Thursday, July 26, 2012

A Guest Blobber Who is Almost as Funny

I think the creator's of Total Recall missed a great opportunity in not casting my 90 year old mother, Ruthy, in their film. Aside from the fact that, Ruthy, has total recall of things that happened 67 years ago, she has no memory of the nova and cream cheese on pumpernickel that I painfully extracted for her from the clutches of a tourist at the Zabar's cafe this morning. Nevertheless, she could tell the screenwriters that on the morning of September 19, 1945, while sitting at the Nedick's counter in Union Square, a man with a tweed coat sporting an engraved cigarette case distracted her as he stole her caracal coat that had just come out of cold storage from her aunt Sylvia, the Communist who used to walk up to baby perambulator's on the Coney Island Boardwalk, grab the pacifiers out of the unsuspecting mouths of teething infants and scream at their mothers, "YOU are destroying your child's teeth!" This caracal coat had just been tailored to a svelt jacket size with a nicely cinched waist (whatever that is) and she had placed one of her high-heels over the box at her feet while munching on a piece of date nut bread and a coffee, light, 2 sugars, when this tweed man did something, she recalls, like he spilled the sugar bowl and then, bam- he was out the door. Total Recall. Then, there's the sequel, Total Regrets, where my mother searches her memory unable to put together the circumstances surrounding her departure from West Palm Beach in 2005, skipping over the disturbing fact that she was air-lifted from Century Village during Hurricane Wilma. "Matty, darling. I have no idea why we left Florida." We're Just Sayin... Matty Selman

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