People Are Funny

People Are Funny

Today, after several business calls with the financing half of my little scientific R&D company team and an email to my expert witness partner explaining that I am imminently qualified as an expert in why a project financing did not get financed for a big African gas project, I decided to take a long overdue motorcycle ride on a nice-not-too-hot afternoon here in Southern California. I know that rain is coming on Sunday after a long dry summer and while I have not lived through a San Diego November yet, I am led to believe that it is the start of the rainy season. I know that I dot like riding in the rain if I can avoid it, so I wanted to get in a ride while I can.

Everything I do these days seems to be to get something done while I can. I am trying to raise more money for the high-tech ceramics company because we are running short and the market for this type of technology is white-hot. The time is doubly right. I literally just finished teaching a graduate level course in project financing (something I have done since 2015) and I did run a banking business that included project business in Africa….and I financed a big NYC project twice for over a half of a billion dollars in the last few years. The time is right for me to be an expert witness in projects financing and the world seems to be asking that of me. What is that old expression? When the student is ready, the teacher will come. I don’t know if that means I’m the student of the teacher, but it sounds cool.

As I headed off for my ride, I had only one crucial decision, would I wear my boots or not. If its a serious and longer ride I should wear my boots. If it is just a dabble of a ride, maybe not. I already have given up on wearing a jacket in the heat of San Diego summer and along with that has gone the full-coverage helmet in favor of my Calvary half-lid, so what’s a foot boo-boo on top of all of that? But today I put on the boots and headed out through Castle Creek up into Valley Center, where almost all the political lawn signs are red, red and red. I had no interest in Palomar Mountain today so I rode to Lake Henshaw and out through three Indian reservations (they are all over the place out here) with their cheap gas deals towards Santa Ysabel. My intention was to ride down through Ramona’s ranch country and down through the canyon formed by Santa Ysabel Creek and into the verdant San Pasqual Valley with its flat-topped citrus trees as far as the eye can see. But I had skipped lunch and was parched, so when I got to the Santa Ysabel junction I stopped at the inviting Julian Pie Company store with its outdoor patio tables. I bought myself a piece of apple/cherry crumb pie and sat down for a mid-afternoon break in the shade.

I did what any lone traveler on a break would do, I began checking my emails on my iPhone when I was suddenly interrupted. The patio had a smattering of other customers, few except me wearing masks in this irrationally “safer” remote spot. One of the women from the group to my left walked up to my table and stopped. She was a woman of about my age with well-coiffed and stylish grey/silver hair wearing casual, but stylish and good-quality clothes and a pleasant smile. She had a slight limp like one might have from a past stroke or perhaps a joint injury. I was raised to be polite, so I put down my iPhone, put on my mask and looked up at her as she stood decidedly at my table (there were other people to my right had she been intending to seek out someone else).

Her first comment to me was that she didn’t like masks, but she said it in a friendly offhand manner. I did not want to engage in what has become these days a highly politicized issue, so I just shrugged. She was perhaps five feet away from me…far enough, but not quite far enough. She said, “do you like jokes?”

This is not a normal opening line from a casual passer-by on a Monday afternoon in the Central Valley area of San Diego where cowboys and Indians are the most common regular inhabitants. It took me a little by surprise also because I do not often find women to be natural joke-tellers. They might be funny, but telling jokes is something I attribute to men sitting around over a beer or at the water cooler. I didn’t really know what to say to this unusual situation and I probably would have said the same thing to anyone asking that question under these circumstances, but I felt particularly weird saying this to a well-to-do matronly woman. I said, “sure.”

The woman then told me, without introducing herself further, that she was a stand-up comedian and asked me if I knew how to tell that. I said, “because you’re standing up?” That brought a smile to her face as she suddenly recognized me as a worthy raconteur and audience. Then it really began.

She rattled off twenty or so jokes in rapid fire like a Catskill comic in 1960. They were sort of standard sophomoric jokes that verged on the juvenile…like a series of elephant jokes might seem. I asked her if she did this sort of thing often, to which she said with total sincerity, “Don’t you remember, I said she was a stand-up comedian”, and that she played at the Comedy Club in La Jolla. Had I ever been there?

I said no and that I had only recently moved here but that in New York, where I had lived for many years I had been to many comedy clubs. She then told me she was originally from Connecticut and had I ever heard of a big engine company called “Briggs and …..”. She was leaving me to fill in the blank.

I said, “Briggs and Stratton?” To that she said with great pride, that was her father’s company. While that all made sense with the nice clothes and hairdo and living in La Jolla, I wanted to look back over to her friends on the patio to see if they were aware or concerned about their friend’s unusual trespass into my space. I said she was a long way from Connecticut to which she said she had moved from there years ago and lived in Florida, Wisconsin, Missouri and Arizona before moving to San Diego. This was a lot of information for a casual encounter to test out her new comedy material.

She then went into a series of rapid-fire jokes that I could barely understand. I caught perhaps every other one and was not inclined to interrupt her flow by asking her to repeat them. She quickly drifted from childish Art Linklater House Party jokes to raunchy and risqué Penthouse jokes that focused for some strange reason on the number 69, or as the French might say, soixante neuf. I must admit, I’ve heard a lot of dirty jokes in my day, but I have never heard the fullness of the array of 69 jokes that this matronly, silver-haired woman was spewing out to a stranger by the side of the road at the Santa Ysabel Julian Pie Company outlet. I was beginning to wonder what to do about all of this when my iPhone suddenly rang.

I am usually not that keen on having my rides interrupted with business, but I will admit to being very relieved that I had been saved by the bell. While I loudly made the business nature of the call seem like it would go on forever, this lady’s friends came and gathered her up and they all got in their nice expensive car and drove off, presumably back to La Jolla. They did not seem particularly disturbed by their companion’s performance syndrome and they looked perfectly normal themselves, so I assume they just accepted this as part of life with this woman.

I really do not have an explanation of what happened though I can imagine this woman had a small screw loose (pun intended) and had lived through one too many orgies in her affluent suburban upbringing. As I mounted my motorcycle for the ride home I thought of Art Linklater again and his House Party when he would alternately say, “Kids say the darnedest things!” and, of course, that People Are Funny.