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Ermine Cunningham Graduates from the Downtown Y and Makes People Laugh

  There's no doubt we all could use a good laugh these days.

And you never know from where the next really successful humorist will appear.

The writing program at the Syracuse downtown Y, anyone?

That's where Ermine Cunningham took two years to study the craft of using the written word to bring smiles to people's lives. She enrolled in 2011, after retiring in 2010 from more than two decades of teaching English as a second language to students in the Syracuse Central School District.

You can read all about that quite torturous transitional time in Cunningham's life in her new book. Well, actually, you can read about way more than that, but she starts "Pretend You Know What You're Doing: My Voyage from Teacher to Humor Writer" with a chapter titled "Nothing On My To Do List," and the what's-next sentence: "Bold streaks of orange, green and brown seemed to ripple as I stared at the tie-dyed Indian wall tapestry tacked up on my daughter's ceiling. Lying on my back on her double bed, it mesmerized me as I tried halfheartedly to deal with my despair." 

Cunningham turned her crisis into our good fortune. Well, a WordPress blog, really, called "Odds & Ends from Ermigal." She started that in 2011, coaxed by Syracuse New Times humor columnist Jeff Kramer, around the same time she signed up for the Downtown Writers Center program. And now there's this 211-page book.

Book Cover

The first half is a quite entertaining biography of her non-traditional journey from a traditional Italian family home in Mattydale.

She's a graduate of North Syracuse High. That's where she had a light-hearted advice column called "Dear Pappy."  From there we follow her through college, including an eventfully foreign  semester in Spain. And through alternating rewarding, thankless and frustrating teaching jobs in Rochester, and then a stint for IBM. And through a failed marriage to a car dealer from a tiny town between Rochester and Syracuse, and her successful New Times ad campaign to find her second husband. And through a tearful adoption process to secure an infant daughter from Guatemala, and her building a bridge with the Syracuse community for students who spoke English as a second language.

Yeah, Ermine Cunningham did all of that right here amid us. And she writes of it in a most interesting and humorous style.

The second half of the book is a collection of favorites from her blog, picked via reader reaction and her own choice. It's a pleasant mix of family recollections and slanted jabs at current events and playful posturing with life's little moments.

One of the stories is titled "Sometimes, Dreams Do Come True.”  "It was posted on the Erma Bombeck site in May (this year), the day before my birthday," Cunningham says. "It’s based on the true incident of a fourth-grade boy managing to fly alone to Las Vegas with no ticket and no adult.  I imagined, from a teacher’s point of view, the shenanigans of a kid with that much chutzpah. I gained some new readers, but mostly it was fun to write. And that’s enough for me."

Speaking of the late humor columnist who was syndicated in newspapers all over the world, Cunningham enjoys attending the Erma Bombeck Writers Workshop, which is held every other year in Bombeck's hometown of Dayton.

"(It's) a great opportunity to laugh and learn from established humor writers and aspiring colleagues," Cunningham says.  "My goals were to learn more about humor writing techniques and be inspired to improve and grow. Like past Erma workshops, it was all I expected and more."

Cunningham lives in Baldwinsville with her husband, Carl, the winner of the three-pile sweepstakes in that New Times classified ad adventure. Their daughter went off to college, which allowed Ermine that precious moment to stare up at the ceiling in 2010.

Her book is available for purchase at amazon.com and her site.

She'll sign copies for Central New Yorkers who send her a request through erminecunningham.com.
 

Mark Bialczak has lived in Central New York for 30 years. He's well known for writing about music and entertainment. In 2013, he started his own blog, markbialczak.com, to comment about the many and various things that cross his mind daily.