I BROKE MY ANKLE on Thanksgiving Night, 2004. We had my sister and her kids staying with us from New Jersey, and my sister-in-law and her family from Huntington Beach in Orange County. No better joy in a house than when all its beds and couches are full.
In addition, for the meal, were a couple of my comedy-writer friends. It was one of these, Barry Marder (who wrote the wonderful Ted Nancy: Letters From An Idiot books), whom I was walking outside, about ten at night, when he said something funny, and I threw my head back laughing and clapped my hands in pleasure. It was the momentum of these two gestures, coupled with misplacing one of my Allen Edmond’s wing-tips on a sloped part of our moist driveway, that sent me into a perfectly executed chimp-flip. I did not stick the landing, and this caused a snap that can best be called pretty loud.
