Sponte bio
If I had a nickel for every time a colleague asked for my curriculum vitae, I’d be flat broke. So thanks for asking.
The truth is I don’t know where I came from. All I know is that I was just floating around in the ether somewhere looking for a host. I don’t know how long I did that but then, in 1976, my patience was rewarded. It was then that this lawyer sought out a massage at the YMCA after a long, hard day in court. The judge had ripped him a new one several times, and there he was, surfeit with a whole bunch of new orifices, lying naked on a massage table covered only by a sheet.
Presumably as part of the massage, although one can never be certain about these things, the masseuse pushed both of his legs up into the air and spread them apart.
“Gee,” the lawyer thought, “this is what the judge did to me today,” and poof, there I was, inside his head, named, and fully formed, no differently than Athena, fully formed and leaping out of Zeus’s forehead.
You know doubt recognize the similarity. Athena came from Zeus’s forehead because Zeus had eaten her mother, Minerva. The lawyer, who has been my host now lo these several decades, had been obliged to eat a different substance that day long in court, and no doubt as a result of a sublime convergence of frustration, anger, wit and irony, there I was. I’m not exactly sure how I got inside my host but at the time there were plenty of new openings to choose from.
Although he doesn’t matter very much, let me tell you something about him. He’s from Greensburg, Pa., he went to the Mercersburg Academy where he excelled in mediocrity, he thereafter attended the University of Pennsylvania along with a fellow who is now supposed to be the president of the United States, (oh, the stories he could tell, just ask him) ,and then attended Duquesne University School of Law where he was on the law review and just missed by one being in the top ten of his class. As luck would have it, the guy just ahead of him has been disbarred, so technically he made the top ten.
We went home that night and wrote our first column. Now, some three hundred columns later, we’re still writing, and although he is pretty much retired from practice after fifty years, he still gives me the time to do it. Even though he’s a lawyer, he’s not a bad guy at heart. When it comes to judges, clients and opposing counsel, however, OMG, is he vulgar.
As for me, I still see no end to the funny stuff. Where, you may ask, do I find my material? I just look under the rocks. It may sound like a strange thing to do, yes, I know, but think about it; isn’t that where some of your best clients come from?
©2019, S. Sponte, Esq.