Memories That Make Me Laugh

I promised that this next post would be happy, and so it is. I thought I’d share some of the family memories that you may not know.

Most of you who know us know that Kirk’s role is to be the comedy man, and mine is to be the long-suffering target of his humor. We both knew our parts well, and enjoyed them thoroughly.

One of the many torments I endured would happen when I took a weekend nap, or if I came home really tired from work and fell asleep on the couch. He would wait until he was sure I was pretty deeply asleep, and then would draw on my face, generally with eyeliner. Over the years, I have woken up with cat whiskers, a Dudley DoRight mustache, a devil's horns and goatee, and every other manner of artistry. Hard to believe someone could sleep right through it all, but I can.

Two of these events in particular come to mind. The first occurred when Erika was probably about 10 years old. I came home from work, and promptly dozed off on the couch while Kirk was getting ready to make dinner. Erika (who gets her sense of humor straight from her father) wanted to draw on my face. After some consultation, they agreed on a Charlie Chaplin/Adolf Hitler mustache. They proceeded to give me a nice replica. They then woke me up and told me Kirk needed me to run to the store for something he needed for dinner. I dragged myself up off the couch, picked up my purse, and headed toward the front door. I could see that they were acting pretty amused at something, but this was pretty normal so I didn’t think anything of it. Just as I left the house I heard Kirk say to Erika “I can’t – I just can’t.” I looked back to see him coming after me, while she held onto his arm trying to drag him back saying, “No, no, don’t tell her!” He told me to come back and look in the mirror, and much to my horror, there was the mustache. She was fully prepared to let me go out in public with that thing on my face. Fortunately he knew that my willingness to be the straight man has limits, and this was one it was best not to cross.

On another occasion, I fell asleep on the couch on Halloween. He left me there and went to bed. I woke up about midnight, and got up to go in the bedroom. The whole house was dark, and when I stopped in the bathroom on the way to bed, I turned on the light, looked in the mirror, and screamed out loud. While I was sleeping, he had drawn an enormous spider web and spider on my face. It stretched fully from side to side and top to bottom. The end of my nose was colored black, and was the spider’s body. Its head was drawn on the bridge of my nose, and there were 8 long legs drawn from my nose onto my cheeks. The rest of my face – chin, forehead, outer cheeks, even my eyelids, had a perfect spider web pattern on them. It was a more elaborate job than any member of Kiss ever dreamed of, and in my groggy state, it scared me half to death.

Kirk also greatly enjoyed what he called “funny thoughts.” This was his term for when a person is thinking, and thinks of something so funny they actually laugh out loud. If he laughed out loud without provocation, and I asked why, and his answer was “funny thought” you could pretty much guarantee he had just thought of some new practical joke he could play on me.

I, on the other hand, am not overly prone to “funny thoughts.” I think about funny things, but few are so funny they make me laugh out loud, and that is the key criteria for being classified as a “funny thought” in Kirk’s book. However, there is one thing that he knew 100% qualified as a funny thought for me. It is something that happened several years ago, and I am so thoroughly entertained by it, it still makes me laugh out loud to this day.

It involves Fabio. Just in case anyone does not know who Fabio is, he is a complete idiot who became known for modeling for the covers of Harlequin Romance novels. He has ridiculously giant muscles, long flowing hair, is dumb as a rock, and is completely in love with himself. You may also know him because he used to do “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter” commercials. At any rate, I can’t stand Fabio. I dislike him even more than I dislike Martha Stewart, and that’s saying something. A few years ago, Fabio was hired to do PR for a roller coaster at Busch Gardens. It was, at the time, the latest greatest thing in roller coasters, and the theme of the ride had to do with Greece or something. So Fabio was hired to ride in the front car on the maiden trip of this new roller coaster. At the end of the ride, there was all kinds of media waiting to take his picture as the coaster came to a stop (remember now, this is a man who LOVES himself and his looks). All went well until the roller coaster was going over the tallest hill. As it flew down the incline, a passing goose was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and Fabio’s face hit the goose going God only knows what MPH. The goose burst into a million pieces. There is no funnier thought in my book than my mental image of Fabio at the end of the ride, as the coaster screeches to a halt and the cameras all go off, with a blood and guts and feathers all over his precious face. I never saw the pictures, but my imagination ran wild.

This image is one that would still make me laugh years later. A few months ago, we were in bed, and we both were almost asleep, when somehow the picture popped into my head. Of course, I started laughing. He listened for a minute, and then said one word. “Fabio?” I said “Yup.” Then we both started laughing and pretty soon we couldn’t control it. Every time we settled down, one of us would start again.

The next day when I came home from work, I received confirmation that Kirk was the man for me. While I was at work, he had spent quite some time on the Internet, and had found the photo I had been dreaming of for years (see photo to the right). He had printed copies of it, and there was one in almost every room of the house. He had even saved it as the screen saver on the computer. He had also found interviews with Fabio talking about how Busch Gardens is fortunate he does not plan to sue, and that they should realize that geese are dangerous (see youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7w4dpxgSWA&NR=1 - the interview is priceless!). The part I love best about the picture is that the girls on either side of him don’t even have a speck of blood on them – that goose was going for Fabio and Fabio only.

Who would choose a Harlequin model when you could have Kirk?