The I'm OK You're Crazy Plan
"Dying is easy; comedy is hard,” an old vaudevillian once said but not to me it isn’t. I’ve been making people laugh since I was four years old and first began doing my imitation of the old faster-than-a-speeding-bullet Superman prologue, which I’d rattle off in tights and bunchy underpants, a dishtowel around my neck for a cape.No, to my mind, it’s not hard to make people laugh, provided you don’t mind sacrificing your dignity. If you ask ME for an epigram depicting one true thing, I’d say this: “Comedy is easy. Therapy is hard” and I found out just how hard when I enrolled in counseling under the “I’m OK, You’re Crazy” plan, maybe you’re familiar with it?Doing therapy under the “I’m OK, You’re Crazy” plan occurs when someone you live with suggests you get counseling, although he personally wouldn’t open up in a therapist’s office if you dragged him there in chains and threatened to pull out all his nose hairs.To be plain, my husband, whose nose-hairs I have occasionally eyed, said he thought I should seek treatment. Because I seemed sad, he said.“Hey, all humorists are sad down deep,” I retorted, though I knew he was right; I was sad. Not long before, my mom had died, and I guess I felt too young to face life without her. Plus, she didn’t just die. She died in my living room. During her own birthday party. Within 20 minutes of when I offered the toast by reading a letter which her dad had written her when she was off in college, her own mom newly dead, and she homesick, grief-struck, eating too much chocolate and failing History. My reading it aloud these 60 years later made my steely mom cry, who never, ever, cried - something which I then somehow concluded brought on her death.So, yes I was sad, if not plumb crazy. And I began seeing this counselor to try feeling better.Every week I drove to her office, all unwilling. Every week she asked me how I was. I could only tell her how everyone else was. I told her a million stories, most of them funn. I entertained the daylights out of us both, but I wasn’t getting at the problem, and I think we both knew that, and so, after 18 months, I quit.And 12 years passed, and I was funnier than ever, still in full flight from every kind of sadness that had ever come my way. Then, one day, my oldest friend called to say she was doing counseling - over the phone of all things - with a gifted therapist in Colorado, who was at first reluctant to work with someone in such an unorthodox manner.“But it’s helping!” my friend said, and one day added, “and you know you should do it too.”And so? And so I am doing it, though God knows it isn’t easy. I can’t seem to sit still as I talk to this faraway therapist. But because we’re on the phone, she doesn’t know this. Sometimes I scrub toilets while we talk. Sometimes I strip small pieces of furniture. nOnce though, she got wise to me. “Are you DRIVING?!” she said. I was driving all right.But I am doing it, as I wish my mom could have done it, to ease her own aching heart.I’ll say it again and you can take it from this old vaudevillian: Comedy really is easy by comparison; and therapy is very, very hard.
