I’ve never liked numbers, probably because they remind me of how random my life has been. As an example, by the time I was thirty I had attended three different colleges and held thirty different jobs. By the time I was seventy I had been married five times, and coincidentally they all had the same first name…Plaintiff.
As a morning radio announcer on Maui I was invited to occasional one-year-old birthday parties, and at one of those parties I delivered a particularly long-winded celebratory speech before asking, “So where is our birthday boy?!” Whereupon a toothless octogenarian walked up to me, gave me a hug, and accepted my gift of diapers. I was at the wrong party, and not the first time either.
In my twenty years in radio I wrote and produced over one thousand commercials, most of them bad. I remember the owner of the first Mexican restaurant on Maui coming to me with his concern, “I’m worried the locals might wrongly assume that our food is too spicy.” I assured the gentleman I would assuage that fear, and I did, with one fateful line, “Our food is not too hot!” They were out of business in a week, and my advertising agency, “McAvoy Layne and Associates” was right behind them. (We never had any associates.)
In my 1,000 cruises into Emerald Bay on the Tahoe Queen and the Dixie, there was one I would like to forget. I wasn’t actually onboard when it happened, but the crew could not wait to tell me all about it.
I used to keep a can of Frosty White Hair Spray up in the wheelhouse in case I had another engagement as Mark Twain when I disembarked. We used to marry people on those paddle-wheelers, usually on a Saturday, my day off. Well on this particularly windy Saturday the bride to be went up into the wheelhouse to make last minute adjustments and happened to spy, “Hair Spray” but failed to read the fine print, “Frosty White.” So she grabbed that fateful can, closed her eyes, and battened down the hatches.
Well, there were no mirrors up there in the wheelhouse, so having no idea what she had done, out she went. The crew told me they had to stuff napkins in their mouths to keep the laughter down, for the groom thought she turned into her mother up there in the wheelhouse. Furthermore, the crew took great delight in advising me, “And she’s looking for YOU!”
So you see why I don’t like numbers? In a thousand cruises into Emerald Bay, the one where the bride turned into her mother is the one I remember most, and I wasn’t even onboard when it happened. No, I’m done with numbers. Did I ever tell you about the time Loni Anderson came up to me on the poop deck and…oh but I see I’m running out of space…another time.
— Want to hear McAvoy Layne tell it? Go here for an audio version of this column. For more than 35 years, in over 4,000 performances, columnist and Chautauquan McAvoy Layne has been dedicated to preserving the wit and wisdom of “The Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope,” Mark Twain. As Layne puts it: “It’s like being a Monday through Friday preacher, whose sermon, though not reverently pious, is fervently American.”
