Did you know that sugar free ice cream will not melt if you leave it outside? You didn’t? Well that’s probably because it’s a myth, a myth my grandmother started back in the summer of 2004 when the east coast had that big black out.

During that long, horrible and inconvenient power outage, my grandma Jo was visiting from South Carolina. Being a grandma, the first thing she worried about wasn’t the fact that I was pregnant and felt like I was going to die from heat exhaustion, instead all of her worries were focused on the food in the freezer and the fact that all of it may spoil if the electric didn’t come back on soon. She had two large coolers outside on the deck and had us help her load them up with the Hot Pockets, frozen broccoli, Miracle Whip and other items stored in my parent’s freezer. When we were just about finished, I grabbed a box of Weight Watchers sugar-free, ice cream bars and placed them in one of the over packed coolers. My grandmother took them out and placed them on the table by the back door and turned to me and said, “You can leave those out, they are sugar-free.” I was puzzled. “Why?” I asked. “Anything sugar-free can’t melt,” my dear, sweet and obviously misinformed grandmother replied. It was within that moment that  I realized that it was 100% worth my while to listen to every single thing this woman said and to write it all down because one day when a comedy site asks me to write for them , I would have some of the greatest material known to man-kind.

My grandma Jo definitely had a hand in raising me and spoiling me. I remember when Garbage Pail Kids

were big back in the eighties.

I only had a few cards, which I obtained by begging my best friend Lauren, to trade but everyone already had the ones I had, and no one wanted to exchange with me. I was a sad kindergardener with a handful of sucky cards until my grandma came home with a surprise.  Not only did she get me new cards, but it was an entire sheet of them not even cut yet. It was like getting an uncirculated mint coin from 1562!  I didn’t even have to trade my selfish friends so that I could collect the correct cards to make up that giant garbage Pail Kid picture on the back. The work was already done for me. Where did she get this gem of a present? Was there a black market for Garbage Pail Kids? Did she have to go to a secret location with $10,000, her first born and an alpaca and trade Art Spiegelman for this glorious gift?  There were so many possibilities, but I never found out. She simply told me that she is grandma and can do anything she wants.

She wasn’t kidding because about three years ago, I received a phone call from my amazing grandmother, asking me a question I would expect from a five year old.  She began telling me that there was a full moon where she was and how beautiful it was.  She then proceeded to ask me if we had a full moon in New York.  Without any hesitation, I told her that we haven’t had a moon in NYC for at least a year. It took her a few seconds to realize what was going on before calling me a little fuck and then saying, “No really, is the moon in New York full like ours?” We now have several old age home pamphlets hidden in a drawer at my parent’s house  just in case she starts smoking straws and telling  people Bob Barker is really Jesus Christ.

My unique grandmother graduated high school back in the fifties, got married at twenty-one and managed to raise two brilliant children.  She owned a bar for a while when I was a kid then moved down south when I was fifteen.  She has a boyfriend with whom she lives with named Carl (we call him Pops).  She makes him a whole turkey every time she comes up to visit so that he can eat while she is away.  She loves lottery scratch offs and Atlantic City even though she never wins and comes back complaining about how bad the machines were every time she goes.  She doesn’t drive but has told me she could drive a train if she had to. She is a stage 3B lung cancer survivor that will yell at the television screen any time Gene Simmons pops up because my mother fooled around with him when she was a teenager.  I consider her one of my best friends and not just because she wears a mustache whenever I tell her to.

She has been scanned for Alzheimer’s and shows no signs of it but has told me that if she ever gets the disease she will kill herself, and if she can’t remember to kill herself, she wants me to do it.

While most grandmas are knitting and watching “Murder, She Wrote” my grandma talks about blow jobs and always asks if I’m keeping my boyfriend happy so that our relationship remains strong.  She even tried to get me on board to get my handicap brother a call-girl for his twenty-first birthday because she said and I quote, “What your brother needs is a blow job.  I’ll pay for a woman to come. That will release his tension.”  My father put a quick end to that gift idea which resulted in my brother getting a Harley Davidson hat instead.

Then there was the time she told my mother and I that they should put radios in nursing home bathrooms so that old people can shit with dignity.  She went on to explain that music was the new laxative.  If we didn’t send her to a home then we definitely should have done it last September when we were on the Staten Island Ferry going into the city.

We were standing outside on the deck and she turned to me and said, “Oh look! It’s the Statue of Liberty; I never realized how tiny she was. Those buildings are really small as well.”  I took the remaining fifteen minutes of our boat ride explaining how everything looks teeny tiny when you are far away from it. I made her look at the sun and bring her fingers up and squish the sun with them as an example.  She caught on quickly.  I was so proud of her.

There are so many more stories and instances that I can tell you about, but we would be here all day.  Bottom line is that my grandma is friggen awesome, and I wouldn’t trade her in for the world (not even a family of alpacas).

I LOVE YOU GRANDMA!!!