Our pal Charlie Frye favors us with a little Four Coin Fosse…

The vaults of The Ed Sullivan Show are full of performances by comedians that few remember today. Here from 1956 is Myron Cohen…

What has been occupying me for the last week or so continues to occupy me…and longer than I'd expected. The reruns here will soon be displaced by new material but today, you get the one about the time I had Scarlet Fever. A bit of Googling tells me this disease is no longer as common as it once was but it still occurs here and there. I don't think I have a "worst enemy" or anyone I dislike enough to wish it upon and if I ever do get one, I will not even wish it upon that person. This ran here on December 27, 2015…

When I was about six, I came down with a very, very bad case of Scarlet Fever. A couple of other kids in my class at school had it and that's apparently how I got it…but I got it really, really bad. It was so bad that for a day or two there, there was a very real worry that I might die from it. [POSSIBLE SPOILER: I didn't.]

I do not remember everything about that time but I recall my pediatrician, Dr. Grossman, making a house call to our home late one night. That scared me. Watching TV shows as I did, I had heard any number of jokes about how doctors did not make house calls anymore. And this is how my mind worked even then: I thought that if Dr. Grossman and his little black bag were at my bedside, I had to be nearing death's door.

That was one of the two things that got me worried. The other was that for the first time, I saw my father cry.

My father was a lovely, kindly man who never in his entire life hurt another human being intentionally or failed to help out one — even a total stranger — who was in need. But he was also a very nervous man who worried about everything…and especially about illness. In later years if I had some minor ailment, my mother and I conspired to hide it from him. It just got him too upset. He was upset that night when Dr. Grossman came.  At that age, I figured that if my father was upset, I should be as well.

I was bright pink from the infection, absolutely covered in rashes. My throat felt like I'd tried to swallow a porcupine and I had a temperature so high, they wouldn't let me know what it was. I think my mother just told me I had an unlisted number. But I managed to get myself mostly unscared by remembering that Dr. Grossman was a great doctor. He would know how to fix me.

And of course, he did. First thing, he ruled out taking me to a hospital. I was not part of the conversation but later, my mother quoted him as saying, "Mark's too weak to be moved and if we take him to a hospital, he's liable to infect other children or pick up something else he doesn't need now. There's nothing they can do for him there that you can't do just as well here."

It was close to Midnight — and I think it may have been a Sunday evening — when he left our house, having written several prescriptions that had to be filled A.S.A.P. At the time, pharmacies that were open 'round the clock were not common even in Los Angeles. My mother worked her way through the Yellow Pages and found a few but none of them were well-enough stocked to have what we needed on their shelves.

Finally, she called a Horton and Converse out on Wilshire that was closed but the pharmacist was still there and had what was required. He agreed to wait around if someone could come right away for it.

My father was instantly dispatched in his car to fetch the drugs. One day years later, he told me the story of driving to the pharmacy but he turned pale as he did and his hands began shaking. He said that that night, they were shaking so badly he could hardly drive. After a near-collision, he pulled over to the side of the road and thought, "I can't do this."

Then he realized he had to do it. His only child's life was at stake…or seemed to be at stake, which in this case was the same thing. He finally drove to the drugstore and waited anxiously for the order to be filled.  Then he raced home, trembling all the way and probably hearing the Lone Ranger theme song in his head.

If you'd known my father, you would understand that he did not tell me this story to impress me with any heroism on his part. Indeed, he did not think he had been heroic. He told it to me to admit a certain weakness on his part and to tell me that as I went through life, I had to try to not be like that. I have tried to not be like that.

Once he was home that night — or rather, that morning — my mother gave me the pills, which I suppose were antibiotics. They may even have been precursor drugs to what I'm taking now for the infection I had recently in my knee.

There was also an external drug which had to be administered — a purple liquid that was to be applied to my forehead and chest with compresses. Pure cotton cloths were needed and we had no rags around or cotton sheets that could be cut up — and of course by now it was around 2 AM. There was nowhere to buy any so my father's handkerchiefs were sacrificed.

He had about a dozen of them and my mother, wearing the gloves she used for dishwashing, used them all up over the next few days. Each was soaked in a bowl of the purple liquid, then used to softly wipe my brow and chest. This went on most of that first night and apparently it along with the pills helped to bring my fever down and out of the danger zone by 7 AM. That was when my mother staggered off to bed and my father got up to keep an eye on me. He'd been trying without much success to sleep.

He didn't get much the next few days. He stayed home from work and he and my mother slept or took care of me in shifts. One was always at or near my bedside and when I was awake, I was read stories…but not too many because I was supposed to sleep as much as possible. Dr. Grossman phoned often and about three days after his late visit, he came by during the daylight hours, inspected the patient and announced that I was well on my way to a full recovery.

I don't recall hearing him say that. I do remember how happy my parents were and that's how I figured it out before they informed me.

I had missed enough school because of the illness and was so weak that it was decided I should skip the rest of that semester and build back my strength. I had previously skipped two semesters (one year) of elementary school so I eventually graduated one semester ahead instead of two. During my recovery, I had one interesting visitor whose visit I managed to sleep through. I wrote about that here.  And if you'd like to read more about Dr. Grossman, I wrote about him here and here.  The piece at the first of those links guest stars Jerry Lewis.

When I was awake, I read comic books. I read "real" books too.  A very inspirational one was Ventriloquism for Fun and Profit by Paul Winchell but I also read tons of comic books. My father almost never came home from work without a few, mostly Dell Comics featuring characters I also watched on television. I had read comics before getting sick but it was as the Scarlet Fever was departing that my interest in them became obsessive. Some would say I traded one illness for another…but at least I managed to turn the new one into a profession.

Finally, I was well enough to accompany my mother to the Von's Market where I could buy my own comic books, at which point my father was asked politely to cease bringing any home for me. I liked it better when I could pick them out myself. I got less Casper the Friendly Ghost and more Bugs Bunny that way. Also, though my father made notes of what he was buying for me, he did occasionally bring home duplicates.

The first time he brought me one I already had, I told him so and he got terribly embarrassed. He wanted to rush back out to the store and see if they'd let him exchange it for one I didn't have. Thereafter, I learned not to tell him. When he handed me a duplicate, I'd feign delight and if he asked, I'd lie and say I'd never seen that one before. Then I'd put it in a little pile I maintained of comics to be traded to friends at some future date.

Instead of giving me comics, he gave me money to buy my own…but I didn't spend every cent of it on issues of Looney Tunes and Yogi Bear. With my mother's help, I went to a J.J. Newberry's — a "dime store" next door to the Von's — and I bought my father a present. It consisted of two six-packs of fine cotton handkerchiefs embroidered with an "E" for "Evanier." These were to replace the dozen of his that had to be thrown away after they became permanently stained with the purple liquid. It was the second time I saw my father cry but it was a good cry.

Every time I post reruns here, I get requests to post this rerun which I've rerun before but it wasn't a rerun when it first ran on this blog on June 2, 2006. I have added a new addendum to the end and you won't want to miss that…

For no visible reason, I'm going to tell a story from my past. Back around 1970, our local comic book club would sometimes adjourn its Saturday meeting and then a band of us would car pool to a local movie theater and take in a cheap double feature. One time, we caravaned to the Meralta in Culver City for the parlay of Kelly's Heroes — starring Clint Eastwood, Telly Savalas, Don Rickles and Donald Sutherland — followed by House of Dark Shadows.

I think it was a buck to get in and I hate to think what they could have charged us to get out. The Meralta (seen below) had probably been a lovely theater at some point but by the time we got to it, it was the kind of place where the cashier wore No-Pest Strips for earrings and the ushers were just cockroaches in uniforms. The seats were shabby and one out of every four was either broken, missing or filled with a dead body. The curtains no longer operated so (and this is critical to our story) the screen was open between films. And out in the lobby was a refreshment stand that sold popcorn that was stale when you could have purchased it to munch throughout D.W. Griffith's latest.

There were about ten of us there, crammed in a section of two rows with a gap or two where the seats were unsittable. We watched Kelly's Heroes and I don't think any of us particularly enjoyed it. Then came intermission. Some of us went out to the lobby but one of our group (a guy named Gary) stayed in his seat — he may have become permanently affixed by then — and handed some coins to another of our group (a guy named Barry). Said Gary to Barry, "Hey, while you're out there, get me a candy bar. Any kind." Barry was annoyed at being treated like an errand boy so he decided to go out and spend Gary's money on the lousiest candy bar he could find.

The Meralta refreshment stand had many to pick from but when Barry spotted a display of Idaho Spud bars, he knew that was it. The Idaho Spud is a popular candy in some parts of the country but apparently not in Southern California. None of us had ever heard of it before and I've never seen one since even though it has been manufactured since (their website says) 1911. The site also explains that it's "a wonderful combination of a light cocoa flavored marshmallow center drenched with a dark chocolate coating and then sprinkled with coconut."

And maybe it is. But you know what it looks like, in or out of its wrapper? It looks like a chocolate-covered potato.

Isn't that the first thing you'd assume? It's called an Idaho Spud and it has eyes all over its packaging. So what's the first thing you think of? Chocolate-covered potato, right?

And the Idaho Spud people have no one to blame but themselves. No one forced them to call it that. There isn't even a logical reason to call it that except that they're made in Idaho where, contrary to popular belief, not everything is a potato. In fact, I developed a theory that the guy who invented it turned to his wife and said, "Muriel, I've invented a new candy bar but I don't know what to name it" and she asked, "Well, what is it?" To which he replied, "It's a wonderful combination of a light cocoa flavored marshmallow center drenched with a dark chocolate coating and then sprinkled with coconut."

Muriel said, "That's easy. Call it an Idaho Spud." And the inventor, who was drinking to celebrate his new invention, was so plastered by this point that it sounded good to him. Especially because people would think it was a chocolate-covered potato. "That'll be great for sales," he said just before he passed out, face down in a bowl of vodka.

Anyway, Barry bought Gary an Idaho Spud, took it back to where we were sitting and handed it to Gary. "Here's your candy bar."

Gary looked at it and said, "What the hell is this?"

Barry said, "It's an Idaho Spud. I think it's a chocolate-covered potato or something."

Gary recoiled in horror. "I didn't ask for a chocolate-covered potato."

Barry replied, "You didn't say not to get you a chocolate-covered potato." Gary had to concede the point. Sadly, he pulled the wrapper from his candy bar, took one bite, hated it and hurled the remainder of the Idaho Spud at the screen…

…where it stuck.

This was still during intermission and the curtains were open, the screen was exposed. We all saw the Idaho Spud sail onto the screen of the Meralta and just stay there, about two-thirds of the way up, slightly to the left of center. Then House of Dark Shadows started. For us, House of Dark Shadows starred Jonathan Frid, Grayson Hall, Kathryn Leigh Scott, Nancy Barrett and an Idaho Spud candy bar. And the Idaho Spud should have had top billing because it was in every damn scene. Prominently featured, in fact.

My friends and I paid no attention to the movie. We just stared at the Idaho Spud. Every time the camera cut, it had a new role in the film. Sometimes, it was a beauty spot on one of the actresses' faces. Sometimes, it was a fly on a wall. There was a shot of a door where it looked like the doorbell. At one point — I don't recall the exact dialogue — one of the actors said, "What is this thing?" And we all answered, referring to the brown lump on his face, "It's a chocolate-covered potato." This was years before The Rocky Horror Picture Show and home video made yelling back at a movie screen a national and annoying fad.

Other members of the audience picked up our fascination with the alleged candy bar and by the end of the film, I don't think one single person at the Meralta was paying any attention to what the actors were saying or doing; only to how the lump figured into each shot. At one point, there was an odd lighting effect that made it look like the Spud had fallen off and a moan of disappointment echoed through the theater. But then, in the very next scene, you could see it was still there and a little cheer went up. It was still there when we left, having little idea what House of Dark Shadows was about. In fact, it was still there three weeks later when I took a date to the Meralta to see Airport. On the sheer strength of superior acting ability, the Idaho Spud stole the movie from Dean Martin.

That's about all there is to this story. I'm not sure I ever went back to the Meralta so as far as I'm concerned, the Idaho Spud remained in place until they tore the place down, maybe even after that. It probably didn't but I'd like to think it did. Even now, when I find myself trapped in a particularly boring movie and my mind wanders from the storyline, I find myself wishing I had something of the sort to focus my attention on. A good movie, of course, needs no external help. But a bad movie can always use a chocolate-covered potato somewhere.

---

ADDENDUM: And whenever I rerun this article, someone asks me if the Idaho Spud is a real candy bar or is it something I just made up for a story? It's a real candy bar and you can order a lovely gift box of twelve of them from Amazon for only thirty bucks. And by the way, I've never tasted one because I'm highly allergic to coconut…

Here's the latest one of these — me 'n' Sergio down by the schoolyard answering questions from readers of Groo the Wanderer…

Another rerun. This one is rerunning from February 22, 2015…

Let me tell you about the photograph you see before you. It was taken in the backyard of the home in which I lived with my parents from age 1 to about 22. I'll guess I was about seven, maybe eight in this picture. The little girl was named either Roxy or Lee.

The reason I'm not certain is that Roxy and Lee were identical twins — and I mean identical. Their grandmother, who lived next door to us, could not tell them apart and she claimed that even their parents had trouble. Roxy and Lee liked this and encouraged their folks to dress them alike. When their folks didn't, they were known to swap outfits, just to keep everyone guessing. They would also sometimes claim to be each other. If you took a guess, they'd usually tell you you were wrong, even if you were right.

Every week or three, Roxy and Lee would come stay with their grandmother for a few days and when they did, we'd play games and I would make up little adventure stories for us to act out. Once, we put on a show in that backyard for my parents, their grandma and as many of the neighbors as we could bring there under duress. We opened with a magic act that utterly baffled the three people there who didn't know that my assistant had a twin. For a few seconds there, they actually thought I'd magically transported her from one big cardboard box to another.

The other seven people in our audience laughed because they knew the secret. Then we intentionally gave it away to the other three so Roxy and Lee could both be in the rest of the show together. They sang and danced to a record I played there in the yard thanks to a phonograph and an ungodly-long chain of extension cords. I did other magic tricks and a ventriloquism act that did not have Paul Winchell sweating the competition.

I liked Roxy and Lee a lot. One day, we learned that their grandmother was moving away. Actually, everyone in the small apartment complex next door was moving away.  It was being demolished to be replaced by a large apartment building.  I was quite sad because it meant the end of my friendship with Roxy and Lee.  I never even got to see them for a "last time."

In the above photo, one of them and I seem to be running some kind of mobile exhibit of rocks we'd found or something. I have no idea what we were doing but I do remember that wagon which served me well. It was at different times, a spaceship and a stagecoach and an ice cream truck and a door-to-door lemonade stand and I believe I even won the Indianapolis 500 in it a few times. Finally in my teen years, I gave it to a younger boy who lived down the street and he too found all sorts of imaginative uses for it.  He may even have used it as a wagon.

The main thing I would call your attention to in the photo is that little house we had in our yard. It was there when we moved in and I'm not sure of its original purpose. It had no plumbing or electricity, which suggested it was built as a tool and storage shed. But it also had big windows all around it which suggested people were expected to be inside it. Here's another photo where you can see it…

I don't know what caused me to make that face. Usually when I'm around females, they're the one making that face.

For a time, I used the little house cautiously as a playhouse — cautiously because many of the windows were broken, the floor had weak spots on it, there were portions of the ceiling that looked like they might come down at any minute, and there were a great many rusty nails in its walls. My Uncle Nathan, who was marginally handy with tools, occasionally went in and tried to remove some of the greater hazards but it finally came down to a simple decision: My father would either have to spend a lot of money to have someone come in and fix it up or it would have to be demolished.

A neighbor recommended a carpenter who came by and quoted a price to make it safe and inhabitable. The amount was clearly out of the question so my father asked, "How much to tear it down and haul everything away?" That fee was less but also more than he could spend at that time. Uncle Nathan boarded up the windows and the one door…and the little house just sat there for a year or two looking sad and maybe haunted.

During that time, the apartment complex next door was razed and a new, modern building took its place. As you might expect, we began finding termite droppings in our home. A bunch of them probably came in when they lost their residence next door and another wave probably arrived with all the lumber that was trucked in to build the new building.

An exterminator gave us a price to have our house tented and fumigated but, he said, there was no point in doing that as long as that little house was in the backyard. It was swarming with the little beasts and would re-attract them after any "kill."  He gave my father an estimate on what it would cost to rip the place down now. It was $300, which seemed like a lot at the time. My father thought about it for a few days and finally decided he had no choice but to pay it.

Then my mother had a thought. She asked our gardener Felipe what he would charge to do it. He said he didn't do that kind of work. Then she asked him, "If someone else tore the building down, what would you charge to haul away all the old wood and broken glass?" That, he said, he would do — for $40.

She came to me and said, "How'd you like to make $130?" That was half of what would be left if she and I tore it down and Felipe cleaned up after us.

I think I was ten at the time and $130 seemed like…well, less than a million dollars but not by much. The primary expenditure in my life was the purchase of comic books, most of which I bought at used book shops where I could get six for 25 cents. I did some instant arithmetic. $130 was 3,120 comic books.

But not really. There were many current comic books on the newsstand that looked so wonderful that I couldn't resist paying full cover price, which then was a dime. So maybe it was more like 2,000 comics. I remember thinking, "Gee, it's too bad I won't have a little house in the backyard to store them in."

My mother then said, "Now, don't think I'm going to let you spend the $130 all on comic books. Some of it's going to have to go for clothes and other expenses."

I asked, "Could I buy a pair of socks and spend the rest on comic books?" She said no. I could spend $30 on comics and then the remaining $100 would go towards, as she put it, "Necessities of Life." I tried to argue that Detective Comics was one but all she said was, "Nice try, kid. Nice try." I never could put one over on my mother. My father, yes…but not my mother.

Still, I took the offer. Thirty bucks worth of comic books was, after all, thirty bucks worth of comic books. Even at twelve cents apiece, that was a lot.

She presented the proposition to my father: "Give us the money and Mark and I will tear down the little house." He was skeptical but obviously, there was a value to keeping the dough within the family. "You've got a deal," he told us. "But for God's sake, be careful."

We were…and it was, up to a point, enormous fun. The little house was built like a real house but without a concrete foundation. We bought tools so I had safety goggles and gloves and a sledge hammer that was appropriate to my size and a big crowbar that I used to pry the shingles off the exterior. Once I did that, some of the walls beneath them could be knocked down with the sledge hammer, even by a ten-year-old boy. The little house turned out to be in even worse shape than we'd thought, plus we also had a big assist from those termites.

When we got the place down to the framework, Uncle Nathan decided to get in on the action. He went someplace and rented a gasoline-fueled power saw and then came over and cut down some of the upright beams, collapsing the roof. Boy, that was exciting. Many years later, I was outside the Hacienda Hotel in Las Vegas the night it was imploded with thousands of gallons of liquid explosives. Watching the little house come down was more memorable and astonishing.

Then Uncle Nathan sawed the roof and interior paneling into smaller chunks that Felipe the Gardener could fit into his truck. When the house was almost down, we paid Felipe to dig up the wooden frame that had formed the foundation. He then hauled the wreckage away and we were done.

My father was amazed. Absolutely amazed. He stood out in the backyard, staring at the plot where the little house had been and he said over and over, "I can't believe you did it! I cannot believe it!"

Between that extra cost of Felipe's excavation and what we spent on tools, we didn't clear $260. It was more like $200 but I still put aside $30 from my share for comic books and the rest went for clothes, shoes and some new shelving for my bedroom. I had to have a place to put all those comic books, after all. That was a Necessity of Life.

Only days after the little house was gone, we had to spend two nights at a nearby motel while our big house was covered with a tent. It was then filled with poison gas…which, the exterminator swore to me on the life of his children, would not harm my beloved comic book collection. As we were checking into the motel, the clerk noted that the address my father wrote on the registration card was less than a mile away. "You're not from out of town, I see. Might I ask the reason you'll be staying with us?"

My father was still reeling with astonishment at our demolition work. I guess it was partly that and partly to make a joke that he told the man, "My son here tore down our house."

The clerk gave me a look of incredulity and he asked, "Did you really do that?"

I said, "Yes." And motioning to the little suitcase I was holding, I added, "I packed my sledge hammer and my crowbar! If the TV in our room doesn't work, this place will be a parking lot by morning!"

A great moment from the old $10,000 Pyramid with your host Dick Clark and Celebrity Guest Tony Randall…

Things should be back to normal around here in a day or two. In the meantime, here's a rerun from May 17, 2014…

When you're a kid — we're talking under ten here — adults are always asking you the same questions…

When's your birthday? My parents were married March 3, 1951 and I was born on March 2, 1952 so I'd answer, "I was born on March 2nd. My parents were married on March 3rd." It always got a laugh. I didn't know quite why it got a laugh but it did so I left it in. It was usually followed by a hurried explanation from my mother.

What do you want to be when you grow up? From about age six on, that was an easy one: "I want to be a writer." I really did and I've never wanted to be anything else even though this response seemed to disappoint most of those who asked. They'd say, "Are you sure you don't want to be a fireman or a movie star or the President of the United States?" I'd reply, "Nope…a writer." They'd usually shrug and you could see them think, "Well, he's young. He has time to decide on a real career." I'm now 62 and I haven't come up with one yet.

What's your favorite color? Now, that was an odd one but I got it a lot. My parents would introduce me to some adult and within moments, the adult would be asking me what my favorite color was. I'd think, "Why? Are you going to paint me that color or something?" But I'd tell them it was orange and they'd react like I'd said something world-shattering…or at least interesting. Orange, huh?

Orange is my favorite color but it's not a vast preference. I don't go out and throw rocks at green or spread vicious slander about yellow or anything. I like lots of stuff that's not orange, a fact that my Uncle Aaron never seemed to grasp. I wasn't present whenever he and Aunt Dot were picking out a present to buy me but I just know it went like this…

AUNT: Oh, there's that game Mark wants so badly. Let's get him that. He'll love it.

UNCLE: We can't get him that. It's not orange and the boy loves orange. Hey, instead of the game, let's get him a couple of traffic cones.

When Uncle Aaron and Aunt Dot gave me a gift, I never knew what it would be except that it would be orange. One time, they bought me an orange shirt that was a size too small…and they knew it was a size too small for me when they bought it but all the shirts that were the right size were not orange. I guess the logic was: Better it should not fit him than it should not be orange. If they were around today, I'd probably get John Boehner for Hanukkah.

My Aunt Dot was my father's sister and she had married this man named Aaron who had a sister named Emma. Emma was a sweet, befuddled little lady who was very old. How old? No one, including Aaron, knew. The last twenty or so years of her life, she worked as a salesperson in a variety of department stores and places that sold women's clothing. It was not a mystery why she kept losing jobs. The mystery was why it sometimes took a whole three or four months for her to lose one of them.  A more confused woman you never met.

Every few months, she'd be fired and go looking for another job.  To get one, she felt it necessary to conceal her true age so she'd just make up a new date of birth, shaving a decade or two off her life.  At some point, she seems to have lost track of the truth and literally didn't know how old she was.  About me, she retained three facts: (1) My name was Mark, (2) I was just wonderful and adorable and (3) I loved orange. She too was forever giving me gifts that were allegedly the color we now call The New Black.

That was another problem with having orange as my favorite color. Some people have very odd definitions of orange. For reference, my idea of the perfect orange is the color of Baskin-Robbins orange sherbet…or maybe one shade darker. But it's not red with a little yellow in it or yellow with a little red in it. Orange is orange is orange. Aunt Emma — she insisted I call her that — once gave me a jacket that I suspect she fished out of the trash at the last place that had fired her. It was about the color of steer manure mixed with Chinese mustard.  She said, "I knew Mark would like this. It's orange."

It wasn't. But almost every time I went someplace where I was going to see her, I had to wear this hideous thing. "Oh," she'd say with glee. "I see you're wearing your orange jacket!"

One evening, we got a call: Emma had collapsed in her apartment and been rushed to a hospital.  We decided to go see her the next day and I made a mental note to bring the coat along.

The next morning before we left, the mail came and in it was a mystery: An envelope addressed to me from the Beverly Hills branch of Home Savings and Loan, which was then a big financial institution in Southern California. In it was a bankbook in my name showing a deposit of five hundred dollars. That's was a lot of money in 1966 when I was fourteen.

I had never set foot in a Home Savings and Loan and we — my father, my mother and myself — could not for the life of us figure out where this money came from or who'd deposited it or why. Home Savings wouldn't tell us over the phone so we decided to stop there on our way to see Emma and find out.  I went in, showed the bankbook and what little I.D. I had at that age and they told me. The account had been opened in my name four days before by Aunt Emma.

No other name could have been as startling. We didn't think she even had five hundred dollars, nor did it make a lot of sense that she would give it to me.  Might she not need that money for medical expenses? Or to live on when she got out of the hospital? She had reached the stage where she probably was never going to get another job.

Twenty minutes later, we were in her hospital room. I, of course, was wearing the non-orange orange jacket.

She was surprised but not upset that we knew she'd opened the account for me. I expressed my thanks but told her I didn't think I should accept it. "You might need it," I said. She said she wouldn't need it for medical expenses because her insurance was covering every penny of that stay…and she also wouldn't need it when she left the hospital because she wasn't going to be leaving that hospital. Then she added in a joking manner, "Not alive, anyway."

She wanted me to have the money so her daughter, of whom she was seriously not fond, wouldn't get her hands on it. She sounded fairly lucid and serious about it so I said, "Okay, I'll hold onto it for you…but when you need it back, you're taking it back." She replied, clearly at peace and without the slightest trace of despair, "I won't be needing it back." Then just as we were about to leave, she said something else I'll tell you in a moment.

As it turned out, she died a few days later.  She had prepaid for her funeral but it somehow fell to me to make some of the arrangements. When the mortuary called, one of the things they said was, "We're having trouble verifying her date of birth. We've checked hospital and government records and found several different ones that don't match the death certificate. Can you tell us when she was born?" I couldn't but I figured Emma would appreciate me lying about her age so I just made up a year. I don't remember now what I said but it's on her tombstone.  I'm sure it was one she gave out at some point.  She was somewhere between 91 and 100.

I left the five hundred dollars in the Home Savings account and eventually added to it. So did Home Savings. This was back in the era when banks paid real interest on the money they held for you.

Around 1975, I decided to start saving for a house so that became the purpose of that account. Any money I didn't need to live on went into the account Emma had opened for me. A good deal of that dough came from writing variety shows hosted by people who didn't speak English very well, including the infamous Pink Lady and Jeff. (Jeff's English was fine but his co-stars…well, that's a long story. Or probably a lot of long blog posts someday…)

In 1980 after an exhaustive search, I found a house that I wanted to purchase and a price was agreed-upon. The seller had one special condition of the sale: She was still paying off her loan on the place and under the terms of that loan, she could save a hefty fee if the person she sold to obtained their loan from the same outfit. So I had to either qualify for my loan there or if I couldn't, get a loan somewhere else and pay the hefty fee along with the purchase price. Fortunately, her loan was with Home Savings and Loan. In fact, it was at the same branch where Emma had opened the account…and there was yet another nice coincidence I'll get to, paragraph after next.

I made an appointment with the gent in charge of approving loans, dressed up nicely and went in to see him. He said, "Ah, I see you've been banking with us here for fourteen years." I said, "Yes, and I have most of my down payment money in your bank here." That helped me a lot to qualify for the loan and that account was there because of Emma. The gent then said, "Well, all I need now is to see your income tax forms for the last several years. Can you arrange to get me copies?"

I said, "If you'll let me use your phone, I can have them here in ten minutes." The office of my Business Manager was directly across the street from that Home Savings. That was the other coincidence.

I made the call, my Business Manager himself ran across Wilshire Boulevard with the necessary papers and I qualified for the loan right then and there. I'm sorry Emma never knew she started my home-buying fund…and that she started it in exactly the right place. She did me a much bigger favor than either of us knew at the time.

I'll never forget her for that but what I'll really remember is the last thing she said to me. Let's roll the tape back to that scene in her hospital room, a day or three before she passed. As we were about to leave, I thanked her one last time for the cash in the mystery account and I told her it was maybe the nicest thing anyone had ever done for me. Fortunately at that age, I had enough sense to not add, "And it sure makes up for this ugly coat."

She was lying in that bed, grinning with almost no teeth and she said, "I wanted you to have the money, Mark. I'm just sorry I couldn't figure out a way to make it orange."

Recently, I linked you to an episode of the Laugh-In revival that was done in 1977, sans Rowan and Martin or anyone else who'd been in the original version. The new cast included Robin Williams and my partner Sergio Aragonés. Sergio doubled as a cast member and as the creator of cartoon graphics that were sprinkled throughout the shows much as his marginal cartoons were sprinkled throughout issues of MAD magazine.

There were six of these hour-long episodes and they were announced as monthly specials. The one I linked to before was the first episode from September of '77 and this was the fifth show which aired February 1, 1978. I believe all six were rerun a few years later when Robin Williams was more of a star…

Still busy. This article was first posted here on December 8, 2013. Pay special attention to the part where I explain that I had a pretty good childhood…

As you know well by now, my mother was Catholic and my father was Jewish. When they first spoke of getting hitched, they received so much condemnation from both families that they separated…and the woman who would be my mother went so far as to marry someone else within her own faith. That didn't work out and they ended up getting an annulment, which is just a divorce for people who got one but want to be able to say, "I was never divorced." My mother decided to go with the Jew, they married…and they had an ideal marriage. I've never seen a couple that got along that well.

At first, to avoid ticking off either side of the family, they pretty much raised me to be nothing. Then, in one of the few mistakes they ever made in parenting, they sent me to Hebrew School. I told you in the last of these pieces what a disaster that was.

It prompted a few comments from folks who said, "Gee, what a terrible childhood you had." No, no, no. I had a great childhood…the best one I witnessed among all my friends. In these articles, I am literally telling you every unpleasant memory I have from being a kid. It's about six or seven in my first eighteen years. My parents never fought. There was very little yelling. There was no hitting. There was no heavy drinking. I never got in trouble. And though we weren't wealthy, I pretty much got everything I wanted.

Hebrew School, as bad as it was, was only once a week for a few months. Once it was over, they decided to give me at least a brief exposure to the religion of my mother's side.

On the (bad) advice of a family friend, a visit was arranged between me and a high official of a local church. Then as now, I am unsure of his title and as I think back upon him, I have a mental image of Dean Wormer in Animal House but dressed as priests dress when they want to remind you that they're priests and you're not. I have always had a natural suspicion of people who try to "one-up" you with how they dress. It's like when you go to someone's office and they make sure they're sitting in a higher chair than you are.

He welcomed me, greeted me cordially and condescendingly, parked me in a chair, then sat in one that made him much, much taller than anyone else who'd ever visit him. He then proceeded to lecture me for a good half hour on how there was one true religion in the world (his) and the rest were frauds, shams and, of course, The Work of The Devil.

All who followed them — indeed, all who didn't surrender wholly to his version of his faith — were condemned to spend all eternity writhing in exquisite agony amidst the fire pits. These lost souls included, of course, my father, my mother (especially her for her act of treason, even though it had resulted in me), all the aunts and uncles I liked, all my friends…and billions of foolish non-Catholics around the planet.

I believe I actually said, "Sure gonna be crowded down there" but he didn't hear me. He didn't hear much of anything I said. It was kind of like "accept Jesus as your personal savior and get the hell out, kid." Or maybe it was "get out of hell." I don't remember. I do remember a pretty horrendous description of God. It made Him sound like a wrathful super-villain with the power to flood the world or wipe out a continent if he felt disrespected and there was talk only of Fear of God, not Love of God, which was even more off-putting. Mostly though, I recall the utter contempt for other religions and those who followed them.

Oh — and there was a lot about him (with a small "h") and his operation. It was not enough to just accept the teachings. God wouldn't be pleased with you if all you did was lead a moral life. You had to show up at church (preferably Father Wormer's) every single Sunday, participate in its affairs and rituals and — especially! — fill the old collection plate.

I got out of there without accepting Jesus or even Father Wormer as my personal savior. When I quoted to my parents some of the lecture/scolding I'd received, they realized they'd chosen poorly and urged me to pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.

A few weeks later, I spent a much more pleasant half-hour with an elder or a senior or a monsignor — I'm bad on these titles — at St. Timothy's down on Pico. He was the right guy but little of what he said meant much to me. The main thing I got from him was more respect for Catholics — they weren't all like the other guy — and the message that one could be of any faith if one respected others'. Either of those two things alone would have been worth the visit.

I came away from the latter meeting with the feeling that I didn't have to commit myself body and soul to any established church or teaching; that I didn't need to swear allegiance to any of them to understand that you shouldn't kill, you shouldn't steal, you shouldn't harm another human being except, when necessary, in self defense and perhaps the defense of others.

Having a last name like "Evanier" causes people to not know instantly what you are so when they asked, I'd often say, "As Jewish as I wanna be." I meant by that I'd take the parts of the faith and culture that made sense to me and respectfully decline the others. It's worked flawlessly except when I encounter someone who thinks you have to pick a team, swear total allegiance to it and work to destroy all others.

If you'd asked my father, he would have told you he was a devout Jew, though he might also own up to all the ways in which he didn't fit some folks' lists of what a devout Jew oughta do. Among other things, he didn't recruit. He never told anyone there was anything wrong with them not being a Jew. He barely told that to me, his own son. He was a kind and honest man who made things better for his friends and family, gave to charity and never knowingly harmed another human being. If that's not enough for your God, I want no part of Him.

If you didn't see the 60 Minutes story on Tony Bennett, you need to see it. You will not be unmoved by it…

Still very busy so here's another rerun. This one's from November 19, 2013…

I tell people I'm Jewish but the truth is this: My mother was Catholic. My father was Jewish. That makes me, technically, Nothing. When they wed, my mother dropped most of her identity as a Catholic and never regretted it. My father was kind of a minimalist Jew. He went to shul on the High Holy Days but few other times. He did not formally belong to any synagogue. He did not hesitate to eat ham or bacon. He spoke about thirty words of Yiddish…but then so did my mother, having picked it up around him and other Evaniers. My mother's brisket and latkes could hold their own against any cooked by a pure, certified-as-Kosher Jewish Mother.

Another truth is this: Religion was not very important in our house. We had one prying neighbor lady who was always asking me questions about my family. Did we dutifully pray before every meal? No prayers were ever uttered in the our home. Did we routinely read The Bible? Nope. My mother had her childhood Bible, more as a keepsake than a reference, but it was almost never opened. Which holidays did we celebrate? Any holiday where you got gifts and/or ate a lot of food.

It all worked fine for us but it bugged the heck out of that lady and certain other onlookers. As I've mentioned here, my parents' mixed marriage was at first frowned-on by friends and relatives on all sides. The rise in acceptance in interracial marriages and now gay marriages shows the world moving in one direction: It doesn't matter who consenting adults marry as long as they're happy. Today, a Jew marrying a Catholic would scarcely elevate any eyebrows. When my parents wed though, it was like — as my father once put it — a penguin was marrying a gopher. (In the penguin-gopher analogy, I never figured out which was the Jew and which was the Catholic. If I had to guess, I'd guess the penguin was the Catholic because it looked more like a nun.)

After a short while, both sides of the family came to accept that Bernie and Dorothy were married and they had this great kid…and that, by God, was that. But there were some lingering resentments and feelings. My immediate family was more Jewish than not and my father's side occasionally asked, ahem, why I wasn't in Hebrew school? Or why I wasn't working towards Bar Mitzvah? The truth was that given the emotions that had surrounded their marriage, my parents didn't want to open old wounds — a wise move but not one that my Aunt Dot and Uncle Aaron could fully endorse.

Aunt Dot (for those of you not taking notes on these articles) was my father's sister. Uncle Aaron was her husband. They were slightly more devout Jews than my father and they feared for my soul or the family lineage or I don't know what they feared for. I think maybe my alienation from a world that expects everyone to have a neat, understandable religious label. "The boy should be something," I heard Aunt Dot say to my father once when they didn't know I could hear. "At least, expose him to it."

They campaigned intermittently and not without results. My father finally agreed and then my mother agreed with my father: Mark would be enrolled in a Sunday-only Hebrew school. I was not there to work towards a Bar Mitzvah; not unless I suddenly was seized by the passion to be a full-fledged Jew and insisted. But I should at least learn what it was all about and make up my own mind. There would also be some move made to expose me to Catholicism so I'd understand that side. Uncle Aaron consulted his rabbi and got a recommendation for a Hebrew school not far from my home.

Immediate Problem: The school had two classes, each of which was held from 10 AM to 2 PM on Sunday morning. One class was for kids aged 7-9. The other was for 10-12. Into which class should 10-year-old Mark go? I was a newcomer to these teachings so obviously, I should go in the Beginner class, right? But that might be embarrassing because I'd be in with the "little kids."

A lot of my classmates at weekday school were in the Advanced class so obviously, I should be in the Advanced class, right? But that might be awkward since in the Advanced class, it was presumed you already knew all the stuff you learned in the Beginner class and I hadn't taken the Beginner class.

There was so much discussion about this topic that they even asked me what I thought. I thought I should not be in Hebrew School at all but if I had to be, I should start in the Advanced class. I figured it would get me out of this ordeal sooner. It was decided that I'd go into the Advanced class and that I'd make a special effort to read certain books that might bring me up to speed.

It was horrible. The Advanced class was taught by a young, angry Israeli man named Avik who took an instant dislike to me and my lack of Jewish purity. I kind of thought of him as an anti-semi-semite. He was fierce and militant about his faith, and quite intolerant of those who did not share his ferocity and militancy. After my first day there, he went to the lady who ran the school and told her I should not be in his class. She responded, "You think he should be in the Beginner class?" and Avik replied, "I think he should not be in this school at all." Well, we agreed on that but not much else.

The principal lady told him he was stuck with me so for the next month or three, he did what he could to make my learning unpleasant. However fast I tried to bone up on what I'd missed, it wasn't fast enough for Avik. The man was filled with rage on a wide variety of subjects and as for his sanity…well, let's just say he was a few Jews short of a minyan. In class, in front of my friends, he'd pepper me with questions he knew damn well I couldn't answer.

At first, I tried responding with a joke but that only made him madder. At times when he began yelling at me, I would just get up and walk out of the classroom. The facility we were in was a nursery school during the week so I'd go out and sit on the edge of the sandbox. I'd just sit there and wait 'til class was over and my father came to take me home. I tried to tell him about The Problem With Avik but he just kept telling me to work a little harder.

"In this world, you've got to learn to get along with people."  That was my father's oft-given advice…and good advice it was.  But what do you do about people who angrily refuse to be gotten along with?

It got really bad in the portion of class where Avik taught us Yiddish and Hebrew. I happen to have an utter inability to learn any foreign language.  You could teach a giraffe to speak Russian before you could teach me.  Go ahead.  Try it.  See how you fare.

In regular school at different times, I studied Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and I think one or two others. The reason I kept changing is that via intense, short-term memorization I was able to get through the tests in each class, after which my mind immediately jettisoned all I'd memorized. So I'd get through Beginning Spanish and then when I passed that and moved on to the next level of Spanish, I wouldn't remember two words of Beginning Spanish…so I'd switch to Beginning French and start all over. I was rotten at all of them and that included Yiddish and Hebrew.  Especially Yiddish and Hebrew.

Avik would ask me a question in Yiddish (or Hebrew; I could never tell the difference) and when I couldn't answer him, he'd ask it again, only louder. And then louder and louder. One time as he hit around the fifth level, I said to him, "You seem to be misunderstanding the problem. I can hear you just fine. I just don't know what any of those words mean." He screamed at me and ten seconds later, I was outside sitting on the edge of the sandbox.

There were actually a few decent weeks there because Avik was away — in Israel, of course — and his substitute was a decent guy who didn't loathe me because I did not fit his definition of a good, young Jewish boy. Whatever I did learn well enough to remember, I learned during those weeks. But then Avik returned and it was back to the sandbox for me.

Finally one day, things reached the meltdown level. We were supposed to bring in money to donate to a fund to plant trees in Israel and my parents had given me two dollars for that. I had it in my wallet along with three dollars of my own — three dollars I'd earmarked for the purchase of comic books and my other (brief) passion of the time, Topps baseball cards. Avik came around with an envelope and when I pulled the cash out of my wallet, I pulled out all five dollars, put two in the envelope and started to put the other three back in my wallet. Avik suddenly grabbed my hand with the three bucks. "You are holding out," he said. "Your parents gave you five dollars to donate and you are trying to keep three for yourself." He then snatched the three dollars away from me and jammed it into the envelope.

I told him he was wrong, that my parents had only given me two for the donation, and pointed out how almost everyone else was only giving two. He called me a liar. I told him to go call my parents and they'd verify they'd only given me two dollars for the cause. He said something like, "I don't have to call your parents. I know your kind, passing yourself off as a Jew. You are not a Jew! You will never be a Jew!" Then he said something about how my father could not possibly be a Jew either. If he was, I would have been in the synagogue with him every week and I would have entered Hebrew School when I was younger and would now be two years from being Bar Mitzvahed.

There was more, including nasty words about my mother who had gone no further as a convert to Judaism than learning how to cook a great brisket, but I'd had enough. I charged from the classroom…and this time, I didn't stop at the sandbox. I barged into the office of the principal lady, told her what had happened and that Avik was insane and also that he'd stolen three dollars from me. The woman phoned my parents, verified that I had indeed been given two dollars to donate, and she suggested they come over immediately so this incident could be properly discussed. Then she led me back to the classroom and in front of all the other students, told Avik to give me back my three dollars and apologize.

Avik protested that I was lying. She said, "I spoke to his father. Mark is telling the truth." Avik started screaming what I think were actually curse words in Yiddish or Hebrew. Whatever they were, they were directed at me and my father and even at the school for allowing me in. Then he threw the envelope with the money down, stormed out of the classroom, got into his car and went elsewhere. My classmates cheered me because I'd won. I even got my three dollars back.

The administrators of the school called a hasty meeting to discuss what to do. They weren't certain if Avik had quit but just in case he hadn't, he was fired and I received an official apology from the school, not just for the $3.00 brouhaha but also for the way he'd treated me in general. They urged me to please, please stay in the class and learn with Avik's replacement but by this point, my parents had arrived — at the school and also at the realization that putting me into it was a serious parenting error. My folks left it up to me to stay or leave…and I gave it careful consideration. I thought it over for almost a sixteenth of a second.

That was the end of me and Hebrew School…an experience I never missed. But it was not the end of the story of me and Avik.

Three months later, I was with my mother at a very large Kaiser Health Clinic where she was going for some medical matter. We had an hour to wait so I told her I was going to take a walk around the building. A few corridors later, I happened to notice a man glaring at me and realized it was Avik. He started walking briskly towards me and yelling something, not necessarily in English.

I turned and ran a bit, looked back, saw him still striding purposefully towards me and I ran some more. I finally found a Security Officer and told him a strange man was coming after me. Avik saw me pointing him out to the Security Officer and he turned and fled. And that was the end of the story of me and Avik.

It was also the end of my Jewish indoctrination. Soon after, I received my glimpses into Catholicism. That didn't turn out much better except that I convinced everyone in even less time it was not for me. I'll tell you about that in the next installment in this series.  Or maybe the one after.

Very busy at the moment. Here's a rerun from November 10, 2013…

As a kid, I attended what was then Westwood Elementary School in West Los Angeles. It's now Westwood Charter School and still in the same location. When I drive by these days, the only structure that seems to still be there from my era is a freestanding handball wall in the northwest corner of the playground; that and a few of the cheese sandwiches they used to serve in the cafeteria there. The cafeteria is gone but those cheese sandwiches will be found and studied by Paleontologists of some future century. And based on the many fingerprints of the cafeteria workers, they will reconstruct Cro-Magnon Man.

Westwood was a good little school and one of the main reasons was the principal, Mrs. Kermoyan. I'm trying to think how old she was then, keeping in mind that when you're between six and 11 as I was, everyone over about 16 looks either forty or near-death. I'll say late thirties, early forties. She was a bright, conscientious administrator who cared about all her students but who took a particular interest in me. I saw a lot of her and not because I was ever in any trouble. I was never in any trouble. Not long before I graduated Westwood and moved on, I accidentally got a peek at my cumulative record.

This was a file students weren't supposed to ever see as it contained everything the school system knew about you and your parents, and included candid remarks from each of your teachers. Mine was filled with glowing statements about how oh, if only all students could be like Mark! The worst thing in there was that Mrs. Preuss wrote, "Has annoying tendencey to correct adults and be right." I laughed at that and decided to try not to do that so often. I started by not telling Mrs. Preuss that she'd misspelled "tendency."

Mrs. Kermoyan took a special interest in me and because of it, she and her associates unknowingly ruined my life for a while…then knowingly and happily made it just about all right. That's the story I'm about to tell you but first let me tell you a little more about the school. It was a nice, happy place located just barely within walking distance of where I then lived. The faculty was all female but for two teachers.

One was Mr. Manitzas, who proved to be one of those unforgettable educators who leaves a lasting and positive impact on those he tutors. He was fascinated with art and he'd often speed through Arithmetic and History so he could spend more time showing us slides of great paintings, especially every single canvas to which Vincent Van Gogh ever put brush. Years ago out of curiosity, I Googled "George Manitzas Westwood" and found a bevy of blogposts and message board chatter from former students who remembered him fondly and credited him with great inspiration. There are still a few of them up and I intend this posting to add to the search results about him.

The other male teacher was a Japanese gentleman named, I'm afraid, Mr. Fukushitma. Is that the worst last name you ever heard in your life? Should someone with that name even be allowed to reproduce? And he even pronounced the first syllable as if it had a "c" in it. I was never in his class but I do recall that no one on campus, be they pupil or faculty, could refer to the man without snickering.

In L.A. city schools at the time, and I suppose it's still this way, the first elementary school grade was B-1. When you were promoted, assuming you were promoted, you went into A-1. Then came B-2, then A-2 and so on. After you completed A-6, they shipped you off to a junior high school and to the seventh grade, therein.  At some point, at Mrs. Kermoyan's suggestion, an expert was brought in to test me and determine if I was sharp enough to skip a grade here or there.  I skipped a few and then at one point, I missed a semester due to a messy bout of Scarlet Fever.   The result? Well, my parents were quite proud and I briefly felt like I'd won a prize or something. I soon found out otherwise as I kept finding myself in a different class from the other kids I was getting to know.

School, after all, is as much about learning how to get along with others as it is about mastering long division or basic grammar. Arguably, the social aspect is more important. With my advancement, I lost all the friends I'd had and found myself in with a new group, all a year older. A year isn't much of an age difference when you're in your thirties or older but when you're in the single digits, it matters a lot. As I was younger and heralded as some sort of smarter-than-they-were prodigy, none of them were particularly interested in being around me.

I could get along fine in the classroom, especially in Reading and Writing, which were the areas that had most prompted my advancement. And I could at least sound like I understood Arithmetic and History and everything else. What I was lousy at were the three most important activities of the schoolday — Recess, Lunch and After Lunch Play.

I ate my lunch largely alone every day for a year or two. And then after lunch or at Recess when the games commenced, I couldn't seem to get on a team. They had this system where each week, two boys were designated as captains and when it came time to play Sockball, they'd take turns picking other kids to be on their squads. Egos were forever decimated or magnified based on how soon you were picked. It was embarrassing to be picked last…so you can imagine how I felt. I never got picked at all.

I'm not sure if it was because none of them knew me or because I was younger and therefore punier or because I lurked in the back and never spoke up. It might have just been that I'd never demonstrated that I could play the team sports, which was in part because I wasn't certain how any of those games were played. I kinda figured them out from watching but I never felt secure enough to dive in and participate. Or to point out to anyone that I'd been left off the roster so I never got to be captain.

Sockball was the big game on the Westwood playground. It was a lot like baseball except that you socked a big, inflated rubber ball with your fist as hard as you could and then ran the bases. You were out if someone caught your ball or threw it to a baseman before you reached his base. Everyone on one team got an "at bat" each inning and you'd see how many runs that side could score. Everyone on the other team was either one of the four basemen (home plate had a baseman, not a catcher because nothing was pitched) or was in the outfield, so there might be ten or twenty guys in the outfield.

I would plant myself deep in center and just stand there for the entire game. If the ball came near me, I let someone else handle it. When it came time to switch sides, I'd stay out in deep center because I wasn't on either team. It became a great metaphor for my early years and there are still days when I feel like that.

There were other games. One was Dodgeball and while the basic concept seemed pretty simple — i.e., dodge the ball, you jerk — I didn't know what else to do. So the first time anyone (me or any other kid) got hit, I'd go "out" and stay out. There was also a game I never understood called Four Square that involved another big rubber ball and four squares that were painted on the asphalt. Don't write and tell me how Four Square is played because there's little chance of me taking it up at this age.

The point was that throughout my early school years, no one really talked to me outside class and I felt increasingly like an alien presence. I was younger, weaker, smaller and worst of all, allegedly smarter. Being "Class Brain" because you skipped grades may make your folks beam but it's a great way to not relate in any way to your peers. Away from school, I was a happy kid but at Westwood Elementary, I felt like I was functioning in a parallel universe all my own.

It wasn't like being the New Kid in Class. We had new kids in class all the time…and since they were new kids, they were introduced and put on teams and placed into the rotation of team captains, and they were even taught how to play Four Square. Nobody ever did any of that for me. I'd see a foreign exchange student who barely spoke English start to fit in within days but I just felt more and more remote from those around me. I became withdrawn and dour…but only at school. At home, where I felt like I belonged, all was fine.

It got worse when my one teacher decided that in reading from her class textbook, I was working too far below my level of comprehension. That was bad, they said…so meetings were held and the faculty debated what to do about the Evanier boy. They finally decided to adjust the times of the Reading lessons in the another class that was a year past mine to coincide with those in mine. Then when it came time for Reading, Mark would be sent down the hall to take Reading with students a year older. This meant that I would come in like some mutant freak and the pupils there would glare at me and resent the snotty young kid who was showing them all up with his unnatural command of the language.

You can imagine how much I looked forward to that each day: Oh, boy! Another whole group of kids to not fit in with.

The plan was that as I progressed through school, I would always take Reading with the class ahead. I, of course, asked what would happen when I got to sixth grade since the next class up was at another school across town. "We'll deal with that when the time comes," I was told — and of course, when the time came no one had the slightest idea what to do so they just sent me to the school library every day during that hour. I'd mostly sit there and draw Fred Flintstone.

So I hated school throughout those years…and Mrs. Kermoyan knew that I wasn't happy but she had no idea why. When I tried to tell her, my vaunted command of the language failed me. I started to explain to her about eating lunch alone and spending Recess standing in center field, not being on either of the teams that were playing. Somehow, she didn't understand, muttering something about how advanced students need challenges to stimulate their minds…or something. In hindsight, I could later understand that when I said, "I'm always alone," she took that to mean I was more advanced than the other kids around me so maybe I needed to be around older ones still.

Finally though, I was beginning to feel like I was almost on the same planet as the other students. Almost, not quite. I think it started one day in class when I did something unprecedented in my then-brief life or, as far as I could tell, any classroom I'd been in. I made a funny.

By then, I'd read hundreds, maybe thousands of comic books and I remembered every word of every one of them. I remembered every joke I heard on TV, too. One day in class, one of my fellow pupils, Fred Stern, was reading a book report — some book about the Dark Ages. It was one of those vague speeches that made you wonder if he'd even read the book. I guess the teacher was thinking that maybe Fred hadn't. When Fred finished, the teacher asked him, "Fred…why were the Dark Ages called the Dark Ages?"

We all watched the color drain from Fred's face like a plunging thermometer. He didn't have a clue.

It was during that awkward silence that I realized our instructor had unknowingly given the set-up line to a joke I recalled from an issue of Archie's Joke Book. For the first time ever in my life, I spoke up in class without being called on. I said aloud so everyone could hear me, "Because they had so many knights!"

For a fraction of a second, there was utter silence in the room and I thought, "Oh, I did something stupid." But it was only a small fraction because then, they all got the nights/knights pun and the entire class exploded in laughter. I mean, exploded. I can still hear that explosion and several aftershocks.

Even the teacher laughed and boy, that sure felt good. Nothing connects you with others quite like making them laugh. It was a moment of Instant Acceptance for me and later that day at lunch, other students asked me to sit with them as they repeated the joke for kids in other classes. "How did you think of that?" everyone was asking.

Another student who I suspect also felt like an outcast invited me to go over to his house after school and play games, whereupon I instantly clobbered him in Stadium Checkers. I was great at Stadium Checkers because, unlike Sockball, it came with printed instructions. The next day, a couple of other students spotted me drawing cartoon characters in my notebook and asked me to draw cartoon characters in their notebooks. That was nice. No one was really talking to me but they were talking at me so we were getting closer.

Little things like that made me feel like I was starting to belong…but then I suddenly began to get called out of class to take special tests. I recognized those tests. They were the same kind I'd taken that had prompted the school to skip me ahead an entire year. They were even administered by the same lady from downtown. Fearful, I gave a few wrong answers — just enough, I thought, that they wouldn't think I was throwing the game but would think, "Hmm…maybe Mark's reached the upper limits of his ability."

I guess I didn't throw enough. A week before my current class concluded, the teacher kept me after school and gave me a sealed letter to take home to my parents. She told me, "They're going to be awfully proud of their son" and I shuddered because I knew what it was.

I gasped, "They're going to skip me ahead again?" She answered with a smile, "Yes and your parents will be so happy." Well, maybe but I sure wasn't.  I still remember the shocked look on her face when I began yelling, "No, no, no!"

"You should be happy about it," she exclaimed. I cried, "I'm not happy about it" and asked her who could undo this rotten decision. She said someone would have to talk to Mrs. Kermoyan. I announced that I was going to talk to Mrs. Kermoyan and I sprinted from that classroom and down the stairs, taking them three at a time because it sure felt like every second counted. I barged into Mrs. Kermoyan's office and began shouting.

I don't recall the first part of what I shouted and it was probably incoherent and hysterical. I do though recall the second part vividly. I told her how I always ate lunch alone and how no one would let me into a game and how the older kids in Reading class glared at me and how I was just starting to not completely hate coming to school each day. Then I saw her go pale as I asked her, "Don't you want me to have any friends at all?"

I was crying throughout all of this…but when I said that last thing, suddenly I stopped and she started.

Mrs. Kermoyan broke into tears, came out from behind her desk and squatted down in front of me. She threw her arms around me and said, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I did something terrible to you. I thought you were always so unhappy because you needed to be in with smarter kids. I'm so very, very sorry." Over and over, she kept saying, "I didn't mean to hurt you…can you forgive me?" And over and over, I forgave her. I still forgive her. Mrs. Kermoyan! If you're still alive and you're on the Internet and you Google your name some day and find this, I forgive you! Honest!

I must have forgiven her twenty times. She assured me I would never be skipped again in any grade unless my parents and I approved, which made me very happy at that moment. Later, in high school, I wished I could have skipped all of them and proceeded directly to my life.

But I remember sitting there in her office that day, listening in as Mrs. Kermoyan called my mother and told her that the school system wanted to skip Mark ahead again but, "he and I have talked it out and we agree it's not in his best interests. We both hope you agree." My mother replied that she'd discuss it with my father but that they'd found that "Mark usually knows what's best for Mark." Boy, that made me feel good. I felt like for the first time ever, I was in control of my own life. Better still, someone recognized that I had the capability along with the right to be. That was really what the problem was, after all.

And that "not belonging" problem? Gone for good, as of that moment…or at least, I began to feel like I belonged. It took a little longer for all my classmates to decide that but decide they did. As things turned out, I actually found myself enjoying the next class into which we all went.  The next class, by the way, was Mr. Manitzas.

My existence at school more or less normalized in fourth grade. I still had that problem with taking Reading in an upper class but everything else fell into place once I realized the problem was not with me. By then, other kids were picking me to be on their teams at Recess…and not because I was a good player. It turned out, I was really lousy at Sockball and all those other games. It also turned out that it didn't matter. What mattered was that I got my turn at bat and my name on the roster.

One disadvantage of staying home and getting home delivery of almost everything is that when things go wrong, you have to call the company — and at least in my experience, you either get right through or you're put on hold for the balance of this century and maybe part of the next. Kroger — known in this area as Ralphs Market with no apostrophe — sure doesn't want to talk to me.

They do have a "Virtual Assistant" who asks questions to try and route my call to the proper human being who won't take my call. I'm supposed to answer them "yes" or "no" but neither of those options quite fits what I'm calling about…so I keep saying "agent" or "representative" and every so often, the V.A. offers to credit my account with $5.00 to make up for whatever the hell I'm calling to complain about. That's nice but I'd rather talk to a person.

Finally, the Virtual Assistant — who did not by any definition assist me, virtually or otherwise — put me in a queue to talk to a human being and told me my call would be answered in the order in which it was received. Another recorded voice then told me that because of higher-than-expected call volume, my wait time could be as long as forty (40) minutes. I'm thinking that the "virtual" part of the term "Virtual Assistant" is using the definition of "virtual" that means "almost or nearly as described, but not completely," meaning he, she or it almost supplies some assistance.

I gave up after sixteen minutes.

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By the way: The following has nothing to do with why I called Ralphs/Kroger though if I'd ever reached anyone there, I might have mentioned it. I like a brand of quasi-potato chips or crisps or whatever you'd call them called Popchips. I like the kind in the bag below on the left, which holds your basic Popchips.

Recently, they brought out a new variation which is kind of like a potato chip with no potato in it. They call them "Popchips Grain Free" and the ingredients list is cassava flour, tapioca starch, sunflower oil, cane sugar, sea salt and, for color, annatto. Cassava flour, in case you didn't know — as I didn't until I Googled it — is made by grating and drying the fibrous cassava root. Cassava is also known as manihot esculenta and is a woody shrub of the spurge family, Euphorbiaceae, native to South America. Cassave flour is used a lot these days because it's free of gluten.

I tried this kind and didn't like it anywhere near as much as the basic Popchips made from potato flour. But what I especially don't like is that lately, every time I order the potato kind from any company that carries them and delivers, they deliver the cassava flour kind. As you can see, the packaging could be confusing, especially when you don't know there are potato-free Popchips. They also make varieties with corn and peanuts and some promise sizzling hot spices. I put on my orders "make sure the bag says POTATO on the front" and still, they bring me the other kind with blue on the bag.

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Finally: I announced here recently that I would be attending the Comic-Con Special Edition in San Diego on Thanksgiving Weekend. I am now announcing that I will not be attending the Comic-Con Special Edition in San Diego on Thanksgiving Weekend. Changed my mind.

You might care to know why. Part of it was because when I told my doctor I was going, he gave me a look that said, "What do you need that for?" Also, since I made the decision, I've been asking myself that and I don't want to spend the next seven weeks asking myself that. Thirdly, when I floated the idea of not going to the lady friend who was going to accompany me, she seemed pleased.

Fourth…well, three is enough. I do not think the convention will be unsafe. The folks who run it are very smart and very non-merecenary. They will not hesitate to spend or lose whatever money must be spent or lost. But I can't say the same of other places where I might sleep or dine and I don't know what I would do at the con during the many hours I wouldn't be hosting panels.

In the unlikely event (highly unlikely) that anyone was thinking of going because I was going to be there, I apologize. But I doubt there's anyone in that category. I just thought it best to make that decision now, rather than closer to the convention dates. Do not let me stop you from attending…and if you need information on attending, here's where you'll find some.