Bombeck - All I know about animal behavior I learned in Loehmanns dressing room

To all the animals I exploited in this book who won't see a dime of the profits

To Norma Born, my secretary, who lists the library as her home address on her driver's license

Introduction

In the sixties when Jane Goodall was in Africa studying the behavior of chimpanzees in the wild, I was in Centerville, Ohio, keeping vigil over three children under age five.

Not a day went by that I didn't question why I was chosen to monitor the daily habits of a trio of drooling Homo sapiens while Jane was in shorts working on her tan.

From time to time, I would see her on PBS, and for days afterward, I would fantasize about climbing to a solitary hill to watch chimps pick and eat bugs off their siblings.

No pantyhose riding around my hips, no fight with the traffic every day, no kids pounding "Heart and Soul" on the piano for five hours nonstop, no going through the garbage looking for a sales slip. I would just sit there quietly while some chimpanzee stomped his brother's face into the dirt and smile and say, "I'd intercede, but it would flaw my research."

Jane and I met only once and I was beside myself with admiration. I think she said to me, "Aren't you curious as to whether or not the chimps have a sense of humor?" and I replied, "If I had a face like that, I know I would."

I didn't begin to convey the respect I had for the work she was doing or my disappointment that I had squandered my life scrutinizing the behavior of humans. For nearly thirty years I have recorded essays of people's mating habits, maternal instincts, and reproductive cycles; of how they handle trends and technology; of what makes them laugh and what makes them cry.

But I had not produced the breakthrough for which I had hoped.

One day as I was shuffling through the newspaper, I saw a picture of an elephant named Lucille from our local zoo. Lucille had a paintbrush in her trunk and was splashing and dribbling colors onto the canvas like a drunken house painter. The painting sold for $250.

The picture dredged up memories of a routine by comedian Jonathan Winters, who drew an irregular circle on a piece of paper with a small line coming out of the top. He labeled it "Christmas ornament" and put a price tag of $4,000 on it. It always got big laughs.

Lucille had to be the first stand-up comic in the animal kingdom and no one realized it.

The breakthrough hit me like a bolt. Jane and I were studying the same species. Maybe some of them had more fur, fewer teeth, longer tails, and more interesting sex lives, but the correlation was there. Some of us were more poorly engineered than others (bats have tits located under their armpits), but generally, humans are not that far apart from bush animals. We share the same planet, breathe the same air, and sometimes vie for the same food. We certainly have the same goalsurvival.

Consider the camel. He has yellow teeth, corns, and halitosis. When he catches a cold he mopes around with his nose running and is unbelievably rude. Now don't tell me you haven't had a blind date who matches that description perfectly.

Sometimes we even resemble one another. I once worked for a woman with a face like a ferret. It would not have surprised me if she burrowed into a hole at night.

On the following pages is a look at how close animals in the wild and humans really are.

An African monkey supposedly is adept at picking every lock on every cage he has been in. For that he got twenty minutes on a National Geographic special. I had a cousin with the same skill who got two years.

We can learn a lot from one another. The hippopotamus is a vegetarian and looks like a wall. Lions who eat only red meat are sleek and slim. Could it be that human nutritionists are on the wrong track?

The gap closes daily. It will be only a matter of time before humans become smart enough to attach a beeper collar to their teenagers to track where they go and what they do once they get there.

So which animal is smarter? The wild female Virginia opossum who produces up to fifty babies yet has only thirteen teats, or the human female who gives birth to three offspring and has only two windows in the backseat of her car? Think about it.

The female African elephant carries her baby for a period of 660 days before giving birth. The infant weighs three hundred pounds and is born with stretch marks. The female nurses it for three years and continues breeding until she is ninety years old.

Before you get too choked up about the 660-day gestation period of an elephant, you have to know that in human terms it comes out to about nine months.

You also have to consider that elephants are tall. You can get by carrying three hundred extra pounds if you are tall enough to eat branches off a thirty-foot tree. I have always believed that women under five feet, eight inches should never carry a child. They look dumpy.

I do know that things have changed for pregnant women. Human pregnancies used to be a fun time for women. Oh sure, you were carrying around a watermelon seed inside of you that grew to the size of a piano, but there were no diet restrictions, you were actually advised to give up exercise, it was all right to drink coffee or alcohol, you could soak up sun on the beach, and people treated you with all the care and vigilance of a homemade time bomb.

There was a mystique about the condition. You were doing something that no man had ever done or could do in the history of civilization.

Then carrying a baby became ordinary. Everyone was doing it. Women ran marathons in the eighth month, a female jockey gave birth just hours after riding her third horse of the day, anchorwomen signed off the six o'clock news with contractions coming every three minutes. I remember reading that Maria Maples (who eventually became Mrs. Donald Trump) had to pull out of a Broadway show, The Will Rogers Follies, because her pregnancy interfered with her cartwheels. (She is tall.)

Experts decreed that exercise was good for you, sun was bad, coffee and alcohol were no-no's, and you had to watch your weight gain and eat sensibly.

It wasn't fun anymore.

During the first few months, people were excited for you. Their response to your condition was a universal one.

They would stare at your stomach and say, "You don't even look pregnant." (Why would you when you were carrying an object no bigger than a comma?)

At four months as you struggled to keep in civilian clothes, they would say as one, "You're pregnant, all right." (Well, it wasn't a big lunch!)

At six months, the general consensus is, "Are you sure there's just one in there?" (As compared to what? A litter?)

It's at eight and a half months that the mood turns impatient. "Haven't you had that baby yet?"

For me it was especially sensitive when the baby was a year old and they were still asking, "Haven't you had that baby yet?"

It was the baby boomers who got creative with the birthing process.

For a generation who couldn't wait for paint to dry or a light to turn green, they didn't even have the patience to wait a month or two to make sure they were pregnant. They discovered they could pee on a little strip of paper and if it turned pink or another happy color, they could start shopping for a nanny. They wanted to know the sex of the child before it was born. No one knows why this is important or what they do with the information, but they wanted to know.

The old joke, "Are you pregnant?" followed by, "No, I'm carrying it for a friend," became a reality. Surrogate mothers are having babies for women unable to have their own.