His and Hers

He claimed to have invented flushing the toilet with your foot. 

She took me to see the “Dirty Dancing” live tour after the movie came out. We showed up early and I was bored/had no idea why I was there. That’s when she taught me about people watching. She told me to look at all the people walking by and to imagine what their lives were like. “Look at how they’re dressed and how they talk to each other. The show has already begun.”  

His father had pigeons on the roof of their childhood home and all the kids from around the neighborhood would come by to see them. Perhaps that’s where his love of animals came from. He always cared way more about them than humans.

She would have the whole family say a Sufi prayer before meals: “O thou, the sustainer of our bodies, hearts, and souls, bless all that we thankfully receive. Amen.”

Nothing was more important to him than air conditioning. If he came home and it wasn’t on, he’d lose it. Perhaps it was because he was a tank commander in the Israeli army back in the late 50’s. I imagine him sitting in the desert in one of those metal boxes/ovens, slowly reaching his boiling point, and promising himself, “One day I’m going to move to America, find a wife, and settle down in a house where I’ll have my children turn on the air conditioner every day an hour before I arrive so I come home to a cool breeze.” And then he turned that mirage into a reality.

One time the whole family was eating dinner at a restaurant and she got drunk and told us that she once had an abortion. We just stared at her. He tried to stop her as it was happening; but his way of stopping her was to roll his eyes and mutter, “Fraaaaaan-ces.” It was ineffective.

Y’know those slivers of soap that are left when you reach the end of the bar? He collected them in a bowl next to the bathroom sink.

She had a sister named Marcia who was schizophrenic. When she was in her early 20’s, she plunged to her death from a Manhattan highrise during the family’s Thanksgiving dinner. The story was no one knew if she fell out or jumped. Every year on Marcia’s birthday, she would light a candle in her honor.

One time, he had dinner with Eleanor Roosevelt. He also worked as an Assistant DA in New York City alongside Rudy Giuliani. I asked him about Rudy once and he said, “That guy will do anything for cameras.”

She met Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. Joseph Campbell was one of her professors. She knew Allen Ginsberg, Lou Reed, Gregory Corso, and many other underground luminaries. A friend of mine once called her “The Forrest Gump of the 60’s art world.” Though she was immersed in the counterculture, she eventually decided to run away from that life. To her, moving to the suburbs and having kids was the ultimate act of transgression. The theory: If you’re deep inside the underground, nothing is more against-the-grain than embracing mainstream domesticity.

Every night was the same for him on TV: PBS NewsHour and Jeopardy.

She watched General Hospital every day and told me it was her way of staying in touch with “regular people.” One time on the show, Ian Buchanan told another character to “ignore your intuition.” This outraged her. “Never ignore your intuition!” she yelled back at the screen. 

He used to hide chocolate around the house. He was diabetic and wasn’t supposed to eat it, yet we all knew it was there. I’m not exactly sure who he thought he was hiding it from. Then again, hiding things can be a performative act. “Look, I tried to keep you from knowing.” 

She had an overbearing mother. They didn’t talk for years but eventually made up. Then, her mother would come visit us in the suburbs every couple of months and bring bagels and lox from Zabar’s. Even as a child, I could sense the tension in the air. But the bagels were good.

He had an overbearing mother too. She would visit every August and stay with us for a month. It was the only time each year I would hear him speak Hebrew. I asked him if he was worried about forgetting it. He responded, “You never forget your mother tongue.”

They bonded over a desire to mostly be left alone.

Suburban life: She worked every election as a poll worker. I think it pleased her to be part of the engine of democracy. She had other jobs too. She used to bind books at the library, she worked for her mother as a designer, and she owned a lingerie store called “The Blue Door” long before Victoria was famous for her secret. I used to hang out there a lot as a child, surrounded by bras and panties, which is probably the reason for a lot of stuff.

There was only one brand of croutons he liked: Orem. They were tiny, square, yellow crackers and on the rare occasions he could obtain them, he bought a dozen boxes. Soup without these croutons was pointless in his opinion. He also used to insist there was only one kind of pasta that he liked. It was a specific noodle that was thin and hollow inside; however, he couldn't really describe it well and didn't even know what it was called. Since it was the only pasta he would eat, he never ate pasta. Anyway, somewhere in there is probably the reason why I'm this old and have never been married.

She loved watching the weather report. She didn’t understand barometric pressure, but she always wanted to hear about it.

One time a bat flew into our home. He spent hours trying to chase it out of the house by waving a broomstick while the rest of us huddled in the corner alternating between shrieks and laughs. It felt like an airborne version of Woody trying to deal with the loose lobster in Annie Hall.

I begged her to take me to see Eddie Murphy Raw in the movie theater for my birthday. As we entered the theater, the usher said, “He’s too young to see this.” She didn’t say anything and we entered. After eight minutes of Eddie talking about p***y, she turned to me, told me we were leaving, and we walked out. She also took me to see “When Harry Met Sally.” When the movie ended, she sat there as the credits rolled and said, “Characters. That’s what makes a great story. Great characters. If you care about the people, you’ll follow them anywhere.” 

One time he rented the movie Doctor Detroit and there was a scene with hookers and cursing. He stood up, ejected the tape from the VCR, and threw it across the room.

She saw the video for INXS’ “Devil Inside” and became furious. She heard the lyric as “Every single woman has the devil inside.” She screamed out, “Every single MAN has the devil inside!” Turns out the actual lyric is “Every single one of us, the devil inside.”

He had a thing for cleanliness. He’d scrub his hands in scalding hot water (washing his glasses too) before every meal. He also took a bath and a shower each morning and called this his “daily ablutions.” On weekends, he’d spend hours in the tub “reading.” He’d also inspect my hands before I could eat dinner to make sure I had washed them. I’d have to hold them under his nose so he could make sure they smelled like soap. In retrospect, this was his way of saying, “I’ve got this problem. Here you go.”

One time she asked me if I wanted to go see Guns of the Trees, a ‘60s movie that she acted in, when it was playing at an arthouse cinema in NYC. I asked her, “Do I have to?” And she said no so we didn’t go. I always felt bad about that and, years later, I found a place online where I could order the film. It’s avant garde and a bit head spinning, but you can see how it was cutting edge at the time. She plays a depressed woman who commits suicide. 

He had an elaborate model train setup in the basement, the kind featured in model railroad magazines. Seems like the perfect activity for a little kid, right? Well, I never played with the trains. I can’t recall if it’s because he didn’t offer or because I just didn’t like them. He used to spend tons of free time down in the basement working on those trains though. After both his kids were out of the house, he never worked on the trains again. Guess he no longer had a reason to be in the basement.

She often dreamed of being invisible as a child. Her big fear with that was that one day she might go see a movie and someone would sit on her. She also told us about going to camp and how one of the other girls there would constantly tell moron jokes. “Why did the moron tiptoe past the fridge?” “Because there was a little Russian dressing.” He found these jokes delightful.

He loved getting mail. There was always a letter opener on the table by the front door. We knew he was home by the sound of ripping envelopes. Mysterious boxes arrived all the time and we never knew what was in them. Model trains, police scanners, computer games, etc. I never got mail and was jealous. He told me, “You have to send mail to get mail.”

The empty boxes would accumulate in the basement for months until she yelled at him to throw them out.

Later, I discovered he had an enormous stamp and coin collection that was quite valuable. He sold it off in order to avoid bankruptcy due to her voluminous healthcare costs.

Many Friday nights, she drank a bottle of wine and got drunk.

He hardly ever drank, but when he did, it was usually beer – Tsing Tao or Michelob. Occasionally, he’d order a Tom Collins. I never once saw him drunk though.

She insisted we celebrate Sabbath dinner. Every Friday, she would light the candles and say a prayer while waving her hands around the flame. 

He would bless the wine (actually grape juice) and we’d each take a sip. Then he’d bless the challah and rip up pieces and pass them around. Then we’d eat. Afterwards, they would sometimes put on Israeli folk music and dance.

She drove me to synagogue every week to study Judaism. We’d always get bagels nearby beforehand. After my bar mitzvah, I begged her to let me stop studying Jew stuff and she acquiesced.

He was from Israel yet seemed completely apathetic about his Judaism. However, he knew everything about Jews and the Torah. I think Judaism was so baked into his upbringing that he didn’t need to “practice.”

She stole the money my sister received for her bat mitzvah (according to my sister).

At the end, he had piles of things everywhere, including stacks of ham radio operating manuals. They piled up first on his desk, then on his bookshelves, and finally next to the bathtub. However, I never saw him operate a ham radio. He also kept piles of magazines about the Commodore Amiga computer, something he hadn’t owned for decades.

In tenth grade, I went to the barbershop, and came home with a crewcut. She asked me, “Why are you so button down? I don’t understand why you’re so conservative!” I had no answer. In retrospect, perhaps the only way to rebel against someone so counterculture was to act like a square.

Every Sunday, he would prepare an ornate brunch with at least five different kinds of cheese, toast, eggs, bacon, orange juice, and coffee (hot in winter, iced in summer). He made this entirely for himself and didn’t offer any of it to anyone else. Well, that’s not entirely true. Sometimes he’d leave me a couple of strips of bacon. Then he did the NY Times crossword puzzle.

She spent a lot of time in her meditation room. The first time I ever smoked weed, I remember thinking, “Hmm, this spells a lot like my mom’s meditation room.”

He told me that in a relationship, there’s always one person who loves the other person more. I asked him who it was in their relationship. He refused to answer.

Once, she woke up from a nap and I told her that her face looked sad when she slept. She got upset. She didn’t smile a lot, actually. One time my therapist asked me if I do comedy because she was funny. I responded, “I don’t think so. I don’t really remember her laughing or even smiling at all.” So, y’know, that’s definitely not why I do comedy.

He owned every James Bond and Marx Brothers movie. He loved showing me the scene at the racetrack where Chico sells Groucho a bunch of phony racing guides. And the Sean Connery Bond films were his favorite. He also loved Cyndi Lauper, Clint Eastwood, Steven Wright, and Ronald Reagan. He would show me classic movie serials he saw at the movies when he was a kid. They always ended in a cliffhanger, like the hero would go over the edge in a car, but in the next one you’d find out he jumped out right before the car went over the side.

She played music on a boombox in the kitchen. Billie Holliday, Sade, Leonard Cohen, Stevie Nicks, Anita Baker, Glenn Gould, some weird college station from New Jersey, etc. And then there was lots of odd world music and chanting I couldn’t even identify. She took my sister to see Modern English perform at The Roxy right after “I Melt With You” came out.

He constantly cursed “the German” who had installed a custom stereo system in the living room. The receiver and CD player didn’t fit properly and dangled out of their respective spaces. Also, the whole unit was immovable due to its immense size. It was all the fault of “that goddamn German.”

She once hung garlic on the rearview mirror of a man visiting our neighbors. She considered him a cult leader and wanted to ward off his evil spirits.

He loved being an early adopter of technology. He had an Apple IIE computer and we’d play games on it together. One was Olympic Decathlon, where you raced by hitting the arrow keys in rapid succession.

She conducted workshops on “Women Who Run with the Wolves,” a book discussing the female archetype in mythology. And for a while, she led a weekly dream analysis workshop at our home. I’d come home from school and there would be a gaggle of middle-aged suburban women in the living room discussing their dreams. I’d quietly walk past and go to my room until they were gone.

He hated paper trails. Whenever he threw out a piece of paper, he’d tear it up into little scraps first. He eventually bought a paper shredder and was thrilled to own it.

In middle school health class, the teacher told us LSD could give you flashbacks and 20 years later it might hit you and you could drive off the road. She picked me up from school that day. I asked her if she had ever taken LSD. “Yes.” More than once? “Yes.” I buckled my seat belt.

He was a broke law student when they met so he used to take her on dates to night court. He went on to prosecute racketeering and white collar crime cases before going into private practice. Why’d he leave the prosecutor’s office? “Eventually, they want you to become a judge or move on.” I remember him describing one of his first cases in private practice. His client was being sued for rolling back the odometer on airplanes. (Planes have odometers!?) I could sense the defeat in his voice, like he had turned to the dark side. He was used to putting the bad guys behind bars, not defending them. 

She would go to court to see him practice law occasionally. She said he once fired a gun in a courtroom.

He said he never fired it, he just waved it in the air.

When it was time for her to talk to her daughter about the birds and the bees, she simply left a pile of books on the staircase, including “Our Bodies, Our Selves.”

He never hit me. But he’d threaten it frequently. He’d grab his belt and beg her to allow it. She would say no and he’d reluctantly agree to let her punish me in some other way. As a child, this whole routine scared me to death. Now, I’m impressed at the whole Kabuki theatrics of it all.

When I was in college, she told me she had been married to a photographer before she met him. And then revealed she had been briefly married before that too. And one time, while driving on the highway, she told me about how she hitchhiked throughout Europe and the Middle East with Angus. I could see the sliding doors open and close in her mind.

He loved quoting the song “Forever Young” by Bob Dylan. He cited its lyrics several times during toasts, including the one he gave at his daughter’s wedding.

May you grow up to be righteous
May you grow up to be true
May you always know the truth
And see the lights surrounding you
May you always be courageous
Stand upright and be strong
May you stay forever young

She had a room filled with African masks. That’s where she did her writing. She wrote poetry for years and sometimes showed it to me. I told her she used too many fancy words and recommended saying things more plainly and simply. I have a box of her poems and I keep telling myself one day I’ll read through them. I once asked her for book recommendations. She told me to read “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” by James Joyce and “The Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison. 

He would constantly badger her about moisturizing her hands and mention how her skin would shrivel up when she got older if she didn’t. Turns out she wound up paralyzed due to MS, so I guess wrinkled hands weren’t really the big issue. Everything’s relative.

When I was a child, she shoplifted a pair of sunglasses from Bloomingdale’s in front of me and the next day made me watch as she wrote a letter apologizing for the theft and mailed the sunglasses back to the store.

When he was dying from bone cancer, he had a home health care worker that he was convinced was poisoning him in the night. It took all my restraint to play along instead of explaining, “She’s not poisoning you. She doesn’t have to. God already did that.”

She made a point of teaching me about fashion and clothes. She’d explain how to tell if clothes matched by holding up a tie next to a jacket and pointing out how they both had the same color red within them and thus would be a solid match.

I once asked him if it would be alright if I married a non-Jew. He replied, “If I cared about whether or not you married a Jew, I wouldn’t have moved to America.”

She got a personalized license plate for the VW Rabbit convertible we owned that read, “HptyHop.”

He brought me to a Yankees doubleheader and spent the whole afternoon reading the Sunday paper while I watched the games. 

She would drive me into the city for cultural excursions. Sometimes, we’d see matinees of musicals. I remember watching Patti Lupone in Master Class and Nathan Lane in Guys and Dolls. I felt uncool, but was nonetheless blown away by their performances. She also took me to museums. I always suggested the Museum of Television and Radio because it didn’t feel stuffy and boring like most museums. It was like if YouTube was a place before YouTube existed.

They would kiss in front of us. Not frequently, but every once in a while. More when I was younger, less as I got older.

At least that’s how I remember it all. Death is like a hard drive that crashes. You still have questions but you can no longer retrieve the answers. They’re gone forever.

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Standup

This week’s clips on social:

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A post shared by Matt Ruby (@mattrubycomedy)

mattrubycomedy

A post shared by Matt Ruby (@mattrubycomedy)

Next weekend: 4/8-9 at Blue Ridge Comedy Club (Bristol, TN).

And in NYC, you can see me almost every Tuesday at Comedy Cellar for HOT SOUP and every Wednesday at NY Comedy Club (4th St.) for GOOD EGGS.

Quickies

🟥 Art people sure do hate evil billionaires until it's time for the Sacklers to buy a wing at a museum or the Kochs to build a theater for the ballet.

🟥 You can’t be a lapsed Jew because we refuse to let anyone go.

🅼🅰🆃🆃 💎 🆁🆄🅱🆈 @mattruby

THE HISTORY OF MAGIC Man does magic trick: "Ooh! Ahh!" Woman does magic trick: "Drown her!"

April 3rd 2022

3 Retweets11 Likes

🟥 My brain can’t process that ramen is some kind of fancy food to get at a restaurant because in my mind it’s a puck in a plastic packet with salt powder that’s the cheapest way to survive college.

🟥 Love the term “California Sober” so much I'm trying it out on other things too: "I don't have an eating disorder, I'm just California Healthy!"

🟥 I'm clinically depressed. Damn autocorrect. Meant to say I'm comically depressed.

🟥 Online dating advice for dudes: Don’t post a photo of you catching a fish, post a photo of you in your therapist's office. You in a sportscar? Ugh. You reading "Nonviolent Communication: A Language Of Life"? Hot.

🟥 An intervention is the worst kind of surprise party. Either way, all your friends and family secretly gather in an apartment in order to yell at you. But when you walk in, it's not "Surprise, let's party." It's "Surprise, party's over!"

🅼🅰🆃🆃 💎 🆁🆄🅱🆈 @mattruby

FOUND THE CORRESPONDING IMAGE TO THIS JOKE! 👇 "I went down the street to the 24-hour grocery. When I got there, the guy was locking the front door. I said, 'Hey, the sign says you're open 24 hours.' He said, 'Yes, but not in a row.'" -Steven Wright

March 30th 2022

1 Like

🟥 You can have a geriatric pregnancy in NYC and people will still think you're "starting young."

🟥 The magic of being into crypto is it's a way to say "f*ck the man" while simultaneously trying to BECOME the man.

🟥 America became the comments section.

🟥 Amazon is banning the word "restrooms" on its new worker chat app. Can’t wait to see an Amazon PR spokesman explain: “Technically speaking, if you p*ss in a bottle, there's no need to use the word ‘restrooms.’"

5-spotted

My Time with Kurt Cobain (Michael Azerrad). A reporter sent to cover Cobain winds up befriending him.

Kurt excused himself to go to the bathroom. He was gone a long time. I considered the possibility that he had sneaked out of the restaurant. That would have been brilliant. But, eventually, just as I was starting to think that someone should go check on him, he returned. He was high, dazed, his eyelids nearly closed. He was nodding slightly. It was the first time I’d ever been sure that Kurt was high on heroin. Surely everyone else at the table could see this, too, but no one acknowledged it in any way, and the conversation continued around Kurt, as if he were a senile grandparent. It was obvious to me that Kurt got high at that dinner deliberately, as a self-destructive protest.

Jacob Greenfeld on how to create resonant writing: “Share your secrets.”

All of my most popular pieces of content have one thing in common: I was scared to publish them. There is almost a perfect correlation between my level of fear before a post goes live and how much it resonates with readers.

Comedians Weigh In On Implications Of Will Smith Oscar Slap (Forbes). “If you take out the intent, the context and the nuance, you have no comedy left,” says Judy Gold.

Gold was giving this example about the treatment of comedians long before the Oscar slap—“If you murder someone and you go on trial for homicide, your sentence is determined by your intent. What were you thinking? Was it premeditated? That is what your sentence is based on. And yet a comedian doesn’t get the same consideration.”

Kanye West on going off his meds:

If you want these crazy ideas and these crazy stages, this crazy music, and this crazy way of thinking, there’s a chance it might come from a crazy person.

Other People’s Mistakes (Morgan Housel). Tons of gems in here.

What makes sense to me might not make sense to you because you don’t know what kind of experiences have shaped me and vice versa.

The question, “Why don’t you agree with me?” can have infinite answers.

Sometimes one side is selfish, or stupid, or blind, or uninformed.

But usually a better question is, “What have you experienced that I haven’t that would make you believe what you do? And would I think about the world like you do if I experienced what you have?”

It’s the question that contains the most answers of why people don’t agree with each other.

Thanks for reading.

-Matt