Testimonial trumper tantrum.

He throws the biggest, most beautiful tantrums. Believe me.

(This one got stuck behind so MANY huge stories this week. But I had to weigh in anyway).

One particularly warm summer day when I was around 6 or 7 years old, my grandmother sent me to my room for something I had done wrong, which sadly, I can’t exactly recall, but knowing me, I had said something fresh to her because I was always saying something fresh to someone, and she was a someone who was around a lot, so as a result, much of my muttered grumbling, eye rolling & mocking mouthiness was directed at her, which could explain why she always hated me and reserved the last remaining drops of life left in her body while lying on her deathbed to say something she really needed to say to me, something I’ll reveal in another story at another time, but I digress.

So, there I was up in my boiling hot bedroom, staring out the window at all the neighborhood kids playing in lawn sprinklers, riding in circles on their Big Wheels while mine sat neglected in the driveway, or clustered on the curb of the dead-end my house bordered making Snoopy Snow Cones, or playing with their Star Wars figurines (the rich kids across the street had all the Star Wars stuff), Rubik’s Cubes and Jax.

And I was stuck inside. In my dumb room with all my dumb stuffed animals and dumb Barbies and dumb imagination and I was so bored and so hot and so MAD, that all I wanted to do was something, anything to get rid of my anger. So, I scanned the room and my eyes stopped on my big sister’s prized and meticulously sharpened 64-Pack of crayons and then scanned back to my open window looking out on all of those happy neighborhood kids NOT imprisoned in their rooms on a summer day.

So, I took those crayons and one by one, I launched them out my window. Seeing how far from view I could cast them. Like waxy little colorful missiles I hurled them with glee.

Waxy. Wait, did I say waxy? But wax and heat are natural born enemies and it was very, very hot outside and the crayon box was now empty, and I thought, ‘uh oh’ and then, after about an hour of me wondering what I had been thinking because my sister was going to murder me, a chill went down my spine as I heard a familiar and very much unwanted bellow from the downstairs —- JOOOOOOAAAAAAANNNNNNNEEEEEE!!!

It was my dad. He was home from work. His little Datsun parked on the street, the family wagon parked on the driveway, underneath… my… bedroom… window. 👀

He spoke not another word. Pointed to me and to the front door. I walked a walk which must have been a thousand years long to get to the driveway and that’s when I saw it — a kaleidoscopic crime scene in polychromatic Crayola crayon.

My sister’s once carefully cared for and lovingly maintained 64-pack reduced to melted splats on the driveway, the walkway, the station wagon… and as my dad pointed up to the little bit of roof just beneath my window on our light grey traditional Jersey suburb split level… all over the roof too. So much colorful melted wax, it looked as if Rainbow Brite herself had blown up right there, in front of, on top of and underneath our powdery-blue Chevy Caprice wagon.

It was some of the worst behavior I have exhibited in all of my life. It was so petulant, so bratty, so impulsive, so careless, selfish, self-destructive and so out of control, that the embarrassment (coupled with the memories of my Lebanese-born dad’s next-level, well-earned punishment) of what I did that day has stayed with me ever since.

And I was still better behaved than Donald J. Trump was in court this week. By a factor of 10.

Ok, in case you missed it — Trump’s testimony earlier this week was insane. And to be clear, we are talking about a guy who, when it comes to sheer, unadulterated insanity, makes Charles Manson look like he would make a trustworthy nanny to small children.