I was barely sapient during the early 'Saturday Night Live' years, when it was still good and still a punk/anarchist/radical podium. We were staying over in a small motel and my mom flipped on the TV, and Steve Martin and Dan Aykroyd were playing the swingers from Czechoslovakia. After that was 'The Micro-Dentists,' working on the teeth of Garrett Morris as Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. But my mother turned it to something else. It was 'dirty' and I wasn't allowed to watch it. I heard them say 'buttocks' before she switched it. Even the valid scientific term for the ass was forbidden... I wasn't supposed to know that there was such a thing as an ass. I understood absolutely none of it anyway. I thought 'buttocks' might be what adults called the ball-sack. It was not explained.

I've said that I was afraid to swear until I left home and had been at college a little while. This is an example of the level of mental domination that my mother had over me. I am still unsure how she managed to achieve it. She didn't beat up on me physically... I don't think she hit me with the wooden spoon more then half a dozen times. I can't remember any particular incidences of it, except one.

I'd done something to drive her crazy, again. My mother went to whack me with the spoon, and she'd stressed it so much from the previous beatings that the end of it flew off on the first strike, bouncing away. I looked over my shoulder to see what had happened, and then we both started laughing. Punishment time was over... that was way too funny to continue. Though I didn't realize it at the time, this would be the last time I was punished in such a manner. Maybe my mother decided that God reached down and broke the spoon. More likely she thought I was getting too big to spank. From then on she just screamed at me when she wanted me to obey.