Maybe I should mention that I'm a guest on this blog, and not your regular host. In case you haven't been prepared in any way.

Have you ever made a pun, a really good one, completely by accident? This has happened to me two or three times in my life, and it is sweet. The thing about making a sweet pun by accident, is that it’s just like making a sweet shot playing pool, when you are a really crappy pool player. You have to walk away from it like freaking Cool Hand Luke, like you meant it all along. There is nothing cool about sinking an awesome shot and then jumping up and down, squealing, “Can you even believe that went in?! Awesome!!” Please, ma’am, just walk around the table to your next shot and let other people tell you how cool your shot was. (One time it was my DAD telling me how great my shot was, and he IS a really good pool player, as well as my dad, so tell me just how sweet was that?)

The first cool pun I made by accident was when I was looking at a potential living space with my boyfriend, around college time. It was this Victorian house, and it had an elaborate shower with two shower heads on adjacent walls. I said, “For if you need to keep a clean profile.” And then I said, “OMG, I didn’t even mean to make a pun! That was so great!” Just hand me the “DORK” sign.

But about a week ago, I made another really good one. I was walking along with my husband, riffing on our cat, “Little” Brown, and his recent move to LA (with us). Uli was going over the well-traveled territory of how Brown can’t get an acting job to save his life, and got into the also well-covered area of Brown’s weight (which is very, very heavy). We passed a pet grooming salon, and I wondered aloud whether they did plastic surgery there. Ulrich doubted it in the extreme. I said, “No? A little cat-nip/tuck?” And because I am, if not cooler than I was 15 years ago, at least able to fake it a little bit, I just kept quiet as I realized what an awesome play on words that was. Now, the problem with the totally awesome pun (intended or otherwise) and my husband is that he is a mathematician/scientist type, and he doesn’t notice all of them. Not even half of them. And so it becomes necessary to sacrifice the cool in order to reap the rewards of an appreciative audience. After all, he knows well how uncool I am, so who am I really fooling? And so I’m afraid I did need to point out how great that was, and he was forced to unenthusiastically agree that it was a good one.

Sigh. Then, later, we were having drinks at a restaurant/bar that had a bunch of Chagall prints on the wall. Brown as Artist has I think been covered, but not so much Brown as Painter, and so we tried some few on-purpose pun material. Ulrich commented that “he covers a broad range” (the “with his ass” implied) and I immediately responded that, “You couldn’t really call him a starving artist.” Oh, that was rich, especially with a couple of glasses of wine in ya.

Two nights ago, I was making Thanksgiving dinner with my mother, and she did me the favor of tying this story into current events. She had made dough for her pumpkin pie and stuck it in the fridge, and I had just finished wrapping up the dough for my tart tatin in saran wrap. She marked mine with “TT,” but then crossed the Ts with one straight unibrow line. She said, “Well, now it says pi,” and I said, “Well, that’s not very helpful in distinguishing what it’s for.” She (uncool) delighted in the unintended pun, and I got to tell her about my blog entry.