming Toy Epstein. I suppose the name should have made me suspicious, but everyone kept telling me she was a Chinese woman who had married a Jewish salesman.

Then one day, my friend Bernie announced to everyone he knew where she lived. He had her exact address!

“Where’d you get that?” I asked.

“Mort gave it to me! He said he was with her last weekend!”

That Saturday morning, five of us piled into Bernie’s car and headed for the neighborhood where Ming Toy Epstein lived. We had no idea what we were going to do once we got there, but we had to go see if she really existed, or was just an urban myth.

We drove to a neighborhood on the south side of Chicago known as Oakenwald, populated almost exclusively by Nisei: Chinese, Indonesian, Philippine. (The year was 1949, only four years after the war ended, so there were no Japanese.)

We drove to the address. Bernie parked. The house was small: stucco, with wooden shutters.

An elderly man sat on the front porch, rocking. When we got out of the car, he stopped rocking and stared at us. We stopped and stared back. Then he stood up and grabbed a rifle perched next to him. Without hesitating for a second, he pointed the rifle upward and fired it.

It was so loud we thought World War III had started. You never saw five Jewish boys run so fast in your entire life.

Later, an angry Bernie confronted Mort. Mort laughed until we all graduated a year later. And he’s still laughing. It was the first thing he mentioned to us at our 50th year class reunion.

*

I often find myself thinking about the link between women and humor. And, given the fact I now qualify as “ancient,” wondering how guys from my era – like Jack Benny, Bob Hope, and Abbott and Costello – did in their pursuits.

Cantankerously Yours,
Wendell Abern