A Mischievous Muse

I first met my future sister-in-law, Janice, in 2002 in Chagrin Falls, Ohio. She had just purchased some fancy handles for her kitchen cabinets, and later, when I examined them at a restaurant, I blurted out, “Nice knobs, Janice!”

While another kind of person would have been offended by my poor choice of words, Janice took this as the opportunity to acquire a new partner in crime. She and I became fast friends and, through thick and thin, enjoy laughing at other people’s foibles almost as much as at ourselves.

Janice, whose birthday is Saturday, is the devil on Joe’s and my shoulders, urging us to break bad or to commit increasingly dreadful acts of foolishness and self-degradation so we can laugh at them later on.

Janice and Joe, 1970

Janice often got her little brother, Joe, into trouble as a kid. She once dared him to run around outside with plastic bags on his feet in the middle of winter and then locked him out of the house. When he rang the doorbell to get back inside, his mother was waiting for him to deliver the ass-whooping of his young life.

As for me, Janice regularly urges me to expose my most humiliating recollections in this blog. “People like it when you don’t take yourself too seriously,” she is fond of saying. Janice was the counsel behind self-deprecating posts ranging from my foray into hypnosis to my ill-fated encounter with Liza Minelli to my blurting out to an overseas customer service rep that “I am a man!”

When confronted with her mischief-making ways, Janice quotes the once-popular chef Paula Deen: “I is who I is.”

Tomfoolery at The Greenbrier (2020)
and at The San Francisco Bridge (2008)

Janice is smart enough to avoid self-incrimination. The closest thing I have to her acting like a turkey is a photo of her with a stuffed turkey taken at the Greenbrier. Or feigning a jump off the San Francisco bridge à la Kim Novak at the end of Vertigo; mining a tour of Hitchcock locations for comedy is a very Janice thing to do.

With My Trouble-Making Muse, 2015

She lives up to the Roman origin of her name: “having two sharply contrasting aspects or characteristics.” Aside from all the tomfoolery, Janice is perhaps the wisest person I know. She never seems to err from matters of style to those requiring keen judgment. This would be annoying if not for the fact that her interventions often involve urging Joe and me to indulge: Eat the cake, take the vacation, buy the sweater.

On March 14th, Janice became a grandmother to Michael Joseph, whose middle name is a tribute to Joe. But don’t expect “Granny Janny” from her: she will be the cool grandmother and, if the past is prologue, one who urges little Mickey to get into trouble. Word has it she is already staying up late and watching Breaking Bad with him—you can't start them too young.

Janice stands alongside Joe as a primary inspiration behind this blog. I may write things up, but during our daily 6 a.m. check-in calls, they both help me to see new experiences—particularly the funny ones—as fodder for you all to read.

If you ever get a chuckle out of some stupid thing I did, you can thank Janice for making me write it down. Hell, she probably made me do it in the first place.

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