We live in a glade, my mother and I. We live in a house that sits in a forest. And we live with my father. My mother and I are quiet people, except when we laugh. Then we are loud, and we go on and on. My father’s a talker. He has no sense of humor. He goes on and on but says very little.
My mother and I, we have our own language. We speak in code. Lines from old movies, Marx Brothers routines. We quote them and laugh. My father stares like a dog at a book. I don’t get it, he says. What’s funny about that?
I found a list online the other day of what someone called “Mostly Forgettable Movie Quotes”. I remembered most of them. Number ten on the list comes from Steve Martin’s “The Jerk.”
In the movie Steve Martin’s a carnival worker. He guesses people’s weight. A man steps up from the crowd and asks, what do I win? Martin answers:
Anything in this general area right in here. Anything below the stereo and on this
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