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Tuesday, October 21, 2014

Eating Lasagna With Ballpoint Pens.




Why life isn't fair:

I'm sitting in my gorgeous new house in Chicago.
It is for the most part, filled with still packed boxes.
It will probably take much time to get everything unpacked.
But I've got my room to watch TV, and there is enough room in our bedroom for us to be quite comfortable.
However, there are several things that I count on my wife to take of, and, sad to say, she let me down.
One of those things was to provide me with eating utensils.
This issue came to a head when, after not being able to immediately retrieve the silverware from any of the investigated boxes, and my wife not bringing home any plastic silverware, where it resided in abundance at her office, we were faced with the issue of dining out, only to learn that at just about every restaurant in our immediate area, the kitchens closed at nine pm.
As my wife generally works until at least 7:30pm most nights, and then has a half-hour drive to get home, we have generally been fighting the clock to eat out locally.
The first night. not being aware of this, and not knowing where the silverware was, we began making excursions to the local restaurants, only to be turned away because it was after 9pm.
Now we did have leftovers from a previous restaurant experience, and thought we'd probably be able to find at least something that resembled a spoon or a fork.
At least one that we could share.
After much searching, we determined that we couldn't.
Knowing her as I do, I assumed that after about three weeks of hotel living out here, waiting to move in, she would have had her usual good sense to swipe at least one set of silverware from one of the restaurants that we had frequented.
But she was remiss in her duties.
And we both paid the price.
Oh, I suppose we could have gotten back into the car, and gone to the supermarket, where we could have acquired plastic forks, but we were far too demoralized at that point.
And far too cheap to pay for something we had in abundance in the house somewhere.
The leftovers in question were Italian seafood pasta, and Lasagna.
The pasta seemed manageable.
I got the idea to transform two ballpoint pens into chopsticks, and eat it like it was Chinese Lo Mein.
The Lasagna was the tricky part.
Trying to eat the Lasagna with two ballpoint pens as chopsticks was certainly a daunting process.
And of course, a thoroughly humiliating one.
I mean, think about it.
My wife is a highly valued, well paid financial executive.
I have achieved a certain amount of prestige in my show business career.
Our new house is a showplace.
We have other quite valuable real estate holdings.
And we're both sitting in our new kitchen, attempting to eat Lasagna using ballpoint pens as chopsticks.
We managed to get through it.
And we won't have to re-create this experience, as the silverware has now been uncovered.
But, at the time, my first and only thought was "How the mighty have fallen".
As Zero Mostel put it, in "The Producers", "Once I was the King of Broadway. Now, I'm wearing a cardboard belt!"

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My books ,"Show Runner" and it's sequel, "Show Runner Two", can be found at the Amazon Kindle Store.
Along with the newer ones, "The Man Is Dead", and "Report Cards".
You can search by typing in my name, Cindy Williams, Laverne and Shirley, The Odd Couple, or Happy Days.
Check them out.
You don't need a Kindle machine to download them.
Just get the free app from Kindle, and they can be downloaded to an IPhone, IPad, or Blackberry.
The paperbacks, "Mark Rothman's Essays" and my new novel, "I'm Not Garbo" are not e-books.
But they are available for people without Kindle.
I have many readings and signings lined up for those, and the thing about Kindle is you can't sign one.
If you'd like one of the paperbacks, personally autographed, contact me at macchus999@aol.com.
And now, we've got my reading of my "Laverne and Shirley Movie" screenplay on YouTube, and my 4-hour interview at the Television Academy's Emmy TV Legends Website.
Here's the link:
http://www.emmytvlegends.org/interviews/people/mark-rothman

*****

2 comments:

  1. This would have been a great story line on one of your shows! Imagine the possibilities with Felix and Oscar searching for their, uh, cutlery, and then trying to eat with ball point pens!
    Lee Markham
    Monroe, MI

    ReplyDelete
  2. Oh come on! What do you think God gave you fingers for?

    ReplyDelete

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About Me

Hi. I am, according to my Wikipedia entry,(which I did not create) a noted television writer, playwright, screenwriter, and occasional actor. You can Google me or go to the IMDB to get my credits, and you can come here to get my opinions on things, which I'll try to express eloquently. Hopefully I'll succeed. You can also e-mail me at macchus999@aol.com. Perhaps my biggest claim to fame is being responsible, for about six months in 1975, while Head Writer for the "Happy Days" TV series, for Americans saying to each other "Sit on it."