Erma in Bomburbia

COVER STORY

For a survivor of housework and motherhood, laughter is still the best revenge

Notice: Car-pool moms entered in the U-Haul Mother-of-the-Year brake-off should complete the following literary quiz. Answers must be written in eyebrow pencil, and nuttiness counts,

1) For ten points, and a year's supply of mental floss, what American philosopher, whose latest book has been ensconced on the New York Times best seller list for 40 weeks, described the stance of a pregnant woman as "like a kangaroo wearing Earth Shoes"?

2) Who first defined the contribution of American mothers to the psychological well-being of their children as "guilt: the gift that keeps on giving"?

3) From whom did Tocqueville, while touring American suburbs, steal his famous one-liner that "the grass is always greener over the septic tank"? Hint: Henry David Thoreau is a good guess, but wrong.

4) What noted existentialist and television celebrity, when asked in supermarket parking lots whether she is the legendary Erma Bombeck, blushes prettily, lowers her gaze and says, "No, I'm Ann-Margret, but thank you anyway "?

"I'll be honest," says Bombeck (for it is indeed she, the syndicated star humorist of 900 papers in the U.S. and Canada, and the baggy-toreador-pants clown of ABC'S Good Morning America), "when I started, I thought I was squirrelly. I thought it was just me. After the first columns, everyone on the block confessed it was them too." Those early columns, written in Centerville, Ohio, back in the early '60s, were not quite Corinthian, but they sure were Ermaic. Their message was that housework, if it is done right, can kill you. It was that the women who kept house in the happy hunting ground called suburbia were so lonely that they held meaningful conversations with their tropical fish. It was that "you become about as exciting as your food blender. The kids come in, look you in the eye, and ask you if anybody's home."

The message has not changed in substance, although many of the women she wrote about 20 years ago have gone on to divorces, master's degrees and careers, and Bombeck and her husband are now the wealthy proprietors not of an $18,000 tract house near Dayton but of a lavish hacienda on a hilltop near Phoenix. "Women around the world are coming to the point where they are looking at their domestic situations and saying, 'My God, I'm going crazy, it's climbing-the-wall time,' " says Bombeck. She is 57 now ("somewhere between estrogen and death," she mutters); her three children are grown and flown, and the elegant white walls of her fine house do not have crayon marks or grape jelly on them. But motherhood is a sentence without parole—have some guilt with your chicken soup; eat, eat!—and Bombeck and her fans have no trouble understanding each other. "I could move up to Alaska," she says, "where the nearest neighbor is 300 miles away, get there by dog sled, walk into the cabin, pour a cup of coffee and then hear her say, 'These kids are driving me crazy.' "

Dropping in is what Bombeck does. Three times a week in the newspapers, and twice more on television, she plays the nation's dingbatty neighbor, who comes in the back door without knocking and

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