quips are "Men seldom make passes/At girls who wear glasses." And when asked to use a certain lengthy scientific term in a sentence, she said, "You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think."

About her living quarters she said, "It's a small apartment, I've barely enough room to lay my hat and a few friends."

Dorothy Rothschild Parker did wear glasses, but not when she was out in public. Born in 1893 in New Jersey, and raised in a luxurious West 72nd Street home in New York City, she went to work for Vogue at the age of 21 writing captions for women's undergarments. Her ability to turn a phrase showed itself early. "Brevity is the soul of lingerie, as the Petticoat said to the Chemise." appeared in the magazine in 1916. Her obvious talent allowed her to succeed drama reviewer P. G. Wodehouse a year later. This career did not last long because she could not refrain from criticizing bad drama and poor acting. Describing Katherine Hepburn's role in "The Lake," Dorothy made the immortal wisecrack, "She ran the whole gamut of emotions from A to B." Parker is also credited with having originated the term "wisecracking."

About a play titled "House Beautiful" Dorothy made the two-word review "play lousy." We hear an echo in her reaction to "Winnie the Pooh." Turned off by author Milne's habit of addressing his audience as Gentle Reader and by his cutesy sentimentality, she wrote, "Gentle reader fwow up." It was a dfferent book about which she quipped, "This book should not be gently tossed aside. It should be thrown with great force."

There was a dark side to her humor, attributable to early death of her mother and father, shame that her father made his fortune via sweatshop labor, a dead stepmother, a brother who disappeared, an uncle who went down with the Titanic, troubled marriages and affairs. When told that taciturn president Calvin Coolidge had died, she said, "How could they tell?" Biographer John Keats quotes her remark about an abortion: "It serves me right for putting all my eggs in one bastard." When her second husband died of suicide involving a barbiturate overdose, a disliked, overly solicitous neighbor asked Parker if there was something she could do to console and assist her. "Get me a new husband," Dorothy said. The neighbor expressed horrified disbelief at the tasteless remark. Dorothy countered with, "Then run down to the corner and get me a ham and cheese on rye. And tell them to hold the mayo."

Death figured into much of her humor. She attempted suicide four times. In the 1937 poem "Resume" we find

Guns aren't lawful
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

On the subject of writing she humorously praised the well-known book by Strunk and White: "If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second-greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first-greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they're happy."

Dorothy Parker died of a heart attack in 1967 at age 73. She had suggested two possible epitaphs for her gravestone. One was "Excuse My Dust," the other, "This Is On Me."

You've got to love her.

Learn more about this author, Kerry Michael Wood.
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