Happy Campers : Writer Wants Women to See the Humor in Men’s ‘Training’

There is--Sue Kirby is certain of it--a secret camp where men go to learn those “sure-fire” male responses to the women in their lives.

How else do you explain the similarity of reactions to situations such as when a wife comes home with a new purchase and all her mate can utter is:

“How much was it?”

Or how about when, after an especially hectic day of work and household chores, a woman prepares a hearty soup and salad for dinner and the man in her life counters with:

“Is this it?”

Or when a woman is wearing a dress that her husband had previously complimented at great length and he comes out with:

“Is that new?”

Where do men learn these responses?

There has to be a camp: A place, according to Kirby, where a tough-talking camp leader in a well-worn flannel shirt--”You know the one. He brings it with him on the honeymoon and you spend the next 25 years of your marriage trying to throw it out”--clues men in on basic “survival techniques” they can use “for almost everything a woman is gonna throw at you for the rest of your life.”

Such a camp, says Kirby, “is the only possible explanation for the fact that all men have a cookie-cutter sameness to the way they look at life and react to women.”

Kirby knows all about The Camp.

She’s been discussing it in talks to women’s groups, garden clubs, PTA gatherings and Assistance League chapters throughout county over the past decade.

At the urging of her admirers, the Lake Forest mother of five has now written and self-published a book on the subject: “Men’s Secret Camp: Timeless Traditions and Tribulations of Family Life & Love” ($10.95).

The paperback book serves up the wit and wisdom of the woman who has been billed as “the Erma Bombeck of Orange County.”

“The book is meant to be fun,” said Kirby, 51. “I think it’s a humorous, easy approach to living life harmoniously. There’s a lot in the book about what women do for their families: how they create traditions, celebrate birth, go to the aid of a sick friend. And each chapter has a responding chapter on how men approach the same subject.”

But don’t think Kirby is putting down men.

“Not in the least,” she said. “I’m only hoping that women understand that this is just the way it is sometimes. A lot of women are deeply hurt by something men say and there was no hurt intended. They don’t mean it the same way we take it. Sometimes it’s a fleeting comment--something most men say--and it’s ruined the whole evening or weekend.”

So instead of getting “ticked off,” Kirby said, it might lighten the moment if women can simply visualize The Camp.

“I think there could be some women who wouldn’t understand my motives,” she said, “but it is my sincere desire that we try to see men in a little more humorous light--that we accept some of the things that seem to come natural in the way they react to us and that we begin to enjoy each other.”

Whether it’s one of her three sons or her 78-year-old uncle, Kirby said, “there’s a definite sameness in them all. No matter how they were raised, it seems there are some similar approaches to many of life’s little trials.”

Take the sacred American tradition of the family barbecue in which men believe they’re giving the women the day off by doing all the cooking. But what happens when men flip the meat and it lands on the ground? They merely follow this bit of Camp advice: “Wash it off with whatever you’re drinking.”

And, as Kirby sees it, “men have no idea when meat is truly done.” So they resort to Camp’s Barbecue Basic Training Rule No. 3 (paragraph 7): “Remove Meat From the Grill When Conversation Lags.”

Kirby, who describes herself as a “fierce defender of the family,” said the reason she wrote the book “is so men and women get along better.”

“We seem to need some real basic help in learning how to enjoy our families and our mates again. We seem to have gone way off in other directions--having the smartest children, being the best dressed, having the best homes. But we’ve forgotten the most important things: How to love each other for who we are.”

“Men’s Secret Camp,” which had a 2,500-copy first printing, has been out since early December. Although available in gift shops around the county and through the author by calling (714) 830-3254, Kirby has been selling her book by a more direct method: out of the trunk of her car.

And Kirby, who spent $10,000 to publish the book, is pleased with sales.

“In three weeks, to sell 500 out of the trunk of your car during the busiest time of year, it means sales are good, “ she said with a laugh.

Most of her sales have been at the end of her talks, which she delivers in a humorous, storytelling style that grew out of a floral design class she taught at Saddleback College a decade ago.

“When I’m nervous the natural thing was for me to tell a joke or say something silly,” recalled Kirby, who had just divorced her first husband and, having “a desperate need to feed my kids after he left,” had turned her hobby of making wreaths and floral designs into a successful business called Out of the Woods in Lake Forest.

Kirby, who learned from her failed first marriage that “a wife should not rely on her husband to feel valuable,” was soon being asked to demonstrate her floral and craft designs to church groups and at school functions.

But it didn’t take long before her mostly female audiences became more interested in what she was saying than what she was doing.

“I talk about myself and my own humorous situations at my house that sometimes weren’t so funny,” Kirby said. “People would clap and laugh (and think), ‘She’s been in our house.’ One woman said, ‘Is my house bugged?’ The belly laughs really strike a note when it’s a situation they have at home. I just think it’s so healing to laugh about it.”

Says Dottie Parnell, director of the Hoag Health Center in Irvine, who has had Kirby back to speak eight times over the years:

“Whenever she speaks here we have standing room only. She’s very, very humorous, yet it’s very poignant. One of the reasons we like to have her is she really gives women strength in adverse situations and helps them to laugh at themselves. She’s someone who took a bad situation for herself personally and turned it into a huge success, and she’s able to share that.”

What Parnell likes about Kirby’s book, she said, “is that even though she’ll be talking about men or saying that your husband will say this or that, the bottom line of it is it isn’t an anti-male message. It’s more, ‘Ladies, this is the way they are and just love them and accept them for the way they are.’ ”

Kirby concedes she may “take some heat” from feminists who might feel she’s letting men off the hook with her Camp talk.

“I can’t say that I’m pro-men; I’m pro-harmony,” she said. “I mean, we have to look at them with a warm, loving smile and realize . . . they probably went to camp.”