How Steve Weinstein Turns a Psychologist’s Neat Agenda Into Family Comedy in Nuts To You
Richard Ballnick can explain your childhood, your ego, and your fear of public speaking. His own father is another matter.
That is the running joke behind Richard in Steve Weinstein’s comic novel Nuts To You, available now. Richard is a young psychology professor at Golden Arches University, the kind of man who keeps a written agenda and believes that any problem can be solved by a good outline. Then a family worry from Queens lands on his desk, and the outline runs out of room. Weinstein uses that collision to ask one of the funniest questions in the book: what happens when the expert on human behavior has to apply his textbook to the two people who raised him?
The Roar of the Lecture Hall
By the second half of the novel, Richard has become the most popular teacher on campus. News of the Queen’s discovery has spread through Golden Arches faster than a sniffling cold in a dorm building, and his lectures are standing room only. Students no longer ask about Freud. They call out from their seats. “Did you actually hear and see the squirrels talk?” “What kind of music do they like?” “Do they have a religion?”
Richard answers the way a careful professor should, which is to say he dodges. “You’ll have to wait until the paper that Dr. Radcliffe writes, and the book being written by one of our very own students, is published,” he says, then adds, “Now can we please get on with the lecture?” Groans follow. In the back row, the student writing that book blushes every time a head turns her way. Weinstein plays the scene as a gentle satire of campus celebrity, where a teacher’s fame is measured by how many people are sitting on the floor.
A Resignation Letter Nobody Expected
Everything looks like smooth sailing, which is why Richard’s next move stuns the dean. The university president has already admitted, at yet another meeting about him, that enrollment numbers do not lie. Now the dean puts an arm around Richard’s shoulder as if they belong to the same old boys’ club and asks whether money is the problem. It is not. Richard says the people are terrific and the staff so supportive, stretching the truth to keep the conversation short. He does not mention the cold shoulders or the dinner invitations that mysteriously got lost.
The real reason is a family matter that pulls him back toward Queens, and Weinstein lets the reader enjoy the gap between what Richard says and what he means. A resume has already gone out to a local college, and a teaching job came back almost instantly. The moment Richard leaves the office, the president opens a desk drawer where a bottle of bourbon is waiting. Anyone who has ever quit a job and watched the boss change color will recognize the scene.
The Agenda That Runs Richard’s Life
Richard has a habit that people who live with planners both love and dread. He needs an agenda. Like a car’s GPS, the narrator explains, it plots the route without mental distractions, a road map to the future that is, naturally, always subject to change. Once the news from home reaches him, he starts a new game plan with step-by-step items. Find a job near home, checked. Write the resignation letter, checked. Inform the dean, checked.
The last item is the hard one, and Weinstein lets it sit there for a moment, less funny than the rest, because it concerns his father. Richard does what any good psychologist would do and reviews the case history. There is the loner who guards his tomatoes, the man who hates pets, and the father who once watched a goldfish come home from school and die mysteriously a few days later. Baby steps are required, Richard decides. Go too fast and Pincus will close up like a clam.
· Can you be the expert in every room except your own kitchen?
· How many items on your to-do list are really about someone you love?
Hunting the Man Who Cannot Be Found
The plan needs a favor from Dr. Radcliffe, and Dr. Radcliffe has become impossible to reach. Phone calls go unanswered, messages unreturned, texts ignored, and emails deleted. Richard even walks to his office, which is dark and closed. The narrator observes that it might have been easier to make an appointment with someone on the moon. The doctor is now a talk-show guest and a future star of the lecture circuit, moving through the social scene faster than a mouse chasing a piece of cheese.
So Richard turns to the one person who keeps the doctor’s calendar, and his instincts as a psychologist kick in. When Leanne claims the doctor might be at a convention in Charlotte, or maybe Tampa, she cannot look him in the eye. Her face cringes, her eyebrows frown, and her lips crinkle, but her tongue says nothing. Richard sighs and mentions that he will be entering grades next week. Suddenly her memory bank refuels. Leverage, Weinstein reminds us, is a family talent. Whether Richard’s carefully planned steps survive is another matter, because the story has a surprise ending that even a psychologist could never predict. Nuts To You is now open to readers!
A plan can be perfectly neat…
A family can be perfectly messy…
A professor can miss the one person he knows best…
In Nuts To You, the man who explains everyone else meets his match at home!
Author Name: Steve Weinstein; Book Title: Nuts To You; Published By: Author Path Publishers
