Anything for a Laugh

The first time I remember laughing with my big sister I was, well I was too young to reasonably remember, yet I do. I can recall the moment as well as what I had for breakfast yesterday. I couldn’t have been more than two years old. I slept in a crib in the corner of the first room that we shared. I remember standing up holding on to the side of my crib while Andrea jumped on the bed in front of me. She didn’t just jump; she danced, twirled, flipped and laughed. Of course the purpose was to entertain me, and that she did. She has never, in thirty-five years, stopped entertaining me. That was the first time we laughed together. It seems as though laughing together was to be our destiny. Maybe that is why I remember a moment in time so clearly that happened so very long ago.
Few people on this earth can make me laugh out loud. In fact, I can count them on one hand. Andrea tops the list. She makes me laugh with abandon – snorting, pee on myself, out loud, spew my drink from my nose, until my sides ache, belly laugh! We laugh about anything, everything! Few people think that we are as funny as we think we are, but frankly, that only makes us funnier. However out of whack this priority may seem, there are few things as important as someone who makes you laugh. No, actually what is more important is someone whom you can make laugh; someone who really thinks you are funny! That is what it is all about as far as I’m concerned. Maybe that is why my big sister and I get each other so well. I laugh at her, she laughs at me. It is as simple as that.
Our motto is “Anything for a Laugh!” That does mean anything! Some of our greatest laughs have been about entirely inappropriate things. Inappropriate things are the funniest. We have tried to feel bad about the things we laugh about, but it never seems to work. Life is just too funny.
In the midst of our thirty-five years of laughter, we have had to get through some very “unfunny” things together. Our Daddy suffered from heart disease most all of our lives. He died when I was seventeen. Andrea was twenty-four and the mother of his only grandchild. We also lost our brother. He was funnier than both of us. We still use many of his lines in our comedy routines. He was tragically killed, far too young.
Three women, my Mom, Andrea and I were left to pick up the pieces of our family. There have been many times that it would appear as though we had failed miserably. Each of us, like everyone else, have our own short-comings, weaknesses and vices. True of any family, I imagine, there have been many times that we can’t stand to be in the room together. We fight just as intensely as we laugh.
During a particularly hard time for my sister and me, a time that was void of the laughter that had come to characterize our relationship, someone said to me: “Do you have enough fun to counteract the misery?” This particular person understands mine and Andrea’s relationship and she knows that the answer to that question will always be an emphatic YES!!!!!! I’m certain that was the point she was trying to make on a day that my sister and I didn’t like each other very much.
There is nothing in the world that I could dish out, or that she could hand back, that would ever be powerful enough to silence the music of our laughter. Rarely a day passes that we don’t laugh together. In fact, it is essential to my well being to laugh with my big sister. No one gets my jokes quite like she does and even if they do, they never laugh as loud as she does. No one could possibly find her funnier than I do.
With the laughter, comes love beyond belief. Everyone that knows us understands this about Andrea and me, but only those who really know us well know just how amazingly funny we really are!!! In fact, we are thinking of taking it on the road.