A Funny Thing Happened at Dinner

I got to the White House Correspondents dinner and began looking for famous people.

I’m not talking about famous people like George Bush or Jim Wright. In Washington, these are not famous people. You get to see them every day.

No, the 3,000 or so people who show up at the White House Correspondents dinner every year want to see really famous people: People like Sylvester Stallone, Vanna White and Ted Danson.

All of whom attended last year. Donna Rice also attended last year and was a guest of my newspaper. Which meant I actually got to speak to her.

We were both pretty nervous about the whole thing.

I had been warned that she was under a lot of pressure and was distrustful of the media and that I should behave in such a way as to bring credit to my profession.

“So does Gary Hart kiss with his eyes open or closed?” I asked her.

She mumbled something and moved away. She may have mumbled: “Take me, you stallion, I’m yours.”

Or she may have mumbled: “Get lost, you creep.”

I’m not sure which.

At any rate, this year everybody came to our reception looking for Donna Rice again. She wasn’t there this year, but I didn’t want to disappoint anybody.

“So where is she?” a gossip columnist asked me. “Where’s Donna Rice?”

I pointed to a woman from the Soviet embassy who had been Miss Tractor Throwing Champion of 1987.

“That’s Donna Rice?” the columnist gasped. “She must weigh 300 pounds! What happened to her?”

Gone to seed, I said. She just totally let herself go after People magazine stopped calling.

The columnist went away shaking her head.

“Where’s Donna Rice?” a TV bodysnatcher then asked me. (A bodysnatcher is TV lingo for someone who lines up famous guests for famous talk shows. I have waited my whole life to have my body snatched.)

Donna Rice? I said. Over there.

I pointed to a guy who was belting down martinis at the bar.

“But that’s a man!” the bodysnatcher said. “Are you telling me Donna Rice is a man?”

I nodded. She had the final operation last week in Sweden, I said. Now, for the first time, she feels like a whole person. Last I saw, the bodysnatcher was trying to persuade the guy to go on “Geraldo.”

Even though he is technically not a star, but is merely President of the United States, George Bush was very funny at the correspondents’ dinner this year.

The President speaks every year and usually makes fun of himself--just so nobody else can.

Bush was in very good form. “I’ll tell you how nifty, how swell, gosh, what fun it is to be President,” he said, making fun of the way he talks.

The funniest thing about that joke is that when Bush is not trying to be funny, he talks exactly the same way.

Bush also said he was going to nominate John Tower for the Supreme Court because American needs “a little justice.” Tower is short, see and, well, you had to be there.

(Just in case any of you are worried, Tower can’t get on the Supreme Court. He is not a lawyer. Otherwise, Bush probably would put him there. Which would be another good joke. On us.)

Bush also said that when Lesley Stahl of CBS asked him whether he was being too cautious in his first 100 days in office, he replied: “Can I get back to you on that?”

His best joke, though, was about the Iran-Contra scandal. Bush said: “It’s getting late and unfortunately there won’t be time tonight for my slide show of the trip to Honduras.”

The background for this knee slapper is as follows: During the trial of Oliver North, the defense revealed documents showing Bush, as vice president, had made a secret trip to Honduras to get aid for the Contras. Not only was U.S. aid to the Contras outlawed at this time, but the documents also never were shown to the congressional Iran-Contra panel. And the trip never surfaced during the last presidential campaign.

Many people feel Bush was being very daring bringing up the matter, especially since he has refused to answer any questions about it.

So he seems to be introducing a whole new standard, one that may brighten all our lives:

Some matters are too serious to talk about, but not to joke about.