What Was I Thinking?

This is a monologue I performed at a Talent Show...

Hi – I’m Shirley Bomgaars. And I’ve had the name Shirley pretty much my whole life. I was the second child – the first was a girl and I think they expected me to be a boy so they probably had this really cool boy name all picked out. When I turned out to be a girl, they panicked and named me Shirley and it stuck. I’m here with my husband Don – he’s that kinda hairy fellow running around with a camera. He’s looking pretty good right now because he took the dog to the groomer last week – I think he had a “two-fer” coupon… Yeah – one time Don came through the house without a shirt on and our daughter called out, “Hey dad – nice sweater!” Our daughter’s name is Andrea and she’s in her second year of vet school at Wazoo. She’s already decided that she wants to stick with small animals. If she has to put on a rubber glove up to her arm pit, she really doesn’t want to deal with it. She got married about a year and a half ago to her high school sweetheart, Andrew. That’s, right – Andrea and Andrew. Yeah, it’s a little too cute! We tried to get him to change his name, but he just wouldn’t do it. No grandchildren yet, and that’s a good thing, but we do have 2 grandkitties and one grandpuppy. We are so proud! Wanna see pictures? First slide please! Kidding! I don’t have that kind of power…

Our son is named Jonah –and yes, as a matter of fact, he was spewed forth from the belly of a whale. It’s a biblical reference – look it up. There are those who said that I was the most pregnant person they had ever seen. I was as big around as I was tall and I weighed more than Don – which he seemed to think was funny. Me? Not so much! Jonah weighed 10 and a half pounds when he was born and let me tell you, I was glad someone else could carry him around for a change! People always ask me where he got his red hair. I always say it’s because I ate a lot of squash when I was pregnant – beta carotene – I’m pretty sure that’s the scientific explanation. Actually, when you look at him, you can see he takes after his daddy. That’s right – he has a beard, too. They grow up fast, though. Right now he’s a freshman at the U-Dub and currently planning on being an “eccentric history professor.” Take from that what you will!

Kids today! I hate that I am old enough to say that and mean it! Anyway – in the “What Were They Thinking” department, my nephew just got married. In Michigan. In January. Oh we went to it and it was fun – cold, very, very, cold – but fun. Of course then the newlyweds went off to the Bahamas. Boy, did I pick the wrong vacation! Maybe I should have said this was the “What Was I Thinking” department! Yeah, I think we better go with that…

We stayed with my in-laws. We slept in cute twin beds with picket fence headboards and stuffed animals all around. I’m just guessing here, but I think the grandkids usually sleep in there. I don’t know about the kids, but we didn’t get a lot of sleep. It wasn’t the stuffed animals –although that was kind of creepy. It was all the clocks that seemed to surround the room. Big, loud clocks. They all had the swinging pendulums and the quarter hour bongs – and a couple of them chimed out the hour. And they didn’t go off at the same time – although that would have been pretty bad – no, they were set about 30 seconds or so apart. So if you had the misfortune to wake up in the night, there was a good chance you would hear a clock going off on the quarter hour. Then you would lay there wondering when the next one would go off and if it gonged out the top of the hour, you knew that in the next minute or so the hour would chime on one of those…darned clocks!
And speaking of time, mine is up. Thank you.