Acceptance Speech

By our illustrious president’s standards there were a few winners and lots of losers at the Academy Awards ceremony last night. 80% went home empty. Sad. All those crumbled papers with great speeches we’ll never hear. I wonder what Meryl and Denzel had to say. I would imagine all the nominees prepared something just in case. I’ll always remember Bob Hope’s quip when he was Master of Ceremonies back in the day, Welcome to Oscar night or as we call it in our house, Passover.  

Nobody wants to have their name called and get up stammering, revealing their true inarticulate self, or even forgetting to mention people who will never forgive him/her for the snub. With this in mind I decided to write my brief acceptance speech which I have now recovered from the trash bin.

I first want to thank Peggy without whom I would be living in a cardboard box by the off-ramp reading back issues of National Geographic stolen from my dentist’s office and eating my scant meals of freebie samplers at Costco. I want to throw a kiss to my daughters, Janice, Lauren and Shari who were raised in spite of me to be brilliant, creative and gifted Renaissance women. Now you should get to bed (even though you are all pushing sixty.  A big shout-out to my extended progeny all of whom have wisdom by listening carefully to my advice and doing exactly the opposite. I also want to mention my 3^rd grade teacher who cast me as the turkey in our Thanksgiving pageant which launched my career on the stage. I should also give credit to that lady who let me in front of her on line at the checkstand with my head of lettuce and then there was the time I had thirteen items in the 12-items-or-less line and also the guy who held the door open for me in the elevator, I then bumped into and he apologized and to the librarian who waived my overdue penalty. Special thanks are also due to the meter-maid who alerted me, at 8:56, one Monday morning, that I’d better move my car or be ticketed. I might also mention my mother and father, long gone, who allowed me to go to the Saturday afternoon movies where I spent the next five hours with my older brother even though my feet didn’t reach the floor and I was in fear of being sat upon when a large man inched his way across my row in the dark theater feeling his way and I saved my life from being crushed by rattling my Good and Plenty. And I’d be remiss not to take this occasion to salute the Boys Scouts of America who threw me out because I refused to tie the right knots thus demonstrating that I was not suitable material to fight wars in defense of our flag.  Yes, I know, I must wrap this up but, you see, I don’t expect to be here again in this borrowed tux staring out at Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn or is that Audrey Hepburn... and Ingmar and Ingrid Bergman and there’s Bogey…of all the gin joints, in all the towns in all the world I walked into this….