Area Woman Claims Son-in-Law Not Ohioan, Possibly Born in a Barn

Retired real estate agent and occasional gardener Alice Lindstrom said Wednesday that she hopes questions about her son-in-law’s birth certificate will be cleared up “quickly and voluntarily.” Speaking to reporters from her sunporch, which, she emphasized, her son-in-law had not yet painted as he promised before marrying her daughter, Lindstrom said that lingering doubts about Alex McCann’s birthplace and citizenship have placed a great deal of strain on her family. “It is very difficult to watch someone volunteer to rinse the Sunday dinner dishes and load them in the dishwasher before he goes home to do God knows what to my daughter—all the while not knowing if he was truly born in Akron, Ohio as he claims.”

Lindstrom said that she did not, as some have suggested, make up the issue in order to alienate her son-in-law from her daughter’s affections. “I wish I didn’t have to do this,” she said. “I didn’t want all of this to happen, but it fell in my lap and I couldn’t just ignore it, could I?” Lindstrom said that her doubts about McCann’s origins began when her neighbor Essie Powell commented shortly after McCann’s engagement to Lindstrom’s daughter that McCann seemed like “such a nice boy, like Jerry Seinfeld or Jeremy Piven.” Lindstrom said she pointed out that McCann is an Irish name—or maybe Scots, she couldn’t be sure—but that the exchange left her wondering why someone of supposedly Celtic origins had dark hair and good teeth. “I mean, aren’t they all supposed to be redheads? And drinkers?”

Lindstrom told reporters that repeated verbal and written requests for McCann to produce an original birth certificate have been met with eye rolls, sighs, and patronizing hand pats.

When confronted with the fact that a birth certificate must have been produced and verified in order for McCann and his wife to have obtained a marriage license, Lindstrom replied, “It could have been a birth certificate from Guam! Those people don’t care. They’re public servants. And no one in the City Clerk’s office can remember even seeing a birth certificate for Alexander McCann. At least not when I called last Tuesday.”

A recent poll of Lindstrom’s book club and quilt guild show nearly 57% of respondents either do not believe or have serious doubts that McCann is not a member of some sort of unsavory ethnic group. Critics of this poll claim that the results are skewed due to the large number of respondents who erroneously consider “Democrat” and “Unitarian” to be ethnic groups.

“The question that I and several members of the Junior League are asking is: why would this man be so reluctant to hand over his birth certificate unless he had something to hide?” Lindstrom said. “I have people on the ground in Akron, and what they are reporting is very disturbing. Apparently, someone has bribed or intimidated the personnel at all four major Akron hospitals so we cannot access any patient records that could prove or disprove that an Alexander McCann was born on October 17^th, 1984. They keep spouting off some nonsense about privacy laws. Everybody knows there’s no such thing. This is America!”

Linsdtrom’s daughter, Marietta McCann, told WKSL News the entire controversy erupted after Lindstrom walked in on the McCanns during an intimate moment. “I grew up with my mother telling me I should never bother to have sex because I’d never enjoy it anyway. And let me tell you, what Alex was doing? I was enjoying. A lot. But I had to stop enjoying it to scrape my mother off the floor and put cold compresses on her head. Ever since then she’s been trying to convince me that nice boys from Ohio don’t do things like that with their mouths and so he must really be Guatemalan or something.”

Alexander McCann could not be reached for comment, but did release a statement in which he pledged to paint the sunporch before Mother’s Day and noted that Friday evening after 7 p.m. would be an inconvenient time for Lindstrom to “pop over” as he and Mrs. McCann have several “unsavory ethnic activities planned.”