Myron Levy is alive!

After making my comprehensive list of men I wouldn't kick out of bed, which I did for the sake of posterity (I know I am not important and nobody cares except me), I put Myron Levy's name in the Google to see if he's dead. You haven't heard of Myron Levy. He never became the world-famous comedian he should have been. When I was fourteen, my parents took me and my brothers to Kutsher's Hotel in the Catskills. The war had just ended and my father decided we needed a vacation, so we spent two weeks at Kutsher's. I remember three things: the brisket was terrible, I had mosquito bites all over my backside, and Myron Levy was the funniest man in the world. I had never laughed so hard, or fallen so in love, in my young life.

Myron was chubby, prematurely balding, and wore terrible black-framed glasses and a black bowtie like the waiters. He had a funny accent, perhaps Yiddish, perhaps Chinese (or maybe he had a bit where he talked like a Chinese--definitely something my granddaughter Lauren would call "racist.") But when he took the stage, I felt, for the first time, like a woman.

I asked him for an autograph, which he scrawled on a green cocktail napkin. When I followed him past the tennis courts one day, he called me jailbait and told me to scram. Which I didn't understand at the time. I was a nice teenage girl! We didn't talk about those things back in those days. The following summer, we had to go to Florida, and then after that Cousin Harriet's wedding in Boston. The Cohen family never went back to the Catskills.

When I was married to Charlie, I asked him if we could vacation at Kutsher's, for old times sake, and he just laughed at me. The Catskills weren't good enough for that man, and instead he made me go with him to San Francisco. Anyone who knows Charlie knows why we went to San Francisco! He left me four years later FOR A MAN, Ivan, who was his partner for the next thirty-five years. (Ivan passed away last February--G-d bless him.)

Water under the bridge, I say.

But still, I've always wondered what became of Myron Levy. And now I know! He's still alive! He's 90, living with his family up in Albany. Still telling jokes, I hope. I wonder if he knows how happy he made me that summer. 1945. I think they made a movie called Summer of '45. It was a good year, if I remember correctly.