Word: bombeck
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...that Erma was just like the lady in the column, vacuuming around the house and taping funny lines on the fridge. And if she wasn't, they didn't care, and surely I wouldn't find anything bad to report about someone as wonderful as Erma Bombeck-would I? Their injunctions were further reinforced by my seatmate on the flight to Phoenix and by the stewardess, who saw me studying up on Bombeck and who both told me how lucky I was to be traveling to the shrine of household humor...
...apprehensive McWhirter joined Bombeck over the course of several weeks this spring, participating in her own family birthday party, a charity benefit and a shoot for a Good Morning America segment. "Erma is a truly inventive, comic force, mugging continually, swatting one-liners everywhere," he says. "When she is on the phone, she is on the phone. Lunch is funny. The guest-bathroom soap is funny. Even the imminent house guests are funny...
Contributor John Skow, who wrote the coyer story, verified McWhirter's observations during his own visit to Bombeck's household. He was amazed, and appalled, by Bombeck's well-hidden efficiency: "She gets up in the morning, goes into her office and functions till 5," he notes. "She works on her column or her play, and they get done when she says they'll be done. That is terribly depressing to someone else trying to write." However, the two of them, each the parent of three children, did achieve instant rapport on the awfulness of adolescence...
...What noted existentialist and television celebrity, when asked in supermarket parking lots whether she is the legendary Erma Bombeck, blushes prettily, lowers her gaze and says, "No, I'm Ann-Margret, but thank you anyway...
...honest," says Bombeck (for it is indeed she, the syndicated star humorist of 900 papers in the U.S. and Canada, and the baggy-toreador-pants clown of ABC'S Good Morning America), "when I started, I thought I was squirrelly. I thought it was just me. After the first columns, everyone on the block confessed it was them too." Those early columns, written in Centerville, Ohio, back in the early '60s, were not quite Corinthian, but they sure were Ermaic. Their message was that housework, if it is done right, can kill you. It was that the women...