-It was a brisk day in 1996 when my father, a veteran toy company executive, was transporting the very first Tickle Me Elmo prototype through Hong Kong International Airport.  Because the toy’s internal mechanism looked like a bomb in the X-Ray machine, my mom and dad were quickly hustled into a small room filled with armed guards and asked to dismantle the device.  My dad tried, but instead inadvertently tickled Elmo, who first began to shake uncontrollably and then burst into his trademark high-pitched giggle.  The guards actually began to giggle too, as did my mom, who was so amused by the scene she cried with laughter for a good 48 hours straight.  But my dad remembers one very serious-looking guard in the back who never took his hand off his gun or his eye off of Elmo.  Thankfully, my parents were eventually released and the rest is red, furry history.  I recount this story because I’ve always tried to figure out how I got the way I am today – eccentric, prone to cause a scene, and, well, just a little off.  The answer, of course, is my family.  Because in the equation of what creates us, blood counts.        

-My mom, like me, is a worrier.  If I tell my mom offhand that something is bothering me, she consoles me.  Then later she starts to think about my problem, and then she worries about me.  About a week later, when I don’t even care anymore, she calls me up offering advice she found on the Internet, reference books she took out from the public library, and the phone number of a cousin I don’t even know who suffered from a similar problem in the late ‘80s.  My mom tries to solve all of my problems, yet, strangely enough, she can’t figure out how to email pictures from her digital camera that aren’t each three megs big and crash my hard drive every single time.

-My dad has a different way of tackling my problems: by spouting one-line dad-isms.  When I lament the Yankees’ current second-place status, my dad comfortingly grunts, “That’s why they play all the games.”  When I told him I was planning on driving home through the night after a stand-up gig, he simply warned, “Don’t be a hero.”  I’m not even sure what that means…but I checked right into a hotel anyway.

-My rhyming-name sister Caryn is the only person who gets to see my columns before I send them out because she proofreads them.  You ever have someone edit something you wrote with “track changes” turned on in Word?  It inserts these jagged red lines wherever there’s an edit.  Except Caryn’s edits aren’t limited to grammar and punctuation.  She also likes to insert little comments like “This is stupid,” or “You’re an idiot.”  Caryn just got her Master’s from UCLA.  Yet she still found it necessary to insert “You smell” right after this joke.