I can’t stand it anymore. I know it’s the weekend, but Jean Kerr is too funny to skip simply because her birthday falls on a Saturday this year. So…I’ll just keep it short.

Yesterday was the birthday of playwright and humorist Jean Kerr (1922-2003), best known for her collection of essays, Please Don’t Eat the Daisies (1960) and her plays Mary, Mary (1961) and King of Hearts (1954, with Eleanor Brooke). Jean Collins Kerr was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and studied at Marywood Seminary and Marywood College in Scranton. She claims in one essay (I don’t recall which one) that her family knew early on she had a gift for dialogue, based on the fact that one night at dinner, her father burst out, “The only damn thing you’re good for is talk!”

Shortly after graduating, Kerr married theater critic Walter Kerr, mainly because she liked staying up late to review plays and then sleeping in the next morning; the Kerrs had six children, including twins, and collaborated on several plays. The Kerrs settled in Larchmont, New York, in an extremely strange house described in playbill.com as an “eccentric, seven-bedroom Spanish-Tudor” home. (It’s worth reading Please Don’t Eat the Daisies for the description of the house alone. Kerr explains that when hiring contractors to work on the house, they learned to drop everything and give each contractor a full tour just to satisfy his curiosity so he’d get on with the work.)

Fun fact: in the house next door to the Kerrs lived another bestselling author, Marie Killilea (1913-1991). Killilea wrote Karen (1952) and With Love from Karen (1963), both memoirs about her daughter’s struggle with cerebral palsy. Jean Kerr makes a few appearances in the memoirs as a generous-hearted neighbor who was a good listener to the Killilea children.

Kerr also wrote this little gem, I think during her high school years:

Dearer to me than the evening star

A Packard car

A Hershey bar

Or a bride in her rich adorning

Dearer than any of these by far

Is to lie in bed in the morning.

Yesterday was also the birthday of Robert Heinlein (1907-1988). He wrote some science fiction.

Have a splendid rest of your weekend and stay scrupulously honest to the data.