A collection of my more humorous adventures.
There is apparently a new tradition going around this year called “Elf on a Shelf.” Some elves are good and some are mischievous I had something similar to that growing up, we called it “rats in the pantry.” They were pretty mischievous as well, but at least they left us presents every day.
My apologies to any Jewish friends who might be offended, however I do hope you see the ironic humor in this. Someone needs to educate this grocer.
I’ll never forget my first winter in Chicago and the time I tried to give a homeless person my coat. My boss stopped me and made me get on the train. I did not understand why he stopped me and I cried the whole way back to the office. He was protecting me. My kind heart over-rode common sense.
I moved to Tulsa seven years later and worked in the Bank of Oklahoma building on the 27th floor. They had an ice rink back in the 90’s and I’d go down there for coffee and breakfast. Every morning I’d see the same man with ragged clothes and I’d buy him breakfast. At lunch I’d sit by myself in the square and share my lunch and cigarettes with a few of the homeless men that hung around. My boss found out about it and made me stop. He said it wasn’t safe for a nice girl like me to be alone with these men. He thought I was putting myself in danger.
I shared that story recently with the wrong person and their response surprised me.
“Your boss was wrong. I mean you smoked. Obviously you weren’t a nice girl.”
They were so proud of their comment that they laughed. This wasn’t a heckler, I wasn’t even on stage when he said this. We were sitting at a kitchen table sharing dinner with friends. A heckler I can handle, this — I just smiled and changed the subject before getting really quiet and letting other people control the conversation. It’s an old survival skill from childhood, if you let them know they got to you they come back for more. I’ve learned how to hide crumbling.
Just because I can hide it doesn’t mean I don’t crumble sometimes.
Knowing what this man said is a lie doesn’t change the impact of his words. The committee in my brain is now in high gear, passing those words around like a cheap bottle of wine. “You’ll never fit in.”, “You can’t trust people.”, “He’s right you know. You are trash.”, “I’m never coming back here again.”
Every fiber of my being now wants to show this man how “not nice” I’m capable of being. Oh you think smoking is bad, wait until I tell you about the time I did thus and such! The committee is also offering up questions on his mother’s marital status when he was born as well as her emotional temperament. In 24 hours I ruminate every possible come back. They are wonderful come backs by the way, I’m always brilliant after the fact. The problem is those comebacks do nothing for my heart and just keep the hurt feelings going while Mr Idiot has no idea that I’m even wounded.
At this point, I’m the one wounding myself by repeatedly hitting the replay button on the DVD in my brain.
I want to stop the spiral. I try to read. I pray. I stare at my phone to call a friend, but it’s too heavy and then an amazing thing happens, I receive a Christmas card from a friend. Inside the card is a puzzle piece with these words:
“YOU GLOW and you do more than light up a room — you light up the hearts of all who are in it.”
Her card is postmarked several days earlier, and arrives just in time to soothe my heart and my brain. She doesn’t even know about the incident yet. I now have a choice, I can hit the replay button on the remarks that hurt me OR I can choose to believe my friend and her words of encouragement. So what if one man thinks I’m trash. He’s an idiot. I have a wealth of friends who think otherwise and their voices are loud enough to put the committee to rest.
It is said that silence equals approval. I neither agreed with nor approved of his comment and yet I remained silent. I don’t have to be quiet just to prove I’m nice. There is nothing to be gained by staying silent when someone lies about my value to my face. There are a number of acceptable responses that I could have used. My therapist says when someone throws a prickly pear at us (an insult), we don’t have to catch it nor do we need to throw it back. We can simply say things like “ouch” or calmly speak truth, “that’s not true about me.” Simple phrases like that stop most people in their tracks and give them the chance to clean it up.
I’ll try and remember that next time. In the mean time, I’m taking my puzzle piece from my friend and posting on my bathroom mirror. I glow, not only do I light up a room, I light up the hearts of all who are in it. — And so do you.
Question: How do you respond to thoughtless (or maybe not so thoughtless) comments? I’d love to hear from you.
Our oldest home from college and he found my
Belly Dancing for Beginners DVD.
He told me he now needs money for therapy.
I told him if I have to pay for therapy, he should at least see the costume.
I haven’t seen him in two hours.
“How do you separate the hyperbole from reality when you are with other comics?”
It depends entirely on the location and the relationship. If we’re friends we’re real. But we’re not always really friends, sometimes we’re just peers.
I can’t believe you know so-and-so! That is so cool!
No, I don’t know them.
But they are on your Facebook and you have pictures with them!
Sigh.
Being peers with someone, running into each other once or twice a year and photo ops, does not equal “Knowing” them. I get to meet a lot of cool people as a writer and as a comic, but that doesn’t mean we are friends. I am at best an acquaintance with some of them and just a fan for most others. A good example of that is somewhere in this vast world are photos of me with Johnny Cole and Huey Lewis, but it doesn’t mean we are friends or even know each other. The back story to those photos is the questionably legal introduction and being sent home by Mr. Lewis because he rightly assessed that while I might be of legal age, I really wasn’t that bright (defined as I was too naive for my own good) and my cute self and barely there black dress definitely did not belong in front of their hotel in downtown Detroit back in 1987. My enthusiasm for meeting Mr. Cole surpassed all common sense, not to mention several city ordinances. Mr Lewis was a much-needed voice of reason and protected me from knowing more than I had bargained for. So, I have photos that prove we met, but that doesn’t mean we know each other. Thank God.
The false belief of knowing someone happens a lot today. We read news stories, books, Tweets, Facebook statuses, blogs and we gain this false sense of personal intimacy. We come to believe that we really know said person, when in actuality we don’t. Not really anyway. I’ll admit that I’ve been guilty of that myself. True intimacy requires more than just internet snippets. True intimacy requires face time, honesty, humility, and mutual transparency. True intimacy is a commitment.
The word intimacy can really be broken down into three words: Into Me See.
Even though I’ve lived in 12 step rooms since I was 12 and been telling my story from a podium since I was 14, it’s my inner most circle that knows the really real me. They know the whiny sometimes feeling put upon raised an only child who says yes as quickly as she says no for all of the wrong reasons. The sometimes kind to a fault, wishes she had more of a spine when it counted me. They are the committed, tried, true, trusted, and wholly loved individuals that trudge this road of happy destiny. True to life for all of us, other people just get glimpses behind the curtain from time to time.
A behind the curtain glimpse for you guys – I don’t use comedy to cope, I don’t tell jokes about actual people I know (unless I have their permission), and it’s my faith (messy and crayola scribbled that it is) that gets me through life.
While I have been guilty of perhaps “over sharing” some of my recent health issues on my private Facebook page at the request of several long distance friends who are going through the same thing, I do tend to keep the private out of the personal. Most of my stories and jokes are actually a conglomerate of events and people. The theme and overall message are the same, I’ve just changed it up enough that the guilty are protected.
I’m the same way with my comedy, I never tell jokes about individual people per se’, I do however write and tell jokes about circumstances and events that crack me up. Unless I have someone’s permission up front to include them in my jokes, I don’t. Even my doctor jokes are a conglomerate of several people and focus on the awkwardness of the situations caused by aging, than the physician himself. For those of us old enough to remember Phyllis Diller, her husband “fang” wasn’t real either. She made up a persona that skyrocketed her to stardom.
There are a few things that have been said to me recently that I would really like to speak to today if you don’t mind.
1. If I lived your life, I’d smoke too. — Said by my cardiologist last year based on a 5 minute conversation. No, you wouldn’t. I smoke today (on and off) because I’ve been smoking since I was 17. I’m addicted. Smoking because of life circumstances is a cop out, call it what it is. I’m an addict prone to selfishness on occasion and tend to self destruct when feeling overwhelmed, it really is that simple.
2. I suppose being a stand up comic is a great coping mechanism — Not really. I don’t use comedy to cope. I use it to entertain, to show people the underbelly of life sometimes thereby making people think and to help bring levity to life circumstances. I find that when I use comedy as a coping mechanism or even a shield (as I’m sometimes prone to do) my humor becomes barbed and has a toxic bite. I don’t want that. I want people to feel good when leaving my show instead of feeling dirty. You know?
3. It’s my faith in something bigger than me, that helps me cope — While it was my mother who taught me how to say bedtime prayers, I really learned how to pray reading Judith Blume’s “Are You There God, it’s Me Margaret?” For those of you who are unfamiliar with that book, let me just say it’s a book about a young girl who wasn’t changing quickly enough to suit herself and she talked to God about it, daily, as if he were her friend. If that isn’t the story of my life.
The older I get the less willing I am to put God in some kind of black and white box. The more research I do on religion and spirituality, the more I realize that the debates out there aren’t about proving God is real or the facts surrounding history, so much as they are proving who is the smartest. I used to listen in on the modern debates between pastors and I get frustrated at the direction things go. There are too many egos out there for me today. If even the greatest scholars of today (and yesterday) can’t nail down the facts, I’m not about to try.
I just know today when it comes to knowing me — the really real me, I have this power greater than myself that I choose to call God. It’s that relationship that trumps all others. The one that sees through all my stuff and meets me exactly where I am no matter how messy, how confused, scared, sometimes lost, angry or happy I really am. Sometimes I lose faith and hope and ask to borrow a friend’s for a few days. That’s okay as well. It doesn’t matter to me if this relationship doesn’t make sense to others. It’s wholly mine. And I like it. It’s a relationship that is as real to me as the end of my nose, covered in Grace and Love, and Peace. It’s a relationship where instead of my pulling back the curtain for a glimpse, he tore it for a full view.
I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I am wholly loved and fully known by the God of the universe – that’s all I need to know. That is how I cope.
Wishing all of my American readers a very happy Thanksgiving.
Notice that all of your writing friends have signed up for NaNoWriMo and being the kind of person who doesn’t like to feel left out of things agree to do it as well.
Tell everyone on Facebook you will be gone for a month because you are writing a novel.
Keep refreshing your page to see if anyone “likes” your status.
Move lap top to back porch to be inspired by scenery.
Knock over coffee cup with laptop.
Clean up spilled coffee.
Go get more coffee.
Check in on Facebook to see if anyone else is writing yet.
Find out your friends have over 5,000 words already.
Feel like a hopeless failure and go searching for chocolate.
Sit down and make yourself write garbage for an hour.
Delete garbage.
Go look for Bird by Bird book.
Read Bird By Bird
Find out that garbage is a good start.
Try to undelete file.
Check in on Facebook and talk to friends who aren’t supposed to be there either.
Solve family crisis.
Brood and lament about being the oldest child.
Argue about election with strangers.
Get into a cat fight.
Wish you still lived in Detroit.
Think about first amendment.
Write about first amendment.
Search Youtube for inspirational back ground music.
Write 19,854 words over 11 days
Decide your protagonist is an idiot.
Drink a glass of merlot hoping she’ll smarten up.
Remember that you have a banjo lesson in three days and you haven’t played in a week.
Practice for two hours in hopes of fooling teach.
Accept that you can’t learn a song in two hours and that teach is smarter than that.
Drink another glass of merlot and walk around the cove hoping for inspiration.
Get smacked in the gut with a new word for 2013.
Lament to writing coach.
Discover that you and your protagonist are one and the same.
Retract idiot statement.
Practice banjo some more.
Celebrate that you have 19,854 more words than you did 15 days ago.
Lay on floor listening to music and try to learn how to count beats.
Fall asleep counting beats.
Agree to write again in the morning.
I love this woman — Today’s Friday funny is brought to you by Anita Renfroe. (All FCC disclaimers apply — I have not received any goods or services in exchange for this endorsement, I just think Anita is hilarious and wanted to share her newest with you guys.)
Deana O'Hara - Speaker, Comedian, Writer 