Remember Mad Libs? You ask your partner for a list of words (noun, verb, adjective, adverb, etc) and fill their answers into the blanks in the story. Then you read the story back and the nonsensical words your partner provided without knowing their context makes for a strange and funny story!

Except…not.

This girl was just reading through the story sentence by sentence, and prompting her mother for the words in context.

Girl: “The baker said, ‘I can make an adjective cake for you.’”
Mother: “tasty”
Girl: Okay. “The baker said, ‘I can make a tasty cake for you.’”

I could have cried for this poor [noun] who is going to think that Mad Libs is total [adjective] waste of time and wished she could have had her mother [verb] a Twilight book instead. Team [boy's name] FTW!

Then I was struck with [noun] as I [adverb] realized that the [adjective] mother most likely knew how to [verb] a Mad Libs story. Why didn’t that [noun] correct her daughter? Or at least read the very [adjective] directions that appear on every Mad Libs [noun]?

Although the company was [adjective] at least my [noun] was tasty!

This was always one of my favorites:

Thank you for everything, gang, and here’s to 40 more!

That is all.

After all, I was smart.

Fast forward to present time. Names only stay in my head briefly. I’ve been teaching myself PHP unsuccessfully for, what, 4 years now? My vocabulary has become…has become…less gooder. I confuse words and muck up cliches. Consumer technology becomes harder and harder to master.

It calls to mind a book I read in middle school – Flowers for Algernon.

Summary:

• Lab creates drug that makes dumb mouse smarter
• Lab tries drug on mentally-challenged janitor.
• Janitor become super smart
• Mouse reverts to dumbness and croaks.
• Janitor realizes he, too, will be dumb again.
• Janitor becomes dumb again, but cruelly REMEMBERS he used to be smart.
• Tired of being pitied, he moves away from everyone he knows and starts over in a state home.

(isn’t it amazing that we all aren’t emo, given what they made us read in school?)

So in the “now” where my younger brother can beat me handily in Scrabble, and I’m my Facebook friends’ resident punching bag in Scramble, I wonder if I just grew into a brain that was very smart for a youngster and average for an adult, or completely losing it a la Algernon.

How about you? Do you find yourself dumbing down as you get older? Tell me I’m not alone here.

In 1980, the Phillies won the World Series. I was in grade 3, and my brother was 10 months old. The whole region was ecstatic. And there was going to be a parade! I really wanted to go and see Pete Rose and Tug McGraw. Other kids were being pulled out of school to go. But Mom gently told me no – my brother was too small to take into Philadelphia. But the next time the Phillies won the World Series, she’d take me.

I was bummed, but it was a fair enough proposition to an 8-year-old. Next time, I’ll see the parade.

And here we are…28 freaking years later. I’m frown with a job and a place of my own. I’m older now than Mom was in 1980. Pete Rose is banned from baseball* and Tug has passed on. And the Phillies are ONE WIN away from a parade. ONE WIN!

I already told (new) Boss that I WILL take off from work on the day of the parade. I don’t know or care who can or can’t come with me. I’m going to make my way to Broad Street and see the show. I can’t wait another 28 years.

I haven’t been more vocal about the Phillies because I’m just afraid I’ll jinx something and they’ll lose.

So let’s hope that by the end of the week, there’ll be Phillies parade pictures here!

Happy Monday!

*What a crock of crap that is, by the way. You have football and basketball players who get into and out of legal trouble ALL THE TIME and they’re welcomed back with open arms. Pete gambled, never betting against his own team, and he’s out.

But it zapped me back to my early childhood. Every summer, MomMom would rent an apartment in Wildwood, NJ for my aunt, her daughters, MomMom, my mom, and me. This was before the boys arrived in the family. We’d stay there a week and every night we’d walk the boardwalk. That was back in the mid 70′s when you could still win cigarettes and liquor on the gambling wheels.

The rides, though definitely not high-tech by today’s standards, were the best. I fondly recall the little pods of kiddie rides that my cousin and I would ride. They were so simple. There was one with little kiddie cars that went around in a circle. The ride was shielded by a bold, primary colored canopy with lights beneath it. The steering wheels were ornamental and just spun around wildly on a bolt, but the horns were real. Actually, they weren’t horns, but a button that triggered a harsh, staccato electric buzz. I’d lean on that button until my finger hurt.

Occasionally on those kiddie car rides, there would be kiddie motorcycles. Something about them were taboo to the little kids. Maybe they did wheelies or some such thing. But you knew you had really “grown up” when you were allowed to ride them. I don’t think they had the horns.

A trashy cousin of the kiddie car ride was the kiddie boat ride. Same round setup. Same bold, beautiful canopy. But this time there were boats that went around in a circle. And ‘floated’ atop the most miserable green moldy water ever. As if the ride was filled up with water Memorial Day weekend and not emptied until after Labor day. You were taught from infancy to fear that water. Don’t touch it! The ornamental steel steering wheels were shaped like old-fashioned boat steering wheels.

It’s been so long since I’ve been in a kiddie ride section of a theme park — do these kind of rides still exist?

Even if they don’t…as long as I can sniff a telephone pole, I’ll remember them.

The intercom came on, and instead of hearing the secretary’s voice making an announcement…the radio was playing! Spontaneously, the class began to giggle – wondering how they got a radio to play all over the school!

Teacher flipped her lid and began screaming at us that we were bad kids for laughing. She turned off the lights and made us sit with our heads down on our desks. Then we listened, and realized that the President was shot.

My mom picked me up from school as usual. Brownies was canceled, and we went home to watch the never-ending news footage of the assassination. We learned that President Reagan was at the hospital, and was going to be ok.

But James Brady was not. Frank Reynolds, the anchor at ABC News, announced Brady’s death and paused for a moment of silence. A few minutes later, Reynolds announced that there was a mistake: Brady was alive. I laughed again – it was the first time I learned that the news could be wrong!

The next day, as punishment for laughing at the President being shot (Teacher STILL didn’t get why we were laughing, despite our attempts to explain) we each had to write him a get-well letter.

In 1988 I saw him speak in Voorhees, NJ, on behalf of Elder Bush’s presidential campaign. He told us to win another one “for the Gipper.” Reagan always had hope for our country.

Which is something I’ll try to do as the first President of my lifetime (whom I remember, anyway) is laid to rest.