”If I had known better, I would have taken him to a psychiatrist, and there never would have been an E.T.,” says Steven Spielberg`s mother, Leah Adler, in Fred A. Bernstein`s ”The Jewish Mothers` Hall of Fame.” ”Steven`s room was such a mess you could grow mushrooms on the floor. Once his lizard got out of its cage, and we found it–alive–three years later. He had a parakeet he refused to keep in a cage altogether. It was disgusting. Once a week I would stick my head in, grab his dirty laundry and slam the door.”
Although Adler is quite proud of her son, she admits, ”I didn`t know he was a genius. Frankly, I didn`t know what the hell he was.”
When Stevie Wonder wrote ”Part-Time Lover,” a song about married people who have affairs, he had plenty of real-life experiences to draw on. ”We`ve all been through things,” he says in the May issue of Newlook magazine.
”Like once, I was married, and all of a sudden there would be these calls.
`Uh, is so-and-so there?` You know, in this real high-pitched little voice, but it wasn`t no little girl`s voice; that was a man.” Wonder translated the event into a line in the song: ”But if there`s some emergency/Have a male friend ask for me.”
When something goes wrong–the sink is clogged, the plants are dying, the front-door lock is stuck–most of us figure we`ve got only three options: 1)
ignore it and hope it will go away, 2) call in an expert, 3) cry. The ”How To Do Just About Anything” book offers a fourth alternative: Fix it yourself. Its 1,200 entries range from how to burp a baby to how to jump-start a car. To assemble the 448-page volume, Reader`s Digest, the publisher, consulted more than 100 experts and tested the advice given. Sally French, who oversaw the project, remembers seeing editors wandering down corridors ”attempting to tie knots they hadn`t heard of since their Boy Scout days.”
REPLAYS
”It`s a lonesome walk to the sidelines, especially when thousands of people are cheering your replacement.” Fran Tarkenton.
”When you lose, you die a little.” George Allen.
”No one knows what to say in the loser`s room.” Muhammad Ali.
