Kick Me
Adventures in Adolescence
WE STOOD IN LINE AT ELLIS ISLAND FOR THIS?
There is no God. . . I mean, there can’t be. Think about it. . . If there were, then things in life would have to be fair. There would be no suffering, there would be no war, there would be no poverty . . .
. . . and none of us would be born with last names that could make us the brunt of adolescent jokes for the entirety of our school careers.
In a truly just universe, no child’s last name would be Cox, Butz, or Seaman. No teenager would come from a family named the Hardins or the Balls. A young Richard Shaft wouldn’t have to come home from school crying each day. An underendowed Lisa Titwell wouldn’t beg her parents to let her finish her education at an all-girls’ school. And an adolescent Paul Feig wouldn’t have had to endure hearing the letters e and i constantly taken out of his last name and replaced with the letter a.
But, alas, I did.
It didn’t start out that way. Fortunately, or unfortunately, when I was in grade school, there was a TV commercial for Fig Newton cookies that featured a man dressed u ...
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