For the longest time, my wife, Francesca, who is not a Rotarian but goes to their lunches and annual events, tried to get me to address the Rotary club in Tarrytown, N.Y., USA.

I always resisted. It was not that I feared speaking in public or was intimidated by that particular audience; after all, I had once addressed a national association of repo men in Washington, D.C., and after laboring valiantly for 45 minutes to coax a chuckle or two out of 400 repo men, repo wives, and repo children, any speaking engagement would have been a pleasure. I had also once flown to Indianapolis to address the American Society of Indexers and had attempted to deliver a speech whose themes were limited to subjects that began with the letters h and i . As in Hoosiers, hydrogen, Indiana, iodine. You know, as if I had indexed my subjects? As if I were a member in good standing of the American Society of Indexers?

Not everybody got the joke.

These oratorical setbacks notwithstanding, my hesitation to address the Rotary Club of The Tarrytowns was rooted in the fact that I knew just about all the members, some of them pretty well, and was afraid that I might inadvertently say the wrong thing. In fact, because inadvertently saying the wrong thing is what I do for a living, I was a bit surprised that the club was so eager to have me. But at the time, I was appearing on Imus in the Morning fairly regularly and had also logged time on the Late Show with David Letterman , Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect , and Conan O’Brien, so some of the club members might have been hoping that I would show up at the event with one of those illustrious cutups riding shotgun. That way, the club would be entertained by someone who was really, really funny, not by a snarky wiseacre like me.

I did not bring along David Letterman, Bill Maher, or Don Imus. And the club did not get addressed by someone who was really funny. I was funny, sure. But not hysterically funny. Not fall-out-of-your-chair funny. I was mildly amusing. I tickled a few ribs. I coaxed forth a smile or two. The club was happy to have me, but I don’t think it was in any great rush to have me back. Not unless I brought Howard Stern along.

Person of the Year

A couple of years later, my wife was named the club’s Person of the Year. This was in honor of her 19 years as president of the Neighborhood House, an underfunded senior center that arranged all sorts of activities for retirees in our village. The Neighborhood House offered cooking classes and art classes and exercise classes, showed a PG-rated film every week, sometimes hosted concerts, occasionally showcased flamenco dancers, and arranged intermittent outings to the city. But mostly it was a gathering place and support system for widows and widowers. It was the kind of quaint, self-sufficient, homegrown institution that gives small towns an intimacy and charm that big towns can only dream about. City dwellers simply have no idea what life is like out here.

At the time Francesca received the award, many people in Tarrytown were unaware that the presidency was an unpaid position, that she had donated enormous chunks of her time over the years out of the goodness of her heart. A lot of people had a hard time believing that someone would take on such an onerous, time-consuming job without getting something at the back end, like free cable service or a parking space or a pension, especially since she was married to someone who never did anything out of the goodness of his heart, as there was never really all that much goodness in there in the first place.

Francesca had been all in favor of my addressing the club when she knew that my wisecracks would be directed at the director of the YMCA, who took too many shots during our midday basketball games, scoring at will against me, or at local merchants with pretentious window displays, or at politicians who described themselves as “die-hard Yankees fans,” as if anyone who supported the Yankees ever had to face the prospect of dying hard. Her enthusiasm diminished considerably when she realized that at the awards ceremony, some of my wisecracks might be directed at her. Being selected Person of the Year was supposed to be a celebration, an honor, a triumph. It wasn’t supposed to be a roast.

One indication that Francesca was having second thoughts about my being the keynote speaker was that she never bothered to tell me where the event was being held. The day of the event, thinking that I had left myself plenty of time to get there, I motored down to the Hilton where I had delivered my first speech, only to find that it was closed for renovations. More suspicious still was the fact that my wife’s cell phone was turned off when I tried to reach her. After a series of frantic calls to close friends, the village hall, and the chamber of commerce, I finally found out that the luncheon was being held a couple of miles away at the Marriott. I arrived fashionably late, just as lunch was being served.

Big moment arrives

I could see, as soon as I walked in the door, that Francesca was disappointed that her ploy had failed, and that I would actually get a chance to talk about her in public. I don’t know if she would have preferred that I’d been in a traffic accident, but I don’t think she would have minded a flat tire, a blown gasket, or a pileup on the interstate. The idea of me speaking on her behalf at a function like this completely terrified her. And now she’d put me in a bad mood.

I calmed down during lunch, and at last the big moment arrived. I strolled to the podium, adjusted the mike, reared back, and fired. In fact, the speech went very nicely. I said nice things about my wife, nice things about the club, self-deprecating things about myself. Cribbing a line from Mark Twain, I said that my wife and I, early in our marriage, had decided to divvy up the pro bono chores: She would do everything, and I would do the rest. This was very close to the truth. My wife was relieved that I didn’t use the speech as a pretext to tee off on a couple of merchants I’d long had running feuds with or to make fun of the hapless New York Knicks. For example, I didn’t take any potshots at the pharmacist who overcharged me for a fax in 1987, and whose establishment I boycotted for the next 20 years, by which time he’d been caught robbing Medicare blind and got sentenced to six years in the pokey. And I laid off the art gallery whose faux primitive paintings I found a bit pricey, and the tea shoppe whose owner could never serve me a cup of English Breakfast without ridiculing my crummy taste in beverages. Today was no time for jabs, digs, snide remarks. It was a day to honor my wife and the many Rotary club members who had worked so hard to make our picture-perfect little village work to, well, perfection.

At the conclusion of my speech, I said that when the Good Book was finally opened and the last judgment was delivered, I fully expected my altruistic wife to slip effortlessly through the pearly gates, and for St. Peter to graciously turn a blind eye as I snuck in on her coattails. After that, Francesca got all her nice awards and testimonials, including a plaque signed by a local politician who had once described his governing style as a cross between Teddy Roosevelt and the Roman hero Cincinnatus, who died in the fifth century BC. Why I hadn’t taken a little jab at him is a mystery I will take to the grave. Francesca was so relieved that I’d managed to get all the way through my speech without insulting anyone that she barely noticed the standing ovation she received. The whole experience of listening to me talk about her was like swimming in shark-infested waters: It was exhilarating and fun, but it wasn’t the kind of thing you could enjoy until it was over.

A few months ago, Francesca came home from a club event clutching a door prize. It was a basket of cheer. It was, she beamed, the first prize she’d ever won in her life. The basket, donated by a local dentist, contained no scotch, no rye, no truffles, no biscotti. It consisted entirely of dental supplies: toothpaste, mouthwash, floss. If I ever get invited to address the Rotary Club of The Tarrytowns again, that orthodontic basket of cheer is going to be the first item on my agenda.

Joe Queenan's latest book, Closing Time, was published in April.