“A” my name is Alice — really. Bob is my husband. Cromwell, Connecticut, is our home. Does this sound familiar? Every little girl in America jumps rope to “’A’ My Name Is Alice.” Fourteen years ago, I married Bob, and my life became an offbeat jump rope song.
Golly-gee, living in a nursery rhyme is great fun. Hear a little sarcasm? I try to suppress it for the sake of the kids, but it always creeps in.
Johnny is 13 now, a budding comedian specializing in dry wit that hovers dangerously close to full-out sarcasm. Katie, 11, having heard what men think of glasses-wearing girls one too many times, is our wise-cracking Dorothy Parker (or maybe Sarah Silverman).
Levon is 10 with no witty bone in his body; Bob hopes he’ll be a musician like his namesake, drummer Levon Helm.
Mike, at 8 years old, nurtures his sarcasm gene with South Park and The New Yorker cartoons. Nancy may be a mere 3 1/2, but she has developed crushes on Sheldon Cooper (both Big Bang and Young), Chandler Bing, and Liz Lemon. Our baby, Oona is only a year old and loves Three Stooges’ slapstick, the precursor to sarcastic humor (see, e.g., the Marx Brothers into Groucho Marx).
Perhaps you noticed that makes six kids, our own juvenile Monty Python troupe. Quips galore in my house.
Rock star dad that he is, Bob built a mini Globe Theatre for their more theatrical comedy endeavors. Shakespeare it ain’t, but it keeps them and the neighborhood kids busy. That, of course, means the parents are partying at our house on the regular. Until the childless neighborhood killjoys come over and raise hell, resulting in …
Visits from our local constables, none of whom have any sense of humor or patience for busybody neighbors. When the cops arrive, red lights flashing, sirens blaring, the party really gets going. Xenophobes might hear the chaos and think they have discovered a tenth level of Dante’s Inferno. YOLO is our motto. Za usually arrives just in time to calm everyone down; no one in our tenth circle talks while they eat.
J.E.M. Wildfire 