Tuesday, June 26, 2012
Nora Ephron Died....And She Was Funny.
Nora Ehron died today and I feel strongly about her death to pull myself out of my blogging lull and pay homage to this phine author of "HeartBurn", "I Feel Bad About My Neck" and "I Remember Nothing", not to mention the author of such screemplays as "Silkwood" (with Alice Arlen), ""Sleepless in Seattle", "When Harry Met Sally", and "Michael" (and more.....) oh my God, a member of my generation (well, bless her heart, at seventy-one, she was Even Older Than Me) - - Nora Ephron died today!
I don't think people with great senses of humor should be allowed to die.
Cary Grant. Will Rogers. James Thurber. Dorothy Parker. Victor Borge. Jack Benny. Woody Allen (hang ON, Woody!) ......and, go ahead, add your own. Bring back the humored dead. Hold on, all you terrific humored ones!
Not to mention the ones I know, the ones YOU know, in our daily lives.
My friend Christine, she's got the best female sense of humor I know. Every time we see each other I know it's gonna be a treat. All I have to do, no matter what's going on in my life, no matter how much pain I'm in, no matter whether my water heater's broken or my hair just got caught in a drawer and I took the scissors and cut it out or I, the World's Worst Driver, just drove into a pole at the nearest gas station, no matter any of that, when I see Chris all I have to say is this: "Say it." And she looks at me with her warm eyes and assumes an East Indian accent and clips out, "My dog does not worry about the meaning of life."
And I say, "Again."
And she says it again. With a straight face. Totally. "My dog does not worry about the meaing of life." Okay, I know it doesn't sound like much to you, but to me, it's hilarious. It's groundbreaking. And then I make her go into Yiddish. And we go ahead and make up a conversation in Yiddish. And then we just talk and the talk is always hilarious, even if there's crime and death and sodomy in there, even if there's bugs in the cereal in there, which there once were, at my house on Wheaton Way when we were in our twenties and I didn't change cereals quickly enough (or was it flour?) I don't remember - - it's always hilarious.
She says I make her think. Okay, good. I make her think. But SHE. SHE makes me LAUGH.
I guess it's a fair enough trade, only I think I'm getting the better of the deal. Because I know. I KNOW. That laughter IS the best medicine in the whole. Wide. World.
And Nora Ephron was funny. I miss her already. I miss her in that category of people that you don't know and you know you never will know but you feel like you know because they have helped inform you about the world. Nora Ephron told me something, something great. She told me that there is a way of looking at the world, in specific, about bad, sad, really awful events, and turn them into something juicy, something fully of life in a real-sweet-and-salty way. Without being crass or mean or evil. Just by staying human and keeping your eyes open and reporting to yourself and to others with honesty. Just, I guess, by being and staying human.
A friend died the other night. A friend finally died the other night. I say it this way because it's the only true way to say it. Even the Hospice people, who called me today to say Thanks for doing so much and especially for sticking with it and for doing the hard stuff even when she (the friend) got so mad at your for doing all the hard stuff that she (the friend) hated you at the end (which went on for five or six months) and you put back your shoulders and did the right thing anyway.......anyway, when the friend died the other night, I got together with two or three other friends who were intimately connected with the life and death of __________ and we toasted ________and remembered the good times and the better times and the way better times and the way way way better times and before the night was over we were showing each other our upper arm jiggles and dancing to Simon and Garfuncle's "Diamonds On The Soles of Her Shoes" and, if that wasn't funny or humorous, neither was it being artificially down in the doldrums (we had all said goodby about twenty million times) and, when I thought about it later, it did seem so human and so sweet and so group-compassionate.......and I knew that when I told my husband Alan, who also has a great sense of humor, he would enjoy the humanity behind the whole scenario.
Because Alan, too, has a great sense of humor. Alan's humor is largely a product of New Jersey (exit 105!) , a place which gave us ..........nearly everybody who's anybody with a sense of humor. Neil Simon. Carl Reiner. Oy, I can't begin to name all of them, but there they are. Slightly ascerbic, slightly (slightly! who am I kidding!) insulting! At Alan's fraternity reunion held at Sal's, the guy who came up with the ad campaigns "I can't believe I ate the whooooole thing" and "That's a some spicy meatball!" - - you shoulda HEARD the friendly ???!#&$^@%#^&*# razzing going on. And then they'd throw their arms around each other (New Jersey guys are very loving, very physical, both with females and males) and call out, "God! I LOVE you, man!" and the atmosphere would be thick with that kind of missing and loss and love and sweetness that sometimes only grown men can seem to create or summon up.
Alan can make me scream with laughter. Like Chris, he can do accents. Like Chris, he can enter a comedy routine in a snap. Without his sense of humor he'd just be another smart, loving, handy-around-the-house, loyal, fascinating, generous guy. Add humor to the mix and he's dynamite.
Alan left this morning, returning to his bungalow on the water for his/our three or four days alone, while he tends to his house and his gardens and his life in general and I tend to my patients and my hair and my life in general. My pain was extra hurty today and I don't like it much when Alan leaves (our first wedding anniversary is TOMORROW!) but I had shopping to do so I went to the bank and then to Safeway and at Safeway I stood in line for a long old time with a ton of groceries in my cart and I unloaded them with tears in my eyes in that way that tears have of kind of, it's like when you point your finger at a dog and command, "Stay" and the dog stays but he keeps fidgiting and you just know at any moment that damn dog is going to make a go for it, well, that's the way my tears felt as if any moment one or more was going to break loose and point to the fact that today I was Cinderella and was NOT going to the ball..........and the Safeway guy who was once a Christian counselor who couldn't stand the bad urges of his patients so he gave it up cheerfully told me what I owed and I plunged my hand inside my purse - - and I kept on moving my hand around and around and around inside the large summer bag until it seemed like my hand had developed a life all it's own, kind of like a motorized hand in a bad horror movie, just a motorized hand belonging to a woman who, by now, for reasons totally unknown, for usually I am the most cheerful woman in the vicinity, was a the woman with the moving hand and the buckets of tears running down both eyes, saying, "I - I - I - I - don't - know- whereeeeee - m-m-m-m-my m-moooney www-eeent - - - ' and the Christian counselor Safeway guy who really likes me because I say "GodBless" to him every time I leave his station came around and stood next to me and looked both ways like he was looking for traffic and then took me in his arms and gave me a hug and patted my hair and the woman behind me said, "That's all right, honey, you go get your money it's somewhere, that's for sure" and the check-out boy said, "I thought things like this only happened to ME!" which made me laugh and wipe my tears off my face at the exact moment that the woman from the TV part of the store came running over to me with a box of Kleenex because she likes me and she noticed I was standing there, sans dry face, sans money, sans everything.
"You go find your money, honey," said the Safeway Christian Counselor guy," and I'll put these groceries right down here, all safe and sound for you," and then he said this most wonderful crazy thing, he looked at the line behind me and said, "It's all right folks, she's a doctor!"
And me, I drove home and found my wallet on my couch, right where I had left it, paying bills.
It's all right, folks, she's a doctor.
And I thought: wow, I really am a wacky broad, but I'm in a great community and there's laughter and love and sweetness and a whole hell of a lot of groceries waiting to be paid for back at the Safeway store. And then I laughed. My pain was still clutching and throbbing but I laughed and laughed.
When I returned to Safeway I thanked the Safeway guy and the lady behind the Video place and she said, "Oh, that happens all the time, but we're all so glad you found your wallet, because, you know, we really love you, you kick ass!"
What a day! What a great, grand, glorious, wonderful day! Who could ask for anything more?
Except for Nora Ephron not to die. From pnemonia-complicated leukemia.
Here is a little bit from Ephron's latest book "I REMEMBER NOTHING:
"Here is another thing I've known all my life, which is why you will not find me lying on my deathbed regretting not having eaten enough chopped liver. let me explain this. You can eat all sorts of things that are high in dietary cholestrol (like lobster and avocado and eggs) and they ahve NO EFFECT WHATSOVER on your cholesterol count. NONE. WHATSOEVER. DID YOU HEAR ME? I'm sorry to have to resort to capital letters, but what is wrong with you people?
Which brings me to the point of this: the egg-white-omelette. I have friends who eat egg-white-omeletes. Every time I'm forced to watch them eat egg-white omelettes, I feel bad for them. In the firrst place, egg-white-omelettes are tasteless. In the second palce, the people who eat them think they are doing something virtuous when they are instead merely misinformed. Sometimes I try to explain that what they're doing makes no sense, but they pay no attention to me because they ahve all been told to avoid dietary cholesterol by their doctors. According to the NEW YORK TIMES, the doctors are not deliberately misinforming their patients; instead, they're the victims of something known as the informational cascade, which turns out to be something that's repeated so many times that it becomes true even though it isn't. (Why isn't it called the misinformational cascade, I wonder.) In any case, the true victims of this misinformation are not the doctors but the people I know who've been brainwashed into thinking that egg-white omelettes are good for you.
So this is my moment to say what's been in my heart for years: it's time to put a halt to the egg-white omelette. I dont want to confuse this with something actually important, like the war in Afghanistan, which it's also time to put a halt to, but I don't seem to be able to do anything about the war, wherease I have a shot at cutting down consumption of egg-white omelettes, especially with the wind of this new book in my sails.
You don't make an omelette by taking out the yolks. You make one by putting additional yolks in. A really great omellette has two whole eggs and one extra yolk, and by the way, the same goes for scrambled eggs."
And then she gives a recipe for great scrambled eggs, which is one of the great things about Nora Ephron, she's always giving you great recipes, especially in her first book, HEARTBURN, which is a book written from the point of view of a cookbook writer, later played by Meryl Streep in the movie.
Great recipes, funnier-than-hell book, funny movie. She was once married to one of those two reporters, I keep forgetting which one, who broke the Watergate trial. If the book is true, and I think it's pretty close, he wasn't nearly as cool as either Robert Redford or Dustin Hoffman, but who is? Nobody's ever as cool as people in the movies. That's their job. To be cooler than the rest of us. If Meg Ryan or Cate Blanchette or whoever the newest - - well, no, let's say if Meryl Streep or Diane Keaton had been the one losing her mascara in Safeway today instead of Kay Morgan, they would have done it in a whole lot cooler way than the way I did it, just standing there looking sensationally miserable, like a really old eleven year old girl whose dog AND cat just died.
Later on, though, there's a zany funniness to it, which makes life great. Which makes life worth living. Because I did find my wallet and I did retrieve my groceries and I lived to blog about it and I love, more than anything, to laugh about life, even and especially my own life, and besides, when it comes right down to it, the people I love the most, all KICK ASS!
Here's to you, Nora Ephron! Now you go make omelettes with TONS of egg yolks for Elvis Presley and Cary Grant and Jimmy Durante. And forgive me my typos. I'm in a hurry and you know how it is down way way down here, in living-people-land.
I don't think people with great senses of humor should be allowed to die.
Cary Grant. Will Rogers. James Thurber. Dorothy Parker. Victor Borge. Jack Benny. Woody Allen (hang ON, Woody!) ......and, go ahead, add your own. Bring back the humored dead. Hold on, all you terrific humored ones!
Not to mention the ones I know, the ones YOU know, in our daily lives.
My friend Christine, she's got the best female sense of humor I know. Every time we see each other I know it's gonna be a treat. All I have to do, no matter what's going on in my life, no matter how much pain I'm in, no matter whether my water heater's broken or my hair just got caught in a drawer and I took the scissors and cut it out or I, the World's Worst Driver, just drove into a pole at the nearest gas station, no matter any of that, when I see Chris all I have to say is this: "Say it." And she looks at me with her warm eyes and assumes an East Indian accent and clips out, "My dog does not worry about the meaning of life."
And I say, "Again."
And she says it again. With a straight face. Totally. "My dog does not worry about the meaing of life." Okay, I know it doesn't sound like much to you, but to me, it's hilarious. It's groundbreaking. And then I make her go into Yiddish. And we go ahead and make up a conversation in Yiddish. And then we just talk and the talk is always hilarious, even if there's crime and death and sodomy in there, even if there's bugs in the cereal in there, which there once were, at my house on Wheaton Way when we were in our twenties and I didn't change cereals quickly enough (or was it flour?) I don't remember - - it's always hilarious.
She says I make her think. Okay, good. I make her think. But SHE. SHE makes me LAUGH.
I guess it's a fair enough trade, only I think I'm getting the better of the deal. Because I know. I KNOW. That laughter IS the best medicine in the whole. Wide. World.
And Nora Ephron was funny. I miss her already. I miss her in that category of people that you don't know and you know you never will know but you feel like you know because they have helped inform you about the world. Nora Ephron told me something, something great. She told me that there is a way of looking at the world, in specific, about bad, sad, really awful events, and turn them into something juicy, something fully of life in a real-sweet-and-salty way. Without being crass or mean or evil. Just by staying human and keeping your eyes open and reporting to yourself and to others with honesty. Just, I guess, by being and staying human.
A friend died the other night. A friend finally died the other night. I say it this way because it's the only true way to say it. Even the Hospice people, who called me today to say Thanks for doing so much and especially for sticking with it and for doing the hard stuff even when she (the friend) got so mad at your for doing all the hard stuff that she (the friend) hated you at the end (which went on for five or six months) and you put back your shoulders and did the right thing anyway.......anyway, when the friend died the other night, I got together with two or three other friends who were intimately connected with the life and death of __________ and we toasted ________and remembered the good times and the better times and the way better times and the way way way better times and before the night was over we were showing each other our upper arm jiggles and dancing to Simon and Garfuncle's "Diamonds On The Soles of Her Shoes" and, if that wasn't funny or humorous, neither was it being artificially down in the doldrums (we had all said goodby about twenty million times) and, when I thought about it later, it did seem so human and so sweet and so group-compassionate.......and I knew that when I told my husband Alan, who also has a great sense of humor, he would enjoy the humanity behind the whole scenario.
Because Alan, too, has a great sense of humor. Alan's humor is largely a product of New Jersey (exit 105!) , a place which gave us ..........nearly everybody who's anybody with a sense of humor. Neil Simon. Carl Reiner. Oy, I can't begin to name all of them, but there they are. Slightly ascerbic, slightly (slightly! who am I kidding!) insulting! At Alan's fraternity reunion held at Sal's, the guy who came up with the ad campaigns "I can't believe I ate the whooooole thing" and "That's a some spicy meatball!" - - you shoulda HEARD the friendly ???!#&$^@%#^&*# razzing going on. And then they'd throw their arms around each other (New Jersey guys are very loving, very physical, both with females and males) and call out, "God! I LOVE you, man!" and the atmosphere would be thick with that kind of missing and loss and love and sweetness that sometimes only grown men can seem to create or summon up.
Alan can make me scream with laughter. Like Chris, he can do accents. Like Chris, he can enter a comedy routine in a snap. Without his sense of humor he'd just be another smart, loving, handy-around-the-house, loyal, fascinating, generous guy. Add humor to the mix and he's dynamite.
Alan left this morning, returning to his bungalow on the water for his/our three or four days alone, while he tends to his house and his gardens and his life in general and I tend to my patients and my hair and my life in general. My pain was extra hurty today and I don't like it much when Alan leaves (our first wedding anniversary is TOMORROW!) but I had shopping to do so I went to the bank and then to Safeway and at Safeway I stood in line for a long old time with a ton of groceries in my cart and I unloaded them with tears in my eyes in that way that tears have of kind of, it's like when you point your finger at a dog and command, "Stay" and the dog stays but he keeps fidgiting and you just know at any moment that damn dog is going to make a go for it, well, that's the way my tears felt as if any moment one or more was going to break loose and point to the fact that today I was Cinderella and was NOT going to the ball..........and the Safeway guy who was once a Christian counselor who couldn't stand the bad urges of his patients so he gave it up cheerfully told me what I owed and I plunged my hand inside my purse - - and I kept on moving my hand around and around and around inside the large summer bag until it seemed like my hand had developed a life all it's own, kind of like a motorized hand in a bad horror movie, just a motorized hand belonging to a woman who, by now, for reasons totally unknown, for usually I am the most cheerful woman in the vicinity, was a the woman with the moving hand and the buckets of tears running down both eyes, saying, "I - I - I - I - don't - know- whereeeeee - m-m-m-m-my m-moooney www-eeent - - - ' and the Christian counselor Safeway guy who really likes me because I say "GodBless" to him every time I leave his station came around and stood next to me and looked both ways like he was looking for traffic and then took me in his arms and gave me a hug and patted my hair and the woman behind me said, "That's all right, honey, you go get your money it's somewhere, that's for sure" and the check-out boy said, "I thought things like this only happened to ME!" which made me laugh and wipe my tears off my face at the exact moment that the woman from the TV part of the store came running over to me with a box of Kleenex because she likes me and she noticed I was standing there, sans dry face, sans money, sans everything.
"You go find your money, honey," said the Safeway Christian Counselor guy," and I'll put these groceries right down here, all safe and sound for you," and then he said this most wonderful crazy thing, he looked at the line behind me and said, "It's all right folks, she's a doctor!"
And me, I drove home and found my wallet on my couch, right where I had left it, paying bills.
It's all right, folks, she's a doctor.
And I thought: wow, I really am a wacky broad, but I'm in a great community and there's laughter and love and sweetness and a whole hell of a lot of groceries waiting to be paid for back at the Safeway store. And then I laughed. My pain was still clutching and throbbing but I laughed and laughed.
When I returned to Safeway I thanked the Safeway guy and the lady behind the Video place and she said, "Oh, that happens all the time, but we're all so glad you found your wallet, because, you know, we really love you, you kick ass!"
What a day! What a great, grand, glorious, wonderful day! Who could ask for anything more?
Except for Nora Ephron not to die. From pnemonia-complicated leukemia.
Here is a little bit from Ephron's latest book "I REMEMBER NOTHING:
"Here is another thing I've known all my life, which is why you will not find me lying on my deathbed regretting not having eaten enough chopped liver. let me explain this. You can eat all sorts of things that are high in dietary cholestrol (like lobster and avocado and eggs) and they ahve NO EFFECT WHATSOVER on your cholesterol count. NONE. WHATSOEVER. DID YOU HEAR ME? I'm sorry to have to resort to capital letters, but what is wrong with you people?
Which brings me to the point of this: the egg-white-omelette. I have friends who eat egg-white-omeletes. Every time I'm forced to watch them eat egg-white omelettes, I feel bad for them. In the firrst place, egg-white-omelettes are tasteless. In the second palce, the people who eat them think they are doing something virtuous when they are instead merely misinformed. Sometimes I try to explain that what they're doing makes no sense, but they pay no attention to me because they ahve all been told to avoid dietary cholesterol by their doctors. According to the NEW YORK TIMES, the doctors are not deliberately misinforming their patients; instead, they're the victims of something known as the informational cascade, which turns out to be something that's repeated so many times that it becomes true even though it isn't. (Why isn't it called the misinformational cascade, I wonder.) In any case, the true victims of this misinformation are not the doctors but the people I know who've been brainwashed into thinking that egg-white omelettes are good for you.
So this is my moment to say what's been in my heart for years: it's time to put a halt to the egg-white omelette. I dont want to confuse this with something actually important, like the war in Afghanistan, which it's also time to put a halt to, but I don't seem to be able to do anything about the war, wherease I have a shot at cutting down consumption of egg-white omelettes, especially with the wind of this new book in my sails.
You don't make an omelette by taking out the yolks. You make one by putting additional yolks in. A really great omellette has two whole eggs and one extra yolk, and by the way, the same goes for scrambled eggs."
And then she gives a recipe for great scrambled eggs, which is one of the great things about Nora Ephron, she's always giving you great recipes, especially in her first book, HEARTBURN, which is a book written from the point of view of a cookbook writer, later played by Meryl Streep in the movie.
Great recipes, funnier-than-hell book, funny movie. She was once married to one of those two reporters, I keep forgetting which one, who broke the Watergate trial. If the book is true, and I think it's pretty close, he wasn't nearly as cool as either Robert Redford or Dustin Hoffman, but who is? Nobody's ever as cool as people in the movies. That's their job. To be cooler than the rest of us. If Meg Ryan or Cate Blanchette or whoever the newest - - well, no, let's say if Meryl Streep or Diane Keaton had been the one losing her mascara in Safeway today instead of Kay Morgan, they would have done it in a whole lot cooler way than the way I did it, just standing there looking sensationally miserable, like a really old eleven year old girl whose dog AND cat just died.
Later on, though, there's a zany funniness to it, which makes life great. Which makes life worth living. Because I did find my wallet and I did retrieve my groceries and I lived to blog about it and I love, more than anything, to laugh about life, even and especially my own life, and besides, when it comes right down to it, the people I love the most, all KICK ASS!
Here's to you, Nora Ephron! Now you go make omelettes with TONS of egg yolks for Elvis Presley and Cary Grant and Jimmy Durante. And forgive me my typos. I'm in a hurry and you know how it is down way way down here, in living-people-land.
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