Filling in

Hi everybody. I'm Brooke, Lisa's daughter. She asked me to write a little blurb in here while she's away in Italy so people don't lose interest in her. Fat chance, I say. But now I have all of you captive, so when I finish laughing evilly, I will try to think up a good memory about my mother.

Oh, I have a good one. When I was younger and before I was practically married, I had quite a few would-be boyfriends. These hopefuls would come meet my mother before I would, you know, deign to go out in public with them. I figured if they could handle her, an older and therefore far more concentrated version of me, they could handle me. She would inevitably say something outrageous and scare them off.

"Oh, errr, I like your mother," they would say skittishly to me. "She's very... unusual." I would laugh as I always did and know that the relationship wouldn't live much longer.

One guy did a vanishing act after she said to him, "oh look how handsome you are! You must be related to us."

Another would-be suitor vanished after she showed him some old snapshots of herself at 30 or so in a bikini. "Oh," she tittered, "I was much thinner then." He laughed nervously.

The best one of all was a young man she decided was gay. "You're gay, right?" she kept asking. "Aren't you gay?" He demurred thirty or forty times, but she was bound and determined to extract the truth from him until she ran upstairs and came down with a pink feather boa that she draped over his shoulders before stepping back to admire the effect. "There," she said, smacking her lips in satisfaction, "that looks perfect on you!" He didn't last long after that.

I was amused yet horrified as a teen and twentysomething, but now that I am thirty and just about ready for kids of my own, I keep thinking about her antics back in the day and laughing to myself. It gets funnier every year. I can't wait.

Of course, it helps that the man I am now with has a mother just like mine, so he knows how to handle it all. For every time she's cracked a Mexican joke, his mother has made fun of my white-girl accent when I nervously try out my bad Spanish on her. For every time my mother regales him with an embarrassing story from my childhood and brings out the naked pictures of me, his mother tells me some tidbit of information that is usually mortifying to him and hysterical to me that I am too nice a girlfriend to repeat here. So we are each uniquely equipped to deal with each other's families.

Some would call that karma. I call that hilarious.