Newsletter in Laguna Beach: Where Company Loves Misery

Ed Mauss isn’t ashamed to say he’s a bumbler, and he wants fellow sufferers to know they’re not alone.

Mauss began publishing the Hard Luck Gazette newsletter last August and has since regaled its 100-odd subscribers with tales of hapless people.

“People like knowing they’re not the only ones,” Mauss said.

If the pages of the Gazette are any indication, they have plenty of company.

Like the man who, while traveling on the Australian outback, hit a kangaroo with his Jeep. After overcoming his initial shock, he dressed the animal in his leather jacket and sunglasses for a photograph, only to gape as the animal came to and hopped away with his wallet and passport.

Like the woman whose dress stuck to the toilet seat at a party and who ended up dragging a sanitized toilet cover back into the crowd.

Like the woman who was vacuuming her parakeet’s cage when the phone rang and she wedged the vacuum between the bars of the cage to answer it. By now, you can probably guess what happened. (The parakeet was fine, though a little dusty.)

Mauss compiles the stories from readers’ letters, publishing the four-page periodical once a month. He also awards $15 to the best story in each issue. The one requirement, he says, is that they must all be true.

That gives the newsletter credibility, but it doesn’t do much for the hapless many who send in their stories.

Take Dave Smith of Fountain Valley. He isn’t likely to forget the day his wife summoned him from the shower to fix the garbage disposal. To express his lack of enthusiasm for the task, Smith marched through the house without drying off--or putting anything on.

He had just climbed under the sink when the family’s new kitten attacked. Smith jumped and knocked himself out on a pipe.

“That’s the way paramedics found him,” Mauss said. “Wet and naked, half of him under the sink. The paramedics couldn’t keep from laughing.”

Mauss doesn’t just play hard-luck stories for laughs, though. After wildfires gutted whole neighborhoods in Laguna Beach last fall, the Hard Luck Gazette donated $50 to the local fire relief fund.

“We’re lucky that we can laugh at ourselves now,” he said. “There are some people who have suffered hard luck through no fault of their own.”