About

…the Author

Husband, father, middle-manager, writer, podcaster … I’ve got it all! Each week I produce a brand new humor essay. You can listen to them on this site or read them at the companion blog:

http://www.myfavoriteshortcomings.com

…the Essays

In the early nineties, I was a stringer for a local paper. To fill space one day I wrote a funny piece about traveling with a two-year-old. The editor liked it and asked for more in that style. Short Cummings was born.

I joke that I wrote an allegedly humorous column, but there was never enough evidence to convict.

After I’d been writing for about a year, the paper underwent an editorial change and my services were no longer required. I archived my old files and turned my hand to other kinds of writing.

From time to time my wife would pull out the old columns and tell me I should take up writing them again. To my mind, without an audience, there wasn’t much point. However, when I started looking for a format for a podcast, it all sort of came together.

…the Title

Well, my name is Kevin Cummings and the essays are short. Get it? Hi-lar-i-ous, right?

There’s truth to that statement, but there’s another reason as well. My dad is only 5′ 4″ tall and gets a might feisty if you call him short. During his military career (22 years U.S. Air Force) he routinely scratched the word “shortcomings” out of memos and replaced it with “foibles” or “failings”.

When I needed a name for the column fifiteen years ago, I recalled that facet of dad’s personality and capitalized on it.

…Ummm…So what’s with “Happily Domesticated”?

Oh.  Right.  Well, for the first three years of the podcast, it was called Short Cummings Audio.  In September of 2009, in conjunction with the release of a book-length collection of my essays I renamed the show to Short Cummings Audio presents Happily Domesticated.

Disclosure