Things have been just a little too deep on this blog lately. What happened to the comedy?

I thought I’d divulge another secret…I’m deaf in my right ear. The deafness was caused by a one in a million allergy to erythromycin. When you hear, ‘one in a million’ …think of me. ( i think the actual odds of someone losing hearing permanently from the allergy is something like  one in 240,000)  It’s so rare in fact that it’s not even listed in PDRs as a possible side effect. Anyway, as you can imagine my life is filled with enough challenges without having to ask people to repeat themselves, so I lipread as often as I can and if that doesn’t work, I try to figure out what someone is saying before asking them to repeat.

This doesn’t always work because there are a LOT of words  out there that sound alike. Some of them are naughty words. Funny story about that.

Stop me  if  you’ve heard this  one before:

Around the time that Tim Burton’s “A Nightmare Before Christmas” was released, there were plenty of commercials to entice my pre-teen kids and they wanted to see  it desperately. Finally, they sat me down to watch the commercial…well, they screamed for me and I came running, thinking they were kililng one another…that’s another story…anyway, I watched the commercial in total silence as you can’t read the lips of an animated creature and when it was over told the kids that they could not go to that movie and they couldn’t make me take  them  no matter  how much they begged me.

They exchanged a perplexed look and left the room. For once I received no argument, such was  my tirade. My brother, who calls me Pookie, turned to me and asked me why I was so adamant  about them not seeing the movie; afterall, Tim Burton directed ‘Pee Wee’s Big Adventure’ one of my faves of all time.

I looked at him like he had six heads and said, ‘I don’t know when broadcast television started becoming so lax with the language, but I will NOT let them see this  movie if the main character is going to use that kind of profanity!’ My brother shook his head. He knew that I had misheard something and he was just waiting to hear it.

“What did you think he said, Pookie?”

“He said ‘I OWN the effing thing’ ! What kind of talk is that for a kid to hear?”

The laughter came out of him like a howitzer.

I was confused. I was dead sure I had heard correctly and felt that for once righteous indignation was in order.

“Pook…he said ‘I am the PUMPKIN king’. How could you have misheard that?”

He left the room, I called the kids back in and we went to the movies.

I felt like my friend’s deaf grandpa who always answered the wrong question. I felt like Emily Litella from Saturday Night Live (when it was funny and Gilda Radner was still alive).

“Nevermind”

I think being partially deaf is a blessing. It keeps you laughing and wondering…and it’s good to have as an excuse to ignore people. Win/win….I love that.