A Fine Madness and Other Mad Stories by Jeffrey M. Feingold; Holyoke, Massachusetts: Meat for Tea Press; © 2024; ISBN 9798388-289186; 96 pages; $13.95
SAN DIEGO – “Mad” and “Madness” are the operative words in the title of this collection of short stories in which the lives of Howie and Marsha Fine – the subjects of “Fine Madness” – are improbably chronicled. The short stories take me back to my boyhood reading Mad Magazine and “What Me Worrying” along with the magazine’s most identifiable protagonist, gap-toothed Alfred E. Neuman.
The stories make little objective sense, but they make you chuckle (or giggle) as you read them. Nonsense can be funny, even for adults.
One preliminary story concerns an unattractive funerary supply salesman who douses his head with a miracle hair growth product. Another deals with a man who describes himself on a dating site as a “Prince” and then becomes increasingly concerned as no woman responds to his overtures. A third relates the story of a limousine driver who regularly goes to Hooters and is surprised when his boss takes offense.
Next come the “Fine” stories, the first being when Howie’s wife Marsha spots a tattoo on his derriere. The second concerns a magic blender, which doesn’t work until Howie reverses its “polarity” and he and Marsha switch personalities and aptitudes. A third includes a farcical misreading of the Ten Commandments, with Howie later violating the ninth commandment against coveting anything of his neighbor’s.
Interrupting the Fine saga is an unrelated story about a father and a daughter watching and analyzing old movies. The father mansplains the plots while the daughter dreams of being with her boyfriend. Or perhaps it’s the other way around, the daughter sleeping with her boyfriend and dreaming of her father? Madness.
Donald H. Harrison is publisher and editor of San Diego Jewish World.