Word: erma
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...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...
...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...
...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 and her mother, 25-year-old Erma Fiste, shared a bedroom in her grandmother's house, and each day Mother Erma would get up at 5 a.m., fix breakfast...
...times, but not until years later did Erma think of her mother's tough-minded energy as wise or heroic. What she felt at the time was a daily desertion. When her mother married a moving-van operator, Albert ("Tom") Harris, two years later, Erma gave him the classic drop-dead greeting: "If you think you're going to take my father's place, you're crazy." His attitude, she says, was "This kid needs sitting on." Eventually Erma and Tom made their adjustment. The incredible self-centeredness of children, normal and natural but often savagely...
When her daughter showed signs of shyness and loneliness, Mother Erma signed her up for tap-dancing lessons as therapy, then took her to an audition for a Kiddie Revue at a local radio station. Erma stayed on the program for nearly eight years, tap dancing and singing. "She was quite a little hoofer," says her mother, who still has Erma's signed song sheets for On the Good Ship Lollipop and I'm Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter. Bombeck says it is obvious that the wrong Erma broke into show biz. When...