Meet our writers

Win $1,000







Reflections August 2012

Skinny Dipping

But Most of All I Remember Portnoy

By Rose Valenta

Women could hang pictures of pig skins all around the house, then replace them gradually with images of themselves in a bikini when they were only 25 years old, then introduce the more recent cellulite images, so that the testosterone reacts the same way to the cellulite images, as it does to footballs and bikinis. Then, as soon as the Eagles game starts, she can have her way with him before the first touchdown.

When my children were young, Erma Bombeck was still appearing on television and Aunt Erma's Cope Book was more valuable to me than Doctor Spock.

I read If Life is a Bowl of Cherries What am I Doing in the Pits? at least 6 times. My kids were driving me nuts and it suited my predicament, even though I knew by that time, Erma Bombeck was about $31 million richer and having lunch regularly with Joe Dionne, McGraw-Hill's chairman. She was being driven all over NYC in a limo, while I was sneak-writing humor pieces with a flashlight in the back seat of my old Chevrolet Biscayne, away from the prying eyes of my mother-in-law, Surly Kate, who had the sense of humor of a wasp.

"I grew up during the Depression" she said. "No one had time to write, we all had to get real jobs."

I have to do this soon, or my children will grow up and I will run out of great humor material, I thought.

Still hopeful that I would get discovered; I went out and got a real job as a boring technical writer for a McGraw-Hill subsidiary and became the Walter Mitty of the literary world. Only I sat at my desk and imagined myself as a best-selling novelist, Erma incarnated, and a Pulitzer Prize winner.

The urge to write creatively never subsided and I still wrote humor pieces in the bathroom like Portnoy, mostly to my friends.

E-mail came along and I had a field day entertaining my co-workers with columns like this one: “Is There a Common Sense Particle?”

Scientists have released a brain study that was conducted on monkeys, hoping to find out what makes us humans tick.

In the study, they allowed the test group of chimpanzees to look at a bunch of sailboats, and then the scientists began replacing the sailboats with tea cups one-by-one, until the monkeys couldn’t tell the difference. This is really exciting news, isn’t it? Although I could think of many ways football widows could take advantage of that knowledge.

Women could hang pictures of pig skins all around the house, then replace them gradually with images of themselves in a bikini when they were only 25 years old, then introduce the more recent cellulite images, so that the testosterone reacts the same way to the cellulite images, as it does to footballs and bikinis. Then, as soon as the Eagles game starts, she can have her way with him before the first touchdown.

I have also conducted my own brain research and found that the human brain operates at between 4Hz and 20Hz frequency, depending on whether one is asleep or alert, and the body serves as a wet-cell battery (something for Budweiser to think about before the next Super Bowl). Plus, we are all down at the bottom of the great electromagnetic spectrum when it comes to common sense, I’m sure there is a particle for common sense in there somewhere, but it is as elusive as Higgs-Boson.

We can usually observe the 4Hz phenomenon on a daily basis, when someone pulls the wrong excuse out of their alibi database, or says something profound, like “Dude!”

Case study: I was traveling through the Italian Market area of South Philadelphia on a Saturday morning and it was 90 degrees outside. Two gorillas, whom I'll call Veni and Vici, were arguing over a parking spot that they had spotted simultaneously. They were ping-ponging the "MF" word back and forth at each other using different voice inflections while stressing various syllables and pointing fingers. Not another word was uttered, just "MF" in 47 different inflections along with a vicious game of Morra (Italian finger game). It was quite amusing and nobody won (the Morra number “1” came out most often).

Since I was the observer, like Jane Goodall, they didn't mess with me.

Then there are the homo sapiens, who think they are running on 20Hz, but are really down
around 8Hz -- not quite asleep. These are the same humans, who drink strong french roast in the morning, but still can’t get it together until noon. “I’m a night person,” they will say when they think they are on 20Hz. However, if you were to meet up with them in a bar at midnight, even at their best, they would say “Dude!”

I suppose that’s why scientific research is always conducted on monkeys. They know when not to speak.

"You should write a book" they all said.

I just married off my last daughter and ran out of material, I thought.

Surly Kate and a few years passed, grandchildren came along, and I was again energized.

My grandson came home from school with an "F" one day, then got into the Doritos and spilled them all over the floor, tipped over his soda, yelled "Avast!" and kicked the dog.

My daughter said "You know, Mom, I have never forgiven you for not allowing me to take oboe lessons when I was 12. What were you thinking with the trumpet lessons?"

"What does that have to do with little Johnny's behavior?" I asked.

"It’s all your fault," she said. "You wanted Harry James, and I could really give a rat's ass about any flight of the bumble bee."

"Okay, so do you want oboe lessons, or the real book on Pirate Parenting?" I asked. I was
becoming my mother-in-law.

"It's too late, I'm 30 years old."

Then it occurred to me, kids are like squirrels. The whole time you are raising them, they gather evidence against you like nuts, so they can pelt you with them after they grow up and fail Parenting Skills 101.

 

Meet Rose