Nobody Wants This

I stayed on for a bit with my mom after Thanksgiving, helping with some things around the house.

“Helping with some things around the house” is a sanitized version of what I was doing. This fall, my mother was the target of evil scammers who posed as people trying to protect her online identity and accounts. We think—fingers crossed—that she eluded them. To “help around the house,” I was sleeping in my childhood bedroom, waking up with thoughts of fraud and spending my days with her changing passwords and setting up multi-factor authentication. Fun times, people!

We took breaks to watch TV. We watched the very sweet romantic comedy on Netflix called Nobody Wants This. Kristen Bell plays a cute, fun, blonde LA woman who falls in love with a rabbi. The storyline is based on the creator’s own experience (note: the creator’s, not The Creator’s!). There must be some subtext to the title, as clearly it is not the case that NOBODY wants this. Kristen Bell and Adam Brody, the actor who plays the “Hot Rabbi,” have sizzling chemistry. Yowza! They want this. Maybe the title Nobody ELSE Wants This wasn’t snappy enough?

I kinda wish they had gone with that alternative, though, so that I could write a show for Netflix called Nobody Wants This. Here’s the logline:

Middle aged sisters fight online scammers who can’t spell worth shit but still manage to almost fool their elderly mother whose IQ, by her own report, was 5 points higher than their nuclear physicist father’s. Sisters win the big battles but are occasionally thwarted by intergenerational challenges.

Every day I intended to maintain my good humor in the face of intergenerational challenges. Some days I did. But not on this one day: We were returning from an errand, and we saw a tractor-trailer that was plastered with delicious-looking pictures of ice cream bars. The truck had the Good Humor ice cream brand logo on it. Mom pointed out, “There’s the Good Humor Truck!”

My silent thoughts: she does realize that is a wholesale delivery truck, not “the ice cream truck” that travels neighborhood streets spreading delight with its tinkling beacon, right? Right?!

Right? Maybe wrong. She started to reminisce about The Good Humor Truck, from her youth, with its delectable treats on offer. And The Bungalow Bar, which a later search revealed to be a competing traveling ice cream store of her era and geography.

I grouched at her, “Yeah, I remember the ice cream truck from my youth, too. EXCEPT WE WERE NEVER ALLOWED TO GET ANYTHING.” Uh-oh. My own good humor eluded me—not as in the fingers-crossed way one hopes for eluding scammers—but as in the I’m-all-out-of-patient-devotion way. I piled on: “Because MY childhood was DEVOID of joy.” I know, I know, an exaggeration.

My mother is generous to a fault, so she let it slide. With her generosity, we are still able to find The Good Humor in the tense times. Everybody Wants That.

p.s. Dear Readers: if you or your loved ones have issues with financial scams or identity theft, I know a lot about it now. Happy to be a resource. xo LK