Get your mind out of the gutter. Last night my wife participated in a Woody Allen type retelling of The Three Little Pigs. (Maybe it was just my mind in the gutter. I promise one thing. She and I are going to have a long talk about that growl.)

Although my wife is frequently mentioned in my columns, I have to admit that on occasion I take liberties with the truth. Almost everyone who comments to me on my columns says something like, “Your wife sure is a good sport,” or “Don’t take out an insurance policy,” or “One night she is just gonna stab you while you're asleep.”

Since we have an anniversary coming up, I felt this would be a good time to write a more “feel good” column about my wife. (And for those cynics out there among you, no, this is not about me feeling good.)

Let’s start with the Woody Allen-like rendition of the classic story.

My wife played the wolf and took some liberties with the script. Sure the wolf blew the straw and mud houses down, then failed on the brick one. At which point in her telling of the story, the three little pigs break into a customized version of the funk classic “She’s a brick house.” But it was after the little pigs stopped shimmying that my wife put her true stamp on the skit. In most of these stories, the wolf or bad person ends up failing to kill the protagonist, then dies a horrible death. You have witches burning up in ovens, witches with houses falling on them, and even lumberjacks hacking the Big Bad Wolf to death.

However, in my gentle wife’s retelling of this story, after failing to blow down the brick house, this wolf entered his “blue phase” where he bemoaned the fact that he was just hungry and had no friends to eat. The wolf spelled this out to the audience by singing a Disney tune with rewritten lyrics, at which point the pigs take pity on the poor wolf and invite him in for dinner. If I were writing this script, the wolf would then pull out a large chainsaw and proceed to carve up some nice ribs. Not my wife -- there is peace and harmony for all and the wolf will eventually reciprocate and have the pigs over for dinner where you can only hope he will have the good taste not to serve pork.

Then there is the whole therapy thing with my wife. I have touched on this before but I think it says something good about my wife. Random women in dire need of help will approach my wife and corner her with some story such as: “Ed was arrested for selling off the kids as cheap laborers again. It’s just unfair and un-American. We’re trying to support Nike’s campaign to stop the outsourcing of child labor. Why did this happen to us? Why?” At which point my wife will say something totally appropriate and uniquely capable of providing that person with comfort, which is why she attracts these weirdoes in the first place.

Finally, there's the Academy Awards. The newest Hollywood stud will step up to the podium to accept his award, point to a starlet in the crowd and say something like, “There is one special person I’ve got to thank. They said we wouldn’t make it. But six months later you and I are proving them wrong. And even though I’m now an award winning movie star and you are still working in television, I promise this to you before our peers and everyone watching: No matter where my fame takes me, I will always love you.”

This will reduce my wife to tears. “That is so sweet,” she will say. That’s because my wife always looks for the best in people, no matter what.

So on the eve of our anniversary, I want to say to my wolf/wife simply this: "I can’t believe you like me. You really, really like me."

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