…with Gary Moss

It was 1947. I was about 5 years old. My family lived in a one bedroom, second floor apartment, in a four-story building on Gladstone. My best friend was Ernie Hart. Ernie and I were allowed to play by ourselves, outside, as long as we stayed around the building; we never got into any real trouble. On this particular afternoon Ernie and I wandered around the building to the paved alley in the back, with no particular place to go, with no particular thing to do. No one was in the alley when we got there. All that was behind our building was a dirty parked car, caked with mud. About five feet away from the car was a clothes pole. (People didn’t have clothes driers in 1947; after doing the wash, people would hang their clothes out to dry on ropes strung between clothes-poles, attached to the ropes with clothespins.) Near the closest clothes-pole was a bucket filled with water. In the bucket of water was what appeared to be rags, in the eye of a typical 5-year-old. Ernie and I were up for doing a ‘mitzvah,’ a good deed. We decided to wash the dirty car, right there and then, as a surprise for its owner. We ripped the rags in the bucket into pieces and began to wash the vehicle. We had been scrubbing the car for at least 15 minutes and we were making great progress when Mrs. Sonny came running outside, screaming at us. The ‘rags’ in the bucket were her living room curtains.
I told my mom that it was Ernie’s idea; Ernie told his mom that it was my idea.

It was 1976. I was 34 and carrying a few extra pounds. I had agreed to join my then wife by going on a diet, I have no idea why there was a plate of chocolate-chip cookies in the house. It was a Saturday afternoon and she was going out for a few hours to run some errands and go shopping. Our three kids had all gone down for a nap and I was the designated baby-sitter for the afternoon. I was going to watch a football game in the family room. I said good-bye and watched her pull out of the driveway and head down the street. Closing the front door, I headed toward the family room. To get there I had to walk through the kitchen. As I walked through the kitchen a familiar voice called to me. It was the voice of home-baked, tollhouse chocolate chip cookies. I had never cheated on my wife with another woman. I imagine that the guilt I was feeling when I put my hand under the napkin, covering the cookies, on the plate, was no different from adultery. I grabbed four cookies and immediately shoved the first one into my mouth. I just stood in the kitchen devouring it. I took a bite of the second cookie and I heard a car pull up in the driveway. I anticipated that my wife must have forgotten something and had returned for whatever. I dashed down the basement stairs and stood in the laundry room, gobbling down the evidence of betrayal. I heard her come into the house; she called to me, “Where are you?” I responded, “In the laundry room,” trying to complete swallowing the evidence. Her steps got closer and she was standing beside me. “What are you doing?”, she asked? In an angry voice, with cookie crumbs around my mouth, I choked out, “Doing some laundry.”
BUSTED! I told her, “The devil made me do it.”

Competitive scrabble players, more often than not, play words that are acceptable. But according to the rules, there is nothing wrong with bluffing, much like in the game of Poker. There is a remedy for a knowledgable opponent. ( First say, “HOLD”. Say it quickly; before your opponent draws any tiles from the tile bag. Then when you are sure that you want to challenge, say “CHALLENGE”. A third party will look up the word and adjudicate it for you.) A player who makes up words can be caught in this manner and have to pay the penalty, by having to remove that phoney word and lose a turn. That’ll teach ‘em.

Have a look at all the ‘real bingos’ and ‘phoney bingos’ played to date, in 2010, at Club #350. CLICK HERE.