I first saw Tehran as a very, very young child, less than one second old, in fact. Which is a drawn-out way of saying: I was born there. I don’t remember much because, like most babies, I was selfish and stupid and probably crying because one of my boundless needs was not being met exactly when I demanded it. I was born on Ashura, which is the day Shiite Muslims mourn the death of one of their prophets, Hussein. While I was crying in the hospital because I was being slapped on the ass, in the streets of Tehran people were crying because their prophet had been martyred years before. A day of crying—an inauspicious moment for the birth of a comedian.
My earliest memories as a kid in Tehran were of soccer, orange soda, Mohammad Ali, Zorro, Spider-Man, and chocolates. Yes, my experiences were very similar to those of a kid growing up in America. Even back then, America had done a tremendous job of exporting its culture abroad. We did not have the Iranian equivalent to Spider-Man or Superman or any other superhero, so I drank up Western culture wherever I found it. In Iran, that drink came in the color orange. Most people who find out I am originally from Iran think I grew up in a desert, riding camels and living near an oil well.
“Did you guys have camel traffic jams in the old country?”
“No,” I’d say, “we didn’t ride camels. And even if we did, there would be no camel traffic jams because there are no camel lanes. You just go around the guy on the slower camel.”
“Well, you sure seem to know a lot about camels. There’s no shame in admitting that you rode them as a kid back in Iran. Did you name your camels? In America, we sometimes name our cars.”
“We didn’t have camels!”
“Wow, someone’s sensitive. Fine, you’ve never ridden a camel. Calm down.”
“Okay, fine. I lied. I did ride a camel once. But that was at Marine World Africa USA! In Vallejo, California. USA! And his name was Bob.”
The main difference between Iran and America, transportationally speaking, is that in the United States people actually follow traffic laws. When a car misses an exit, the motorist simply drives to the next exit, turns around and tries again. In Tehran when someone misses an exit, he puts the car in reverse right there on the freeway and goes backward. There is nothing scarier than being in the backseat of a car on a freeway and having the driver look at you as he drives in the wrong direction. All you hear are cars honking, drivers cussing, camels scurrying into the passing lane. You don’t dare turn around to see what’s speeding toward you, typically in the form of impending death moving at sixty-five miles an hour. Somehow, though, these eccentric drivers manage to zigzag their way back to the missed exit and arrive safely at the proper destination. This has happened to me a few times in the Middle East, and I’ve learned that if you don’t look back and just do some breathing exercises, you get through it fine. Just repeat this mantra: “I refuse to die going in reverse. I refuse to die going in reverse. I refuse to die . . .”
I don’t know why people in the Middle East have no regard for traffic laws. However, I have a theory as to why New York City cabbies are notorious for being bad drivers. It’s simple—the worst drivers from countries in the Middle East, Africa, and South America come to New York and get jobs as cab drivers. They are coming from places where going in reverse on the freeway is totally acceptable. When they arrive in New York, they implement this style of driving in city streets. New York cab driving is like the Indy 500 of bad drivers from around the world. The best of the best go there to compete. Or rather the worst of the worst, I suppose, depending on if you’re the poor sap in the backseat.
My Dad, the Electricity Mogul
While I was enjoying my American-influenced youth, suddenly protests began in the streets of my hometown in 1978. I didn’t know what all the fuss was about. I was only six years old and too busy drinking orange soda to care. A year earlier, U.S. president Jimmy Carter had visited Tehran and made a famous speech where he called Iran an “island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world.” One year later, Iran was in turmoil. It’s safe to say Jimmy wasn’t much of a fortune-teller. More of a misfortune teller.
Before I left for America, we would hear protests in the streets and have to observe a curfew every night. I remember being a kid and having to go into the basement a few times when the protests and gunfire got close to our house. I really didn’t know what was happening. Mostly, I thought it was pretty cool to be with my family in the basement hiding from danger. I felt like Batman in the Batcave! (Yes, we had Batman in Iran, too. And no, he didn’t ride a camel.)
My first six years in Iran were good ones. We lived on the same property as my grandmother, who would spoil my sister and me with gifts and sweets. My father made lots of money owning an electric company, so he had built a compound with two houses—one for us and one for my grandmother. Not an Osama bin Laden–like compound where we were hiding in plain sight by wearing white cowboy hats, but more of a benevolent compound. Do those exist? Why is it always bad guys who have compounds? We had a pool and a big grassy area where my cousins and I would play. I never really understood how my father came to own the electric company. I always thought I was the only one who never knew what his dad did until later in life I asked other people what their dads did. It’s amazing how many people really don’t know. I’m not sure if that’s a reflection of the generation I grew up in or if it’s an immigrant thing, but somehow dads didn’t do a good job of giving their kids the full story.
“Dad, what do you do?”
“Make money.”
“How?”
“Vork.”
“What kind of work?”
“Vork that makes money. Eh-stop asking qvestions and eat deh food I paid for.”
I was able to piece together stories to discover that my father had come from Tabriz, a city in the north of Iran, and moved to Tehran as a young man. He was employed at an electric company and slowly worked his way up until he was the boss. When the shah nationalized electricity in the 1950s and 1960s, his regime contracted out the work to a few companies, and one of those was my father’s. I say 1950s or 1960s because my dad was never good at giving me the timeline of when anything happened.
“Hey Dad, when was I born?”
“Sometime in deh seventies.”
“Early or late seventies?”
“Vhat am I, an accountant? You vere born. Be happy you’re here.”
My dad’s company would get contracts to do the lighting for roads and buildings all over Iran. This helped him build considerable wealth and eventually become very powerful. When I describe my dad, I often reference Don Corleone from The Godfather. My dad was a rich, well-connected man; people would come to ask for favors and he would help them. As a kid I didn’t know any of that. I only knew that whenever I needed money I would ask and he would hand me twenty- or hundred-dollar bills. This was where his indifference toward numbers worked in my favor.
“Hey Dad, can I get some cash?”
“How much do you need?”
“I don’t know. Five, ten, a hundred.”
“I’m no accountant. Take vhat you need. Give me back deh rest.”
I was too young to ask why this man always had so much cash around. Was he a drug dealer? A stripper? An electric company CEO? He sure as hell was no accountant—he made that clear.
Escaping Revolution in First Class
I left Iran at age six for New York City, where my dad was on business. He was staying at the Plaza Hotel in a suite when my mother, my sister Mariam, and I joined him. We thought we would only be there for two weeks during our winter break, enough time to let the protests in Iran settle, but things never cooled down. We even left my baby brother, Kashi, back home and had to get him out later as things got worse. We packed for two weeks. We stayed for thirty years.
My first few months in America, my father would take business calls in the hotel room, forcing us to go shopping at FAO Schwarz or Macy’s. One of my earliest purchases was an orange and white Snoopy winter set—a hat, scarf, and gloves. (I’m not joking. We Iranian children were OBSESSED with orange soda. The color orange became my favorite color. Anything I found with orange in it was something I loved.) I would spend the days running around Manhattan in my orange regalia and the nights going to dinners with my family ordering strawberries and whipped cream for dessert. I didn’t know the details of the revolution taking place back in Iran, but it was working out fine for me. After all, I had escaped the revolution aboard a Pan Am flight, first class no less. In contrast, many of my friends had to escape through Pakistan or Afghanistan, spending years living a transient lifestyle while waiting for a visa to come to the West. Often when I hear these stories I feel guilty, so I try to compensate.
“It was so tough living across the street from FAO Schwarz when I first moved to America. Just to get to the toys I had to take the elevator down, wait for the light to turn green, and then cross traffic. And my dad typically gave me hundred-dollar bills so I was always having to make change. You know how hard that can be on an immigrant who barely knows how to do math in English?”
Iranians are like Lebanese or Cubans in that we are spread all around the world. Yes, there are millions of Iranians in Iran, but there is also a huge diaspora. When you come from a country that’s had a revolution, or a monthly natural disaster, or simply a great deal of strife, it’s good for your touring career because you are guaranteed to find people from your country wherever you go. If you’re Iranian or Lebanese or Cuban, I advise you to pick up a guitar and learn to sing. Your audience is waiting for you.
I’ve done shows in Sweden, Norway, Australia, Dubai, Beirut, Canada, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and even Kansas City. There’s always at least one Iranian in every audience. How an Iranian ends up in Kansas City, I’ll never know. Did he get off on the wrong flight? Was he kidnapped? What the hell is he doing in Kansas City? Nine times out of ten it has to do with college. Iranians are big on education, and since the 1950s, they would send their kids abroad to study. Some of the kids made it home to Iran. The unfortunate ones were stranded in Kansas City.
Happy New . . . WHAT? SPEAK UP!
Living in a diaspora has its pluses and minuses. One of the biggest minuses as a kid was that every Persian New Year we would have to call our relatives around the world and wish them a happy New Year. This seems like a simple enough task, but there’s a catch. The Persian New Year is not like the Western New Year. In the West, it happens at midnight in each time zone around the world. So come midnight you scream, “Happy New Year!” to the people at your party, you kiss the person next to you, and then you post a message on Facebook and go to sleep. The Persian New Year is based on the Zoroastrian calendar and indicates the first moment of spring. So the moment occurs at the same time all around the world. Meaning it could occur at 3:26 p.m. in Iran, which would be 3:56 a.m. in California. I know this math seems a bit off, but Tehran is actually eleven and a half hours ahead of California. I don’t know how they were able to split time zones into thirty-minute intervals, or why they would do such a thing. It’s tough enough doing the math when you travel and have to convert money from dollars to Iranian rials. Whenever I travel anywhere outside the United States, I’m very confused for the entire first week. You give someone dollar bills and they give you what feels like Monopoly money. And the conversion is never basic math like 1:5 or 1:10. It’s always 1:3.8675309. When dealing with Iran, you not only have to worry about converting the money, you also have to convert the time into thirty-minute intervals.
Back to the Persian New Year. Most normal people would let the family sleep and wake up the next morning to make their phone calls. Iranians are not normal. It is customary for younger family members to call older family members. So my dad would be up at 3:56 a.m. calling Iran and yelling into the phone. That’s one thing I’ve never understood. Technology has made so much progress, but anytime you make a call to Iran, it feels like you’re calling a village that just installed its first phone booth that week. To this day you must yell. Then there’s a pause as your voice travels. Then you hear an echo of your voice. Then the person on the other end answers. After a few sentences you don’t know if you’re talking to yourself or to someone else. I assume part of the problem might be that someone from the government is listening to your call so maybe the third line is what’s causing the difficulty in communication. I used to think that it was only Iran listening in on the calls, but I guess nowadays the United States might be listening, too. So that’s four lines, which would further explain the bad quality and the need to shout.
Growing up, it was perfectly normal to wake up at four in the morning to your father shouting at relatives on the other side of the world. You would think he was mad at them, when in fact he was offering good wishes.
“I VISH YOU A GREAT NEW YEAR! VHAT? IIII VIIIIISH YOUUUUUUU A GREEEEAAAT NEW YEAAAAR! VHY ARE YOU REPEATING EVERYTING I’M SAYING? IS DAT ME TALKING OR YOU? I’M NOT YELLING! I SAID! I VISH YOU . . .”
This would go on for hours as we had to call relatives in Iran, Sweden, Kansas City—wherever the hell they were living. It was hard enough trying to sleep through this at four in the morning, but then my parents would wake us up to wish our relatives a happy New Year.
“HI! IT’S MAZ! MAZ! YOUR GRANDSON! WHY ARE YOU REPEATING EVERYTHING I SAY? IS IT MY TURN TO SHOUT OR YOURS?”
Living in the United States, phone calls were my main source of contact with Iran. I would get on the line with relatives and tell them how much I missed them. As I got older, it occurred to me I really didn’t know them that well; it was just habit to say I missed them. Besides, it wouldn’t have been too nice to tell the truth.
“HI. IT’S MAZ. I DON’T WANT TO BE ON THIS CALL. I BARELY KNOW YOU. IT’S BEEN YEARS SINCE I’VE SEEN YOUR FACE. I JUST REMEMBER YOU USED TO GIVE ME MONEY FOR CANDY. DON’T GET ME WRONG, I APPRECIATED THAT, BUT I HONESTLY DON’T KNOW YOU THAT WELL AND MY DAD IS JUST MAKING ME TALK TO YOU AND TELL YOU I MISS YOU. WHY ARE YOU REPEATING EVERYTHING I SAY? I JUST WANT TO GO BACK TO BED. JUST HANG UP. HANG UP!”
Persian Eyes, They’re Watching You
I did not return to Tehran until 1999. My father traveled there in the early 1990s to work on some real estate deals and earn back some money he had lost while living in the United States. In the ten years he was in America, he had lost much of his fortune in bad real estate ventures. It was strange seeing Don Corleone sitting around our condominium in Los Angeles, where we moved in 1990, waiting for the phone to ring, just staring at the wall very anxiously. I was always expecting him to pull me aside and whisper, “I should’ve known it was Barzini all along!”
Fortunately, he never went movie crazy. In Iran, if you lived rich, chances were that you would die rich. It was hard for someone on top to lose it all. In the United States, it was not the same. If you weren’t careful with your money you could lose it very easily. And my father was not the type to put money into a 401(k) or a trust fund for the future. He was a self-made millionaire who thought he could never lose, but he had to move back to Tehran to get his business going again.
It wasn’t until 1999 that my two brothers, sister, and I were able to get our papers in order to visit him. We had to arrange for visas that would allow us to come and go temporarily without having to serve in the military. Iran considers you a citizen of Iran even if you have become a citizen of another country, and they have mandatory military service for all boys of a certain age. So in order to visit we had to make sure our papers were cleared and we could enter the country without having to do military service.
I had no interest in becoming Jihad Joe. First of all, I am not into fighting for any military. The only one I could ever see myself joining would be Old Navy, and that’s just because their sweatpants are comfy. Second, I grew up in America. Sure I spoke Farsi, but my reading and writing of the language was and is at the first grade level. I don’t know what kind of a soldier I’d make if I couldn’t even read the signs. “Mines to the left, water fountain to the right”—such a sign could result in very serious repercussions for me. I don’t know how you spell “mines” nor “water fountain.” I would hate to leave this world trying to drink water out of an improvised explosive device. Also, what would happen if one of the commanders wanted us to chant, “We hate America! Death to America!” Out of sincerity I would have to raise my hands and offer my opinion. “Sir, not all Americans are bad. You’re right—some of them are real bastards. Still, I don’t wish death upon anyone. Can we just say, ‘Bad karma to all bad Americans’? That’s more my style.”
Visiting Iran made me realize that I wasn’t as Iranian as I thought I was. In the United States, I didn’t feel American enough, and in Iran I didn’t feel Iranian enough. Somehow when strangers would see me in the streets they would know instantly that I had come from America.
“How’s life in the United States?”
“How do you know I live there?”
“You’re wearing Levi’s five-o-one jeans. We don’t have those here.”
“We have the five-o-twos. The five-o-ones are so 1998.”
Being in Iran after twenty years was bittersweet. On the one hand, it was great to see Tehran and its beauty. It’s a bustling city surrounded by the Alborz Mountains. It could really be a beautiful place were it not for the overpopulation and pollution. Obviously, under the current regime there’s also a lack of basic freedoms. There’s a lot of fear instilled in you, and you feel like you’re being watched even when you’re not. This made me very paranoid and forced me to walk around the streets with my hands up, constantly saying, “I didn’t do it! Whatever you’re thinking, I did not do it!” By the end of the second week I didn’t trust anybody. My dad would come by my room at the end of the night.
“Goodnight, Son.”
“Goodnight? What, exactly, do you mean by ‘goodnight’?”
“Um . . . just goodnight?”
“Or maybe you mean I should go to sleep so you can look in my diary to see if I’ve written anything against the regime.”
“Son, I don’t vork for the regime.”
“Sure you don’t, Dad. Sure you don’t.”
When I went to visit it was the month of Ramadan, so we were supposed to fast during the daytime. None of my siblings or I are religious, so we weren’t fasting. The only problem was that when we were out, we didn’t want to be caught sneaking food. We would wait until we were in the car, and my dad would pass back cookies, which we would hide in our fists and eat surreptitiously, trying to look inconspicuous. I felt like an idiot, a grown man sneaking bites of lemon cookie with a vanilla cream center. They were delicious—delicious and blasphemous at the same time. I wonder what kind of deity cares if you have a cookie during holy daylight. Is there such a god? It’s a shame how people can take a religious message and turn it into something so silly. I shouldn’t have to feel guilty eating a cookie. Cookies are good whether you’re Muslim, Jewish, or Christian. The only people who hate cookies are vegans! And even they have nondairy cookies.
Two weeks in Tehran during Ramadan was like being in junior high all over again. We were nervous eating our cookies during the day. We were nervous walking with our sister in the streets for fear that someone would stop us and ask about our relationship with her. In Iran, men are only supposed to be walking with a woman if they are engaged to her, or she is their mother, wife, or sister. The morality police could stop you and inquire as to your relationship to the girl you’re walking with, and if they don’t like your answer, they could throw you in jail. A lot of people who live in Tehran don’t seem to fear this, but when you’re visiting you’re on high alert and freaked the hell out most of the time. I was constantly telling my sister to stay five steps behind. Then I realized this looked misogynistic, so I told her to stay five steps ahead. Which made it look like I was stalking her. We eventually settled on walking on opposite sides of the street, and I would occasionally shout chauvinistic barbs at her, just to fit in.
Of greater concern, alcohol is not allowed in Iran, although a lot of people drink it. The type that is consumed is either homemade or purchased from the Armenian black market. I did not dare drink in public, but the locals didn’t seem to care. We went to dinner one night with an uncle who snuck in a flask. He told us all to order Cokes and then proceeded to spike our drinks. (They weren’t actually Cokes, since Iran wouldn’t import American products like Coca-Cola because of sanctions. It was a knockoff whose name I forget, but we’ll call it Mullah-Cola.) Anyway, we were freaking out for fear we would get caught, but he was totally blasé. This was another stupid policy in Iran, where everyone knew people were breaking the law, but they did not want to admit it. If it weren’t for the damn law I wouldn’t even want a drink. But since my sixty-year-old uncle had gone to such lengths to sneak it in, I indulged.
Eight Minute Keb-Abs
The last time I was in Iran, my father took me to a gym. When I say gym, I mean sauna. And when I say sauna, I mean a place where men go to relax and pretend they are exercising. You can see the difference in cultures between the Middle East and the West when you go to exercise in these countries. In California, a gym is a place with treadmills and elliptical machines, free weights and dumbbells, men and women and mirrors everywhere. In Iran, a gym has one stationary bike, four dumbbells, an enormous sauna and steam room, and men only—no women allowed. There are gyms for women, too, but I would have had to dress in drag to get into those.
It was amazing how little thought was given to the actual exercise room at the gym and what detail had gone into the sauna area. There was a sauna, a steam room, a cold bath, a hot bath, and even a restaurant to eat rice and kebab after you’ve steamed. “Exercisers” go in, sweat out the pounds, then come out and put them right back on. Thankfully, I was there during Ramadan, so the restaurant was closed. Besides, I had eaten so many contraband cookies, I wouldn’t have been able to stomach a post-workout kebab.
Men go to these places to spend the day together and get away from their families. They talk politics, sports, and finance and leave feeling like they’ve gotten an actual workout when in reality the only reason they sweat is because it’s so hot. I was shocked at how openly these guys were talking politics and criticizing the leadership. People had gotten to a point where they didn’t give a crap. And they knew so much detail about everyone in the regime. I think it’s a cultural thing, but Iranians will know every nuance about a person and his background. Whereas in America you work with a guy for ten years and never know his last name.
“Hey Mike! How’s the wife and kids? You don’t have a wife and kids? Your name is Ted? Are you sure?”
In Iran people know first names, last names, family history, what car you drive, net worth, where you went to school, why you went to school, whom you slept with at school, who wouldn’t sleep with you at school, on and on. I don’t know why Iranians know so many details about each other, but I’m guessing it’s in case they want to set you up to marry their daughter. It’s like buying a new car. They do all the research so they can compare and contrast. Why set your daughter up with a Toyota when she could be with a BMW?
That trip to see my dad was the last time I visited Iran, which is a shame. I’ve done stand-up all over the Middle East, but I have never done it in my birth country. It is a dream of mine to one day be able to perform there. For now, though, I don’t know if the current regime would welcome me because I’ve made fun of them in my stand-up. I’m guessing they would have me begin my show with a confession that I am a puppet for the Great Satan and close by denouncing Jerry Seinfeld. “He is a Jew. And the only thing worse than a Jew is a gay. While we’re at it, Ellen DeGeneres, go to hell!”
As an Iranian-American stand-up comedian, it is almost impossible not to talk about Iran in your act. That’s because Iran is always in the news in the United States. Even when something happens that has nothing to do with Iran, Iran will find a way to work itself into the discussion. There was a revolution in Egypt in 2011, and the first thing Iran did was send ships into the Suez Canal. They weren’t dropping anything off or picking anything up. They just made the trip to indicate that under the new Egyptian leadership, they would be treated as closer allies. Either way, the revolution was about Egypt, but Iran got its name into the papers. The Iranian regime must have the same publicist as the Kardashians.
Being unable to avoid talking about Iran makes it difficult to go back and visit. I do one joke in which I claim that perhaps the leadership in Iran is on drugs. That would explain why they talk so much shit to America—a country with the most powerful military in the world. The fact is that opium usage is high in Iran, so it would make sense that some of these leaders could actually be on drugs. We always assume that leaders of a country have their act together. But anyone who witnessed Muammar Gaddafi’s last days in power in Libya understands that a lot of these guys are out of their minds. Gaddafi was rambling on like a meth head. I’m convinced that some leaders in Iran are just as bad. And the fact that I just wrote that line means I won’t be performing stand-up in Iran anytime soon. I’m not sure if I’m officially banned in Iran, but if I ever do a show out there I plan to call it “Banned in Iran?” and just perform until they arrest me. At that point the tour will change its name to “Banned in Iran!” Exclamation, end of paragraph, end of tour.
In 2009, there were protests in the streets of Tehran after the presidential elections. Many accused the regime of rigging the elections and giving President Ahmadinejad a wide victory when it was expected to be a close race. In some provinces, Ahmadinejad got more than 100 percent of the votes. Apparently some people voted in more than one province. The whole thing reeked of voter fraud. The protests became known as the Green Movement. Iranians were proud to see the peaceful protests, and for once it was okay to say you were Iranian in America. Up until then, most Iranians preferred to say they were Persian because it sounded nicer and friendlier. It distanced you from the current regime, and also most Americans didn’t even know what you were talking about. “You’re Parisian? I love french fries!”
I remember being in Chicago for the Just for Laughs comedy festival and a big announcement came from the Supreme Leader of Iran claiming that if people continued to protest, whatever happened to them would be out of his hands. It was basically a threat that the authorities would be allowed to punish the protesters any way they saw fit. That really pissed me off. How dare he make such a declaration against his own people? And what the hell is a Supreme Leader anyway? What is this, Star Wars? I’m willing to accept a supreme burrito, but a Supreme Leader? Give me a break!
After the announcement, the protests went south as the regime cracked down and turned to violence to stop the movement. People were shot and many died in pursuit of democracy. I observed the news daily, like a soap opera I couldn’t take my eyes off—a violent, bloody, real-life Dallas. I would go to bed late at night after reading as much as I could about the movement online, and wake up the next morning to CNN to see if any progress had been made. One clip that kept playing on the news was of a young woman, Neda Agha-Soltan, dying after being shot by the authorities. It was a poignant and sad scene to watch. I decided I would go to Iran and join the protesters in the streets to fight for our freedoms. No, I didn’t really do that. I’m a comedian. Not a lunatic. And I have no experience overthrowing regimes. What I do have, however, is a monthly newsletter, which had until then been intended to inform people about my upcoming shows.
The newsletter went out to thousands of people and usually elicited only a few responses. This time, I dedicated the whole thing to my support of the Green Movement and asked others to please support it any way they could. I hit send and went to sleep, having done my part to support Democracy in the Middle East. The next morning I awoke to hundreds of responses. Most expressed their support. However, I also got some people challenging me. One e-mail came from a woman in Greece. How she got on my e-mail list I have no idea. She basically told me that if the people of Iran had voted for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, then who was I to question it. She said that this was all a ploy by the West to overthrow the regime and that I should mind my own business.
This upset me—not just because she claimed it was none of my business, but that someone had the gall to question the Supreme Word of my newsletter. This led to an e-mail exchange that consumed hours of my life—hours that I could have used to write jokes about Ahmadinejad! After several exchanges I thought, What the hell am I doing? I’m debating some chick in Greece who has no influence over any of this. Why do I care what she thinks? It took a lot for me to stop myself from responding to her last e-mail. What can I say—I’m a man, I need to get in the last word. I finally let it go, but she reached out to me one more time to provoke me back into the debate. I ignored it. I’m not sure what happened to that Greek lady, but if she happens to be reading this book, please know that you were wrong and that I was right. And now it’s in print, with a title and fonts and on a bookshelf and everything, so you can’t do anything about it unless you write your own book. In your face, Greek lady!