"I'm living in a fish bowl!!!"

Bing!

Me: I believe the question is, "What did Grandma shriek out when calling Mom early in the morning?"

Alex Trebek: That is right.

I suppose you thought I'd take this opportunity to have a little fun with the David Blane special. Special. It sure was. An entire two hours of prime-time television dedicated to all things special and David Blane. But, I'm not going to tell you a bunch of things all those late night guys already said. Well, I don't know what they all said since I go to bed at ten, but let's move on.

I will say that the title of this stunt was more than brilliant. David Blane: Drowned ALIVE! That's right, David Blane....drowned.....ALIVE! Well, let's just talk about what an amazing feat that is, not only will he be drowned, but he'll be alive when it happens. Who knew? I thought that it was only possible to drown whilst living and that once someone dies of drowning they're considered drownED, as in, "The cause of death, well she was bobbing for apples, never came up for air, and she drowned."

Why, wasn't the whole point of it all to actually just hold his breath and not drown? Holding your breath for nine minutes has almost nothing to do with drowning, when you think about it. He didn't even have to be under water to do it. He could have held his breath sitting in his living room an egg timer. Oh, but we had to be all dramatic and go into a big plexi-glass bowl full of cloudy looking water and get our hands an feet all nasty and water-logged. And we had to have chains and handcuffs to undo on top of all that. Oh enough, already. It's his own fault he didn't make it. He should have stuck to the basics, just run of the mill holding his breath underwater for nine minutes. Hop in, pinch your nose, and make big cheeks until time's up.

Looking at him in that tank left me tempted to shake some fish food onto the surface and tap on the glass. I would have like to have gotten him a treasure chest that periodically flipped it's lid to burp some fresh air bubbles. He needed some colorful aqarium pepples on the bottom or something, the way they were keeping him, he might as well have been in that big plastic baggie from pet store.

But try, if you will to imagine what it would be like to live in a fish bowl, with the whole world watching you float around, and how exposed you would feel. I couldn't quite grasp what the saying meant when the phone rang early one morning. My mom answered in a voice that sounds close to Andre the Giant's which is what she ussually sounds like if she hasn't had enough time to wake up.

"Hello."

"I'm living in a fish bowl!!!!" a small, scared voice cries. It was Grandma. Apparently sometime after she woke up in her studio apartment , the curtain rod to the one very large and only window gave way and took all her privacy down with it. She was still in, what she would call, her dressing gown. She knew that everyone who happened by Solon Road or the complex parking lot would surely be looking up at the top floor and find her indecent. For her, this was an emergency, of course second to her having only three packs of cigarettes left in her carton of Belairs.

The whole world was watching as blue curls of smoke framed a tiny woman, shaking in her nightie as she peered down into the parking lot below, waiting for her daughter's car to pull in.