The Shirley Diaries: Driving Under the Influence of Laughter
Part 1
My mother’s name is Shirley, though I’ve often thought of her as Lucille Ball. Not that she has red hair, or that she is an actress (though she probably missed her calling, for she would have been a skilled comedienne), but she just has a way about her….a very funny way about her!
It has not escaped my attention that my mother and some of her outrageous life moments coincided far too often with my humiliation. Coincidence? Maybe. But I have no real evidence that would stand up in a court of law.
Shirley is not a name you hear very often these days. The proper English pronunciation is SURE-lee…..as in, SURELY you will be loved, SURELY you will be supported, SURELY you will be fed, cleaned, clothed and SURELY you will be properly and humorously humiliated – as every teen should be – by their mother. I like to refer to this woman, my mother, as The Shirley. This is because she is the only Shirley I know, and SURE-ly there is no one else like her!
When I was very young, I remember hearing Psalms 23 in church one Sunday. “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever." To my childish ears, I heard, “Shirley, goodness and mercy shall follow me…” At first I found it comforting that The Shirley would always follow me and she would have goodness and mercy with her. Later in life, I began to suspect that I would never shake The Shirley and that she had substituted a lead foot for the goodness and booming laughter for the mercy!
I first suspected something was amiss when I was in Elementary school. It was prior to fourth grade, though I can’t say how old I was, but I can say that I remember the day vividly. You see, I got to walk to and from school back then and I thought it was pretty cool. The Beaver always walked to and from school on Leave it to Beaver, not that I’m claiming to have lived an idyllic Leave it to Beaver-ish sort of existence….but things were on an even keel, and that’s important to a kid. But one day my mother surprised me by picking me up at school! I was so excited to see her! I loved my mother! My mother wasn’t like other mothers – call me naïve, call me ignorant, call me a therapist, please! – you see, my mother was always smiling. She had a very pretty smile, broad with straight white teeth (and this is long before teeth whitening came into vogue). She often reminded me of the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland.
That day, the day she unexpectedly picked me up from school, she was NOT smiling! I crawled into the car, wondering why I was being picked up. It took only a momentary glance at my mom, The Shirley, to see that there was something quite wrong. My mother, the now unsmiling, furrow-browed creature sitting behind the wheel of the silver 1964 Chevy II, was sporting a perfectly coifed head of GREEN HAIR!!! GREEN! It was olive green to be precise, and believe me it was very….well, green. It looked like a large green Spanish olive had tried to swallow The Shirley! Seriously, add a little cream cheese to the top of her head and she’d have looked like an appetizer for a giant fairytale hand! Why she'd felt the need to curl, dry, tease and spray her green locks into a perfectly coifed confection, still puzzles me to this very day. It also bears mentioning that she had taken the time to put on make-up! The Shirley was an enigma even with green hair.
June Cleaver never had green hair!
Before I could say anything, she put the car in drive and we rolled out of the pick-up zone. I looked over at her olive green hair and said, “mom, your hair is….green.”
The Shirley looked at me seriously and said, “Yes, I know. I had a hair dying accident. We have to get to the beauty supply before they close!”
At that point, we reached the street and she stopped and looked both ways. I sat perched in the front seat, lap belt across my hips, innocent and ignorant of just how desperate my mother was to get to that beauty supply store. The traffic kept coming and my mother decided to ‘floor it’ to get us out of the school parking lot. Almost at once the rear of the car seemed to leap up as the back right tire hooked onto the curb as we swung out and around onto the road. The orange belted crossing guard and the ten or so kids that were standing there, leapt back in surprise. As we bounced down from the curb, my head nodding like a deranged bobble-doll, traffic in front of us suddenly stopped. Mom threw her arm across my chest – the custom of the lap belt days – as she slammed on the breaks. My bobbling head shot forward and then bounced back into alignment with my body, which had been held skillfully against the red seat by The Shirley’s arm. Gee, I thought, rubbing my flat chest, I hope she slows down so I can live to see her hair brown again!
Quite an adventure for an inexperienced youth like myself…but, no worries, The Shirley had many more incidents…uh, er…. adventures planned! A few years later the silver Chevy II with the lap belts was replaced by a brand new two-door 1969 Chevy Nova. The Nova was cool looking! It was sleek and modern with shoulder belts that would prove invaluable to me in the coming years. And, it was misty green, a color reminiscent of my mom's long ago hair coloring incident -- ah, good times!
This cool looking car, however, prompted my mother to sharpen her wild driving skills. She drove much faster, it seemed, and mastered the art of hysterical laughter while executing u-turns, speed bumps and school pick-ups. The Shirley used the Nova as a weapon of mass distraction. She could stop on a dime on the crest of a curb and draw the stunned attention of all who lingered. They were shocked…they were awed…they were laughing in our wake and my mother was laughing along with them, 'hoo-hawing' over her own driving escapades.
This is all very funny now, but it had its crippling moments when I became a teenager. I was on drill team in high school and had to be picked up after late afternoon practice sessions. The younger girls that didn’t drive yet, like me, waited together on the front curb of the circle drive in front of the school. Books stacked amid overworked pom-poms, cold cans of sodas dripping in the Texas sun, and twenty or so gabbing girls decorated the pick-up zone on the front circle drive. Naturally, the stage was set for my mom to be the FIRST mom to arrive – lucky, lucky me!
Enter stage right, The Shirley, careening down the road and flying way too fast over the speed bumps designed to slow an everyday normal person down. The Shirley was not an everyday normal person.
My mom treated speed bumps as though they were really just flat pavement with shadows painted on it to look like speed bumps. Sometimes I was afraid that she would hit a speed bump so fast that the car would actually take flight…a pure blast of jet heat shooting from the rear of the Nova that would rocket my mom upwards, into the wild blue yonder of the Texas sky. Milky Way bound! She would be the first Shirley on the moon!
I stood there, soda in hand, eyes wide and deer-like, while the other girls tittered and wondered to each other in hushed, giggling tones, whose crazy mother that was roaring over the speed bumps at twice the speed of sound? I stood silent and lock-kneed; hoping the half empty orange soda in my hand was tainted with hemlock. To my immense dismay, it turned out be an ordinary soda with no power to save me from my madcap mama! I briefly considered pretending to die in order to draw the attention away from the charging Nova. This seemed short-sighted though and I decided instead to act mortified…which was not difficult at all.
But this was only the beginning of the circus act, I would quickly understand with genuine horror, as The Shirley turned the harassed Nova into the school pick-up circle. She raced up to the curb, slapdash, engine roaring, tires scurrying to find traction under her inability to take flight. I watched The Shirley-driven super Nova as she skidded to a last minute stop causing me and the rest of the waiting drill team to jump back from the curb, pom-poms swishing, books scattering, and tanned limbs scampering for safety.
The Shirley was upon us! I glanced through the windshield to see her there, smiling, always smiling, always happy to see me. I was fourteen and therefore, did not feel the same way at that precise moment.
Head down, I gathered my books and pom-poms and tried to make my escape like a bad magician being booed off the stage by a bunch of popular drill team girls. When I reached for the door handle, I noticed something was wrong. Something was very, very wrong. The angle of the car was….well, lopsided! My mind raced to balance what I knew for certain – that cars sit flat on the ground – against what I was actually seeing! I stepped back and took a good look at the odd situation.
To my complete astonishment – or amazement or surprise or, well, let’s call it PETRIFIED SHOCK – my mom, The Shirley, had managed to lop her front right tire up onto the curb!!! I was certain I would die, I wished I could die….death would have been especially welcome at that moment! Damn that hemlock-free orange soda! I was certain this was something from which a fourteen year old girl could not recover!
I stood, for what felt like hours – though I’m sure it was mere seconds – and waited for death to bring some conclusion to my horrification. But my mom, The Shirley, still smiling like a Cheshire cat with a belly full of bird, slid across the seat and unrolled the window (no electric windows for us!) and said, “What is wrong with you, Cher? Get in the car now! We have to stop by the store and pick up some Preparation H for your father!” I dropped my pom-poms and promptly melted into the comfort of the 101° concrete.
Okay, in all fairness to The Shirley, she didn’t actually say the part about Preparation H. I made that up to put an exclamation point on how horror-struck I was that day. She did, however, manually roll down the window and - while smiling that brilliant smile - commanded me to get into the car; the lopsided object of my disdain, the two-door torture chamber on wheels, the assaulted Nova that would not fly...The Shirley-mobile!
I sighed and quickly accepted that death was not forthcoming. I picked up my pom-poms and stepped over to the topsy-turvy Nova. You have not learned true humiliation until you have had to smash a couple of oversized pom-poms through the window of a car that wants to leave the situation as badly as you. The engine simmered with anticipation of making a quick getaway! I dipped myself and my books down, down, down into the poor Nova that was parked lopsided….one quarter hunched up onto the curb… three-quarters lollygagging on the pavement.
Before I could get the door shut, the Nova’s engine roared loudly, but did not move forward. Puzzled, I turned to look at The Shirley who had thrown her head back in unbridled laughter and then resettled herself at the wheel.
“I guess it would help if I had it in gear, huh sweetie?” She laughed again, joy bubbling from her Lucille Ball-self.
Can you say mortified? Can you say scarred? Can you say psychotherapy with a tequila chaser, please?
Mom put the car in drive and heaved the beleaguered Nova off the curb and out of the circle drive. As she ‘floored it’ out onto the roadway The Shirley managed to cut the corner too close, leaving the rear right tire to ‘harumpf’ down into the trough where the road broke away into ditch. Sometimes, late at night, I can still hear the cackling laughter of the drill team as we roared away from the scene of the crime.
That year, I quit the drill team and joined the Drama Club.
(To be gloriously continued…)
© May/2008 C. D. Duffin
Used by Permission
Contact Author
Part 1
My mother’s name is Shirley, though I’ve often thought of her as Lucille Ball. Not that she has red hair, or that she is an actress (though she probably missed her calling, for she would have been a skilled comedienne), but she just has a way about her….a very funny way about her!
It has not escaped my attention that my mother and some of her outrageous life moments coincided far too often with my humiliation. Coincidence? Maybe. But I have no real evidence that would stand up in a court of law.
Shirley is not a name you hear very often these days. The proper English pronunciation is SURE-lee…..as in, SURELY you will be loved, SURELY you will be supported, SURELY you will be fed, cleaned, clothed and SURELY you will be properly and humorously humiliated – as every teen should be – by their mother. I like to refer to this woman, my mother, as The Shirley. This is because she is the only Shirley I know, and SURE-ly there is no one else like her!
When I was very young, I remember hearing Psalms 23 in church one Sunday. “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever." To my childish ears, I heard, “Shirley, goodness and mercy shall follow me…” At first I found it comforting that The Shirley would always follow me and she would have goodness and mercy with her. Later in life, I began to suspect that I would never shake The Shirley and that she had substituted a lead foot for the goodness and booming laughter for the mercy!
I first suspected something was amiss when I was in Elementary school. It was prior to fourth grade, though I can’t say how old I was, but I can say that I remember the day vividly. You see, I got to walk to and from school back then and I thought it was pretty cool. The Beaver always walked to and from school on Leave it to Beaver, not that I’m claiming to have lived an idyllic Leave it to Beaver-ish sort of existence….but things were on an even keel, and that’s important to a kid. But one day my mother surprised me by picking me up at school! I was so excited to see her! I loved my mother! My mother wasn’t like other mothers – call me naïve, call me ignorant, call me a therapist, please! – you see, my mother was always smiling. She had a very pretty smile, broad with straight white teeth (and this is long before teeth whitening came into vogue). She often reminded me of the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland.
That day, the day she unexpectedly picked me up from school, she was NOT smiling! I crawled into the car, wondering why I was being picked up. It took only a momentary glance at my mom, The Shirley, to see that there was something quite wrong. My mother, the now unsmiling, furrow-browed creature sitting behind the wheel of the silver 1964 Chevy II, was sporting a perfectly coifed head of GREEN HAIR!!! GREEN! It was olive green to be precise, and believe me it was very….well, green. It looked like a large green Spanish olive had tried to swallow The Shirley! Seriously, add a little cream cheese to the top of her head and she’d have looked like an appetizer for a giant fairytale hand! Why she'd felt the need to curl, dry, tease and spray her green locks into a perfectly coifed confection, still puzzles me to this very day. It also bears mentioning that she had taken the time to put on make-up! The Shirley was an enigma even with green hair.
June Cleaver never had green hair!
Before I could say anything, she put the car in drive and we rolled out of the pick-up zone. I looked over at her olive green hair and said, “mom, your hair is….green.”
The Shirley looked at me seriously and said, “Yes, I know. I had a hair dying accident. We have to get to the beauty supply before they close!”
At that point, we reached the street and she stopped and looked both ways. I sat perched in the front seat, lap belt across my hips, innocent and ignorant of just how desperate my mother was to get to that beauty supply store. The traffic kept coming and my mother decided to ‘floor it’ to get us out of the school parking lot. Almost at once the rear of the car seemed to leap up as the back right tire hooked onto the curb as we swung out and around onto the road. The orange belted crossing guard and the ten or so kids that were standing there, leapt back in surprise. As we bounced down from the curb, my head nodding like a deranged bobble-doll, traffic in front of us suddenly stopped. Mom threw her arm across my chest – the custom of the lap belt days – as she slammed on the breaks. My bobbling head shot forward and then bounced back into alignment with my body, which had been held skillfully against the red seat by The Shirley’s arm. Gee, I thought, rubbing my flat chest, I hope she slows down so I can live to see her hair brown again!
Quite an adventure for an inexperienced youth like myself…but, no worries, The Shirley had many more incidents…uh, er…. adventures planned! A few years later the silver Chevy II with the lap belts was replaced by a brand new two-door 1969 Chevy Nova. The Nova was cool looking! It was sleek and modern with shoulder belts that would prove invaluable to me in the coming years. And, it was misty green, a color reminiscent of my mom's long ago hair coloring incident -- ah, good times!
This cool looking car, however, prompted my mother to sharpen her wild driving skills. She drove much faster, it seemed, and mastered the art of hysterical laughter while executing u-turns, speed bumps and school pick-ups. The Shirley used the Nova as a weapon of mass distraction. She could stop on a dime on the crest of a curb and draw the stunned attention of all who lingered. They were shocked…they were awed…they were laughing in our wake and my mother was laughing along with them, 'hoo-hawing' over her own driving escapades.
This is all very funny now, but it had its crippling moments when I became a teenager. I was on drill team in high school and had to be picked up after late afternoon practice sessions. The younger girls that didn’t drive yet, like me, waited together on the front curb of the circle drive in front of the school. Books stacked amid overworked pom-poms, cold cans of sodas dripping in the Texas sun, and twenty or so gabbing girls decorated the pick-up zone on the front circle drive. Naturally, the stage was set for my mom to be the FIRST mom to arrive – lucky, lucky me!
Enter stage right, The Shirley, careening down the road and flying way too fast over the speed bumps designed to slow an everyday normal person down. The Shirley was not an everyday normal person.
My mom treated speed bumps as though they were really just flat pavement with shadows painted on it to look like speed bumps. Sometimes I was afraid that she would hit a speed bump so fast that the car would actually take flight…a pure blast of jet heat shooting from the rear of the Nova that would rocket my mom upwards, into the wild blue yonder of the Texas sky. Milky Way bound! She would be the first Shirley on the moon!
I stood there, soda in hand, eyes wide and deer-like, while the other girls tittered and wondered to each other in hushed, giggling tones, whose crazy mother that was roaring over the speed bumps at twice the speed of sound? I stood silent and lock-kneed; hoping the half empty orange soda in my hand was tainted with hemlock. To my immense dismay, it turned out be an ordinary soda with no power to save me from my madcap mama! I briefly considered pretending to die in order to draw the attention away from the charging Nova. This seemed short-sighted though and I decided instead to act mortified…which was not difficult at all.
But this was only the beginning of the circus act, I would quickly understand with genuine horror, as The Shirley turned the harassed Nova into the school pick-up circle. She raced up to the curb, slapdash, engine roaring, tires scurrying to find traction under her inability to take flight. I watched The Shirley-driven super Nova as she skidded to a last minute stop causing me and the rest of the waiting drill team to jump back from the curb, pom-poms swishing, books scattering, and tanned limbs scampering for safety.
The Shirley was upon us! I glanced through the windshield to see her there, smiling, always smiling, always happy to see me. I was fourteen and therefore, did not feel the same way at that precise moment.
Head down, I gathered my books and pom-poms and tried to make my escape like a bad magician being booed off the stage by a bunch of popular drill team girls. When I reached for the door handle, I noticed something was wrong. Something was very, very wrong. The angle of the car was….well, lopsided! My mind raced to balance what I knew for certain – that cars sit flat on the ground – against what I was actually seeing! I stepped back and took a good look at the odd situation.
To my complete astonishment – or amazement or surprise or, well, let’s call it PETRIFIED SHOCK – my mom, The Shirley, had managed to lop her front right tire up onto the curb!!! I was certain I would die, I wished I could die….death would have been especially welcome at that moment! Damn that hemlock-free orange soda! I was certain this was something from which a fourteen year old girl could not recover!
I stood, for what felt like hours – though I’m sure it was mere seconds – and waited for death to bring some conclusion to my horrification. But my mom, The Shirley, still smiling like a Cheshire cat with a belly full of bird, slid across the seat and unrolled the window (no electric windows for us!) and said, “What is wrong with you, Cher? Get in the car now! We have to stop by the store and pick up some Preparation H for your father!” I dropped my pom-poms and promptly melted into the comfort of the 101° concrete.
Okay, in all fairness to The Shirley, she didn’t actually say the part about Preparation H. I made that up to put an exclamation point on how horror-struck I was that day. She did, however, manually roll down the window and - while smiling that brilliant smile - commanded me to get into the car; the lopsided object of my disdain, the two-door torture chamber on wheels, the assaulted Nova that would not fly...The Shirley-mobile!
I sighed and quickly accepted that death was not forthcoming. I picked up my pom-poms and stepped over to the topsy-turvy Nova. You have not learned true humiliation until you have had to smash a couple of oversized pom-poms through the window of a car that wants to leave the situation as badly as you. The engine simmered with anticipation of making a quick getaway! I dipped myself and my books down, down, down into the poor Nova that was parked lopsided….one quarter hunched up onto the curb… three-quarters lollygagging on the pavement.
Before I could get the door shut, the Nova’s engine roared loudly, but did not move forward. Puzzled, I turned to look at The Shirley who had thrown her head back in unbridled laughter and then resettled herself at the wheel.
“I guess it would help if I had it in gear, huh sweetie?” She laughed again, joy bubbling from her Lucille Ball-self.
Can you say mortified? Can you say scarred? Can you say psychotherapy with a tequila chaser, please?
Mom put the car in drive and heaved the beleaguered Nova off the curb and out of the circle drive. As she ‘floored it’ out onto the roadway The Shirley managed to cut the corner too close, leaving the rear right tire to ‘harumpf’ down into the trough where the road broke away into ditch. Sometimes, late at night, I can still hear the cackling laughter of the drill team as we roared away from the scene of the crime.
That year, I quit the drill team and joined the Drama Club.
(To be gloriously continued…)
© May/2008 C. D. Duffin
Used by Permission
Contact Author
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8 COMMENTS HERE:
We had a 1969 Nova when I was growing up, too! Ours was an aqua blue, two door. I remember standing up while my dad drove. How did we survive the 70s?
Love the Shirl........
I'm curious to know if THE SHIRLEY is still driving and laughing? Can't wait for the next installment! Funny!
Kaylynne
The Shirley is still driving (if that's what you want to call it) and laughing louder than ever! She lives in the country now, so now cows, as well as drivers, have to watch out for The Shirley!
Love the imagery and hearing your voice, i.e. the Nova was Shirley's weapon of mass distraction, the cold soda cans dripping...highly entertaining. Can't wait to read Part 2.
peace,carly
OMG- too funny. My first car was the Pontiac version of the NOVA - a Ventura. Also very cool. LOL about the spanish olive!
And what is The Shirley driving now? Hilarious and brings back all the angst of those teen years. Except I was driving myself at 14.
@ Kay - the Shirley now drives a Chrysler something or other...a big car! And, let me say...there have been 'incidents' lately...I will be writing about those soon!
Read Madcap Mama Two...the torturous driving fiascos of my teen years continued, hilariously, of course. *I can say that now!*
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