Not Just a Hat Rack

Not Just a Hat Rack

          Grace Ethel Cecile Rosalie Allen was an American actress, singer, dancer and comedian who was known as Gracie Allen and was married to George Burns, the actor and comedian.  The Burns and Allen Show ran for years on both radio and television with Burns being the straight man to Allen’s hair-brained female routine.  We all remember the way their show always ended, “Say Goodnight, Gracie.”  What we may not realize since George outlived Gracie by almost thirty years, was that he was not really the better comedian, but rather, she was.  If you look up the famous quotes attributed to each of them, he has only a few where she has many.  My favorite, as a writer, goes to the length of our lives, “Never place a period where God has placed a comma.”

          I think of Gracie Allen quite a lot because, while I may not live as long as George Burns, I feel like him at times in that I am partnered with a far smarter and more perceptive person than myself.  I, like George Burns, try to take advantage of that by playing off of Kim in my writing just as Burns did with Gracie in his shtick.  Anyone who knew Burns and Allen knew that Gracie was the class of the act. 

This past weekend I introduced Kim to a group of four other couples from my college days who she had not previously met.  Kim usually does a lot of the planning and arrangement work for various gatherings we have, but in this instance she did none since she didn’t know a soul who was coming and it was to be in Ithaca, which is more my stomping ground than hers.  After the weekend, when I sent out my goodbye and safe travels note, the reply I liked the best was from the woman in the group with the hardest, most direct edge to her.  She said, “Thank you, Rich, for all the work you put into the weekend, and we all really enjoyed getting to spend time with Kim.”  That pretty much says it all.  Even though I did all the legwork, it was Kim they liked spending time with.

          This is nowhere near the only time that has happened.  In fact, it’s fair to say that it happens all the time.  Kim has a warm and engaging manner that appeals to people and she is smart and very tuned into the affairs of the world.  People have an easy time seeing that she is bright and interesting, and why I would latch onto her.  They like being around her (as do I). 

As a cabaret singer, she does occasional shows and sets up dates at local NYC clubs.  She always uses Lennie Watts to produce and direct her shows and Steven Ray Watkins to do the musical arrangements.  She hires whatever band pieces and back-up singers are needed and organizes rehearsals.  She also gets promotional flyers and postcards made and she and I both send out notices to our friends.  I have found that if I send out a request for our friends to come to town for some reason I may or may not get a response.  But when Kim sends out a notice of her show, people drop everything and respond that they will fly in from wherever they are just to share time with her on stage.  I could say that this could be because she is a great performer (which she is) versus being a person of influence that draws a crowd, but would that matter?  The point is, she is a magnet for people who love being with her.

          Kim has a very Gracie Allen-like saying whenever something obvious comes up that she notices or something complex gets asked of her.  She taps her temple and says quite slowly for effect, “Not just a hat rack.” I find that it is usually the smartest person in the room that has the presence of mind to be self-deprecating and can therefore make fun of their own capabilities.  Kim does that with the best of them.

          If we assume that total intelligence is a combination of intellectual quotient (IQ) and emotional intelligence (EIQ), then total intelligence includes the capacity for logic, self-awareness, reasoning, emotional knowledge, critical thinking, and creativity. It is often described as the gathering and using of information for adapting behavior within a given context.  Experts say that the EIQ counts for most of intelligence where raw IQ counts for a third or less.  If that is true, I have no doubt that Kim is far more intelligent than I am.  I imagine you are now telling yourself that using me as a benchmark is setting the bar low.  I’ll bet that if anyone bothered to measure back then, Gracie Allen would have ranked similarly with George Burns.  In fact, if you figure that George had more than 40% more time to make his mark (given that he lived so much longer and was engaged all that time in entertainment) he barely could keep up with Gracie.

          Kim needs more sleep than I do.  Whenever I try to comment about how much more she sleeps than me, she usually disagrees with my math, but I am prepared to stand by the idea that she regularly gets two more hours or about 30% more sleep than I do.  I have no idea what physiologists would say about what that means, but given that I am considerably bigger than her (no numbers here for my safety and discretion), it cannot mean that her body needs for more sleep, it must mean that her brain works harder than mine does and needs more recharging time.  This all makes sense to me now.

          It’s not easy living with an unassuming brain-trust, let me tell you.  To begin with, there’s the issue that everyone likes her more than me.  I can live with that because my skin is decidedly thicker than hers anyway.  She always gets what she wants because she is far better at figuring out how to make me want to give her what she wants.  That is a true skill.  It happens without me even knowing it.  Her EIQ is on overdrive. Take the dog, for example.  She was so tricky that she never once mentioned that she wanted a dog. After three years together and despite her over-the-top affection for dogs, she never once said a thing because she thought I wouldn’t want a dog.  I do not know how not to reward that sort of approach to life.  We have had Cecil, our Bichon Frise for ten years.  She got what she wanted and I am happy to be able to give it to her.  It makes her so happy to have her own dog that I feel I have afforded her something that she deserves and needs in her life.  As a consequence, I think I have become at least a marginally better and more tolerant person by virtue of having Cecil as well.  That is an ancillary benefit I could never have imagined or predicted.  Do you see what she has done here?  She got what she wanted while making me feel I owed it to her and even got me to feel that I was better off for having done it.  That is pure brilliance.

          My wonderful Kim is so very much more than a hat rack.  She is a pleasure to be around and makes people willing to tolerate me just to be with her.  That has added a great deal to my existence and as we prepare to move out to California where we will certainly be more dependent on one another for our daily interactions. I am happy we met, and happy that the hat fits the hat rack. You’ll have to ask her what that means.