Ben Stein's DiarylSnippets
Stein, Benjamin J.
Snippets Wednesday meeting with my dentist, Dr. S., A and his lovely assistant, D., to get my teeth cleaned. Their office is in a dismal part of Reseda, a community in the news recently because...
...When I called him from Malibu, he sounded very sad and lonely, and since I am his only son, I decided to fly off and visit him...
...My father was tossing slightly and then awakened and said "Hello," as if he had just awakened from one of those naps he used to take forty years ago as he listened to the Washington Senators on the radio in a hammock in our back yard in Silver Spring as fireflies glided around through the night...
...Lenny," I said,"What's in these products that makes you look so great...
...Six months to look sensational, or something like that...
...Their office is in a dismal part of Reseda, a community in the news recently because a man has been holding up its 7-Elevens...
...I went back in the late afternoon and watched TV news shows about the abortion march...
...He and Bootsie hit it off right away...
...I'M NOT MAKING THIS UP...
...Their faces were covered with scary dirt and sores...
...Rocketdyne, Hughes, to be virtually shuttered...
...Name: Address: City State, Zip: L 3707 j r AIM NET 1275 K Street, N.W., Suite 1150, Washington, DC 20005 (202) 371-6710 low as 18 cents per minute (1 hour minimum/month...
...As I walked into my house shortly after midnight, there was a ring on the phone...
...went out for a walk along Eye Street...
...One, a blonde angel, was bent over, holding her stomach, face red and broken out with perspiration, tears in her eyes...
...Sure enough, there was Bruce Herschensohn, Senate candidate in my state of California, and Ken Khachigian, both ace speechwriters, and moments after I said hello to them, there was RN himself, getting out of a car...
...He was clearly still in pain and still exhausted...
...Ring, ring, ring...
...S. came in and looked at my X-rays...
...Anyone...
...The whole service was cleverly set to the tune of West Side Story...
...Like a complete wimp, I bought him one: a helicopter...
...Hasn't anyone noticed this odd fact...
...in a pitiful Southern black accent...
...The bottom line," said Bootsie, "is that you really have to get repeat customers...
...Everything that used to be nice about Georgetown was gone...
...Aram tried to cheer me up with funny stories about Clinton...
...Obviously some work needs to be done to convince him to come visit me in the hospital in years to come...
...Georgetown was a mess...
...I can usually tell if someone has a good case by how angry he or she looks...
...It surely was," I agreed...
...Plus," Bootsie said, "I want to tell people that it's all right for them to be interested in looking good, that it's not a sin...
...Tonight is Purim, a festival celebrating the escape of the Jews from evil Vizier Haman long ago...
...I'M NOT KIDDING...
...My braino father, the superstar economist and thinker, was in George Washington University Hospital...
...Providing a national source of information and action: legislative alerts, rallies, media action, conferences and other initiatives and YES...
...I was very honored to be quoted along with Pushkin and Churchill," I added...
...Not at all," Lenny said...
...Many of them were extremely thin men...
...I've obviously been, unhinged by all the driving I did today...
...He told me business was flat at best, and looked sad...
...Monday Aday of terror...
...I'm sorry," I said...
...So far he hasn't been caught...
...I know, Mr...
...Hi," she repeated...
...Increase over the last visit fourteen months previous, 50 percent...
...And all it takes is a computer, a modem, and a local phone call...
...Memory of better days at the White House, comparison of his life with mine, identification with the kid who always got the short end of the stick...
...I walked down the hall and looked at the patients...
...No more elegant women in white gloves...
...By morning, I was a basket case of fear and fatigue...
...He was back at his Watergate apartment—which has the highest density of newspapers per cubic foot of any dwelling in America, I suspect...
...He analyzed the presidential campaign and made a few funny jokes about Brown and Clinton...
...Yes, I do...
...Sales are booming...
...God help us all...
...The children were all dressed in costumes...
...So that no one could shove a syringe in there and rob the Polynesian woman who's been working there for ten years, with her steel teeth...
...Thanks for nothing, Gorbachev and Yeltsin...
...Will anyone at the hospital care to minister to a European white male...
...Because we encourage buyers to believe that they should take care of themselves, so maybe when they buy our stuff, they won't wake up and put their faces into a buzz saw that morning...
...I've never been downtown," she said...
...woMedia's exciting new ow No *** g • system, gives you instant sio # computer communications access to an entire national network of conservative organizations...
...AIM NET is bringing conservatives together...
...Will my devil boy, Tommy, come to see me...
...Lenny is, well, Lenny doesn't want me to say his age...
...I just stay out in Malibu all the time...
...Tommy demanded a toy...
...One hundred and fifty thousand engineers to be laid off in the Reseda area alone...
...Then I was released...
...I started to cry when I looked at RN and listened to him...
...So the bottom line is that it's a hustle...
...On TV, there was word that "the AIDS bandit" has struck again...
...As I drove him to the hotel, he said, "Daddy, I'm going to burn your house in Malibu down...
...In seconds, you can access the databases of conservative organizations from anywhere in the country...
...He went to a small lectern and gave a simply superb speech...
...Temple Israel's two rabbis—including the one who calls his pet rabbit "Rabbi Rabbit"—were dressed in jeans and T-shirts...
...Please send me information on how I can join AIM NET...
...I dragged myself through the day, talking to my father about economics and basketball...
...Why, he asked, didn't I go too...
...The woman cantor wore high stacked heels such as I haven't seen since I left New York's subway system sixteen years ago...
...Good luck...
...Hmm," I thought...
...The synagogue's main sanctuary was absolutely filled with congregants and their children...
...Isn't it strange that the pro-death side on the abortion question is headed by men and women who are explicitly in a groove of life without children...
...in The American Spectator June 1992 41...
...It's the latest in communications, it's conservative and it's online now at AIM NET: The Conservative Computer Communications Network...
...He had paraphrased me by saying, "You can't sit down at the table unless you put up some chips...
...Scary throngs of Third World people jostling everyone else on the sidewalks...
...I don't want him to be afraid of me...
...But I don't find Clinton at all funny, and I went back to the River Inn and slept...
...Hmm...
...The other, plumper, was holding her, telling her it was all right, that she had had no choice...
...It was pretty amazing...
...I'd stolen it from Joan Didion, so it was pure gravy for me...
...No more Savile Book Shop...
...Of course there are all of those drug addicts downtown, too, who really do stick people...
...She had on a face mask...
...I sat in a chair and watched him...
...As I headed down towards 24th Street, a carload of undergraduates screeched to a stop next to me and started shouting, "Anyone...
...it was a commercial for some really expensive kind of skin cream, and the police kept having to keep the homeless guys from taking food off the catering truck...
...So give us a call or write for more information and a free test run on this computer-age system...
...No, this is part America, part Tehran, part Sub-Saharan Africa...
...Hi," said my pal, L., a young woman whose father is a diplomat in Bangkok...
...He always makes me cry...
...Increasing cooperation and the effectiveness of the movement...
...You'll never guess what happened...
...On the way back to my car, I passed two teenage girls walking out of a gynecologist's office...
...A major gap here in the AIDS protection system...
...WI RI # 0E4 44, *Pres: ow MN 0116 Now it only takes seconds...
...At first I thought it was a movie set, maybe some kind of battle scene, and then I saw it was just totally lost homeless people...
...As I pulled into the parking lot, I noticed that the attendant's cage was almost completely covered with grillework...
...Occasionally I was to spit it out into a drain...
...Fifty cents each, as I recall...
...Oh, my mistake...
...We talked of true trivia—Clinton, Brown, and Tsongas—and tried to hide our fear and anxiety...
...Believe me, I know what those look like...
...Lally is 26, Mom is 46 and looks great...
...Twenty years ago, when my fugitive wife Alex was a law student at G.W., we used to meet there for wine coolers...
...Cost of dental cleaning and X-rays, one hour elapsed time, $123...
...She scraped at my teeth with that titanium toothpick they all use, and soon the blood was flowing lushly out of my gums...
...I soon learned that they were there for the March for Murder, as I call it...
...That's fine...
...Or that the people who march for death look just as angry and filled with rage as the storm troopers of old...
...Of all life's mysteries, the strangest is this: that time, which seems so permanent at the moment, passes and is gone forever...
...I was in a commercial this morning as an extra downtown, and I turned down an alley to try to find the parking, and it was before dawn, and in the alley, there were all of these homeless people, just like a nest of ants, by Benjamin J. Stein all clustered around fires in old trash cans, rubbing their hands...
...I don't have a formula yet," Bootsie said...
...Another sure sign of how bankrupt their moral position is: they cannot even bring themselves to say that their view is right...
...She's just trying to help people feel good about themselves...
...My mother came over, bearing a huge pile of newspapers...
...Goggles...
...My father was lying in is room on the fifth floor of George Washington University Hospital, sleeping, as I walked in...
...Eight women selling by phone all at once...
...Anyway...
...Into the city drain system and then out to sea," she said...
...He has about ten times as much personality as anyone I've ever known, and I think he should be President again...
...It's about the same as mine...
...Lenny makes a certain kind of skin-care product that he sells by phone...
...We would listen to music, drink one glass of cooler, and then go home together...
...Get the latest on public policy, Congress, legislation, foreign affairs, media, campus reports, environment, national security, taxes, the economy, etc...
...It was a damned good speech, too," he said...
...They looked hungrily at my four-and-ahalf-year-old Mr...
...Benjamin J. Stein is a writer, lawyer, economist, and actor living in Malibu, California...
...He kept trying to shoot me with it...
...I didn't sleep all night, worrying about money, health, life and death...
...They both looked mightily offended...
...It'll be something...
...Wonderful...
...Friday A nd now for something extremely obvious...
...As I watched and talked, I thought that someday I will probably be lying here as an older man, only without my parents...
...Helping the exchange of ideas through a 24-hour online system...
...The hygienist must have thought I was the guy with the syringe...
...At long last, have you no shame...
...Off to Temple Israel, the shul where my devil boy, Tommy, attends preschool...
...Too late, I thought, you'll never get your hands on him now...
...Forty percent vacancy rates for office buildings in the Valley...
...It was Lally...
...This tells me they know they're wrong...
...You keep up all that acting," he said, poking me in the chest...
...An undergrad asked me for my autograph and told me he was on his way to hear Richard Nixon speak...
...He talked about Helen Douglas, about aid to Greece and Turkey, and then about how all of this related to Bruce Herschensohn...
...We don't know, just some glop," Lenny said...
...To cheer myself up, I walked over to the George Washington student center...
...All this is available for a subscriber fee as 1.00611...
...Or might I just as well take my hemlock right now...
...Bootsie wants to start a Beverly Hills Beauty Treatment Secret Program...
...He had undergone an appendectomy the day before at the tender age of 75...
...I woke up late in the afternoon and went to National Airport to pick up Alex and Tommy, who had flown in to see my father...
...He saw me and said he had just quoted me in a speech...
...My sister entered carrying a fashionable sweater...
...They both talked eagerly about buying TV time, about info-mercials, bottle manufacturers, FDA approval and how to avoid needing it, and whether phone sales work better than TV sales...
...The hygienist told me for about an hour about how bad the recession was...
...n my car, I drove along the Ventura Freeway, and then heard my car phone ringing...
...The bottom line," said Lenny, "is that once you start to sell a few hundred of those a week, you start to make some real money...
...38 The American Spectator June 1992 Off to Cafe Latte, a restaurant on Wilshire, to meet my pal Lenny and my pals Lally and her mother, Bootsie, for dinner...
...She is 23 and has a "business" selling heavy silver belts to movie stars in Malibu...
...Thursday Arushed, maddening day...
...No more genteel real estate agencies...
...He looked tired and unshaven, but otherwise much as always...
...Now they just say they have the raw voting power to put themselves over, no matter what the rights and wrongs are...
...It was unbelievably sad...
...You really hurt my Mom's feelings," she said...
...Plus, RN has always been unbelievably kind to me and my family...
...1 # AIM NET, Accuracy in events...
...Rubber gloves...
...President," I said, "and I'm very grateful indeed...
...Where does this drain go...
...Ace speechwriter, ace reviewer, ace everything that calls for wit and articulation and erudition...
...Saturday Lunch in Georgetown with Aram Bakshian, one of the absolutely smartest fellows I have ever known...
...One of the songs sung to commemorate this 4,000-year-old festival: When you're a Jew, You're a Jew all the way—From your first snip at Bris To your dying of vey...
...Bootsie," I said...
...The American Spectator June 1992 39 The pro-abortion people surpass even the former peace marchers in their anger...
...I took Tommy and Alex to dinner at a Vietnamese place in Georgetown...
...Various other officials of the synagogue were also dressed like Sharks and Jets...
...It scared me, and all through lunch I felt dizzy at how much life had changed...
...It was jammed with angry-looking you-knowwhats getting psyched for their march...
...He brandishes a syringe at clerks, tells them that it's filled with AIDS-tainted blood, and threatens to stick the clerks with it unless they give him all their cash...
...He's muscular, a well-conditioned soul...
...I asked the hygienist as well as I could...
...They both laughed...
...I got into my little rented car and headed for the Ronald Reagan Center next to Union Station...
...Find out what's happening...
...Stores selling clothes for pimps and prostitutes...
...81114 AIM a 10 to tap into a national conservative network OW NET 1111114 V*441811...
...You didn't know they were there...
...Nurse...
...Still have all those dogs...
...He asked me to get his nurse and they talked about his treatment...
...Tommy was dressed as a soldier, in camouflage, with a toy machine gun...
...Speaker after speaker stood up and talked about how they, the abortionists, had a lot of votes...
...Call today for more information...
...Now this is really revolting: many of them marched holding photos of cute babies, and signs that said "Every baby a wanted baby...
...Outside, a patient across the hall was crying out, "Nurse...
...At my hotel, the charming but slightly down-at-the-heels River Inn, in Foggy Bottom, there were masses of feminist "activists" in the bar, smoking and kvetching...
...With you in it...
...It was his famous speech about helping the Russians...
...Hmm...
...In a very bad recession...
...But really 40 The American Spectator June 1992 disgusting...
Vol. 25 • June 1992 • No. 6
