The Laugh of the Month

The other day my mother and I were having lunch at the Olive Garden. The acoustics were terrible, made worse by the fact there was a huge party of female office workers just across from us. My mother complained to me, saying something about how one friend says that whenever gypsies show up at her favorite restaurant, they’re real loud like that, too.

So, we’re doing the best we can to communicate, my mother telling me the funny stories of the week. I ask her about two of her friends, recently divorced. My mother is quoting the husband this way: “You know how Richard talks crazy. He said, ‘I ain’t gonna be no man mistress!’”

Right at that moment our tall, dark, very handsome waiter walks up, obviously hearing my mother, who is 77, say, “I ain’t gonna be no man’s mistress!”

I know he thought that because he burst into laughter, which he quickly tried to contain. I looked up at him and started laughing myself, then looked at my mother who hadn’t missed a beat, and was also starting to laugh. The waiter high-tailed it out of there, my mother watching him go no doubt back to the kitchen to tell what he’d just heard.

For a few glorious minutes, my mother and I enjoyed together the kind of cleansing Niagara Falls laughter that makes you feel like you’ve been reborn. My mother was clutching her stomach, tears filling her eyes, saying, “Stop, it hurts.” Just when we’d begin to recover, we’d relive the ludicrosy of of a 77 year old woman saying that to her 51 year old daughter and we’d go into convulsions again.