Dropping of bricks

I've been reading Dick Cavett's 1983 book Eye on Cavett (New York: Arbor House), which he wrote with Christopher Porterfield. It's a sequel of sorts to the quirky memoir Cavett (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), by the same team, and I must confess the latter is one of my very favorite books.

Eye on Cavett has a chapter called "On the Dropping of Bricks," and in it the famously garrulous talk-show host argues that there's no such thing as coincidence. He offers as evidence several occasions on which he and others have unintentionally said precisely the wrong thing to precisely the wrong person--have dropped a brick, as it were. In one example, Cavett meets a stranger on the beach. Making conversation, Cavett says something scathing about a "currently popular volume of humor that was being made into a Broadway musical" (105). The stranger then reveals himself to be the author of said volume.

Okay, it's funnier in the book. At any rate, I can say from my own experience that he's right: this happens to me way too often, and I suspect the gods are punishing me. I'll tell you about a couple of times.

In the first, I was sitting in on the first meeting of a college course in psychiatry. As it happened, also sitting in was Liz, an acquaintance I was, in my painfully shy way, considering asking out. After the lecture, the psychiatrist professor told us the class was full and we would not be able to enroll, so we left disappointed. In a fit of sour grapes--it was, I admit, mostly show--I tried to make a joke about the prof, something I thought my friend would find irresistibly witty, something along the lines of, "Psychiatrists are a mental illness."

She replied, "My father is a psychiatrist."

In retrospect, I wish I had then made an Electra joke.

The second anecdote is timely, and it takes place at a dinner party (dinner parties are, no pun intended, like Petri dishes for this sort of thing). At one point, apropos of what I'm not sure, I regaled the group with this feeble bon mot: "Ronald Reagan was as great a president as he was an actor."

A woman I had just met replied incredulously, "I didn't come here to be insulted." It turned out her father had been a high-ranking official in the Reagan administration.

Let these be a lesson to me: stop trying to be funny, at least about people's dads.