I’m no Seinfeld, but there are straight lines I can run with. One is when my wife’s nurse asks us in amazement:
“You mean to say you two are still working?”
Though just in the springtime of our seventies, down in this cancer-ridden retirement mecca of Florida, the silly seventies are the new nineties.
“Yes, we’re both professional dancers,” I reply beaming brightly. “Can’t walk very well, but we can sure ‘cut a rug.’”
To strut my stuff, I immediately spring into my glide dance step to the accompaniment of her laughing out loud for these poor, humor-starved nurses rarely have fun on the battlefield against cancer. It’s an epidemic that keeps filling seats at cancer theaters of the absurd.
Yes, I’m on a roll. I’m the hit comic playing South Florida’s popular Infusion Room, trying to provide a little comic relief for the stress, pain and the misery cancer causes.
Infusion occurs in a place where ports are not for cruise ships but for transporting chemo champagne to exotic destinations like the liver, lungs and lymph nodes. But I’m there to entertain.
The nurse’s rising eyebrows and laughter propel me right into my monologue to counter the routine malaise that abounds at Florida’s dreary cancer concert halls.
I tell the nurse in the bustling oncologist’s office that I’ve found a way to combat the tiredness my wife feels after her chemotherapy infusions.
“Whenever I make her angry, her energy snaps back. So maybe it helps if I keep pissing her off.” Rim shot. More laughter.
Yes, it’s a place that can really stand some standup.
So enter me. Dredging for laughs. “Hello folks, I’m the clown of cancer. Humor me as chemo comedy is my hobby, my therapy.”
So why not some tumor humor? We’ve tried everything else, radiation, surgery, chemo and lately immunotherapy, yet cancer remains an undeterred, defiant adversary that keeps stalking us and often having the last dance, the last laugh.
When will this scourge leave our stage? At what stage will it retire! Stage two, three, four?
Mr. Trump, build a wall around it? Please! Create a new cabinet post, Secretary of Cancer. Make America cancer free! And I promise I’ll stop doing standup at the Infusion Room.
Paraphrasing my late comedian friend Henny Youngman, “Cancer, don’t take my wife, please!”
TM