POINT PLEASANT BEACH – Over the years, friends and family of Eileen Flarity-Laterza have told her to write a book about some of her experiences growing up in a rooming house owned and operated by her Irish parents a block from the beach in Point Pleasant Beach.
She got started on the project three years ago and just released her book, “Stop Me If I Told You This One…” that is filled with eye-wateringly funny and poignant tales about some of the rooming house residents and much more.
“(The rooming house) was kind of unusual, and it was filled mostly with drunks and drug addicts, so there were some stories that came out of that,” she said recently from a coffee shop while being interviewed for this story.
Eileen, 64, recalled a story from when she was 10 years old and one of the permanent rooming house guests, an older Irish woman named Aunt Bea, came clattering into the common living room with a tray full of hot tea and cups just as the U.S. landed a spaceship on the moon.
“Would anyone care for tea?” Aunt Bea said as she stepped in front of the TV.
“All we heard was ‘One small step for man…’ there were 10 or 15 of us waiting for over an hour and we missed the whole thing,” she said.
The boarding house had nine rooms. In the summertime, Eileen shared a room with her two siblings, or if it was Memorial Day or July 4, the family would rent out all the rooms and sleep in the garage.
After her mother died, her father sold the rooming house “as is…he left everything. All he took with him was his shaving kit. There were probably hypodermic needles in the drawers. He left the family photo albums; he had no attachment to anything,” she said.
Eileen, who started her own consulting business 21 years ago after working as a project manager and vice president at Goldman Sachs, is divorced with two grown children.
One of her chapters is devoted to some of the dozens of blind dates she has been on. She recalled one where she let a friend fix her up with a nice man but warned her there was a catch: “he has a giant hook-nose and a glass eye.”
She went on the date, and the man was pleasant enough, but she decided not to have a second date with him after he told her he sometimes took out his eye, set it on the bar and told the bartender “Here’s lookin’ at ya.”
Flash forward a few months when Eileen and some girlfriends were at a karaoke bar in Asbury Park. On the stage she noticed a performer with a giant hook nose and a glass eye wearing a polyester dress and sensible shoes. “You can’t make this stuff up,” she said.
On another blind date gone wrong, her date said he would be wearing a black turtleneck and a gray sweater. She spotted him immediately, and the two spent time getting to know each other and were hitting it off until he said he had to go.
“He said he had to meet someone,” she recalled. Just then, she looked up and across the bar was another man wearing a black turtleneck and a gray sweater sheepishly waving at her.
“Match.com has become less of a place to find love and more of a place to get a great story,” she said.
Paperback and Kindle versions of “Stop Me If I Told You This One…Funny Stories About Growing Up at the Jersey Shore, Blind Dates Gone Wrong, and ‘What are the Odds of that?’ Tales,” can be found on Amazon.
