Kill all the Short People

When Randy Newman came out with his song “Short People” and sang they should be killed, he got a lot of criticism. Many people didn’t understand he was being ironic and mocking the attitudes of many people toward short men.

I have no idea how tall Newman is, but he looks short. So he knows what it’s like.

I am not short, by the way. I’m six-feet-tall, but I do have short friends, and they have told me stories.

I get the impression there are women out there who want short men to, basically, die. “How dare you not be six feet tall? Why don’t you just die?!?”

I had one friend tell me he asked a woman to dance at a nightclub and she told him, “You’re about a foot too short.” I wonder how she would feel if some guy told her, “I’m dumping you for a better-looking woman. Younger, too, and has bigger tits”?

Another told me that in college he put a sign in the student building saying he was driving home over the weekend and looking for riders to share gas. He got a call from a girl, a student there, and got along very well with her on the phone. Instant chemistry.

However, when he met her, he told me, “I could see the disappointment in her eyes,” because he was 5’7”. And on the drive she told him, “On the phone you sounded like you were six-feet-tall.”

I occasionally wonder how tall I sound on the phone.

Another guy told me he went over to a girl’s house to pick her up and she had left. You might claim that wasn’t because he was short, but would she have done this to a good-looking six-foot-tall guy? I seriously doubt it.

Probably the best story I heard from a short friend is when he was going to take a girl bowling while they were in college. She wanted to stop at a bar first.

It turned out some of her friends were there. She told my friend, “I don’t want to go bowling.”

“Do you want to do something else?”

“No,” she said, and turned and walked away.

“I was sitting there in a bar with my bowling ball,” he told me.

One of my short friends became a dentist and oral surgeon. He is quite wealthy, has a one-hundred-year-old three-story house with one of those huge attics people used to put the crazy aunt in, and a big back yard with a privacy fence. He was his office in the backyard, so he’s basically home all the time.

If I was a envious person, I would envy him. When he’s not working on patients, he works on his garden and plays with his dogs.

He married an Asian woman a bit shorter than him. I’ve spent a lot of time at his house and have seen the looks of many of his female patients when they saw his wife. “How dare you be rich and marry an Asian woman! You’re supposed to marry a white woman! And how dare you be 5’6” instead of 6’. I hate you! Why don’t you just die?!?!”

It is bizarre.

There have been times I’ve stood in stores with a short friend and the woman behind the counter flirted with me, but didn’t even look at him. I wondered if it ever occurred to them he was a friend of mine and they should at least say hi to him?

Hmmm…perhaps all short people should just die. Now that I think about it, they’ve caused me a lot of trouble.