My Seinfeld Year

by Fred Stoller

I’m trapped in a weird kind of showbiz sitcom purgatory: I get enough work not to quit, but never enough to feel that I can take a deep breath and stop struggling.

I’m pretty sure I’m the only nine-year-old who set up a lemonade stand whose mother reacted by panicking. “What if it goes under? Don’t do it, Freddie.”

I won a perfect attendance certificate. Other kids might have been good at sports, or drawing, or music. My greatest accomplishment was sticking my arm up in the air and saying, “Present!”

“I asked my sister why my parents like her better than me. She said it’s because she’s older and they’ve known her longer.”

I passed the offices where the writers of Roseanne worked. I had heard horror stories about how she made them wear T-shirts with numbers on them and only referred to them by their number.

“Nice belt,” Jerry commented. That was all I needed never to wear that belt to work again. All during the course of that first week, Jerry and Larry made a point to ask me, “Where’s the belt?”

My former teacher told me he’d made a motion to nominate me for the school’s wall of fame. (A few months later he called to tell me I had been turned down. That’s always my favorite: unsolicited rejection.)