“Mom, you’re so funny and lame. Well, sometimes you’re lame funny. Sometimes you’re really funny but it’s lame because you’re old. But you’re still usually funny. Sometimes.”
"Mom, write in your blog! You’ve had the Holocaust at the top for DAYS. Pep it up a bit!”
“Mom, the day you referred to ‘Mr. Fifty Cents’ you lost all your street cred, white lady.” Me: “I never had any street cred.” Her: “Exactly.”
“Gangsters. They’re like the lions with the biggest testicles. Or when the gorillas go like this"(chest pounding and improvised gorilla grunting). This is said while she is wearing fake leopard print shirts (two of them, layered) and whiskers and black nose artfully created with eyeliner for her duties opening the door on Halloween to exclaim, “Oh, aren’t you CUTE!” to the baby lions and tigers and bears. It’s like “Madagascar” around here.
Imitating me in a breathy style: “You know you’re going to write about this for your blog: ‘Oh, we exchange such clever quips. My darling daughter who knows all my era’s song lyrics, it’s such a joy to watch her grow. Just the other day she looked at me when I tried to sing REO Speedwagon’s “Can’t Fight This Feeling” (to kill the earworm of “Keep On Loving You”) and said, “Stop now. I will shoot you in the face with a bow and arrow.” She’s so funny.’”
(Later: “Are you going to put that bow and arrow thing in your blog? It’s funny and people who read your blog will like it and laugh unless they don’t think it’s funny in which case they shouldn’t be reading your blog because you’re funny. Sometimes.”)
She refers several times to REO Speedwagon as a one-hit wonder. I protest that they had more than one hit (all of them during my high school and college days). She says, “Well, I don’t like any of their other songs so those don’t count as hits for ME so they’re a one-hit wonder.”
She mocks my technical know-how. I explain that I was on BBS systems back when we used packet and the text slowly crawled up your screen at baud rates of 300 and 600. She says, “Am I supposed to be impressed?” I say “Yes.” She says, “I’m not.”
“Mom, writing about your mother’s dementia is not that much of an improvement over the Holocaust. Write about me and how funny and witty I am. That will pep it up!”
“Know what’s fun?” Me: “What?” Her: “Me!”
“Life is never as exciting as you think except sometimes.”
“What’s that thing called…. Pronouncements! I make a lot of those. I think we could make a book out of them and sell it.”
My revenge on her is that she looks like me. She laughs just like me. My words come out of her face at times. Someday my very voice will emanate from her mouth. At least it will if she meets with my fate, which (as I've mentioned before) is to look down and see my mother’s hands sticking out of my sleeves, hear her voice coming out of my mouth, recognize that all the times she said “Someday you’ll look back on this and laugh/thank me/not remember any of it” she was right. BWAhahahahaha.