I think I’ve always been a little over the top when it comes to controlling myself in public.  I mean, it’s not every high school girl who gets her whole class thrown out of Philharmonic Hall by laughing hysterically at a Shostakovich piece because it sounds like background music for a Godzilla movie.  I tried to control myself, but I could truly envision some fire-spewing monstrosity incinerating concert-goers as he plodded down the center aisle of the theater to the dramatic cacophony of Symphony No. 5. 

It started with a slight grimace.  Then, as I tried to suppress my laughter, I began to shake.  Then, the whole row began to shake.  Then, the teacher, Mr. Carbone, began to shake.  Boy, was he disappointed in me – he had never gotten heave-hoed out of the Philharmonic before.  But he was cracking up while he dressed me down.  I mean, especially when I told him about the Godzilla part.  That got me off lightly with Mr. Carbone, who was a real sweetie, anyway.

Years earlier, I had gotten my whole family evicted from a religious service because a rabbi with a pompous Hungarian accent was pontificating about some Old Testament guy who tied his ass to a tree and walked for forty miles in the desert.  Well, number one, how do you walk with your ass tied to a tree?  And, number two, how do you find a tree in the desert to tie your ass to?  These were the questions that I was pondering when I burst into uncontrollable laughter.  My brother and mother certainly couldn’t control themselves, so we were all thrown out on our asses.  And, we were sitting in the front row, no less.  My father sat sadly shaking his head In the choir loft.  Man, was he embarrassed.

But, he was a little out of control himself.  Like the time he brought me up to a Borscht Belt hotel for a summer job interview.  I was applying for a cocktail waitressing position and was meeting with a guy named Chernoff.  Unfortunately, I was a little nervous and kept calling him Mr. Jerkoff.  My father had to be scraped off the carpet over that one.  And, no, I didn’t get the job.  Hey – I was being polite.  I did say Mister.

Life is a great, big tragedy a lot of the time – especially these days, when we’re probably on the verge of extinction.  But sometimes, things just strike me as insanely funny.  People say and do ridiculous things and they are completely innocent about it.  Like when my mother described a play about a fat man as a good, meaty story.  Like when my in-laws gave detailed  instructions on how to grow taters.  Like when I hastily poured my sister-in-law a glass of wine out of a carafe at a winery in North Georgia and she really enjoyed it – until the sommelier informed her that she just drank from the swill bucket. Like when a hiking companion in New Mexico started throwing stones at a bull on a trail to get him to move and I was standing there in a red sweatshirt feeling like a picador without a lance.  I mean, you think about something like that afterward and you just lose it.  At least, I do.   

I asked the stone thrower’s wife, “What do we do if the bull charges us?”

“Jump into a tree,” she said.

Yeah, like there are trees in New Mexico’s high desert.  Actually, there was one small tree.  I could have tied my ass to it and maybe the bull would’ve impaled me as I attempted to trudge across the wasteland for forty miles.  Too bad we didn’t have any rope. 

I like to laugh and I like to make people laugh.  I don’t even care what I look like, anymore.  Hey, I figure if I can’t look good, I may as well look ridiculous.  I don’t think there’s anything more to say about that.