Sally Breslin: My Life: I ENJOY THE TORTURE OF WATCHING ANTIQUES ROADSHOW

I don’t know why I torture myself, but even after all these years, I’m still hooked on watching Antiques Roadshow every Monday night on Public TV.

I guess I enjoy living vicariously through the fortunate people on the show who discover that the dusty old vase they paid 50 cents for at a yard sale actually is rare Venetian glass and worth enough to send a couple of their kids through college.

I guess I’m also hoping I’ll see something on the show that will make me exclaim, “I have one of those packed somewhere in a box in the hall closet! I’m rich!”

Every week, I watch, transfixed, as a typical discussion on Antiques Roadshow goes something like this:

EXPERT: “And what have you brought in for us to appraise today, Mr. Cole?”

MR. COLE: “ Well, I found this here rusty old nail while tearing down my great-great-grandpa’s outhouse and thought it looked different from all the rest. So I figured I’d have you guys take a look at it.”

EXPERT: (Pulls out a magnifying glass from his pocket and carefully examines the nail). “Hmmm, very interesting. This little black squiggle on the side of the nail tells me that it was made back in 1775 in a little shop that sat on the banks of the River Charles in Boston. Do you know what you have here, Mr. Cole? This is one of the original nails that fell out of the horseshoe on Paul Revere’s horse during his famous midnight ride!”

MR. COLE: (Completely expressionless) “Is it worth anything?”

EXPERT: “Well, if this nail were to come up for auction, I expect it easily could go for as much as $150,000. Are you considering selling it?

MR. COLE: (Still expressionless) “Well…I think I’ll keep it…for sentimental reasons. After all, it did come from my great-great granddaddy’s outhouse.”

That’s another thing I’ve noticed about the show; not only are most of the guests not eager to sell their stuff, they usually look as if they’re on the verge of lapsing into comas. Even when they are told that the book they paid a dollar for at a yard sale is actually a rare first-edition worth $20,000, their expressions don’t change.

Let me tell you, if someone ever gave me news like that, I would pick up the appraiser and spin him around, and then do cartwheels across the appraisal floor. And to heck with sentimental value. I would unload the item on the first person who showed me some money.

Unfortunately, watching people getting rich on the show every week for years has inspired me to buy things at flea markets, yard sales and closeouts. And I fully intend to continue buying things until I find that one item that will make me instantly rich. Just one measly valuable item is all I need. That’s not asking for too much, is it?

Meanwhile, I’m running out of living space.

A few years ago, I thought for sure I had THE item in my hot little hands that finally would put me on Easy Street. See, back in the mid-1950s when I was just a kid, my parents bought a summer camp. In the storage shed behind the camp they discovered a long, vertical, framed portrait of a Native American woman. It was covered with dust and dirt and looked as if it had been hanging in there since the Civil War.

When my parents contacted the previous owner of the property to ask him about it, he told them to just toss out the portrait. My dad, however, decided to leave it hanging in the shed to give the place some character (to this day, I still suspect that the Native American woman’s ample display of cleavage might have had something to do with the “character” my dad wanted to add to the shed).

Many years later, when my parents sold the camp, they took the portrait home with them, where my father, to Mom’s dismay, hung it in the living room. One day, however, it “disappeared” into their attic, where it remained...until I inquired about it one day. Mom told me to take it…“please!”

The glass on the frame was badly cracked by then, so I removed the portrait from it, carefully rolled it and then wrapped it. My husband and I were living in a mobile home at the time, so I put the portrait out in our storage shed to prevent anyone from accidentally damaging it. We were planning to build a house in the near future, so I figured I would buy a nice frame for the portrait and hang it in a proper place of honor in the new house.

My research revealed that the portrait actually was a lithograph by a famous American artist named Raphael Beck (1858-1947), whose work included, among other things, the last official portrait of President McKinley. From what I could tell, the lithograph of the Native American woman was worth at least $1,500.

I was excited. I thought that if I kept it long enough, the value would increase by leaps and bounds each year, so that by the time my husband and I were ready to retire, it would be our nest egg.

When we were about to move into our new house and were packing up everything in the shed to bring over there, I found the rolled-up lithograph. Carefully, I picked it up…and noticed there were holes in the paper I’d wrapped it in. Panicking, I unrolled it and discovered, to my horror, the holes went all the way through.

When I held up my precious lithograph, I gasped. Something…like an evil, demonic mouse or squirrel, had chewed out the woman’s breasts.

My husband, sympathetic soul that he was, burst out laughing and said that whatever had done the chewing at least had great taste.

So I’m still watching Antiques Roadshow in the hopes that one day I’ll find out that something like the hideous purple vase we received for a wedding gift will turn out to be a rare Tiffany collectible worth $25,000.

And with my luck, I’ll drop it.

# # #

Sally Breslin is an award-winning syndicated humor columnist who has written regularly for newspapers and magazines for most of her adult life. She is the author of “There’s a Tick in my Underwear!” “Heed the Predictor” and “Inside the Blue Cube.” Contact her at: sillysally@att.net.