Happy Valentine's Day

This bit of Valentine’s Day sweetness is offered free to all.

I was the emcee of the Harvard Freshman Talent Show. It was my first time onstage and the last time I ever did stand-up. After the show, the judge told me, “Hey, you’re really funny.”

So I married her

.

.

My wife is a dead ringer for a sexy comic book siren with the unfortunate name “Mother of Harlots”.

Thirty-seven years into our marriage, I still catch my breath every time she enters a room. Denise is brilliant, buoyant, and ridiculously beautiful. She is frequently mistaken for Nicole Kidman, while I look like a bag of wet garbage. Someone saw us hugging and told her, “You should have that looked at.”

RODNEY: Yeah, I’m ugly, I tell ya!

This is a Valentine to my wife, Denise. If it seems like a cheap way out of buying a card, you’re right… but, every adventure in these columns was instigated by her; every photo, she took.

Rare photo of Denise taking my photo.

Without her, I’d be an 800-pound loner, sitting on my couch watching dog rescue videos. You know, happy. I saw Brendan Fraser in “The Whale” and thought, “Man, that’s living!”

In fact, for the two years of our courtship, that was how we lived: watching TV, eating take-out, never going anywhere. I had no idea Denise liked travel, especially the dangerous kind. Then one night, we saw a news report: sixty tourists had been gunned down in Cairo.

Denise said, “We have to go there!”

I said, “Uh… why?”

She said, “Because it won’t be crowded!”

“Well, that’s true,” I admitted. “I can think of sixty hotel rooms that just opened up.”

I love my wife and she loves to travel, so I go wherever she tells me. This is not an uncommon situation. Women think men are insensitive brutes-- and we is-- but there are so many things we do to please them that we would never do on our own. These include: attending Broadway shows; going to any non-sports museum; shopping for anything other than food and underwear; watching “Dancing with the Stars”, “So You Think You Can Dance” or “Now That’s What I Call Dancing”; buying homes, having children, and wearing pants.

Our problem, like every problem in every marriage, can be blamed on our parents. As a girl, Denise and her mother traveled around the world three times. They went to places I never heard of (like Peshawar) and places I’d heard of but thought were imaginary (like the Kingdom of Swat). They were not rich people, but these were the days of “Europe on $5 a Day” and “India on a Nickel a Month”. Denise and her mom loved traveling and her Dad loved having the house to himself.

In my home, travel was something to be dreaded. Every summer, my dad would jam his five screaming kids into a station wagon and drive us to Civil War sites. Every summer another battlefield. Our family photo album could have been shot by Matthew Brady.

Lately, Denise and I have been hitting the -stans: Paki-, Uzbeki-, and Kazakh-. Now she wants to go to Afghani-, for reasons I don’t quite under-.

But I’m happy.

I married up, she settled, and we both know it.

There was one other comedian in that Harvard Freshman Talent Show. Denise might have married him, except he bombed. He bombed so bad I told him, “Paul, maybe comedy is not your thing.”

So Paul went into drama. He created the medical show “House”, which became the #1 show on Planet Earth. He’s now worth half a billion dollars and lives in a mansion made of uncut cocaine.

But I won the judge.

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