"Anyone can get old. All you have to do is live long enough."

I confess I've long nurtured a grudge: No offense to Elvis, whose pre-GI stuff I've always admired, but his death by excess, 29 years and 3 days ago, obliterated the possibility of proper notice or remembrance for Groucho Marx's death 29 years ago today.

True story:

You probably remember the old Mark Twain joke: "When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned."

I vividly remember a day one summer afternoon when I was home from college. I was on the couch watching a Marx Brothers movie--don't remember now which one, but it was probably either "Duck Soup" or "Animal Crackers." My dad walked into the family room, watched the TV for a few moments, frowned thoughtfully like someone converting Fahrenheit to Centigrade in his head, watched a few more moments . . . and then did the next minute or so of dialogue along with them, word for word.

Talk about an invitation to rethink your assumptions.

During the Depression, he worked as a projectionist in a movie theater. Lord only knows how many times he watched those movies from the projection booth. And, as I mentioned once, he had a ferocious memory for the McGuffy Reader-type literature he was drilled on in school as a boy; but only that afternoon did I get my first clue that his repertoire extended to Marx Brothers shtick. As I watched more of their movies over time, I discovered more material that my dad had lifted.

What can I say? I had always just figured these were peculiar things my dad used to say. Who knew he was, even then, still drilling me on the classics? For example:

"We must remember that art is art. Well, on the other hand water is water isn't it? And east is east and west is west. And if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce, they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does."

Think about it: When your dad says something like "if you stew it like applesauce, it takes more like prunes than rhubarb does," it's just your dad showing his legendarily odd sense of humor. But when you realize it's a classic pop culture allusion--no, more, it's a postmodern interplay of Groucho-as-text with Father-as-text . . . well, that's a whole 'nother story, isn't it?

Tucked away a drawer I still have a little Betty Boop flip-book from his projectionist days, a give-away to the movie theater from some traveling salesman of promotional doo-dads.