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She is now writing not so much about the housewife sorting socks, she says, but about the same woman ten years later whose kids phone her at the office every five minutes. Going back to school and getting a master's degree really changed things, didn't it? Perhaps it is this sort of realism that is missing too often from her TV spots on Good Morning America. Television's appetite for visual gags forces her to be a comic entertainer, not the wise-guy satirist of the newspaper column. She has a natural talent for mugging, but when she tries, typically, to cope with an eccentric dentist who wears a Superman suit, or to record a hit country tune in Nashville, or to interview an underwater hockey team, the jokes sometimes seem forced. Even on TV, though, the zingers can zing: having decided, unaccountably, to interview a pig, she starts off, "Hi, I think I used to date your brother . . ."
Her conversation makes it clear that she is indeed, as she says, "a flaming liberal Democrat." But no, she will not use the column to let the air out of Ronald Reagan. Politics "isn't my beat," she explains; her readers would resent it. She does take risks with her writing, though she says, "You have to stand out there in your bloomers for a lot of years" before you have earned your readers' trust enough to try something radically new. Bombeck's readers have accepted a sharp departure in her latest book, Motherhood: The Second Oldest Profession. Most of it is funny, the mixture of short pieces, one-liners and wry humor as usual, but there are several short, sad stories that have the quality of O. Henry's sentimental tales. One tells of a mother who died of cancer, leaving each of three sons a letter that began, "I always loved you best . . ." Among the most effective is the story of an old Jewish widow who chats happily every night with her dead husband Seymour. Her grown children think she is batty and put her in a home. She does not care; she gets through to her husband there too, and in fact meets another old woman, who says cheerfully that, sure, her own dead husband talks about Seymour.
The author is not entirely certain about the sad pieces. They work, yeah, but "anybody—anybody—can bring out your tears. That is a piece of cake. It is 20 times as easy—make that 50—to make people cry rather than laugh." People have problems, she says. Their kids are on drugs, they aren't getting along with each other. "Now you . . ."—she says to her listener—"say something funny."
Usually she manages. On talk shows these days, she is always asked, with reference to the title of the new book, to name the oldest profession. She skips a beat, looks solemn and says, "Agriculture." It is very hard to catch her off balance. Her editor at McGraw-Hill, Gladys Justin Carr, recalls a lunch meeting in Chicago when Bombeck was publicizing her fifth book, If Life Is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits?, hoping to match the previous sales of The Grass Is Always Greener over the Septic Tank. As Bombeck was about to begin her speech, a procession of waiters entered, each bearing a bowl of cherries over his head. There was laughter, then