Sunday, October 31, 2021

the last book I ever read (The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, excerpt twelve)

from The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio:

The migraine thing is new. I’ll visit Leonel on a Monday, then wake up with a headache on a Tuesday and have to lie in the dark for the next two days, sometimes going to Urgent Care for a migraine cocktail through an IV. My arm starts looking like I use. Then I visit him again. The migraines will not stop. I will just have to start taking daily medication to prevent them and emergency medication at their onset. They will become a part of me, and Leonel will become a part of me, and the sanctuary movement will speak to me and my traumas in the way nothing ever has before.



Saturday, October 30, 2021

the last book I ever read (The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, excerpt eleven)

from The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio:

A couple of months later, I travel to Willard, Ohio to meet them. Willard is the most rural place I have ever been to, and on the long drive there I pass through vast stretches of farmland where my cheap cell phone loses service completely. Willard is known for its rich, fertile soil—people call it “the muck”—and its agricultural industry is booming, which means that temporary workers from Mexico come in seasonally to help plant, weed, and harvest. Before I visited Willard, there was a huge battle over a welcome-home party that the chamber of commerce was throwing the migrant workers. A Vietnam War vet threw a tantrum in a letter to the editor of the local newspaper, writing, “Myself and a lot of other Vietnam veterans and also Korean veterans are still waiting on our welcome-home party. Where does the Willard City Chamber of Commerce think that it is right to give the migrant workers a welcome back party?” At a city meeting dedicated to planning the party, a woman stormed out of the room with her husband, saying, “I’m a compassionate person. I believe people who come here have to come here the right way. It makes me angry when I hear people talking about harboring illegals.” The city has a population of approximately six thousand people, 94 percent of whom are white. This is where the boys live.

I come armed with the cutest pictures of my dog back when he was a puppy because I assume all children like puppies. When I arrive, I find out three of the four children are scared of dogs. (There are three boys and an even smaller child, a girl.) And clowns. I could not have arrived at a better time. They want to discuss their fear of clowns.



Friday, October 29, 2021

the last book I ever read (The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, excerpt ten)

from The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio:

The whitest thing I have ever done in my life was not repeatedly trying to get bangs after seeing pictures of Zooey Deschanel. The whitest thing I’ve done in my life was trying to save Flint youth while I was visiting there. At various points when I was in Flint, I did a cowardly thing, which was to try to suggest a trip in which some of the kids would come to New York with me, because I wanted to open a Pandora’s box for them, the view of the city at night. The skyline! The fucking skyline! I asked the teens if they’d seen New York (they hadn’t), and then asked them if they’d like to see New York (they didn’t know), and holy fuck I hadn’t anticipated that. In my mind, the kids would want to get out. They’d had big Broadway dreams. They’d have questions, they’d want answers, we’d talk gypsy cabs and SAT scores and Plan B in both life and in birth control. But what happened instead is that the teens conscientiously ignored me the entire time I was there—they had no intention of talking to me—so I’d eavesdrop on their conversations, and I’d overhear them talking about how they wanted to be waitresses at some local bar because they heard you could earn mad tips that way, and I fucking DIED, because I grew up on my dad’s tips and knew what kind of life that gave you, and I wanted to save them from that. I’d drunk the social mobility Kool-Aid from college prep programs run by white people when I was in high school and didn’t know how to reconcile all that with what I was seeing in Flint. I had created for myself a world in which I could only feel reprieve from panic if my parents were either dead or at peace, preferably both, and if they were to be just at peace, that would be expensive, and I had to work toward that, and I knew to the gram just how much blood they had shed for me over the past thirty years and I had to repay it in gold. And I didn’t understand these kids who didn’t think the same way. I felt like it was out one fucking job—they were alien to me. I didn’t know how to talk to them. So I didn’t.



Thursday, October 28, 2021

the last book I ever read (The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, excerpt nine)

from The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio:

But his favorite place to work was at a a chocolate and sweets factory in Detroit, where he spent ten years. He started out cleaning bathrooms, but the couple who owned the factory saw that he was a good worker and said, Theodoro, leave that alone. You can go work in the granola station now, so he put on a blue lab coat and became a sweets man.

“My years at the chocolate factory were the most beautiful time of my life,” Theodoro tells me. He learned how to make caramel-covered popcorn, pecan pies, cherry-center bonbons, little chocolate turtles with nuts inside. The aromas, of course, were incredible, but what he loved most were the machine. “At the start of the assembly line, I mixed in honey with the peanuts, then saw them go into the chocolate machine where chocolate cascaded down like a curtain but also up like a geyser; it showered chocolate from both directions, if you can imagine that. Now, at this point the chocolate was very hot, and I went into a cooling tunnel. There were times when I worked the night shift to make chocolate overnight, and the factory was quiet and cold, a few people making sweets for the world. I was very good at my job and I helped everyone around me, even though my supervisor said, That’s not your job. But I wanted us to work as a team, so if I had a second, and my co-workers were slowing down, I ignored him. The last year I was there, they got these really old ovens tha toasted the granola for a really long time and out I came, toasted and brown, smelling like heaven, and you had ten people working on eighty trays at a time. There were metal detectors in the cooling station, to make sure the batch was clean. It smelled like paradise. When I talk about it, it sounds impossible, but I saw it happen.”

Then the company was sold to an owner from Ohio who was going to hire only American citizens. Theodoro’s bosses broke the news to him on New Year’s Day 2012. “I had been working for just about two hours and they sent for me. Theodoro, they said, we can’t keep you here. This company isn’t ours anymore.” They gave him a certificate saying he was one of the best employees they’d ever had, and they hoped that when he showed it to future employers he wouldn’t have to wash bathrooms anymore.



Wednesday, October 27, 2021

the last book I ever read (The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, excerpt eight)

from The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio:

“Sweet Home Alabama” comes on the bar radio.

“I love this song,” Esme says. “I call it ‘Sweet Home Hialeah.’” She starts to sing at the top of her lungs. She may be tipsy. Some of the other patrons at the bar, white people, look at us, and it makes me nervous, and it makes me sad that it makes me nervous. I imagine one of them taking ou an AK-47 and shooting us down, then walking over to our bodies, then shooting us in our heads, execution style, as we continue to sing the pretty redneck song, marveling at the mansions surrounding us, trying not to think of cleaning them, and then, as I feel those white stars on us, I pour a drink on my head. The girls cheer and I let out a bloodcurdling scream. My first ever.



Tuesday, October 26, 2021

the last book I ever read (The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, excerpt seven)

from The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio:

When we speak on the phone a few weeks before my first visit, Salome cries, puts her hand on the mouthpiece to try to block the sound of it, and tells me she wants to show me the notebook her dead husband kept during his last weeks alive to keep track of his treatments. After we hang up, I text her U.S. Census data showing that children of immigrants have higher rates of college and postgraduate education graduation than other groups, and she says my texts make her feel good. She has four children, one of whom has DACA. I am a one-trick pony, unable to comfort with anything other than grades.

Salome is tall, with straight dark-brown hair and the intense feminine air I associate with perfumed talcum powder. She has been in the United States for seventeen years, working mostly as a housekeeper for hotels and apartments. She had four pugs: fourteen-year-old Tobin and her three puppies, Megan, Alex, and Ashlyn, named for members of the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team. “I like to lie down on the couch and let them climb all over me,” she says. She sleeps curled on her side with Tobin at her chest, Megan on the backs of her knees, and Alex on her back. Ashlyn has been staying with her daughter.



Monday, October 25, 2021

the last book I ever read (The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, excerpt six)

from The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio:

She talks to me about the disappeared. All Latin Americans know about the disappeared. The period of the late 1970s and 1980s was a dark time in South America. It was a time of military dictatorships in Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile. The governments kidnapped civilians and took them to undisclosed locations and tortured and killed them. Their bodies were never found. Their bones were never found. In Argentina, in just seven years’ time, the government disappeared about thirty thousand people. They woke up one morning and went about their days and then they vanished without a trace. So in Argentina, their mothers formed a group called the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. They wore white scarves around their heads and marched two by two in front of the presidential palace every Thursday afternoon at 3:30 P.M. holding pictures of their disappeared children. They still do it every Thursday afternoon. These mothers are legendary. They have been marching for forty years.



Sunday, October 24, 2021

the last book I ever read (The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, excerpt five)

from The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio:

I ask Julieta if she ever resorts to alternative medicine in the absence of access to doctors, and she dismisses folk medicine as something that Cubans and Haitians do. “They have ridiculous beliefs with respect to medicine, and you’re not going to leave them without them doing a prayer on you,” she says. Instead, she describes another form of alternative medicine. “I have two migraines and I have a Cuban neighbor who loves me. She was born here, and she’s insured. She goes to her doctor and pretends she has migraines, she says that the light bothers her, that she throws up, and he gives her medication. She shares. A lot of people count on other people. My sister is a citizen and she gives her blood pressure medicine to a woman who is undocumented.”

Julieta swears by hospital-grade Tylenol because she, too, sometimes gets intense pain in her molar. She goes to a Honduran man who was a dentist in his home country but cannot legally practice in the United States; instead he goes to private homes to fill cavities. “He does a very good job,” she says. I have only a couple of dozen memories of my early childhood, and one is of my father writhing on the floor with tooth pain. My mother and I just stood back and watched, sometimes behind over to pat his arm, until the pain stopped—it took about a day. Either he would die from the pain or the pain would stop, and that time it stopped.



Saturday, October 23, 2021

the last book I ever read (The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, excerpt four)

from The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio:

The undocumented immigrants who died on 9/11 worked in restaurants, in housekeeping, in security. They were also deliverymen. The 9/11 Memorial and Museum now stands where the Twin Towers once stood. They have an exhibit that gutted me when I saw it. It’s a bicycle, presumed to have belonged to a deliveryman, a bike that was left tied to a pole near the Twin Towers. Visitors to the site had left acrylic flowers—red, white, and blue roses and carnations. They also left a rosary on the bicycle. It became a makeshift memorial. There was a note on the street next to the bike. EN MEMORIA DE LOS DELIVERY BOYS QUE MURIERON. SEPT 11 2001. “In memory of the delivery boys who died.” Delivery boys. That’s how I know it was the delivery boys who put up that sign, who left those acrylic flowers, men like my dad.



Friday, October 22, 2021

the last book I ever read (The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, excerpt three)

from The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio:

The Queens Zoo does not have a lion, which is the mascot of Milton’s favorite soccer team. Milton used to play professionally in Colombia, and then he played in a league of immigrant men every week in the park for years, before he was diagnosed with asthma after 9/11 and had to stop. Alhough he has mixed feelings about observing animals that are “trapped,” Milton takes lots of pictures at the zoo. He has never been to one before, and I wish I had taken him to the Bronx Zoo, which is bigger and better in every way. The only animals here are coyotes, elk, owls, pumas, lynx, bald eagles, cranes, alligators (seasonal), bison, antelope, peccaries, thick-billed parrots, and Andean bears. It is cold and windy, not a great day to spend time outdoors, and Milton is wearing a cream coat over a white puff vest, white sneakers, and a checkered gray scarf. I’m wearing a puff coat too, and sometimes when we pass our reflections on the glass panes of animal exhibits, I wonder whether a stranger passing us would think I am his daughter.



Thursday, October 21, 2021

the last book I ever read (The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, excerpt two)

from The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio:

I ask Santiago where he learned to translate so well and he tells me that like many children of immigrants, he grew up interpreting for his parents at everything from PTA meetings to doctors’ appointments. “It made me feel important,” he says. “I was representing my parents.” I tell Santiago I did the same thing, that we all did. I ask him why he omitted all mentions of Trump in the speech. “I didn’t want to mention that guy,” he says. “I wanted to make them feel safe.”



Wednesday, October 20, 2021

the last book I ever read (The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, excerpt one)

from The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio:

The story as far as I know it goes something like this: My parents had just gotten married in Cotopaxi, Ecuador, and their small autobody business was not doing well. Then my dad got into a car crash where he broke his jaw, and they had to borrow money from my father’s family, who are bad, greedy people. The idea of coming to America to work for a year to make just enough money to pay off the debt came up and it seemed like a good idea. My father’s family asked to keep me, eighteen months old at the time, as collateral. And that’s what my parents did. That’s about as much as I know.

You may be wondering why my parents agreed to leave me as an economic assurance, but the truth is I have not had this conversation with them. I’ve never thought about it enough to ask. The whole truth is that if I was a young mother—if I was me as a young mother, unparented, ambitious, at my sexual prime—I think I would be thrilled to leave my child for “exactly a year,” as they said it would be, which is what the plan was. I never had to forgive my mom.



Monday, October 18, 2021

the last book I ever read (Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir by Norm Macdonald, excerpt fifteen)

from Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir by Norm Macdonald:

There is the way things are and then the way things appear, and it is the way things appear, even when false, that is often the truest. If I am remembered, it will always be by the four years I spent at Saturday Night Live and, maybe even more than that, by the events surrounding my departure from that show. As long as SNL exists, then so do I.

When people come to see me do stand-up, it is because somewhere in their memory I live on SNL, dressed as a young Burt Reynolds, insisted Alex Trebek refer to me as Turd Ferguson. And they come to see me and I am old and fat and I don’t mention SNL and I do my answering-machine joke and they are happily disappointed. After the show, they stand beside me and take pictures, the way you would with a donkey at the side of a road. They tell me they are big fans and they don’t care what their girlfriends say. They understand me even though they know good and well that nobody else does. I’m dry, they say. The next time I come to their town, they don’t show up.



Sunday, October 17, 2021

the last book I ever read (Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir by Norm Macdonald, excerpt fourteen)

from Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir by Norm Macdonald:

Saget came running in, deliriously happy, clutching a newspaper. “They found a murdered teenage boy in a ravine this morning. Isn’t it fantastic?”

Farley entered, dancing a jig, and bellowed, “Guess what, everybody? A monster is still on the loose and no teenager in Toronto is safe. Yahooooooo!” It seemed everybody was getting the good news at the same time. And that day the mood of the movie set changed for good. It’s funny how something as small as the news of a teenager being slaughtered and tossed in a ravine can be enough to lift the spirits of an entire set full of important Hollywood people.



Saturday, October 16, 2021

the last book I ever read (Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir by Norm Macdonald, excerpt thirteen)

from Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir by Norm Macdonald:

It was such fun to be back in Canada, my true home strong and free. I was born in the Great White North and I remain to this day a Canadian citizen and I will till the day I die. I’ll tell you why. Canada is the country that shaped me, that taught me right from wrong, that turned me from a boy to a man. Also, that American citizenship test is way, way too hard. Trust me, I’ve tried it quite a few times. But no more. You know the old saying: Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me; fool me thrice, shame on Adam Eget, pretending to be me and failing even worse; fool me four times, shame on the guy behind the desk at the Immigration and Naturalization office, who said he would see what he could do for a hundred clams and then said that he couldn’t do a damn thing but kept the hundred clams anyway; fool me five times, shame on the filthy homeless bum who could rattle off all the presidents in less than a minute but then the moment I gave him twenty dollars to do the test in my stead took off running down the street with a whoop and a holler; fool me six times, shame on me again, for threatening to burn down the federal building in New York City if I wasn’t given citizenship immediately. There would be no seventh time. Nobody ever accused this old country boy of being stupid. But it turned out to be all for the best, anyway. I’ve finally come to my senses. I was born a Canadian and I’ll die a Canadian and I will forever be proud to count myself a citizen of Canada, the fourteenth-greatest country in the world.



Friday, October 15, 2021

the last book I ever read (Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir by Norm Macdonald, excerpt twelve)

from Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir by Norm Macdonald:

Steve Lookner had submitted an early joke. “Lyle Lovett and Julia Roberts are getting divorced. Insides say the trouble began because he was Lyle Lovett and she was Julia Roberts.”

I sure loved that joke. I’d never heard a joke where the premise and the punchline were so close.

“Exactly,” said Downey. “That’s what I was getting at when…” But I glowered at him and he cast his eyes down. If he wanted to listen to his Sex Pistols records, he could do it at home.



Thursday, October 14, 2021

the last book I ever read (Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir by Norm Macdonald, excerpt eleven)

from Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir by Norm Macdonald:

I put Adam Eget on a plane to Gander, Newfoundland, while I hunkered down with Fred Wolf to work on the Answering Machine sketch. Fred was a writer of the highest order whom I had known for years from our stand-up days. I loved Fred’s outright disdain for certain hosts. Many times SNL would have a very handsome dramatic actor on as a host. An actor who was convinced he was funny. Women are attracted to funny men, it is often said. This is not true. It only appears this way because women laugh at everything a very handsome man says. So this gives the very handsome men the idea that they are funny. This phenomenon made Fred angry and he refused to refer to the handsome hosts by name; instead he would call them “Face.” “Hey, Norm,” he’d say, and point to his script. “You think Face will be able to handle this line?” That would always make me bust a gut. Face. Perfect.



Wednesday, October 13, 2021

the last book I ever read (Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir by Norm Macdonald, excerpt ten)

from Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir by Norm Macdonald:

I sit on the edge of my bed and open the drawer. I take out the 600 milligrams of Dilaudid, the fresh syrette, and the Gideon’s Bible. I read a few of my favorite Scripture passages as I prepare the syrettes. And then I inject myself with the lethal dose of Dilaudid. I fall to my knees and rest my elbows on the bed. I pray forgiveness for what I am doing. And then I feel joy and peace fill my soul as my consciousness quietly drifts away.

And then…I don’t die.



Tuesday, October 12, 2021

the last book I ever read (Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir by Norm Macdonald, excerpt nine)

from Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir by Norm Macdonald:

Rocco looked me over as the guards left.

“What are you in for?” he asked. I explained the whole situation with Sarah Silverman and Dave Attell and then I asked him the same. “Triple murder,” he said.

I was shocked; any fool knows you can’t murder a man more than once, and I told Rocco as much. He’d been railroaded on those last two counts, and I let him know I’d be more than happy to become his jailhouse lawyer and dedicate my life to gaining his freedom. After all, becoming a jailhouse lawyer had been a boyhood dream of mine, and here I was with an opportunity to make it come true! I knew logically that Rocco was completely innocent of at least two of the crimes he’d been convicted of. And I believed in my heart that he was most likely innocent of the other one too. After all, if a man is innocent of two murders, odds are he’s innocent of two murders, odds are he’s innocent of the third. That’s just grade-school arithmetic. I couldn’t wait to get in front of that jury. I planned to go to the prison library first thing in the morning and start reading law books. And I’d had a little head start too. You see, I had seen every single episode of Matlock many times over.



Monday, October 11, 2021

the last book I ever read (Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir by Norm Macdonald, excerpt eight)

from Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir by Norm Macdonald:

About a week later I walked into the Comedy Cellar to do a set. I had some new material and wanted to try it out (they had recently come out with a new telephone that had its own built-in answering machine), and the first thing I saw was the two of them, Dave and Sarah, canoodling at a corner table. They may as well have been up in a tree K-I-S-S-I-N-G. Well, I saw red and I went over to Colin Quinn. Colin was and is the smartest comedian alive and a great guy to boot. (This was long before he joined the cast of SNL and destroyed my life.)

“Colin,” I said, “you’re from New York. Where does a guy go to hire a hit man?”

Colin laughed. “What do you want with a hit man?”

“Can you keep a secret, Colin? I plan to have Dave Attell murdered and then, once he’s out of the way, convince Sarah to lay down with me.”

I should have paused to give Colin a chance to answer my question regarding his ability to keep a secret before I spilled my whole plan. As it turned out, Colin Quinn was a huge blabbermouth, who would up prating like a magpie about the entire murder plot as soon as he got the chance. But I didn’t know that then.



Sunday, October 10, 2021

the last book I ever read (Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir by Norm Macdonald, excerpt seven)

from Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir by Norm Macdonald:

On Saturday night I was nervous but ready, like a great athlete. We were trying out the sketch at dress rehearsal. The only way you got the sketch on the real live show at 11: 30 P.M. was to destroy at dress at 8: 00 P.M.

Sandler hit me with his first line:

“Hey, Frank, did you hear about that meteor hurtling toward the earth?”

By this time, I lived in the same apartment building, the Regency House, that Adam lived in, and we shared an office, so I was good friends with him and he never called me Frank; he always called me Norm. Naturally, when he called me Frank I didn’t respond, and so Adam repeated his line, but I noticed there was an edge in his voice. If I’d been thinking, I’d have realized at this point that I was Frank, because Adam and I were the only two people in the sketch, but I wasn’t thinking. I was looking at things around the set, one table in particular. It was made of brown wood and reminded me of a table I’d once seen in a table store. So the two of us didn’t say anything at all. About twenty minutes passed and finally the show ended. Boy, Adam was really steamed at me about that one. And Lorne was too.



Saturday, October 9, 2021

the last book I ever read (Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir by Norm Macdonald, excerpt six)

from Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir by Norm Macdonald:

I met some great comics in Los Angeles, and the best one, and the one who became my friend and hero, was Rodney Dangerfield. Many a night I sat at the back of the Improv, watching Rodney the way a dog watches a man, or a man a god. This guy was the complete package. He looked funny, he talked funny, he even moved funny—tugging at his tie and wiping sweat off his brow—and all the while his comically bulging eyes shifted nervously from side to side. He wrote the best jokes any comic has ever written. But that’s news to nobody.

I know another side of Rodney.

I’ve got the inside scoop on big-time celebrities, and one of them is Rodney Dangerfield. Soon after meeting Rodney, when he was at the peak of his career, I learned a very distressing truth. And that truth was that success and money mean nothing when it comes to achieving happiness.

From an outside’s perspective, it seemed Rodney had everything: money, success, fame. But there was one thing Rodney Dangerfield was never able to attan, and it plagued him his entire life. The ugly little secret in Hollywood was that Rodney Dangerfield never got any respect.



Friday, October 8, 2021

the last book I ever read (Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir by Norm Macdonald, excerpt five)

from Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir by Norm Macdonald:

Star Search was a show where they searched for stars. The show had different categories such as junior dancers, spokespersons, singers, and comedians. Once a year they would do a special International Star Search, where they would gather up a bunch of foreigners and try to make them stars. That’s why they contacted me. I was a foreigner. The good news was, if I won, I’d go from a nobody to a star.

Sam Kinison had told Dennis Miller about me—told me I was international—and Dennis, who is a very generous man, helped me, as he would many times in my career. Dennis passed my information on to the show’s host, Ed McMahon.

Ed was famous for sitting beside Johnny Carson and laughing his deep, genuine laugh at all that Johnny uttered. If you’re the best at something, you become a rich man. And Ed McMahon was very rich.



Thursday, October 7, 2021

the last book I ever read (Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir by Norm Macdonald, excerpt four)

from Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir by Norm Macdonald:

Mark owned branched of Yuk Yuk’s all across Canada, and Howie Wagman was, and still is, the manager of the Ottawa club. Howie helped me with the ins and outs of comedy. I’ll never forget my first line on a stand-up stage. “How many of you guys own answering machines?” To this day it remains one of my strongest lines.

I quickly developed a cult following. That sounds pretty good, but the truth is that it’s the last thing you want to develop. The only time having a cult following is a great thing is when you are actually in a cult. Then you get to be a cult leader and life is milk and honey. First off, everyone thinks you are God, so you get to tell them all what to do. Your followers bow down before you and give you all their worldly goods, which can really add up, even with a smallish cult. The best part is you get to lie down with all the ladies from the cult, even the married ones. In a short matter of time, you become drunk with power and begin to lie down with the men also, not because you want to, but just because you can. Yes, being a cult leader with a cult following is fine work if you can find it.

However, being a stand-up comedian with a cult following just means that most folks hate your guts.



Wednesday, October 6, 2021

the last book I ever read (Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir by Norm Macdonald, excerpt three)

from Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir by Norm Macdonald:

“I bet you have good stories about Sam, don’t you, Norm?”

“Oh, sure. I remember one time we were flying from Toronto to Winnipeg, Sam and I, and before we took off the captain came over the intercom, as is the custom on airplanes. ‘Good morning,’ the captain said. ‘This is your captain, Pat Johnson, and we will be flying—’ and Sam gave out a wild scream: ‘NOOOOOO!!!!! NOT CRASH JOHNSON! NOT CRASH JOHNSON!!!!!!!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!’ Well, it was about the funniest thing I’d ever head, the idea that this captain had been in so many accidents that his nickname was Crash. That just busted me up and I started laughing and couldn’t stop. Of course, nobody else found it funny at all—it caused quite an alarm—and Sam got himself a good talking-to by the girls that bring you the little drinks, but he didn’t care. He had me laughing hard, which I guess was the only thing he was after. He apologized to the girls, giggling the whole time. You know, that old Sam giggle.”



Tuesday, October 5, 2021

the last book I ever read (Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir by Norm Macdonald, excerpt two)

from Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir by Norm Macdonald:

The stories of my youth are working wonderfully and Adam Eget is awake. Annoyingly awake. He suddenly can’t stop talking long enough to shut up about how his girlfriend broke up with him just last week, and how he lost his BlackBerry, which has his sponsor’s phone number on it, and how they don’t appreciate him enough at The World Famous Comedy Store. And me, I’m riding shotgun, listening to Billy Joe Shaver on the radio and thinking about the plan. I stare out at the black starless night. I only have two hundred dollars to my name, but I have a plan. And the good thing about the plan is that it’s foolproof, so I decide I’ll get some shuteye now that Adam Eget is exceptionally awake. I close my eyes and turn the car radio way up and Billy Joe Shaver’s voice drown out Adam Eget’s—“The Devil made me do it the first time, the second time I done it on my own”—and I smile as I fall asleep.



Monday, October 4, 2021

the last book I ever read (Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir by Norm Macdonald, excerpt one)

from Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir by Norm Macdonald:

When I was young I was in great shape. I was in my peak physical condition back when I was one. Man, I looked great. I even looked good for my age. Strangers would always approach me, smiling, and they’d say, “Look at you, little boy, what are you, zero?”

“Oh, no,” my mother would giggle. “He’s one.”

“Well, I’ll be danged. He doesn’t look a day past zero.”

“No, he’s one.” She’d blush proudly. My mother did all my talking for me back then because I hadn’t gotten the hang of it yet.