Quinn Cummings, you rock!

Lately I have been seeking the funny.  Pinterest is fertile ground for this.  I have a CD of Garrison Keillor’s humor from Prairie Home Companion, called Pretty Good Jokes, which is excellent.  James Thurber can make me laugh from the grave (or wherever clever, funny people go).  And so when I saw that my boss gave the big thumbs up to a book titled Notes from the Underwire: Adventures from My Awkward and Funny Life, I had to have it.  Plus the author’s name was kind of familiar:  Quinn Cummings.

Quinn is awkward.  And lovely.  And she used to be an actor.  A child actor.  In fact, she was the daughter in one of my favorite movies, The Good-bye Girl, starring Marsha Mason and a ridiculously youthful Richard Dreyfuss.

Now Quinn is a mom and also an author.  Her book is very, very funny.  Not in a joke-telling way, but in that kind of female humor way that reveals a lot about herself and her family.  For example, Quinn is evidently quite a dork.  She has a great vocabulary, she tells an awesome story, but she has a way of causing mayhem – to herself and others – wherever she goes.  Fortunately this just makes more fodder for the book.

Also pretty well-revealed is daughter Alice.  Alice is adorable.  She’s also a smelly soap-stealing terror, prone to repeating whatever she hears to the exact person she shouldn’t repeat it to.  Quinn’s beloved is just known as Consort.  I really like what I hear of Consort, and would like to see a photo.

At any rate, read the book.  USA Today said Quinn is “Erma Bombeck with an edge.”   That assumes A) you know Erma Bombeck (and I do) and B) you don’t think Erma had an edge (she definitely did).   Do you need to be a mom to read the book?  Nope.  But moms’ll love it.

A special gift for those who are trying to place Quinn and keep coming up with the wrong child actress.  Here you go.  Adorkable, right?