The Diver

I have a smart mouth and it can often get me into trouble. Like all social crutches, this make-'em-laugh tic started when I noticed I got Daddy's attention a lot more often if I was repeating, word-for-word, Edith Ann's sandwich recipe than if I was blathering on about my own boring ass day in my own little kid voice. Hey, Daddy, look what I made with Lego bricks and a good imagination! Yeah, kid, big deal.

So I put together a routine and took it on the toddler circuit (my house) and dinnertime (or Dinner Theatre as I liked to call it) became my time to shine. No one who saw my Knife + Fork Production of Porgy and Bess soon forgot it. And when I was in a Fiddler on the Roof mood, watch out.

I got really good at accents too. And not those mish-mosh accents spouted by those actors who can't do any one particular accent well so instead they mix them all up and pretend they're from a country that doesn't actually exist. No, I'm talkin' really good ones like German and Irish and Puerto Rican and Deep South and various British ones too. (I can take Eliza Doolittle from her 'Enry 'Iggins days straight through to her Rain in Spain days and beyond. Take THAT Gwyneth "Sliding-Doors" Paltrow!). I often said I just made my Brooklynese accent disappear one day in college by imitating my Middle-American classmates and never going back to my original voice again.

I was at my smart-mouth bitchiest during the late nineties when I was knee deep in my own version of Will & Grace – only with a Will who wasn't letting me in on his Will-ness … so I'll say it was a Won*t & Grace.
Won*t and I spent seven years together coining phrases, trashing friends, pointing out people's social gaffs, making up code words, and repeating private jokes so often that they were reduced down to single words. PURPLE was one. EGGIES was another. Meaningless to you – pure hilarity to us. It did manage to turn a lot of people off in those days.

So my advice if you're going to be bitchy, evil, and sarcastic: PLEASE know your audience. Because a person with a make-em-laugh tic will dive for a joke the way Gabrielle Reece dives for the volleyball: pushing others out of the way in a desperate attempt to MAKE THE JOKE dammit! MAKE THE JOKE!!! Only some times you miss the joke and wind up falling on your face and getting sand in your eyes. Regardless of risk I admit: I'm a diver. Having Won*t around almost all the time in those days pretty much guaranteed I'd make the shot. He always laughed. So I got careless.

Two cycles back, America's Next Top Model had a moment like that involving CariDee who thoughtlessly tossed off a joke involving a stick, Nigel Barker's butt and ... well, you do the math. Of course in the editing room they highlighted the utterance with sound effects and subtitles JUST IN CASE YOU MISSED HER JOKE which, by the way, was WRONG and HIGHLY INAPPROPRIATE (or so the sound of a needle being torn from a record indicated to me).

CariDee got reprimanded so harshly by the panel (which includes a has-been model [who, without ANTM would have fallen off everyone's radar some time in 1972], a drag queen [who's not so much queeny or draggy as he is bored], and an over bleached eye-roller [who's snide little Sotto Voce remarks during a photo shoot usually lead to that girl's photo landing in the bottom two] who have all been know to evilly mug for the cameras every chance they get when they're supposedly "judging" which girl is "out of the running from becoming America's Next Top Model" ...) that she was reduced to a shaking pile of blubbering snot as she read an I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry apology note that made me cringe inside. So ridiculous! And yet it must have worked for her, since she went on to win.

How come when you say something by accident and feel genuinely sorry about it, the person you inadvertently hurt gets a get-out-of-jail-free card and can bash you into kingdom come – amid the cheers of onlookers? Why is it okay for someone to have unlimited access to getting you back for something you didn't mean in the first place? Obviously, I've been there once or twice.

One time involved a friend of a friend visiting town, his "fear" of condiments, my inability to stop waving a vinegar cruet in front of him, and the subsequent beat down from five other friends who all called me cruel, vicious, thoughtless, juvenile, and mean. (But look – Won*t is doubled over in hysterics! Don't you out-of-towners see that it's Really Very Funny? We'll be laughing about this one for years! The keyword will be Mustard!)

That one didn't bother me; though I'm still amazed at how, to this day, those out of town friends will repeat "Remember how mean you were to D that one time?" And yet they all have complete amnesia when it comes to the part of the trip where D got back at me ten fold every chance he got despite my Personalized Tour of New York created Especially for Six People out on a Jaunt over the Long Weekend. He was awful to me! But selective memory persists and I'm always painted as the villain who couldn't put down the ketchup for TWO SECONDS and try to understand the trauma I was causing him. Fear of condiments?? A real phobia? Someone call Dateline and arrange a sting ... I'll pose as the 14 year old holding a bottle of Frank's Red Hot sauce.

The second time isn't so easy to mock. In fact it stayed with me for days. Or, I guess ... years. I call it the Blind Kid Story.

The Blind Kid Story happened around 5 years ago but I can still put myself right there in that room and feel that powerful hatred coming at me from a total stranger all because I had to make the joke. My friend G and I were going to the movies and we were tagging along with 2 guys she knew. One was a kid I knew through her (who I'll refer to as Kid) , another guy was a complete stranger (who I'll refer to as ... Stranger).

G and I had been waiting outside Stranger's cubicle and, to kill time, I read some of the things he had pinned to his wall. A Dear Abby column caught my eye.

Some guy was writing to Abby, explaining how he lost his sight due to an illness, and how he wanted something or other and how maybe she could make that happen. And the first line she wrote back was "Dear X, your story touches me so deeply that I want to do whatever I can to help you". I didn't read any further because instead I had to say, out loud, the first thing that popped into my mind which was "If she really wanted to help him out she could have started by writing to him in braille so he could read her answer". I actually wasn't even trying to be funny ... really just making an observation that was a bit wry, IMHO.

My friend G laughed. The Kid laughed. I laughed. If Won*t had been there he'd have high-fived me with an "Oh my GOD!" gasp that outranked the laugh every time. It was probably him I was thinking about when I said it, because it was something he would have appreciated. But he wasn't there. And neither was my guaranteed shot.

Stranger looked at me with absolute pure hatred, snatched the paper out of my hand and said, "You know, that's my friend who wrote that. He's the one who went blind". So, like CariDee, I immediately blasted through a really heart felt I'm Sorry I'm Sorry I'm Sorry apology, probably more than necessary. Stranger looked me right in the eye and said "I don't need to forgive you. You're just ignorant. And nothing will ever change how you are. So I don't need to forgive you. I just need to feel sorry for the fact that you have to go through life being you."

Pause.

Here's the part where, If I'd have been smart, I'd have said good night and walked away. Or here's the part where I tell you how my friend G defended me a little bit with a "Hey, she didn't know" or even a "Well, it is a little bit true". Or here's the part where someone does something to break the tension. But for some reason, we stood there in the awkwardness and somehow still all decided to go to the movies.

We all got on the subway together (with Stranger ignoring the seat that opened up next to me opting to stand the whole way) we all searched for something to eat together (G and I headed for a Cosi, Stranger took off down the block followed by a shrugging Kid who did the gender allegiance thing) and we all watched the most sobering movie I'd ever seen – City of God. Stranger wouldn't even sit in the same row with me. Through the whole movie I could hear him thinking: "See, you ignorant bitch, see … see how awful life is for some people? What kinda joke are you gonna make about THEM, huh? Something about how that five year old kid doesn't have a HEAD anymore cuz it just got blow off by a gang banger?"

I never stopped feeling bad about what happened. And I never stopped feeling worse for how Stranger had completely misunderstood that I hadn't meant it to be mean. I just couldn't stop that dive … and I couldn't shake the Won*t legacy of thinking everything I always said was so damn funny.

Sure, a lot of time has gone by, and sure … Stranger and I never crossed paths again. And sure I had a long talk with a good friend about it on the phone that night, and dissected it till it all was better. But you know, I never stopped wishing that for that one moment back at that cubicle I didn't have such a smart mouth. And to this day, sometimes if I'm with someone who doesn't quite know me well enough, even if someone tosses a great setup my way, I'll hold my tongue and just let someone else go for the joke.