Grandma Lobenthal had to be using her decades-earlier vaudeville training to execute this stunt.
It was somewhere around March 1975. I was going to Stuyvesant High School, eight blocks south on First Avenue from where my father’s parents lived in Peter Cooper Village. Sometimes I would stop by on my way home from school before hopping the subway to Queens.
I had a erratic school record, largely depending on what the subject was and whether I was interested. But on this particular occasion I’d gotten 100 or an A on three different quizzes or tests.
Grandma was in the kitchen when I pulled out these three high grades to show her. In an instant, she plunged backward to the ground, in a feigned paroxysm of celebratory astonishment, doing so without banging her head or seeming to dislocate any other part of her 78-year-old frame. And then in the twinkling of an eye, she was back up again on her feet.
I’ve never forgotten her tour-de-force.