“I sent two daughters out together; I expect them to come home together. I do not appreciate this at all.” - Sadie Schluger
was hilarious. Another young man I dated was Herbert Gold- stein, a sweet man, who I think loved me more than all my boyfriends. Years later when I showed him a picture of my kids, I had two boys then, he said, “They should have been mine.” One time Pearl and I went up to Grossinger’s resort in the mountains. I had heard that Herbie would also be there. On the way I told Pearl that I hoped Herbie would leave me alone because I wanted to meet some new people. Sure enough he was there. And it was a good thing too because there weren’t very many interesting alternatives As we walked into the hotel there must have been a thousand people in the main room. Pearl saw a young man in the crowd and whispered to me that he was going to be her date for the weekend. Pearl never lacked confidence and she was right, he became her date. Sylvia Adlin, who worked in our dress shop, was also with us, we had all driven up together. When we were ready to leave Pearl asked us to follow her in our car while she rode with her new friend to New York. We would meet them in New York and then the three of us girls would drive home together. I knew Pearl would do it for me so I agreed. THE ROAD HOME GOES LEFT That’s not the way it worked out. We start- ed out all right but somewhere in the mountains where Route 9A goes left, we went right. Or vice versa. Anyway we got lost in the mountains while Pearl went her merry way to New York It took us ten hours to make what was usually
Izzy and Al waited for me and Al’s ‘date’ to come downstairs. My brother, Marvin, who always provided sarcastic background music on the piano was playing The Funeral March. I came down first with a new hair style. Izzy didn’t care for it and went, “Oh, no.” Then Bev came down the stairs and Izzy said “Oh no” again and got up and walked out of the house. I think he was worried that Al would blame him for getting Bev for his date and being involved in our scheme. Al was sitting in the sun room and didn’t see Bev at first. We walked in laughing and said, “Isn’t this fun?” Apparently not, Al walked out as well. Bev and I were left wondering what was going to happen. We felt like a couple of old shoes being tossed about. Finally, about an hour later, the two guys came back and we all went out together. All our conversation was loaded with sarcasm that night. But, on the way home, Al and Bev were necking in the back seat of the car to beat the band. But that was the end of it, Al never called Bev again. Shortly after that Izzy and I broke up. The Al Pollack story didn’t end there. Six months after Izzy and I had broken up I met Al in the moun- tains at Grossinger’s, a resort hotel. I asked him to give me a ride home and we started dating. As luck would have it, many months later, we ran into Bev on one of our dates - very awkward and embarrassing. This story reminds me of some of the expres- sions we used to use back then. If we were walking arm in arm we might say to someone else we met, “You like chicken? Grab a wing,” meaning take my arm and join us. When we answered the phone we might say, “It’s your nickel,” meaning, you paid for the call, start talking. I once asked Al if he wanted some chewing gum, he replied, “No thanks, I just had my shoes shined.” Didn’t make sense but it was funny. And when our dates couldn’t afford a taxi but wanted to pretend to us girls that they could, they would call out “Taxi” in a whisper. We thought that
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