My good wife reminded me Friday that I had met and interviewed Joan Rivers in her in her dressing room at the Town and Country Dinner Theater in Easr Rochester many years ago — she (Joan Rivers) was the comedienne/chanteuse who died last week. and I had completely forgotten about it.

I forgot many (most) of the interviews I conducted back then, and if it hadn’t been for my beloved wife’s reminders, I would remember none of them.

“Don’t you recall, you were absolutely amazed," she reminded me, “at how brilliant she was; how much she knew — about everything?”

I knew Joan Rivers (real name Joan Alexandra Molinsky) had graduated from Barnard College with a Bachelor’s Degree in English literature and anthropology in 1954, and I assumed that she had lived and grown up in Latin America.

This was because she knew that Mexican, Peruvian, and Columbian women — in fact, ALL South American women — preferred male fedora-like hats over all others!

And she also knew South Americans — particularly Peruvians — liked to dig holes in the earth at least 5 ½ or six feet deep, two and a ½ feet wide, and about five or six feet long.

This was for cars to be driven upon for muffler replacement or oil changes (or both, only $3.75, tax incl.). This practice was outlawed once Firestone, DualTires, Discount Tire and NTB were in Lima.

Perhaps the muffler gave the gals ‘rust-dust’, giving their normally black, ebony-hued, brilliant hair a reddish sheen they felt only a fedora could hide.

Anyway, the fashion remains to this day!

And Joan knew all about it. “There are sun hats, and ‘bowlers’, classics, for sports, for ‘dating’, for ‘true romance’. etc.,” she told me. They are called “snoozes” in Mexican, according to Joan, and the dugouts in Peru are called “gravitas”.

I must have learned this from interviewing Joan Rivers at the Town and Country Dinner Theater in East Rochester during her engagement there in 1977.

She said she was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY and hoped over the next 70.3 years never to stray far.

I hadn’t the faintest idea what she meant by that at the time, but I knew I would never forget when she uttered it (even though I did).

Copyright©2014 by Robert A. Mills, all rights reserved, may not be published, nor re-written nor broadcast without the author’s permission