Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit - Andy Rooney [28]
It is relatively easy to say who invented the light bulb but impossible to say who built the first chair. They took one out of King Tut’s tomb when they opened it in 1922 and King Tut died fourteen hundred years before Christ was born and that certainly wasn’t the first chair, either. So they’ve been around a long time. If there was a first man, he probably sat in the first chair.
Chairs have always been something more than a place for us to bend in the middle and put our posteriors on other legs in order to take the weight off our own. They have been a symbol of power and authority, probably because before the sixteenth century only the very rich owned real chairs. The others sat on the floor at their feet in most countries.
A throne is the ultimate place to sit down and there are still something like twenty-five countries in the world that have thrones, and leaders who actually sit on them.
The Peacock Throne of Persia is one of the most elaborate, but I don’t know what happened to that. It belonged to the King of Persia, but Persia is called Iran now and, of course, they don’t have a king. The leaders they have now usually sit on the floor. I suppose this is their way of reacting against the idiocy of a throne but I hope they haven’t discarded theirs. It was crusted with rubies and diamonds and was supposed to be worth $100 million twenty years ago. In today’s market I should think it would bring $500 million, although I don’t know who it would bring it from.
I’ve seen pictures of it but, personally, I wouldn’t give them $ 50 million for it, and if the average American housewife got hold of it, she’d probably put a slipcover over it.
I didn’t mean to get off on thrones but some kings and queens have more than one. Queen Elizabeth has one in every Commonwealth country, presumably in the event she wants to sit down if she visits one of them. She has five in London alone and several more at palaces around England. I’d hate to have to reglue a throne.
If the United States had a king, I suppose there’d be a throne in the White House. Too bad there isn’t, in a way. It could be more of a tourist attraction than the Washington Monument.
Theoretically the royal chair is never sat in by anyone but a nation’s ruler, but it’s hard to believe that a few of the cleaning ladies and some of the kids around the castle don’t test it out once in a while. I can imagine the guards in a state prison fooling around in the electric chair, too. “Hey, Joe. Look at me. Throw the switch!”
The closest thing we ever had to a throne was that big rocking chair John Kennedy intimidated people with. A visiting dignitary could be disarmed by its folksy charm and overwhelmed by its size and mobility.
There’s nothing else like chairs that we have in such great numbers. We know how many cars there are in this country and how many television sets, but we don’t have the vaguest idea how many chairs there are. I’ll bet if everyone sat down in one, there’d still be fifty empty chairs left over for each one of us.
Over the past fifty years the most-used piece of furniture in the house has been the kitchen chair. Like anything that gains wide acceptance, it turns out to be useful for a lot of things it wasn’t built to do. The kitchen chair is for sitting on, for throwing clothes over, for hanging jackets on, for putting a foot on when you’re lacing a shoe and as an allpurpose stepladder for changing light bulbs or for getting down infrequently used dishes from high and remote parts of kitchen cabinets. It has usually been painted many times, hurriedly.
If the kitchen chair isn’t the most sat on, the one the American working man comes home to every evening must be. (The American working woman doesn’t have a chair of her own.) It’s the one in which he slumps for endless hours watching football games on television. It’s the one in which he is portrayed in cartoons about himself and it’s usually the most comfortable chair in the house. It’s a chair you sit in, not on.
It isn’t so much that the American