Look Who's Laughing Now

This summer I read "I Feel Bad About My Neck," a collection of humorous essays by Nora Ephron, the funny woman behind the movie "When Harry Met Sally." I picked up the slim hardback for $1 at my neighbor's garage sale. Several gems made it worth the investment. One of my favorite of her observations was about humor.

During the course of her growing up, Ephron says her mother told her at least 500 times, "Everything is copy." Ephron interpreted it this way: "When you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at you; but when you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, it's your laugh. So you become the hero rather than the victim of the joke. I think that's what she meant."

Growing up, I didn't learn to laugh at myself. No one in our family did. I guess we figured living on a farm was serious business. So I didn't talk about in third grade when I split my pants playing freeze tag at recess. Or as an overzealous helper at a fair supper I threw away a nearly full bowl of chicken noodle soup, mistakenly thinking the owner was finished. When confronted, I said I was sorry, walked off, and spent the rest of the evening avoiding her death stare. Or in high school, when I couldn't hit the high note for my solo in "Godspell" the director re-worked the choreography so I could hold the microphone high for another girl to sing it while I lip synced.


So now that I'm wanting to write more, I'm tempted to mine the gold from my past. However, if I learned one thing from interviewing people for our church's 20th anniversary newsletter this summer, it's that no one remembers what happened 20 years ago.

So I could expose myself by reminiscing about my horribly embarrassing Freudian slip during my high school graduation valedictory speech, or I could realize that I'm probably the only one in the whole world who remembers it, and never speak of it at all.

What would Nora do?