Wise Up
Husbands and wives
By David Bruce
July 21, 2008
• Steve Pollak, an elementary schoolteacher, member of the band Phish, and songwriter of “Suzy Greenberg,” is married to Leslie, who had prayed to meet someone to share her life. On the 30th birthday, she blew out the candles on her birthday cake and then prayed, “OK, God, I want to find someone who falls madly in love with me, and then hear the pitter patter of little feet after that.” Sure enough, soon afterward, she found a dog dodging trucks on a bridge near where she lived. She adopted the dog, Willie, and shared her life with him. Leslie’s aunt told her, “You said pitter patter of little feet, and fall in love with you — you weren’t specific.” Therefore, on her next birthday, Leslie was more specific. After blowing out the birthday-cake candles, she prayed, “OK, God, I want a tall, dark male human being to fall in love with me, whom I fall in love with, but the clincher is he needs to propose to me before my college reunion on June 8.” Being specific counts. She made the prayer Jan. 17, she met Steve March 23, they were engaged May 11, and they went to her reunion June 8. Leslie says, “True story.”
• Bob Balaban is both an actor and a director. He acted in such movies as “Midnight Cowboy,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “Prince of the City,” “Waiting for Guffman” and “Gosford Park,” and he directed the HBO movie “Bernard and Doris,” starring Ralph Fiennes and Susan Sarandan. In addition, he has been married for 30 years to Lynn Grossman, a former classmate who has had two children with him. His advice about having a long and successful marriage is to find “something deeply interesting about each other.” Note that he does NOT say that the secret to having a long and successful marriage is to “fall in love with each other at first sight.” That definitely did not happen in their case. Mr. Balaban says when they were taking classes together, “She kind of thought I was a homeless person. I used to smoke a lot and dressed in army camouflage outfits and was always running out of money. She thought I was a sad character.”
• C.S. Lewis’ wife, Joy, could be very plain spoken. For example, at an Oxford faculty lunch, Joy did not know where a ladies room was, so she asked, “Is there anywhere in this monastic establishment where a lady can relieve herself?” Another example: She died of cancer, and she once said that she had “so many cancers at work that I expect them to start organizing a union.” Her husband knew that he also had not much longer to live, and he asked her to meet him — if it were allowed — when he died. She replied, “Allowed? Heaven would have a job to hold me; and as for Hell, I’d break it into bits.” Before she died, she spoke comfortingly to her husband with her last words: “I am at peace with God. You have made me happy.”
• When he was playing in the minor leagues, baseball star Bobby Bonilla decided to get married. He asked his girlfriend, Millie Quiñones, to come to where he was playing so they could get married. She did, and he gave her $22 — almost all the money he had — so she could buy a dress and shoes to be married in. Of course, $22 doesn’t go very far, and the shoes she bought were so cheap that they turned her feet grey. Three years later, in 1988, Mr. Bonilla was playing in the major leagues for the Pittsburg Pirates and making a $230,000 annual salary.
• E.B. White and Katherine Sergeant Angell got married on November 13, 1929. Their co-workers learned about the marriage when the happy couple returned to the office the next day. To express his feelings, Mr. White sent his wife an inter-office memo that consisted of a “New Yorker” cartoon depicting a man thinking while sitting on a curb. For the caption, Mr. White had written, “E.B. White slowly accustomed himself to the idea that he had made the most beautiful decision of his life.”
• John Steinbeck discovered while watching television news on October 25, 1962, that he had won the Noble Prize for Literature. His wife, Elaine, who was frying bacon, was so excited that she put the hot pan with sizzling bacon in the refrigerator. Later, when a reporter asked Mr. Steinbeck, author of “The Grapes of Wrath,” if he had deserved to win, Mr. Steinbeck replied, “Frankly, no.”
• Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho,” in which the character played by Janet Leigh is murdered in a shower, caused many people to be afraid of taking a shower. One man wrote Mr. Hitchcock to complain that his wife was now afraid to take a shower or a bath. Mr. Hitchcock wrote back, “Sir, have you ever considered sending your wife to be dry-cleaned?”
• Not everyone cusses on a regular basis, and so when they attempt to cuss, they can make mistakes because they are out of practice. For example, Tucson Weekly columnist Tom Danehy says that his saintly wife once tried to cuss and said, “I don’t give a hell!” He asks, “What does that even mean?”
• Paul Robeson was a kind man. When Yousuf Karsh, the famed photographer, took his portrait, Mr. Robeson sang some spirituals for him. Mr. Karsh was so impressed by their beauty that he said that he would like for his wife to hear them. Mr. Robeson called her and sang for her over the telephone.
• Marie Plantz, aka Mrs. Vince Lombardi, was a football fan even before meeting her future husband. At a high school football game, a nun complained that Marie was standing too close to the football field. Marie replied, “Frankly, Sister, if you knew anything about football, you’d know that you can’t watch it from the stands.”
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