Something Funny, Something Fun: NaNoWriMo

He stands in the doorway holding a plastic owl with absolutely no expression on his face and an explosion of laughter that immediately brings me to tears causing me to clutch the pillow on my right side as tightly as possible alternately exclaiming "ouch, ouch, oh! oh!"
 
After a very scary fall a couple of weeks ago, my daughter said to me, as I lay in bed fearing I would never walk again because I suddenly couldn’t pick up my right leg, "Mom, I’m going to tell you to do what you tell me to do. I want you to make a list of everything good that might come from this." Then she dropped the tone I heard as my own, and added, what I thought I heard to be, "Write something funny today. Everything you write is so serious, just write something funny."
 
Oh my, funny. Could I remember to do something funny? She was right. While my day to day has amazing humor to it, and at least three times a week I watch or read something humorous, I myself have had a long dry spell of producing funny.
 
Actually, our church overtown has an open mic every so often and I’d started doing stand up during that so there must be something in the Spirit causing my daughter to lead me in that direction. I looked at the book to the right of me on the bed, "One Thousand Gifts", (serious) and looked at the books to my left on the night stand, "Jesus Calling", (serious), "The Saturday Widows Club" (serious kinda), a Sue Monk Kidd book about her writings (serious). Ah me…a slippery slope. She was right. It is an occupational hazard, this leaning towards lugubrious, which causes me occasionally to cry out, "I want to go bowling!"
 
The catch 22 is that when I do break into funny I’m usually around a traditional church person and end up feeling like the most socially inappropriate person that breathed on planet earth. The non church people don’t feel I’m funny enough. Deep Sigh. Funny. Well… make a list. We’ll start there.
 
No matter how injured, there is always a blank notebook and pen in bed with me. After I hung up, I reached out and grabbed them. What would be funny? All I could think of was a dog named maybe, hmmm…had to be something British…Roger? No… Reginald? No…Nigel?… no … well…name later. So… a dog who is playing with a tetherball, only he’s a bubble shy of level and thinks he’s playing catch so every time the dang thing comes around again, it …much to his surprise… bonks him in the head. I laughed out loud.
 
Oh…but here’s the hard part. Making jokes, being funny, laughing, requires, inevitably someone else’s’ foibles being met with, not mercy, but mirth. Is that nice? Is that kind? And yet, if we do not laugh at ourselves, we end up …well…serious. Too serious. No fun serious. Again… non church people screwing up their faces asking, ‘What is the big deal?’
 
" Screw it!" I said to myself because I was home alone. "I will worry about the morality of humor later. I wrote down ‘Dog chasing tetherball’. Brings a smile to my face even now.
 
Because of my day gig, the second item of funny was ‘babies peeing on adults’. Gets a laugh every time.
 
The list continued until I had about nine items. Then I remembered the DVD’s. I had just gotten out a bunch from the Seattle Library while I was overtown. (Did you know you could legally be a member of the Seattle Library if you are a King County resident? But beware, they charge for printing).
 
Hmmm…. "Hot in Cleveland season two", "Vicar of Dibley the holiday and wedding specials", and my own copy of "Connie and Carla".
 
And that’s when it happened. That’s when Jon Lovitz as the homeless man in "Hot in Cleveland" Jane Leeves tries to marry so she can get a green card does his deadpan and says, "Do you hear them? Do you hear the owls?" and then returns with the plastic one. Back come all the rest of his best bits, the pathological liar, "Yeahhhhhhhh. That’s the Ticket!" and Harry Hanukkah who took over from Mt Sinai when Santa got sick, and that wonderful character he played against Whoopie Goldberg in "Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ came rolling back into my brain.
 
Soon my list had grown into characters and a place, ‘The Cul de Sac’. Child of a housing development that I am, while in high society living on a loop, usually called The Loop is the privileged ‘I have arrived’ residence (and every city and town has several), in suburbia, the cul de sac is the premier achievement. I started to picture the place.
 
Over the days I grew to think fondly of my characters as I thought of them in my brain and wrote sketchy characteristic lists. When I was driving again, I found the son in law and daughter of the Johnson’s, the only straight white family on the cul de sac, at Jiffy Lube. ‘Tramp Stamp with ‘Butterflies are Free’ and ‘sullen, wordless, mysterious,’ I noted.
 
The morning I absolutely craved a hot meal and bought a MacD’s big breakfast and couldn’t eat it so I brought it home and ate it the next morning, I realized.ahhh… Vera, single and doesn’t cook. Buys fast food and brings it home and puts it on real plates.
 
Mind you all the while I’m thinking I’m going to burn and go to hell because when you are a Christian and in the helping professions, well…you don’t laugh about people. It’s a sin.
 
By the time I had gone a full week back at work, albeit pushing the walker along, it was time for National Novel Writing Month. It’s an annual bacchanal of prose pushing internationally where writer’s pledge to write a complete rough draft of a novel that is at least 50,000 words.
 
Signed up today! If I’m going to hell, at least I’m going to try to win a prize doin’ it. I have so much serious writing to do this month, and I’ll get that done as well, BUT…. at least 1500 words of it everyday will be for fun. That was what my daughter actually said I found out yesterday. She corrected me and said, ‘I said ‘Write something FOR FUN!’. Gotta go. The gay Hispanic couple who are planning each other’s belated quinceanero parties and Mrs. Johnson who just got home from hot yoga are calling me. It’s suppertime on The Cul de Sac
 
Love,
Deborah