I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been asked, “Does everything you write about really happen to you, or do you make up a lot of it?”
The answer to the question is that all of the crazy things I write about are actual events…and anyone who’s ever met me will vouch for that. In fact, my friends and relatives have come to the conclusion that somewhere in my body lies a special magnet that attracts trouble and bad luck.
I think of my kind of luck (or lack thereof) as a series of curses. For example, there is the restaurant curse. Years ago, people stopped telling me about their favorite places to eat because every time I decided to try one, something would go wrong. Either the “good” cook was on vacation (quit, needed emergency surgery, died, was arrested, etc.) that week and the food ended up tasting like something my dogs would bury, or some major appliance would explode, catch fire, spring a leak or take its last breath the moment I set foot in the restaurant.
I can remember one time when my mother kept raving about this restaurant’s pressure-fried chicken, which she described as “crisp on the outside and hot and juicy on the inside.” She said it was the best chicken she’d ever tasted.
So she and I finally went there for lunch one day.
“You’re going to love this,” my mother said, her tone excited after we placed our order.
What arrived on our plates definitely didn't look like anything to get excited about. Crisp? It looked as if it had been soaking in oil for about a week. And when I cut into my piece of chicken, blood oozed onto my plate. I wouldn’t have eaten it even if I’d been on the verge of keeling over from starvation.
When my mother and I complained to the server, she said, “Yeah, sorry about that. Our pressure-fryer broke last night and we haven’t been able to get it fixed yet.”
“Then maybe you shouldn’t call it pressure-fried chicken?” I suggested.
At that point, I could have thought of a lot of other things to call it, but none of them would have been printable on the menu.
But that was only one of my “restaurant curse” experiences. I could list enough of them to fill a book. There was the haddock that smelled like ammonia, the chicken pot-pie that gave me salmonella, the pizza that had a wire ribbon (like the kind on a flower arrangement) embedded in the bottom of the crust; the hot-dog I saw the cook drop on the floor, pick up and wipe off with his apron before shoving it into the bun, and much, much more.
I also am the victim of the concert curse. Back in the late 1960s, when I went to see Three Dog Night at Manchester’s State Armory, the band turned out to have more power than the armory could supply. During their performance, everything kept going black and silent until the fuses could be replaced. The band members finally gave up and walked off the stage.
And then there was the time my friend Kathy and I saved our pennies to go see the British band, the Zombies, in concert. But when we arrived at the JFK Coliseum on the big night, we were puzzled to find the place dark and empty. We thought we’d confused the dates, but then a representative from the band approached us in the parking lot and told us the band members had been arrested on their way to New Hampshire and wouldn’t be able to perform. He said it had been announced on the radio that day, but (obviously) Kathy and I hadn’t been listening to the radio.
But the worst concert curse of all was the time I won free tickets and backstage passes to see Poison in concert at the Worcester Centrum. Before they were due to perform, however, the band members got into a huge argument, ended up throwing punches at each other, and temporarily split up. I mean, couldn’t they at least have had the common courtesy to wait until after the concert to try to kill each other?
No, and I fully blame my “concert curse.” I still believe to this day that if I hadn’t won tickets to that concert, the band still would have performed as scheduled.
I had a really close call with the Michael Buble concert in Manchester a few years ago, too. He nearly had to cancel because he’d been swinging his microphone and accidentally knocked out a front tooth. Luckily, a NH dentist came to his rescue and gave him an emergency appointment, otherwise, I could have added yet another failed concert attempt to my list.
Alas, the restaurant curse and the concert curse are by no means the only curses I’ve been “blessed” with. There’s also the vacation-from-hell curse, the sucker-born-every-minute curse, and the alien-from-another-planet dating curse.
But those would take an entire column each to describe.
That is, except for the alien-from-another-planet dating curse. I could fill up the equivalent of an encyclopedia with that one alone.
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Sally Breslin is an
award-winning syndicated humor columnist and novelist who has written regularly
for newspapers and magazines most of her adult life. Contact her at: sillysally@att.net
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