Paula Poundstone - Theres Nothing in This Book That I Meant to Say

Canonized as a saint 508 years after her death, Joan of Arc led the armies of France when she was seventeen years old. At nineteen she was captured by the British, tried by the Church, and burned at the stake as a heretic. At seventeen I left high school because there was a parking lot that needed to be hung out in, and I didnt want the brainy kids to have to take a shift. At nineteen I became a stand-up comic, turning my back on a successful table-bussing career, and at forty-one I was arrested, putting off my canonization indefinitely.

Joan of Arc was born to Isabele and Jacques dArc in Domremy, France, in 1412. I dont understand French names. Apparently Joan of Arc was never called Joan in France; she was Jeanne dArc. Two different authors I read said they were calling her Joan because that was how Americans knew her. Well, who started calling her Joan in America? You cant just do that. If its Jeanne, then its not Joan. Its not even like it saves your tongue time. Its the same amount of sounds. Why not save ink and call her d?

Joan or Jeanne was raised in a manner considered proper in that time and place. Her father said he would rather have had her brothers drown her than allow her to lose her virtue. Id have been pretty water-safe back then. My mother told me that she learned to swim when someone took her out in a boat to the middle of a lake and threw her overboard. I said, Mom, they werent trying to teach you to swim.

The youngsters in Joan Jeanne Joans community had the responsibility of taking each familys sheep, goats, and cows to pasture and watching them while they ate. There is a bit of controversy in the record as to whether Joan Jeanne Joan regularly took her turn driving the livestock to pasture, but if she did it drunk wed have something in common. In June 2001 I was arrested on a felony child-endangerment charge, for driving drunk with my children in the car, a misdemeanor child-abuse charge, the details of which I am not permitted to discuss because they are sealed by the court, and four charges of lewd acts with a minor, which were later dropped. I pled guilty to the child-endangerment charge and the misdemeanor child-abuse charge because those things were true. There is nothing I care about more in the world than my children, but in fact I was drunk when I drove them to the Baskin-Robbins one day, and it was reported to the police. I have no one to blame but myselfwhich, Ive always said, takes the joy right out of blaming. I wish Dick Cheney could have been involved somehow.