One of longtime “Tonight Show” host Johnny Carson’s favorite openings was the “How hot was it?” monologue.
Sometimes when he opened with that question the audience would shout it out together: “How hot was it?”
“It was so hot,” he would answer, “I saw the Devil in Walmart buying an air conditioner.”
These were jokes Johnny’s writers were submitting when it was a mere 90 degrees in Burbank, where there was no humidity, and almost everyone had a pool of some size.
How hot is hot, and what kind of hot, and where? It depends, I think, on where you came into the world and grew up. Fairbanks, Alaska? Baton Rouge, Louisiana? Anyone, as myself, born in St. Louis and raised there right on the edge of the Mississippi River knows what hot is.
Summer there arrived on May 1 and my friends and I spent the season in T-shirts and shorts, running barefoot from lawn to lawn, avoiding the torrid asphalt streets, as the temperature daily rose to 90, then 93 and 98, with stifling Mississippi Valley humidity, broken almost weekly by frightening thunder storms.
In America’s Midwest, as any native can tell you, summer, like a thirsty lover, drifted happily into the waiting arms of Lady September, and then magically there was sweet October with its Halloween kids on the street and cooler breezes at bedtime.
The elms on our street would, like dancers in a Broadway chorus line, fade to amber and start dropping their leaves, just in time for autumn’s winds to blow down along the street, making that musical scraping sound that lulled me to sleep.
Awakened by North Korea’s dance of death, the United States Air Force sent me to college for nine months in Louisiana, where spring, summer and autumn are indistinguishable. “How hot was that?” “It was so hot the gators swam to Miami.”
I was soon sent to basic training in San Antonio, Texas, in mid June. It was hot. How hot was it?
It was so hot that the South Dakota, Minnesota and Maine boys feared that they had died and gone to Hell. Not kidding.
After nights when the temperatures stood at attention at 98, we awoke to 110 temperatures. “How hot was that?”
“It was so hot that the heat at the Alamo killed more men than General Santa Ana.”
The Yankees dropped around me, as the drill sergeants mumbled the last rites to these babies while I, raised in sweat, still stood at attention.
St. Louis’ summers don’t raise no sissies.
As I write this evening, the nightly news show us a world gone mad with heat and fires wiping out forests. We see all the summer scenes of America’s major cities clouded with smoke and baked in furnace heat, with presidential candidates in tri-colored cowboy hats foaming at the mouth in record numbers.
Saddened to see the great cities of Europe stunned by the same numbers, I will, as usual this summer, abandon my plans to sip martinis in Paris and visit the pope at the Vatican, where I’m asked, “How hot was it?”
“It was so hot that the coins in the Trevi fountain were too hot to steal.” Laughter. Blackout.
J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer.
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