I pull from that memory regularly as a writer. My parents divorced when I was eight years old, and I was devastated at the loss of my father. I was a voracious reader, too, and can still remember the dark wood and the green leather chairs of the River Forest Public Library, can hear my shoes tapping on the stairs going down to the children's room, can feel my fingers sliding across rows and rows of books, looking through the card catalogs that seemed to house everything that anyone would ever need to know about in the entire world. For years I wanted to be a comedienne, then a comedy writer. I played the flute heartily, taught myself the guitar, and wrote folk songs.

I kept a diary as a child, was always penning stories and poems. She showed me, too, that stories help us understand ourselves at a deep level. She showed me the difference between derisive laughter that hurts others and laughter that comes from the heart.

She never said, 'Now I'm going to tell you a funny story,' she'd just tell a story, and the humor would naturally flow from it because of who she was and how she and her characters saw the world. She taught me the importance of stories and laughter. My grandmother, who I called Nana, had the biggest influence on me creatively. That, and the fact that I was overweight and very tall, all made me feel quite different when I was growing up-a bit like a musk ox at a tea party. But I had a mother with a great comic sense (she was a high school English teacher) and a grandmother who had been a funny professional storyteller, so I figured the right genes were in there somewhere, although I didn't always laugh at what my friends laughed at and they rarely giggled at my jokes. This, however, was a difficult concept to get across in first grade. While my friends made their career plans, declaring they would become doctors, nurses, and lawyers, inwardly I knew that I wanted to be involved somehow in comedy. I thought that people who could make other people laugh were terribly fortunate.

I've always believed in comic entrances.Īs I grew up in River Forest, Illinois, in the 1950's, I seem to remember an early fascination with things that were funny. JI was born at eleven A.M., a most reasonable time, my mother often said, and when the nurse put me in my mother's arms for the first time I had both a nasty case of the hiccups and no discernible forehead (it's since grown in).

Hope Was Here by Joan Bauer