It’s been one of those weeks. Dear friends are negotiating agonizing life events like watching their children suffer through heartbreak, losing old friends to cancer, dealing with cancer themselves, or making very hard decisions about aging, beloved pets. Fortunately, I’m not dealing with an immediate crisis, but I’ve been working on an intense story for The Moth about our unsuccessful fertility treatments several years ago. My husband and I are quite comfortable with how things turned out, but this particular walk down memory lane has been exhausting. Right now, most everyone I know needs a good laugh.
Just to Further Make the Point
Emotionally wiped out, I turned on The Ellen DeGeneres Show today in hopes of a giggle. As luck would have it, I tuned in just as Ellen was introducing one of her guests — a woman who lost both her legs while protecting her children from a tornado. Clearly an amazing and heroic story, but certainly not the comic relief I was hoping for. Then the woman said that as the rescue workers were taking her to the hospital and she saw her mangled legs, she told them, “Well, I guess I won’t need pedicures anymore.” When Ellen asked her how she had the presence of mind to make a joke, her guest said it was just so tragic she had to find something to laugh about. We all know the feeling.
BBC to the Rescue
As it turns out, one of my aforementioned dear friends who’s had a rugged week just posted the video below on Facebook — did the trick for me and I had to share (given the state of the Facebook IPO, Facebook shareholders might need this laugh, too). If you’ve got any comic suggestions, for goodness sakes, don’t keep them to yourself — leave a comment and point us to the laughs. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to soak in a hot bath and read fellow Moth storyteller Mike Birbiglia’s Sleepwalk with Me, a very funny memoir based on his one-man show. I highly recommend it. Here’s hoping that the next tears we cry come from laughing very hard.
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