On
the way home from a dinner gathering at a friend’s house that got a little loud
and bawdy, I recalled my favorite dinner party story.
 |
| Winston Churchill |
It
was the famous incident between Winston Churchill and Lady Astor. The two sat
side by side at a dinner party and throughout the evening Churchill was his
usual self, telling off-color jokes and using foul language. Finally, an
indignant Lady Astor spouted, “Sir, if you were my husband, I’d poison
you.” To which Churchill replied,
“And Lady, if you were my wife, I’d drink it.”
I
love Churchill.
Sometimes
in life, we’re stuck beside both kinds of people at public affairs – sometimes
the Lady Astors of the world, and sometimes the Churchills.
Years
back, while channel surfing late at night, I stopped for a moment at the Howard
Stern show. It amounted to a video feed of his radio show, which is absolute
trash. I’d watch a minute or two before, much the way a rubber-necker ogles a
car accident – you don’t really want to be a part of it, but a voyeuristic peek
won’t hurt, right?
The
premise is this: Stern invites a well-endowed young woman – model, actress,
minor celebrity, whatever – to come on the show. He quizzes her about her love
life – but not in an intelligent way, instead, the way a drunken frat boy on
spring break might chat up a call girl on a street corner. The whole point is
to get the guest to take her clothes off. In other words, the Howard Stern show
is the intellectual equivalent of a teenage boy’s sex fantasy, with a good
sound stage. I don’t know which is more pathetic, the aging host who still
thinks this is the height of comedy, or the guest who thinks if she undresses
it might further her acting/modeling career.
And
just so you know, I wasn’t waiting for the payoff, because this was basic
cable. All you see is a woman with scrambled pixels over her chest.
I
recall once channel surfing from Stern and immediately finding myself in an
alternate world of idiots: Pat Robertson’s 700 Club. I’d gone from a pompous
egomaniac to a delusional egomaniac. Pat was blathering on, comparing liberals
to Nazis and insisting that if Disney didn’t turn away from its gay-friendly
policies, God would send a hurricane to destroy Orlando (I’m not making this shit
up).
On
the 700 Club Pat Robertson pretends to read the news while spinning each story
in a way to canonize the Christian-conservative point of view while vilifying
any point of view that might have been considered progressive at any point
during the past century and a half.
 |
| Pat Robertson: I love this picture! |
In
short hand – guns are always good, homosexuals are always bad, reinstating mandatory
prayer in school would solve most of America’s problems, poor women will keep
having babies if you keep giving them welfare, and September 11th
was proof that America is so sinful, God couldn’t be bothered to protect us.
For
me, the involuntary vomiting reflex is triggered as quickly by Robertson as it
is by Stern.
But,
there was talk of dinner parties at the beginning of this ramble.
Let’s
say you’re in purgatory - stuck at a dinner party - they’re seating people -
Pat Robertson is on one end of the long banquet table and Howard Stern at the
other. The seats in the middle are taken by the intelligent and reasonable
people you would prefer to sit with. But, you must sit at one end or the other.
Which end would you choose?
In
truth, there’s a little of both men in me. I’ve offended my fair share of
people with bawdy conversation and rude jokes and throwing conversational hand
grenades. And there’s a childish side of me that likes to shock people
(especially the Pat Robertson kind of people).
There’s also a part of me - the
parent and former-teacher side that discouraged teenagers from pre-marital sex,
alcohol and drugs. As a high school teacher I frowned at 16 years of potty and
sex humor, not because it was my job, but because often it’s simply not funny,
just childish. Howard Stern is proof that the dimmer the brain, the older you
get before you stop laughing at that stuff.
But I have to admit, at the dinner
party, I wanna sit next to Stern. That’s where the most interesting
conversation is gonna take place. And there are plenty of other historical
figures I’d choose. And if I could combine the wit with the crude, that’s my
preference. If I could go back in time, I’d sit my ass right next to Alice Lee
Roosevelt Longworth, the daughter of President Theodore Roosevelt.
Longworth cared little for social
convention and once said, “If you haven’t got anything good to say about
anybody, come sit next to me.”
 |
| Alice Lee Roosevelt Longworth |
In her late teens at the turn of the
20th Century, while her father was the U.S. president, she smoked
cigarettes, went out unchaperoned with men, stayed out late partying, and kept
a pet snake. She looked like a Gibson Girl, but didn’t act like one.
She had a rude wit, once saying of
her attention-whore presidential father, "He wants to be the bride at every wedding, the corpse at every
funeral, and the baby at every christening."
Of a senator having an affair with a woman less
than half his age, she snorted, "You can't make a soufflé rise
twice."
When I’m led through the gates of hell, sit me
next to Winston Churchill, Alice Lee Roosevelt Longworth, and if there’s no other seat, yes, I'll sit with Howard Stern. But if it’s truly hell, my little personal hell will
probably be a private room with the disapproving Lady Astor and Pat Robertson.
My propensity to choose the rude
over the prude rubbed off on my children. Once when telling the story of
Winston Churchill and Lady Astor to my kids, my14 year old daughter, Sally,
replied, “Did you say, ‘Lady Ass-turd?’”
I hung my head in despair a moment,
and then laughed really, really hard.
My new book, The Salvage Man began going online for e-readers before Christmas. It's currently available at iTunes, Amazon.com, Fastpencil, and BarnesandNoble.com. I'll be doing a public launch to tell the world in the weeks ahead - probably throw a party at my house with hardcover versions available. Here's an early look:
