A Winner in the Waiting-Room Game

Ed Shoaff, a man I’ve never met but for whom I have great admiration, is in his 80s and has, he says, been retired since the 1960s. Some retirement. He might not be going to an office these days, but for several years he has been turning out reams of fascinating and greatly entertaining information sheets, critiques, intellectual delicacies, and quizzes dealing with high-class trivia.

His most recent product has been “The Waiting-Room Handbook: Nudge Your Mind While You Wait,” a series of pamphlets designed to be put in doctors’ waiting rooms. I find them delightful--just the sort of thing to pass the time while you’re waiting to be punched, probed, plugged into, or otherwise monitored.

To me, possibly the most attractive feature of these pamphlets is precisely that they do nudge the mind, often causing it to take off on its own flights of fancy and memory. They are filled mostly with one-liners from the famous, the not-so-famous and the infamous.

In one of the handbooks--the one on language, he quotes Mark Twain, who said, “In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French; I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.”

If you’ve ever spent time in France, you probably know what he means. I lived in France for about a year and a half, back in the ‘50s, and even after my French got to be pretty good, there were a couple of French people who pretended that they couldn’t understand the simplest things I said. The way I knew my French was really coming along was that one morning in 1953 I awakened to the realization that all my dreams had been in French, and I’d understood them perfectly.

Twain also said, “They spell it Vinci and pronounce it Vinchy. Foreigners always spell better than they pronounce,” and that took me back to the time in Rome when I was with some friends who were talking about having seen spainchi tratchi. I hadn’t a clue what spainchi tratchi was until the context revealed that it was, in fact, Spencer Tracy. Mark Twain was right.

Shoaff quotes Fred Allen as having said, “The American arrives in Paris with a few French phrases he has culled from a conversational guide, or picked up from a friend who owns a beret.” That Allen beret nudged mightily, sending my mind back more than 20 years to my first reading of “Fred Allen’s Letters,” edited by Joe McCarthy.

If you’re old enough to remember the days of radio, when the vast listening audience had to visualize what was happening in the studio, where there was a live audience, you won’t be surprised to learn that Fred Allen’s show from a studio in Rockefeller Center one evening featured a large, live eagle named Mr. Ramshaw. It’s hard to believe today, but we used to be content just sitting at home and being told about the exploits of eagles in radio studios.

Allen, surely the wittiest of all the old-time radio comedians, wrote a letter to an NBC vice president in which he described Ramshaw’s unhousebroken, or un-studiobroken, performance, and the reason the beret reminded me of this letter was a line, typical of Allen’s wry inventiveness, “if you have never seen a ghost’s beret you might have viewed one on mr. rockefeller’s carpet . . . .” (Like e.e. cummings and Don Marquis’s Archy, Fred Allen eschewed capital letters.) I don’t recall having seen eagle guano, but I suspect that “a ghost’s beret” is about as good a metaphor as we’ll get.

“The Waiting-Room Handbook” thus sent my mind on journeys of thousands of miles and more than three decades. Surely it can nudge other minds onto other memory lanes. That’s a lot more fun than standard waiting-room fare--say, a four-year-old article on “The Semi-Circular Canals of the Rhine.”

I hope some smart entrepreneur sees a way to distribute Shoaff’s works. I have a dental appointment coming up, and I’d love to find one of those handbooks waiting in the waiting-room.