Word: bombeck
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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This is classic Bombeck, the wild exaggeration compressed into the stinging one-liner that only slightly overstates the awfulness of the truth. You don't think husbands and kids are that bad? Listen, let me tell you about bad. "After 30 years of marriage, I felt like a truss in a drugstore window." You think that's-overstated? Let me tell you what it's like to be a working mother, "racing around the kitchen in a pair of bedroom slippers, trying to quick-thaw a chop under each armpit . . ." Shared responsibilities? "Transporting children is my husband...
...mood for compound-complex sentences. She may smile over a column by Art Buchwald, the master of the discovered absurdity, or one of Russell Baker's elegantly sane demonstrations that the world is crazy. But if she enlists in an army, it is likely to be Bombeck's. Am I really down on the kitchen floor with an old pair of Jockey shorts doing this? Yes, and there's Bombeck with pork chops under her arms. Such realizations (epiphanies, a James Joyce scholar would call them) explain Bombeck's syndication in those 900 papers, the wild...
...trim at 5 ft. 2 in. and 127 Ibs. Is it a surprise that her daughter Betsy, 30, and her sons Andrew, 28, and Matthew, 25, have lost their baby teeth? And that her husband is not a football-stupefied turnip but rather an articulate, quick-minded fellow? Bill Bombeck retired in 1978 after a successful career as a school administrator, and now manages their income of $500,000 to $1 million a year. He is more likely to be found jogging than watching the tube, and four years ago he ran the Boston Marathon in the creditable time...
There is a hint of where the columns come from when Bombeck is persuaded to talk about herself. "My life story?" she says. "Fifteen minutes top. You're looking at shallow. I'm just not that deep. You're looking at a bundle of insecurity. I always think that everything good is going to evaporate and disappear overnight. I am the quietest person at the party. I position myself at the chip dip and don't leave all night. I still have a very ordinary, simple person trapped in this rich, gorgeous, successful body." The joke...
...journey that did not lead Bombeck to the moon began in Dayton, and the date could be set accurately enough as June 4, 1936. She was nine, and that was the day her father, a crane operator named Cassius Fiste, died of a heart attack at 42. "One day you were a family," she recalls, "living in a little house at the bottom of a hill. The next day it was all gone." The furniture, including Erma's bed and dresser, was immediately repossessed, and her half sister went off to live with her natural mother. Erma...