Once upon a time, readers across the country opened the newspaper and laughed.
It was Erma Bombeck’s fault.
Bombeck, who lived in Paradise Valley, wrote a humor column about family from the mid-1960s to shortly before her death in 1996. She is the subject of Arizona Theatre Company’s “Erma Bombeck: At Wit’s End,” which opens in previews Saturday, Oct. 20.
She would drop such pearls as “Housework, if you do it right, will kill you.” And “Never accept a drink from a urologist.” Or “Never lend your car to anyone to whom you have given birth.”
She was syndicated in 900 newspapers around the country, and her books became bestsellers.
But back in the column’s heyday, her daughter, Betsy Bombeck, then a teen, thought she was just occasionally funny.
“There was a lot of laughter in our house,” she recalled in a phone interview. “My father had a dry sense of humor, my mother was witty. But there’s the fact that she was my mother.”
Age has improved that, said Besty Bombeck.
“As I’ve grown older, and grown without her, I see the humor more,” she said.
Betsy and her siblings often inspired what her mother wrote. Bombeck recalls how her mother autographed one of her books for her brother: “If you see yourself in here, I have a lawyer.”
“She needed us,” Betsy Bombeck said. “She wouldn’t have been as funny without us.”
Playwrights Margaret and Allison Engel sought out Bombeck family members when they began to write the script for the play.
“Our family, including my dad, met with them and we had some input as to what we would like to see,” Bombeck said.
In addition to being a bestselling author and a must-read columnist, Erma Bombeck was a vocal supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment. That was an important part of her life, her daughter said.
The family wanted to be sure the play would portray Erma Bombeck fully.
And Betsy Bombeck says it has.
“I think it’s an important play,” she said. “It lets people know who she was, it brings up the political stuff she was involved in, and I think it’s funny.”
