Once my best friend and I were eating at the diner we went to all the time. [This was before Seinfeld, so I didn't think of it as "Jerry and George at Monk's", but it was like that.] Someone we both knew vaguely and cared little for came in and joined us without asking. He spent the rest of the meal with us, spoiling the occasion. At the end, he left some money on the table while he went to the bathroom - telling us to work out his share of settling the bill. After I did so, my friend pointed out that I had overcharged our unwelcome guest by a buck or two. Too fed up to go through the numbers again, I said "Consider it an asshole tax."

My mom's choir used to raise money by singing at holiday gigs in Tudor dress. One of their regular gigs was a fancy do where they had some sort of giant eel on a platter. After it ended, she was filling her baggies from the buffet like a good Midwestern mom when she had a wonnnnderful thought and grabbed the eel head.

She kept it in the freezer for two weeks before putting it in my Christmas stocking. Then she took a picture of me howling when I found it. (I was 16.) When I had asked her WHY THE HELL DID YOU DO THIS???? she said that she was "making memories."

(I'm totally starting a blog wherein I tell all of my mom stories. Because she makes new memories every goddamn day, and if I keep them all in my head I'm going to explode.)

Madamina - I thought my mom was a little odd, but your mom is epic. I can't stop laughing!

Madamina, this explains a lot.

My brother and I still give my mom a hard time for this:

He is several years younger than I am, and we used to fight, meaning wrestling and yelling at one another. Parents didn't like it.

My parents used to have happy hour at one of the neighbor's houses. My mom would make up some martinis in an empty Best Foods mayonnaise jar (the rounded kind) to take over there.

One day when she came home, my brother and I were fighting on my bed, and she had one of those "I've had it up to here" moments and threw the mayonnaise jar over us, smashing it against the wall and showering us with broken glass, gin and (very little) vermouth.

Almost immediately she expressed a lot of chagrin and regret for this. This expression of remorse was her big mistake. The jar of martinis still gets a bit of play.

Here's another one from just last night:

The BF and I were watching TV in bed. We keep the captions on so the volume doesn't have to be up so loud and we can still tell what's going on. I was reading the captions and asking him to scratch my back at the same time. But the captions said something about a goatee, so I asked him to scratch my goatee.

A favorite I told in MeFi a while back: shadowhawk....

September 11, 2001. I'm home sick from work. Am lying in bed, with a pounding headache. I normally would turn on the TV, but my head is pounding. Around 9:30 a.m., a co-worker calls with a work question; I answer it. "How are you feeling?" she asks. "Miserable," I whine, "with the headache and all." "Oh, that's too bad," she says. "Go turn on the TV." Thinking that she's just being caring, saying it in the same tone of voice as "go make yourself some chicken soup," I reply, "oh, no thanks, I'm going back to sleep now." "NO," she says, "GO TURN ON THE TV! RIGHT NOW!"

frantically takes notes from Madamina's mom to be used in the future on poor poor Perle. Start that blog Madamina!

No I won't, I'm whacky enough mom already. Her first words were "what the fuck!?"

Ok, now I have to explain Perle's first words.

Seriously. She didn't say much at all when she was two. I didn't worry about it, as she used the word "NO!" frequently, as in "NO BATH" and "NO SHOES!" and "NO BEDTIME!" showing off just how un-far that apple falls from the tree. Also, Danish kids are notorious in speaking late, something about the language being hard to grasp (or perhaps the fact that it's really all grunting noises, hah, I slay me). So her very rare verbal communication didn't bother me, she clearly understood us and was a master at pointing, and knew how to wield a "NO!" like nobody else.

We get on an airplane to fly to Boston. Part of her "NO" thing is that she has to do everything herself, including putting on shoes (on the wrong feet), pushing her own stroller and dragging her own suitcase around. And she never ever ever wants help.

So I demonstrate how to put on the airplane seatbelt, she watches. I offer to do hers. She slams a "NO!" at me and proceeds to attempt to but on the seatbelt for the next fifteen minutes. It's not going to well. Suddenly she throws her hands in the air and with a really exasperated sigh hollers what the fuck!?

I can't stop giggling for the rest of the flight, while her dad gives me the "It's all your fault" evil eye

(picture that coming from this face for full effect Perle in Boston, age 2)

Ha, dabitch! And she is ADORABLE! I don't remember what my first words were, but I know someone whose first word was F-f-f-foolin'. Her babysitter was apparently a huge Def Leppard fan.

heh, thanks. And....F-f-f-f-fooling, thanks, now I gotta go swap earworms in that earwormd thread. ;)

OK, here's a true NSFW story about me and my beloved husband. We were in bed for, as I recall, the first time, and I asked him to "bite me." (Never mind where!) He stopped in mid-foreplay and howled with laughter. Then he explained the usual meaning of "Bite me" to me.

This memory still cracks me up. Also, that was a good hint about how much fun I was going to have the rest of my life with this man.

When my niece, K, was about 2 and a half, she kept circling this faux wagon wheel table with a glass top that was my mum's. She had been told repeatedly to not squeeze in between the table and a chair. Well, she squeezes one too many times between the table and the chair and *!crash!* goes the table. After a short stunned silence, Miz K puts her little hands on her little hips and says, "Jesus Christ, Gran!". We all had to laugh, of course. At the time, that was one of my favourite exclamations. Oops.

The table was about four feet across so that was a lot of glass. Thank goodness it was from a storefront window and was tempered. The glass had been broken a couple times before and Mum declined on getting new glass for it. I don't know what happened to the table top, but I have the base which was from an organ/piano stool.

Geez, that was just about 20 years ago. K now has her own 2.5 year old.

Madamina - "Shit my Mom Does"

Mine was yesterday. Me, my sister, and our three kids are getting rained out of Disneyworld. We stop under an awning and find ourselves next to a baloon vendor. I *loved* the baloon-in-baloon thing as a kid so I pony up the ten bucks for each kid.

What I didn't realize was that these things are much bigger than the ones they made thirty years ago - I think we could have fit a kid in one of those.

Anyway, we get to the car, already packed to the gills, and we try to get three wet kids and their wet ballons into the back seat.

Since this is *not* a car of holding, it didn't work.

Sister's big idea is to hang them out the passenger window, and she'd drive slowly to the hotel.

Yeah.

We actually got pretty far until I noticed that one of the ribbons was shredded. We got out of the rain at a gas station, peeked up to check, and was relieved that the buggers were still there.

Then I rolled down the window. There was one survivor.


Then LoriFLA saved the trip by suggesting we go to lunch at the T-rex Café, where they got to build a dinosaur. the end

Oh, lordy, this thread is hysterical.

Speaking of the cursing of children, I was buckling my kids into one of those twofer grocery carts when I smacked my head on the handle.

Since I'm in public, I mutter "Jesus!" under my breath.

My sweet, then three year old boy, fresh from speech therapy, looks up and very earnestly says, "Chriiist".

Most of my dozens of personal anecdotes have already appeared here, at MeFi or on my own blog, but these two are my personal favorites:

In 1984 and 1985, I was making a public fool out of myself on two Los Angeles radio stations while barely keeping up a computer drone job. One of my day-job co-workers (or more accurately: cow-orker) had, during his bar-hopping, picked up a fistful of free passes to a new Comedy Club. The new club was a class act, owned by a former partner of The Ice House, and after a few evenings laughing loudly and not heckling, my cow-orker got passes to a super-secret event. Robin Williams was going to do his first live stand-up since the death of John Belushi at a few small venues, and this new L.A. club was the second stop on his mini-tour. He invited me to come along and I leaped at the opportunity. We arrived a half-hour early and got a table front-row center for Robin Williams. He did over an hour on stage, including many recognizable ‘bits’ and a few outbursts of odd improvisation, one of which consisted of pointing at ME in my white cable-knit sweater and saying “Look! It’s Bill Tilden!” A true brush with fame, having a comedy legend mistake you for a great… dead… gay… tennis player.

In 1980, my pursuit of a professional writing career included checking the Los Angeles Times classified ads under “W” for Writer. There I discovered an ad from “The People’s Almanac” (the series of pop reference books edited by Irving Wallace and his family) soliciting ideas for “The Book of Lists”. I ended up getting paid for two lists that never got published, and made their “B” list of contributors when they sent me a letter asking if I’d be interested in writing for a new project of theirs: “The People’s Almanac Presents the Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People”. The “Famous People” of the title were all deceased (avoiding various legal issues), and most were historically so. My first assignment was the pessimist philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, and the editors provided me with research material – two biographies, both 50+ years old at the time. Being written long before anyone thought of publishing “Intimate Sex Lives” books, both volumes required a lot of ‘reading between the lines’ to extract much of a sexual biography. And a couple weeks after I sent in my thousand words, I got back a tactfully worded request to rewrite it, in which the Assistant Editor (no relative of Irving Wallace) pointed out that I had failed to note that Schopenhauer had died of complications from syphilis. Obviously, I hadn’t read nearly enough between the lines. I felt like I had just flunked History, Philosophy, Creative Writing and Sex Education on the same day.

When I was around 3, I decided to ride my Big Wheel down the street to the house of my sister's friend Zoey, because my sister had gone over there to play and apparently the babysitter was sick of watching me.

Zoey had an older brother, a surfer dude, who was old enough to drive. And in fact, he backed the station wagon out of the driveway right as I was Big Wheelin' behind it. I got knocked under the station wagon, and a tire ran cleanly over my left leg, above the knee. The older brother felt the bump, and by then I was screaming and Zoey's mother came out of the house too.

They carried me inside and put me in the sink, running water over my weird purply-turning leg. I was still screaming and crying, and Zoey's brother was starting to freak out and finally he yelled "SHUT UP!" at me. And apparently I just instantly was quiet and stopped crying. I don't think I was faking it, I was just scared of that surfer dude. I didn't realize at the time he was probably the terrified one.

Anyway, nothing was broken or permanently damaged. If you're going to have a car actually roll over you, being a tiny 3 year-old with soft bones that can fit entirely under it is the way to go, assuming you're lucky enough that it only rolls over your leg.

My two older brothers are left home 'babysitting' the two of us younger siblings, my brother and me. The boys all start a game of war with elaborate strategy encompassing several yards and houses. My eldest brother sends our 7-year-old brother on a spy mission, out the window and down the side of the house on a bedsheet....just as my mother drives into the driveway.

lysdexic, the T-rex? I've been there!
First time I was there mid-vacation I looked over the menu, decided I was famished and ordered the T-bone steak rare. Waiter looks at me, a wee thing, and raises an eyebrow while smiling "that's the spirit, order the steak proper", and I quipped back "yeah, and I'll clear my plate too". Which I totally did, he was impressed. (that steak was twice the size of my head)
Anyway, we go back for another dinner on Saturday, and Perle notices that some kids have all this singing and clapping going on at their tables. Birthday kids. I decide that she can have a dessert since it's Saturday, and teach Perle to say it's her birthday (in English) just so that she can experience this phenomena herself (the NEVER do this in Sweden). She tells the waiter while pointing at an ice-cream cookie thing. Soon they arrive, clapping and hollering "happy happy birthday!" Perle is overjoyed and digs straight in. She interrupts her feeding frenzy, and looks at me with chocolate-chip vanilla ice-cream moustache and asks earnestly: So mom, how old am I now?