The other night I started watching Wine Country again on Netflix. It is so fucking funny. I do not know why exactly it is so funny, or perhaps I feel as I know and have known these people all my life which makes it only that much more funny.

The main cast is Amy Poehler, Emily Spivey, Paula Pell, Tina Fey, Maya Rudolph, Rachel Dratch, and Ana Gasteyer.

It isn’t that fall over your seat kind of laughter, but the laughter that catches you and for me puts me in a coughing spin, a short spin.

I have listened to Tina Fey’s book Bossy Pants at least 2-3 times in my car. It is on my phone and when my phone is on shuffle it will play a blip here and there and always makes me laugh. Find it at your library if you can – it’s worth the listen.

To write a comedy, to write funny – man that is super tough. So, I am not sure how to do that but I had a patient yesterday that brought me to tears.

Her name is Ann with no e.

“When people ask me how to spell my name I say, Ann, without an e. I have tried to make it faster and easier so I say, Ann, no e.”

So one day someone called upon her name and had to verify the spelling – she said “Ann, no e.”

He said, “Ann-no-e.”

She replied, “Ann, no-e.”

He looked into her eyes, “Annoe. Is that Asian?”

She looked at me, deadpan; blue eyes, larger set gal, white as can be – Norwegian descent with blond hair.

Pause.

So I do not know anything – but I liked this passage I read yesterday:

“The thing about books, of course, is that the stories they contain are not ghosts but rather living things, which is a comfort for both the reader and the writer in me. There’s some small chance that fifty years from now someone will happen across a dusty copy of one of my own long-out-of-print books in their grandfather’s library and will read it on a whim. I’ll be a mere memory by then, and a fading memory at that, but the characters in my books will still be walking and talking, trying to make their way in the sometimes perilous world of the novel, which, all those years ago, was my world, at least as it existed in my imagination.”

The first book that came to mind after reading this was Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy . . . and then the author writes “Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy rests on a set of shelves . . . .”

Tristram Shandy is a book that you giggle throughout – however, it takes a bit to get there and it’s written in an older English style.

Once the gears get going you take off – but what I have found is that patience, a bit of rhythm, and the openness to be present helps.

Work Cited:
James Blaylock, “My Life in Books” Poets and Writers. July/August 2019.