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Turkey and Coral
By Milt Abel | November 28, 2010
| November 28, 2010Turkey and Coral
Our family celebrated Thanksgiving a couple days early. When you’re not famous and working in show business your life’s schedule tends to be at the mercy of whatever gigs come along. Christmas is blocked out, we’ll have a piece of coal and bowls of gruel before I’m away on that Holiday again, but Thanksgiving, like a turkey’s neck, is on the chopping block. So you scoot the bird dinner to Tuesday, and Thursday I scoot across the country to join the Coral Princess in Ft Lauderdale.
After dinner Tuesday my wife and I went for a walk at a nearby elementary school’s playing field. It’s extra large because two schools share it, and it’s been wicked cold (as they’d say in Boston) so we knew we’d have the place to ourselves. We brought the dogs, and a laser pointer. Our newer dog, Max, will chase the pointer’s light.
He’s is a 120 lb. mastador, combination mastiff and Labrador. Labradoodle, Deagle, there are all kinds of hybrid names for mixed breeds of dog. A joke I have yet to try on stage…
“I have a combination wolf – chihuahua, we call it a wohaha. Which is the same sound the mother made during breeding, ‘Wo! Ha! Ha!”
It will only work if I really act it out, and frankly, I probably haven’t tried the joke out of fear that emulating a female chihuahua’s cry of discomfort and ecstasy might prove embarrassing. It might not, if the joke works…
There’s a gleeful smugness in watching an animal chase a light. They’re earnestly chasing something they can never catch and we laugh without remorse at how stupid they are for trying; if they were the same species, and chasing something they could possibly catch -like a fellow employee trying for a promotion, there might still be laughter, but it’d be meaner, wouldn’t it. I’ve known more than one cat ( a species that chases laser lights more consistently) who will stop when they hear the loud laughter over their efforts. Perhaps that’s why everyone loves dogs, but cats not so universally. Because they’re vain, or appear so, while dogs show no semblance of that shortcoming of our species. Drinking out of a toilet and licking their ‘junk’ in the middle of gathering of house-guests proves vanity is way down their list of concerns. Perhaps if I was more like a dog I could at least try the ‘wohaha’ joke.
It had never reach more than 35 degrees all day so when we walked on the playing field’s grass it remained crushed and frozen, our footsteps stayed recorded like in snow, though there wasn’t any. We stopped and looked back over our path, and Max and Augie were off in the near distance, smelling something, and I began to play the laser light over buildings and trees, experimenting for the distance the light registered. I swung it up to the near-full moon and started blinking it on and off like I was sending a morse code signal. I did this for 20 to 30 seconds waiting for some comment from Janie, but she said nothing.
I do something like this all the time: something silly or non-sensical with a joke in mind, or hoping to discover one as I walk out on that limb. It’s just my nature to break my day with silliness, to try and get someone to laugh. Sometimes there is no laugh, but because its just me in everyday life, and not onstage being paid, that’s okay. It gets annoying at times to my wife, who is an ‘A’ personality and wants to get things done. The distraction is what needs to be done as far as I’m concerned on these occasions.
Timing is everything in comedy and after about 30 seconds of blinking the light, and no query from my wife, I discovered my silly joke and broke the monotony of the two of us just standing there and me clicking away. I explained my morse code message: “I’m telling them to postpone the invasion. Everyone has been so nice today.”
And it was true; everyone had been very nice on our premature Thanksgiving. I thought it was a funny joke, but she didn’t laugh. I’m not going to dwell on her not laughing, I’ll move on to my next distraction, otherwise I’ll feel compelled to go outside and signal the moon to move up the timetable.
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