Not quite ready to quit having fun

We get a refund, and all of a sudden the same store that's willing to accept cash in payment for some meat that goes rancid in 27 minutes wants all sorts of personal information before they'll fork over the cash in return.



They ask me to put my name and address on the form. The address is always easy: 448 Bonnie Meadow Rd (Rob and Laura's address from the Dick Van Dyke show.) But the name? Oh, I can be Hugh Jass, Richard E. Normus or Oliver Clothesoff, among others. It cracks me up. Peggy shakes her head, raises both eyebrows and shakes her head again.



I no longer do this one in the company of Peggy, but here's fun for when you're in a grocery store you've never been to before. Walk up to a clerk who's busily restocking a shelf full of Snap-E-Tom tomato juice cocktail, 99¢ Hallmark "honest emotion for less money" greeting cards, or applesauce, and say, in a Charles Boyer kind of fakey French accent, "Please to tell, where are potato cheeps, no?" The guy will always assume that, being European, you are also deaf, so he will fairly shout, "Aisle SIX, sir!" To which you return to your uninflected local tone and say,"Thanks, buddy, aisle 6, got it." And saunter off saucily.



My friend Lisa would rather go out with her hair up in a babooshka than attend an AC/DC concert, so when her husband got two tickets to their upcoming November 15 show, she asked me if I wanted to go with him. We'd be two guys, both close in age to Angus Young, and likely older than most of the rest of audience. The whole thing became moot when I realized the concert was the same day as Isabella's christening. But still I would have gone. At 57, it dawns on me that I have only so many sunrises left, and before I shuffle off this vale of tears and toil, it would be a shame to have to go without ever having seen the spectacle of Angus mooning the audience or hearing the cannonfire during "For Those About To Rock."




A woman who works in my building has a child in the daycare down the street from our house. Today as I left the house for my workout, they were piling into their van, so I stopped for a moment to say hello. Was she surprised when I pulled up and rolled the window down, which let her hear the coda from "Come To Butthead," the song from the Beavis and Butthead Experience, on my truck's CD player.



There's a high school reunion coming up, probably about this time next year, and the rest of the Class of '69 will doubtless be discussing their debentures, their 401K plans, the ruination of our nation by the damned Democrats, and I'll look for a like-minded guy or gal to hang with. You know what always kills at those events? Just answer their question with a totally serious, prolix paragraph, but throw one entirely inappropriate word or two into the middle of a sentence. Do so without irony, without emphasis. It sounds something like this: "Oh, I thought seriously about going into tax-free municipals, but, you know, Roger, when you consider the epididymis of rolling over all your fiducials in that manner, you soon realize there's often a vas deferens between what you have in one hand and what might be in the other!"



Like Oprah, I like to end with What I Know For Sure. What I know for sure is that whatever a guy loved in 5th grade, he will always love.