May Peace Be With You. 05/03/24
/If you’ve ever been to the Hamptons, you’ve seen it. The coupling of a younger woman and a much older man. Good luck with that, because 70 can’t keep up with 40 no matter how hard 70 tries. So how do these seemingly incompatible couplings occur in the first place? Glad you asked. A leading social scientist (whose name escapes me) made a scale, assigning different values to different assets. Intelligence, attractiveness and money being among the highest scoring assets. To serve up a cliche, a 70-year-old male or female movie producer would score very high on the money, power and influence scales, while scoring lower on the attractiveness scale. While the 25-year-old arm candy would score high on the beauty scale, but not very high in the other categories. Does Robert DeNiro becoming a father at age 80 ring a bell? While there is no way these aforementioned pairs should fit together, when you add up the scores on this social scientist’s scale, the pairs make an even match. All of which has little to do with Sam and his much younger wife, Shellie. He liked Shellie and was amazed she went for him. But with age difference comes different responsibilities. Most guys in their mid 60’s aren’t first learning how to put on a diaper (unless it’s on themselves). The inspiration for this comic came from a recent experience I shared with John. My wife and I (we are only 3 weeks apart in age, I might add) took care of our granddaughter one weekend. On the list for that Saturday was taking our granddaughter Charlotte to a 3-year-old birthday party at the NY Aquarium in Coney Island. The party room consisted of a bunch of 3-year olds and their parents. A couple of the parents introduced themselves and said, “Oh, you must be Charlotte’s grandfather.” I told John this, and his response was, “Yeah, so?” And I countered, “You don’t think it’s funny everybody just assumed I was the grandpa? He didn’t think that was surprising in the least, so the hell with him (he’s 5-years-younger anyway, the whippersnapper). And that’s when he suggested the school play might be a better venue for our character Sam, who actually IS a 60-ish parent of a small child. Hilarity, well at least awkward hilarity, ensues. I hate it when he’s right.
The other comic this week was very close to an actual experience I had in Japan last year. My wife and I were part of a three-couple trip. We were being led by a guide to the Temple of Peace. To get there, you had to stand on a long line, and then walk, single file, over a narrow bridge to get to the beautiful orange temple which was in the middle of a lake. The line stretched backwards, up six flights of a huge staircase. When we saw the line I said to our crew, “Screw it, why don’t we just run up there to the side of the line and take a group picture with the Temple in the background. Some of the people on the line thought we were trying to cut to the front and I explained, “Oh no, we’re just taking one picture and then we’re leaving.” Trouble was, nobody spoke English except for one person who exclaimed, “No cutting.” When I shared this experience with John, he liked it, we turned it into a comic, and we allowed the idea to cut to the front of our comic line this week.
That’s it for now. Join us again next Friday. With summer just around the corner, we take a trip to the country club. Have a great weekend,
Andy and John