All I Know About Animal Behavior I Learned in Loehmann's Dressing Room by Erma Bombeck

Author:Erma Bombeck
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780788153990
Publisher: Diane Pub Co
Published: 1998-02-19T05:00:00+00:00

One of the most watchable animals in the wild kingdom is the gorilla. He will belch, hoot, bark, cry, roar, do somersaults, slide down a hill on his stomach, spin on a rope, or examine private parts of his body in detail to gain attention.

Call it a wild theory of mine, but I think exhibitionists are born that way. He's the baby in his crib who cries like he has just swallowed a razor blade, and when you pick him up he stops.

He's the child who, in every home movie, sails across the screen in front of everyone like a blurred Frisbee out of control. At the dinner table, he will dangle a French fry from each nostril and bark like a seal. He wets in the wading pool, clearing it out in fifteen seconds. He wears his clothes inside out to school and lets his underwear hang out of his tennis shorts. For show-and-tell he takes your checkbook to class. When he grows up he frequents karaoke bars and sings "Strangers in the Night"—off-key.

The majority of Homo sapiens live quiet lives in the bleacher seats. They are content to sit back and watch the attention seekers.

This leaves a select group who carry cards in their billfolds reading, "In case of accident—call a press conference."

So how does one go about getting attention? In the animal kingdom a male millipede will bang his head on the ground at the rate of five times a second. That gets a crowd.

Or if you want to make a human statement, you could be like the artist who, along with two hundred volunteers, created a two-mile-long sand sculpture of twenty-one thousand size 34C breasts on a beach in California. His next project is to string ten thousand bras across a mile-wide stretch of the Grand Canyon.

But humans have an attention getter that animals in the wild don't have—nudity. Madonna bared herself from the waist up at an AIDS benefit. The only thing we haven't seen of Madonna's is her X rays.

Howard Stern, the New York talkmeister, appeared nude on the cover of his book, Private Parts. He outsold authors with their clothes on ten to one.

Roseanne has been known to moon a group of bystanders, sing the national anthem off-key with her hand in her crotch, and announce to the press she is going to have a ménage a trois with her former husband and a secretary—and that was just one Sunday morning.

They are professional exhibitionists and most of these things should not be done in your own home. But there's a big chunk of the population who will fulfill Andy Warhol's prediction that everyone will have celebritydom for fifteen minutes.

Heading the list are the lottery winners. Here's a couple sitting around the house doing nothing when they hear their numbers announced on TV. Within minutes, their front yard is overflowing with photographers and cameramen and bloodsucking relatives from as far away as Hawaii. Helicopters circle. Just before hyperventilating, they say into the camera, "Oh my God.

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