Jo-Ann Mapson

The Holy Part

My mom used to say, "March comes in like a lion, and goes out like a lamb," when she hair-pinned our Easter hats on so we could go to church looking decent. We had new hats every year, but the only one I remember was some kind of woven stuff with a wide brim and a yellow satin ribbon tied around it. There were Easter shoes, too, white patent leather Maryjanes for the girls, those stiff, heavy oxblood wingtips for the boys. After church we kids found all the Easter eggs hidden by my father, who when we asked why he didn't have to go to church, insisted he went to "the church of Saint Mattress."

Every year I hoped I'd score one of those nifty sugar eggs with a hole at one end so you could view the frosting drama inside. Never got one. We binged on chocolate bunnies, traded jellybeans, and not surprisingly had no appetite for dinner, which was nearly always ham. Ham looks sunburned to me. I thought of the pig in Charlotte's Web. To this day I can't eat ham.

In a family with five kids, holidays were dramatic. That birth order stuff rings true: there's the firstborn beauty, the second born brains, in fourth place the comic, and the baby of the family who may look like a runt, but is smart enough to skip everyone else's' mistakes. I was smack dab in the middle. Relatively unnoticed, I managed to keep track of going-ons in my college-rule notebooks. At some point I realized that I could create a Mad-magazine type of story by taking my little sister's coloring books and rewriting the captions. I wonder all the time if the reason she's been unlucky with men has its origin in me putting "Sorry, I'm not into princesses" into Prince Charming's mouth. I drew tailpipes and flames on his white steed. Turned Cinderella into Frankenstein with a couple of well-placed neck bolts, a wart on her nose, and for a final touch I gave her a drooping booger.

Back then, nothing was more important than making each other laugh because if we were laughing, we weren't crying. If we kept our dad entertained, he was as charismatic as Jack Nicholson in "Something's Gotta Give." He'd draw Krazy Kat from the comics, play "In the Hall of the Mountain King" until the house throbbed, or he'd pick up my mother, throw her over his shoulder and run around the house while she screamed to be let down. We laughed because he wasn't yelling at us or chasing one of us around with a belt. He was so drop-dead funny that sometimes we had to lie down and clutch our stomachs, but at the same time, even though we didn't recognize it, he was also breaking our hearts. Right then, and after his death, unexpectedly the day before his 48 th birthday.

Writers can't escape that funny/sad equation. Yet it's hard to get right. In youth everything's funny. As an adult, it helps to keep 4 dogs (the Insane Clown Posse) so I can laugh everyday. I wish I'd kept those notebooks, and the coloring book masterpieces, too. To this day I customize whoever's face is on the TV Guide. Ditto for catalogue models. I see those perfect faces and I'm eleven again, holding my Flair pen to show the world what's really behind all that beauty.

My vote for the funniest performance this year (aside from one of clowns eating an entire corncob), goes to Mark Muro's Valentine's Day special-"Love, Sex and All That Comes Between." Muro is an early Robin Williams. He talks at warp-speed, taking unexpected hairpin turns, and leaves the audience laughing so hard they get tears. His poems invite the reader in, show him a comfy place to sit, but fail to mention the spring that may poke you in the backside. Any comic can tell a dirty joke and make some people laugh, but for the spoken word to resonate, you need a glimpse into the writer's soul. Standing there on stage in his pajamas, Muro basically delivered a bedtime story for adults who've forgotten how cleansing laughter can be.

If a writer is lucky, she can access memories, tweak them to fit a story, and enrich the final product. Then there are the memories we don't want to remember. Being a brat in church, counting the pink hats, making faces at my brother, him flicking spit wads, all of us singing made-up sarcastic lyrics to hymns I now find so beautiful they bring tears to my eyes. What a shock to learn that they are next-door-neighbors. Periodically, my mother would give one of us a shake, or glare. At her wit's end, Mom would bend down and hiss in our ears, "Shh, this is holy part!" We tried to be quiet. We tried to find the spirituality that our mom did, listening to the Latin words we didn't understand.

"Funny is as funny does," is another of her sayings, a kind of New England Zen koan. I've worn the letters off this keyboard in search of stories. Every day I reach deeper and deeper into the well of my life, and while just below the surface there's sadness, the same hold true for humor. Each tempers the other. The hateful ham, the yellow marshmallow Peeps chicks that seemed indestructible, and the Easter grass so stiff and icky it reminded us of Grandma's bleached blond hairdo. Every year there were the forgotten eggs we didn't find until they began to smell.

Every single moment it was the holy part.

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