The Norman and Phyllis Show

<p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(83 90 98 1)>The Norman and Phyllis Show is a memoir about my parents. It's a humor book about my eccentric Jewish family in Chicago.</span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(15 17 17 1)>Norman and Phyllis were my parents and well they were crazy. Growing up with them was like being on The Norman and Phyllis Show a bad sitcom the producers forgot to cancel.</span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(15 17 17 1)>They were the uncrowned royalty of the Chicago restaurant scene where Norman taught Mexican waiters broken Yiddish and was a member of The Golden Tipper's Club. They had to go to restaurants. Phyllis was a terrible cook.</span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(15 17 17 1)>Between Norman telling Barack Obama during a campaign stop in Chicago that he had seen him naked in a health club locker room and Phyllis talking incessantly about her bowel movements there was no way I could have turned out normal.</span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(15 17 17 1)>Phyllis stocked the fridge with enough prune juice for a nuclear war but I needed something stiffer to survive. After talking to medical specialists I learned that insanity is in fact hereditary.</span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(15 17 17 1)>For years I thought the job of parents was to embarrass their kids in public. Then I went into therapy and learned otherwise. It was called love.</span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(15 17 17 1)>It was still hard work raising my parents. But I think they turned out alright. This is their story. The story of The Norman and Phyllis Show.</span></p>