My Point...And I Do Have One

trying to keep the door shut. The positions that we have ourselves in. Then we have the “em-em” noise, that territory cough that we use. Somehow it scares people away.
“Eeemmmm.”
    But, even if there is a lock, there are some people who will continue to try to open the door until you say, “Somebody’s in here.” What are they thinking? “It’s just stuck, I know it. Just somebody’s shoes they left in there earlier. Get the ramrod, this one is tight.”
    Some of the bathrooms are fancy, they have the railings on each side of the toilet, and you might assume that’s for the elderly or the handicapped. It’s really for people who are paranoid about catching germs—they can balance themselves above the toilet. That iron cross is hard to do, I tell you that. And the dismount! You need a spotter, you do. That’s why women go in pairs—”I’m going. Spot me.” And when you do an incredible job the judges (you bet there are judges in there) yell, “TEN!”
    Sometimes you need those bars, don’t you? Sometimes you walk in, the seats are wet. That is a horrible experience. Have you ever just not been thinking, you’re in a hurry, you just walk in, you sit, “OH! Eeeesh!!” How does this happen? I mean, what are these women doing in there?
    I ’m sorry. I got carried away.
    I think we do some idiotic things out of habit. Have you ever noticed that whenever you’re with someone and you taste something that tastes bad, you always want the person with you to taste it immediately?
    “That was disgusting, taste it. Taste it, it’s gross. Taste how bad it is.” And they always do.
    Or, do you ever run out of room on the front of the letter you’re writing then write “Over” on the bottom of the letter? We’re not giving the person getting the letter much credit. It’s not like if it wasn’t there, they’d get to the bottom of the page, “ ‘ … and so Kathy and I went shopping and we—’ Now that’s the craziest thing. I don’t know why she just ended that way. I hope nothing happened to her. She managed to seal the envelope. She must have gotten it to a mailbox somehow.
    “Could it be this way? On the back? Never mind, don’t call her, I found it. It was on the back. I followed the arrow.”

    S ometimes I feel like an idiot when I’m with people who have more power than me. I don’t mean someone like Hercules (though he probably would make me feel uncomfortable; the age difference alone—a few thousand years, I’m guessing—would make it hard for us to find things in common to talk about), I mean someone who has power over me. I mean policemen. I mean policemen who pull me over when I’ve been speeding.
    I get nervous, so I try to lighten things up by using humor. And you know what? I’m always amazed that people (and by people I mean policemen) don’t have the same sense of humor that I do.
    For instance, I was pulled over in Los Angeles last week. I was driving—I was speeding. It was obvious I was speeding; I was going very, very fast. So, this policeman pulls me over. He comes up to the window of the car and says, “You know why I pulled you over?” And so I said, “Because of the dead bodies in the trunk?” To make a long story short, he didn’t see the comedy in my remark. Like I said, no sense of humor.
    Do you ever lie to a policeman when you get pulled over for speeding? If you look real good that day, you might think you can flirt your way out of the ticket. But, unfortunately, we usually don’t dress anticipating a traffic ticket. We’re usually wearing some horrible outfit that we just threw on to go out and buy some Häagen-Dazs ice cream. But, we try flirting anyway, and nine times out of ten we end up feeling like idiots (the tenth time we feel even worse).
    “Hi, I think Nehru jackets are sexy—don’t you, officer? HA, HA, HA. Well, anyway, listen—you know what happened? And I think you’ll find this funny—well, not funny, but, well … Anyway, okay, I was in my house and I got a phone call from my mother. She said,‘Ellen honey.’ That’s what she calls me. Well, that’s my name—not the honey part—Ellen. Honey’s just an endearing term. You can call me Ellen Honey. Anyway, she asked me to
‘rush’
over—that’s the word she used, ‘rush.’ I said are you okay? She just said, ‘Hurry,
please
, hurry.’ That’s what she said, ‘Hurry, please.’ Well, you heard what she said. Well, you didn’t hear her, but you heard me