My gifted, now deceased dentist, loved to make jokes and was one of the two authentic geniuses I met in my life. The other was a multi-lingual Columbia University professor whose advice oddly sticks in my mind: that to learn Mandarin well one needs a Mandarin speaking grandmother. But to return to my story. My dentist discovered a new antibiotic while a teenager, was rejected by medical schools because he was Jewish (it was that time in America) and became a dentist. After graduation he was offered admission to medical schools but refused, having opened a Manhattan practice that prospered. Decades after his marriage to an enormously wealthy foreign heiress, their photo was on the cover of a national magazine, its accompanying article lauding "Manhattan's power couple" blissfully approaching retirement. A year later, after their divorce, the dentist told me his ex-wife said the most hurtful thing she could: "I never thought your jokes were funny!"
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