In high school, I had a small part in Thorton Wilder’s play The Skin of Our Teeth. As arch and self-conscious as it is, there are phrases that stick with you for your whole life. Even my sister remembers phrases, and she wasn’t in it. One of my brothers had a small role in a different production and remembers the ad-libbing part where a key actor supposedly has fallen ill, and the stage manager and all the cast and crew come out on the stage, and one of the ad-libbers says, “It must have been the chocolate matzohs.”
Among the phrases that stick for a lifetime are: “We came through the Depression by the skin of our teeth. One more tight squeeze like that, and where would we be?” and “Pray God nothing happened to the Master crossing the Hudson River!” and “Sabina, you let the fire go out!” and “The dogs are sticking to the sidewalks!”
The dogs were sticking to the sidewalks because there was an Ice Age going on, complete with woolly mammoths. … I know.
Anyway, there are those of us who to this day express how cold it is by exclaiming, “The dogs are sticking to the sidewalks!” It’s that kind of weather in New England lately. Suzanne’s family went skiing in New Hampshire near Mt Washington when I saw on twitter that the temperature at the top of the mountain was minus 81 degrees. That’s what my husband calls Type 2 Fun, the kind of fun that is only fun in retrospect, when you can tell the story.For more on The Skin of Our Teeth, click here. And here is one of my more recent wintry photos. Sunny but bitterly cold.
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