If you are looking for the humor writer Emily Kimbrough’s Pleasure by the Busload, you will be surprised to find it in the travel section.

Kimbrough is best known for Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, co-written by the actress Cornelia Otis Skinner. This comic memoir recounts the two Bryn Mawr roommates’ adventures on a trip to Europe.

Much as I love this book, I find their separate volumes of humor columns even more charming. Skinner and Kimbrough both pursued writing careers, and though Skinner has more fans, I prefer Kimbrough’s slightly more down-to-earth writing.

I am especially a fan of Kimbrough’s Forty Plus and Fancy-Free.  Before a trip to Italy, Emily and her friend Sophy enroll in an Italian course at the Berlitz School.  Sophy is fluent from the first day, rolling her r “like Caruso… on the stage of the Metropolitan,” while Kimbrough’s own delivery ” had been uncompromisingly Muncie, Indiana.”

To shelve Kimbrough’s books in the travel section seemed to be a catalogueing mistake.  But sure enough, Pleasure by the Busload, an amusing account of her trip to Portugal with the aforementioned Sophy and other friends, was next to a humorous travel book by the columnist Art Buchwald.

In Portugal, Sophy has rented a Volkswagen Microbus, which Emily mistakes for a delivery truck. No one had told her it would be as big as a trailer.  “… the step from ground to floorboard was a span well over three feet, not possible to accomplish in a tight skirt except by raising it to sufficiently to to allow one’s knees full play.  I was to learn this never failed to charm the Portuguese within eyesight to a rapt scrutiny of the procedure.”

The men are expert oglers both in Portugal and Italy. In Forty Plus and Fancy Free, there is ogling, whistling, and possibly pinching. The women call out that they are grandmothers, but this doesn’t stop them.

Very young grandmothers, I would say!