Laugh Lines

Barbara Klaus

Description

The information about the book is not available as of this time.

Sujets

• Humor
• Color Lines
• Laughter

Informations

• Publié par: Xlibris US
• Date de parution: 14 février 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669862604
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Laugh Lines

Volume 1




BARBARA KLAUS






Copyright © 2023 by Barbara Klaus. 847449

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.


Xlibris
844-714-8691
www.Xlibris.com


ISBN: 978-1-6698-6261-1 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-6698-6262-8 (hc)
ISBN: 978-1-6698-6260-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023901228



Rev. date: 02/10/2023



Contents
Foreword

Timeout For Gray-Matter Gridlock
Engaging Tales of Woe For Mothers of the Gloom
It’s That Time of Year for Dieting
Out of the Closets with a Few Confessions
When Dad Gets Into Serious Parenting
Precious Memories of Long Beach Summers
The Get-Real Estate of Suburbia
Manhattan-LI: No Two Ways About It
Perfection — As In A Perfect Klutz
It’s A Wonderful Life as the Second Wife
What’s My Sport? Well, Ah, Um . . .
Surviving Baby’s First Birthday Party
The End-of-Summer-Fall-Accessory Blues
Taking an Education Trip to College
The Bites of the Dog Days
Brisket Angst, and Other Holiday Terrors
Ah, Grade School, There Was a Pointer to It All
Trouble Communicating? This Is a Discovery?
Reach Out and Touch, Touch, Touch
The Terminal Illness Called Parenthood
A Body of Work That’s All My Own
High-Tech Kitchen, Low-Tech Cook
That Weekend Ritual Called Loehmann’s
Oct. 31: How Sweet It Was — and Is
Black-Tie Affairs Are Not His Strong Suit
Sometimes the Real Turkeys Are the Cooks
A Week as a Single: Pass the Mallomars, Cary
Thanksgiving Day: The Way Things Were
A Holiday Made for a Meshuggener
‘Hi’ Is OK. ‘How Are You?’ Is Nagging.
Deck the Halls With Boughs and Challah
Starting a Revolution Against the Resolution
Breakthroughs Are Breaking Out All Over
In Aspen, Status Has Its Ups and Downs
The New Good Old Days for ’92
When Mom’s Cure Was Worse Than Flu
There May Be Life Apres Ski. Or Maybe Not
Of Course I Love You. Now Pass the Chocolate
My Mother’s Burning Desire to Cook
A Wild and Crazy Leap to a New Holiday
The High-Tech Cost of Living
My Physician: Dr. Living Well, I Presume?
His 1,700th Diet: Will It Work? Fat Chance
The Kid’s Digs: Enter at Your Own Risk
A Perfect Me in a Perfect, Perfect World
Matzoh Memories and Kosher Ketchup
The Gateway to Summer: Hippety-Hop
The Greening of Ocean Avenue
All Thumbs, but None of Them Green
Put Them Together, They Spell TV Mom
Billions of Calories, and Then Breakfast
If the Food Is Bad, Prospects Are Good
How to Avoid the Beached-Whale Look
A Time When We Swallowed a Lot More
Some Close Brushes With Hairstyles
Mastering the Modern Art of Fathering
Mr. Vice President, You Should’ve Met My Family
We All Scream for the One Basic Food
Summer Games: Some Concrete Proposals
Fitting It All Into One Vacation
The Vacation Imperative: Catskills, Ho
Relationships, or My Grandchild the Dog
Looking for the Eat-and-Stay-Thin Diet
The Thrill of Summer, the Agony of Retreat
A Vacation Obstacle Course: JFK Airport
My Morty: What a Dreamboat, Really
Tiny and All-Powerful: A Grandchild
Having a Falling Out With Autumn
3 Weeks, 247 Ingredients: Presto, Brisket!
Fall Cleaning — or This Is Your Life
Furnished in Cream Cheese Box Modern
Clotheshorse? Why, It Must Be Little Me
Meet Morty and Me, Party Animals
Sweet Talk? The Candy Woman Can
Close Encounters of the Cosmetic Kind
Morty the Marathoner: A Real Stretch
Warm Family Feelings and Heartburn
Flashbacks From the Holiday Projector
In Memory of Pure, Uncomplicated Fun
Dear Santa: From One Klaus to Another
Elizabeth R. and the Family From Hell
My New Year’s Date Doesn’t Care a Fig
A Year of Innovations — Imagine That!
Plastic Hopscotch? Stop Playing Around
The Dietetically Correct Way to Cave In
Hearing Wedding Bells? Or Ding-a-lings?
Is the Woman Psychic or What?
Analyzing Personals Can Date a Person
Real People Take Over the White House
Husbands, Wives and Other Enemies
Checkups That Put the ‘Hell’ in Health
Mastering Total Control in Restaurants
A Diet by Any Other Name Is as Nutty
Crafts: For Some, It’s in the Numbers
Say, Dear, What’s On the Passover Menu?
Don’t Blame Morty. He’s Only a Husband
The Late Flatbush Modern Look, Updated
Go by LIRR? I Think I Can, I Think I Can
The Armchair Diet: Get Rid of That Wait
Reflections on the Mother of All Days
Strapless and, Thank God, Not Dateless
The Scent of Mothballs? Ah, It Was Spring
The Wedding Bout: In This Corner . . .
Making the Clintons’ Hair Stand on End
Yummy: Barbecued Goat Cheese and Tofu
Surviving Marriage, the Old-Fashioned Way
In Our House We Celebrate Father’s Daze
The Shoe Box Coolers of Summers Past
A Debt Dating Back to Day Camp Days
Esther Williams Didn’t Check for Algae
Flash to Trash: The Stories of My Life
The Flat bushed in a Reality Check
Making a Wedding, the New-Fashioned Way
Dog Days Don’t Pant Like They Used to
Lifestyles of the Nouveaux Hamptonites
Nobody Goes There Anymore: It’s Crowded
Rituals in Pursuit of a Sweet New Year
Holidays, Antidote to All That Free Time
Yesteryear’s Back-to-School Rituals
Redecorate Isn’t in Morty’s Vocabulary



Foreword
The story goes something like this: My mom was building a following as a regular humor columnist at the New York Times when Roseanne (yes, that Roseanne) read her work and asked her to join the writing staff of her hit ABC sitcom in Los Angeles. After Roseanne, Newsday offered my mom a weekly column to be featured every Wednesday on page two of the popular Part 2 section.
For the next seven years, Newsday readers were invited in to my mom’s world of family and friends and the lives they lived. Her growing popularity led to several sell-out public speaking engagements which enthralled her readers and gave my mom the joy of hearing, in real time, how her work resonated with them. Everyone went home happy.
These columns of my mom’s Newsday years are the pinnacle of an award-winning career that started decades earlier in the basement of our Rockville Centre home. And, she paid her dues. My mom lined the walls of her home office with more than a hundred rejection letters she saved from article proposals over the years. But my mom laughed it off and kept on typing; the clattering of her Smith Corona typewriter was an ever-present soundtrack of her fierce determination.
When most of her peers started to slow down, my mom hit her stride. The freelance assignments came more frequently: The NY Times, Newsday’s magazine, and New York Magazine, to name a few. But none matched the impact of her award-winning years at Newsday, which included, towards the end of her run, the introduction of my son, Jacob, and my mom reveling in the opportunity to share her earliest stories of being a grandma.
When my mom settled in to a well-deserved retirement and embraced a childhood dream of riding horses, she continued to live life on her own terms, seeing the humor in everyday experiences and reveling in the laughter she heard when she shared her stories. While none of what she told over the last quarter-century appears in print, if you ever had a chance to meet my mom, either in person or on the pages of this collection, you have a pretty good idea how she responded to life and the people she met.
No one was more influential to my mom than my dad, who carries the torch for her to this day. His unwavering devotion to her memory and her legacy is what makes this collection possible. It’s an enduring love story and it’s his gift to her and to all of us.
For me, I miss my mom dearly. While I’m proud of her talent and achievements, it’s our deeply personal connection that I hold closest. She taught me to laugh and inspired my creativity.
And, my mom always had my back.

Barry Klaus
January 2023



NEWSDAY: MAY 8, 1991

Timeout For Gray-Matter Gridlock


Barbara Klaus is a free-lance writer from Rockville Centre who, until recently, wrote a column for the Long Island section of The New York Times. Laugh Lines will appear weekly in Part II.

T HE LONGER MY husband and I are married, the more fascinating our conversations get. Forget about world affairs, forget politics; we concentrate on the big issues.
Just yesterday he came into the den and, a look of intense concentration and concern on his face, he looked at me and said, “Did you see my glasses?”
“Don’t bother me with your glasses,” I said as I crawled on the floor. “I had a piece of paper on this table . . .”
“Are you sure you didn’t see my glasses?”
“I could have sworn that paper was right here five minutes . . .”
We are suffering from gridlock of the gray matter, premature senility. Everyone we know is suffering from premature senility. And everyone we know is in his or her 40s or 50s. But it’s not our fault.
The human brain has a shelf life of, tops , 45 years. After that it is meant to absorb images of the Atlantic Ocean from a terrace in Miami and photos of grandchildren. That’s it: no faxes, no computers, no programing automatic telephone dialing systems.
Years ago the brain had a chance. Things were turned on with a key or a button and there