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Q. Isn’t it a fact that all those magazine editors who claimed God was dead a few years back have mighty red faces now? Or is it? How old is God? —Vaughn G., Salt Lake City, Utah.
A. If anyone knew how old God was, He would not be God. It takes more than a too-hasty interment of the Deity, however, to make most editors blush.
Q. If I knew famous people, would they like me? —C.T., Rolla, Mo.
A. Tastes of the famous vary, but you may be sure they would like you well enough if there were something in it for them. It was the conclusion of Dr. Ray Wade Beamer of Cornell, who studied over 3,000 famous people, that they would have responded to his questionnaires if he had provided some not inconsiderable inducement.
Q. All those people on “Love Boat” —do they actually, you know, do it? —Jana Coaple, Scale, Ark.
A. Yes.
Q. Is it true that Swiss chocolatiers are seeking to buy up the Ronald Reagan family? Isn’t that why an exotic Kuwaiti-Swiss operator named Ackmed Arnaud or Antonin Kif is converting his gigantic oil holdings into cocoadollars? —Jerlyn Wheat, College Station, Pa.
A. You probably mean Habib Aucune, who heads an Iraqi-Haitian digital-terror group. No one can plumb the true motivations of such a man, when he is not dancing away the night … with exiled Princess Uami of Imau and their photographer-swain Hsiu, at La Lude.
Q. They do? All of them? On “Love Boat”? —Riley Coaple, Scale, Ark.
A. Yes.
Q. Now that Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II has given lover-boy Warren Beatty the air, who is he living it up with now? —Joe O., Duxbury, Mass.
A. Beatty, 44, has been seen most often in the company of President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines.
Q. Why aren’t I a supernova? —Mrs. H.I., Okla, Okla.
A. Probably due to a combination of factors. You prefer to be identified solely by your husband’s initials, you live in Okla, Okla., and you are the kind of person who has to ask the question above. And yet, you may have a certain spark.
Q. The Emperor Caligula. Was he what I think he was? —O.R., Bevel, Ind.
A. Gaius Caesar Germanicus, or Caligula, emperor of Rome during some of its most sensational years (37–41 A.D.), delighted in torture and made his horse a consul, but he was not bisexual. That was Tyrone Power.
Q. Tel Polymer, who burst onto the TV dramatic scene as Ramirez in “Tampa!” and founded a secret sect, has three 30-year-old sons, Ham, Juan and Uwe. Why won’t he marry their mother, songstress Ina Bord? —Lula W. Vickers, Lula, W.V.
A. Polymer, 56, is director of FIOD (Freedom Is Our Deal), no sect but an affinity group devoted to the problems of single parents who are being traced by other single parents. In 1963, Polymer was briefly jailed for contemptibility, but charges were waived following a public spectacle by his aunt and uncle, wealthy philanthropists Nana and Trimble Leouvis, who reared him first as a Libertarian and then as a Sikh. Polymer, five foot eleven, is no newcomer to drama.
Q. Why does no one in my entire tri-county area ever say “divine”? —Mrs. Dom N., Glen Falls, Wis.
A. It would seem forced.
Q. My husband R. worries that I am involved with a man named Rod who operates the All-U-Can-Crunch Perpetual Salad Bar near our home, but I’m not, but I did go in there for lunch Thursday and, you know, they have the dollar plate and the two-dollar plate and I always try to pile two dollars’ worth on the dollar plate because we are frugal and it was raining out Thursday and I had my husband’s umbrella hooked over my arm as I went down the line, and the big serving I had of Rod’s famous grape-and-carrot congealed salad that he is known for, that nobody else can make, so you know it had to come from Rod’s, slid off into my husband’s umbrella. Have you ever tried to get congealed salad out of the inside of an umbrella? But that is not my question. I got it all out, I thought, but then Saturday it rained again and my husband used the umbrella to go check the car windows and when he opened it a big dob of Rod’s famous salad fell out on his Windbreaker. And even though nothing whatever wrong had gone on, I lied. I said I lent the umbrella to our next-door neighbor Mrs. Showalter, who nobody would dream would be involved with Rod, poor thing. I wouldn’t have brought Mrs. Showalter into it if I’d thought that if it got back to Mr. Showalter he would worry; because he has his own problems. He is our mail carrier and yesterday he came putt-putting by in his cart with another cart following right alongside him with his supervisor in it, monitoring him all day, with a clipboard. The supervisor is a black man half Mr. Showalter’s age. But anyway my husband R. believed me and we are more caught up in each other than ever. Would that be a good story for “Love Boat”? If it took place on a boat? —J.C., Scale, Ark.
A. Well … A luxury cruise ship would not have a … Can you actually get lunch where you live for a dollar?
Q. Do world-renowned people ever, like, smell funny or anything? You don’t have to answer. —Mrs. Julio Nugent, Overlook, Ariz.
A. Yes. Sure. Sometimes. It doesn’t matter.