Erma in Bomburbia: Erma Bombeck

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an expectant hush. Carr swears that Bombeck had known nothing about the cherries stunt. Unfazed, however, she stepped to the microphone and said, "Well, I hate to think what would be going on in here if we were promoting my last book."

The rewards of all the wit and work are now plentiful: for one thing, she is the only female in a seditious cabal called the American Academy of Humor Columnists, whose other members are Art Buchwald, Russell Baker, Art Hoppe, Gerald Nachman and Don Ross, and whose sole function is to give members an excuse to write insulting letters to one another. (She was admitted, says Buchwald, because she won a banana-bread bake-off with another woman and also promised to make coffee and clean up.) Her friends are admiring and loyal. "There is an awful lot under the hair curlers," says one of them, Columnist Ann Landers. "She is savvy and sophisticated enough not to come across as too savvy and sophisticated."

She has a closetful of honorary degrees, her very own 1983 Mercedes 380 SL convertible and three nicely grown children who claim that they are going to add up all the jokes she has made about them and charge her 25¢ apiece. Newspapers around the country (see box) are filled with would-be Bombecks bursting in air. Though when women say they want to be just like her, she says wryly, "What they mean is they want to stay at home, make a lot of money and appear on the Johnny Carson show."

More valuable than any of this is her rich, sure, rock-solid sense of inadequacy. No writer should be without it. Bombeck's brings her back to the typewriter, twitchy with remorse for the unspeakable sin of not measuring up, after only a few days of vacation. She writhes, and writes, and makes a rare sort of contact. "I swear to you, I don't write fiction," she says. Bill Bombeck and their endlessly libeled children swear she does. No matter; when the jokes splat on the page like strained spinach flung by somebody's centrifugal suburban baby, they are true to life. Bombeck's mail shows that. Women, mostly, write to her about husbands who haven't blinked since the football season started or convict sons or babies put out for adoption. Usually they try to make jokes; Bombeck has taught them how.

"Annie is fine except for a slight learning disability," one mother wrote. "Charlie was stuffing Cracker Jacks up his nose today with Carey Allen's assistance. They tried shaving a couple of months ago. Between the school's Halloween carnival (chairmanship, of course), a pumpkin pie in the oven and the twins, here is a very big thank you. I am selfish, I certainly swear, and we sure laugh a lot!" —By John Skow. Reported by William McWhirter/Phoenix