Recently I discovered the origin of my name. I had fantasized that I was named after the supercool Batman, Adam West. Or maybe it was biblical — that would have been respectable.
So I asked Mom one day. Nonchalantly she replied, “Dr. Adam Bicker — you know, from ‘The Love Boat.'”
The lesson here is that you shouldn’t seek out potentially embarrassing stories from your family members. Nobody wins. You should, however, solicit stories from friends’ parents.
Cruel, you say? Don’t do it, Dr. Bicker? Oh, but I must. I dialed up Steve Martinho, Gayle Cohen and Midge Benjamin to get the muck on my co-Forecasters. And it was comic gold.
Oh, Deputy Jim, a.k.a. Jimmy the troublemaker. Let’s talk about when sixth-grade Jimmy’s third-grade brother sent in a request for Playboy. The girls probably still had cooties back then for Jimmy, but that wouldn’t stop him from trying to make a profit. That’s right, he found the magazines and sold them to friends.
Years earlier, in first grade, Jimmy had tried to take the straight and narrow route. He wrote an autobiography, “The Reformed Boy,” about how he would be a better kid. He even started wearing a tie to school, just like his dad.
You should have kept that tie on, Jim.
Amalie’s a little “focused,” or so I hear. Perhaps Midge didn’t want to say anal, but I do. In fact, once upon a teen-angst-filled time, Amalie drafted a “dissertation” to explain to her parents why it was time to starting wearing a bra. The plea was put onto a postcard.
Amalie didn’t always express herself so systematically. At age 3 she was so excited the airplane flight she was on was about to end that she took off her pants and announced it to the the passengers. Surely that wouldn’t happen now …
And Andrea, she gets homesick. Brownie camp didn’t work out so well.
Neither did the time she got busted by the police for breaking into her high school swimming pool. Andrea now has experience scraping gum off of sidewalks because of that fiasco.
This might be mean, I realize. But if any of those three had my game-picking skills, these skeletons wouldn’t have got out (apropos on Halloween).
And Eric West: Your mama wears combat boots.
