The Audacity of Bob Hope

I still feel crappy. I can't seem to eat but maybe tomorrow's mri will tell me something I don't know.

However, life goes on in it's increasingly strange ways. Which is probably due to the fact that I am weaker now than I have ever been in my entire life and occasionally things are a bit blurry. Like, yesterday, for instance. I was getting my drip and a completely insane man was sitting two chairs away from me. And he would not stop talking. And here's what he talked about...

SHOW BIZ.

This guy dropped every name that was printed on every star on Hollywood Boulevard. He started by saying that he was Bob Hope's son but he wasn't sure if Bob Hope's wife, Delores, his supposed mother, was dead or alive.

Nuts enough for you?

He said he was Henry Winkler's roommate at Harvard. For some useless reason I happen to know that Henry Winkler went to Yale. This guy was best friends with Donald Trump ("A great human being.") and very close with Shirley Maclaine ("In what life?" I didn't ask.) and he accompaigned Magic Johnson to Mexico for AIDS treatments.

Aha.

And he was a Jewish Buddhist Catholic and he didn't believe in Western Medicine and that's when we got into a big argument. I usually just sit there and let people ramble on if they are the rambling type. But this guy, Mr. Hopeupyourass, asks me why I'm there and I tell him about my cancer and my sugery and he says, "You should never have done that. Had that surgery. Doctors here in the States will kill you." And everyone in the room told him to shut up but he just kept talking and...

I have to change the subject for just a moment. One of the people in the room was this very nice man that had been smiling at me for a couple of weeks. And I've been smiling back. Not really my type but there was something about him. Anyway, yesterday he sits next to me and we're talking about books and luckily I was reading Cormac McCarthy so I appeared as if I was sort of educated and we were having a grand old time and I was thinking, gee, he would be a nice person to have dinner with sometime.........WHEN I WON'T THROW UP ON HIS PLATE!........And then somewhere in mid-conversation he tells me that he's a MONK! He lives at the Self Realization Church and rings the gong in the mornings. Oh, just what I'm looking for. A gong ringer. But I'm thinking that so far the two men I've met who are the most interesting are a monk and a guy who sells hot dogs. I should never have left Chicago...................

So Mr. Hopethebiggestjerkintheworld won't stop saying that I will probably die because of my surgery and I looked right at him, after being silent for a while and said, "Henry Winkler went to Yale."

Well, that stopped him dead for about one second. His reply..."Believe what you want to believe."

One woman was so disgusted by this guy that she left her drip early. "Life is too short." she said. And so was this guy. When he stood up I could see why he was so angry. He was under five feet tall. And he wore stupid sweatpants and very large glasses. The woman with ELB (extremely large breasts) peeked into the room for a moment. The little guy's glasses fell to the floor. I imagined that his eyes popped out and knocked them off of his head.

Is this my life?!!!!! I used to work on Mad About You. With sane people.

Well, that's a lie. But we were making a living in "show biz". We weren't sitting there with IVs in our arms praying for health, sipping soup, going to doctors once or twice a week. What the hell happened? Is this it? Do I go from this to OLD in five minutes. And I was having so much fun.

Tomorrow I will know an answer. Or I won't. But it will be another day on earth in this very strange world that I find myself living in..................