Is That The Shirt You're Wearing Read online

  “Please Mom, stop,” the middle child begged.

  “Anyway, I guess we were supposed to be boyfriend and girlfriend in the dream and that’s what’s sort of weird because he’s not really my type. He’s too much of a pretty boy for me.”

  “Ewww. Mom. You’re only making it worse! You’re like a cougar,” the 15-year-old scolded.

  I realized I was digging a deeper hole but I was sort of enjoying myself by this point.

  “Oh please, that ‘boy’ is probably 25 years old,” I protested. “He’s not really a high school teenager you know.”

  They stared at me as if I belonged on the Megan’s Law website.

  “Okay, how come you girls never say anything like this when Daddy and Barry are eyeing that model who wears a skimpy swimsuit and eats a hamburger on that commercial? How old do you think that girl is?”

  Aha! I was on to something. They didn’t have a comeback for that one.

  Then my seven-year-old jumped on the bandwagon. “Mommy has a teenage boyfriend. Mommy has a teenage

  boyfriend,” she sang. “I’m going to call Daddy at work and tell him you have a teenage boyfriend.”

  “Okay, you go do that. I’m going to go turn on the Disney Channel to check out the meat.”

  I suspected I took it too far, but knew that for sure when my youngest went to bed that evening. She said something that shook me to the core. “Mommy, when you get divorced, can you not remarry? Because I don’t want some strange dude coming in to kiss me goodnight.”

  Oh dear, clearly my dreamy boyfriend was too much

  information for her. I needed to stop over-sharing with my kids. I should really be more like my parents. They didn’t tell me anything about themselves. In fact, I didn’t even know for sure where my dad worked until I was a teenager, and I was an adult before I heard that my father had two sisters who died from pre-vaccine-era illnesses. Only recently did I learn that my mother had to live with her mean aunt for an entire year during the Depression.

  Their generation chose to keep their private lives private, even from their children. I certainly didn’t know the content of their nocturnal fantasies. Why couldn’t I keep my big mouth shut like they did?

  After resolving to change I reassured my daughter. I explained that my dream was just a crazy jumble of images and I had no intention of divorcing or remarrying anyone, certainly not that blond boy from the Disney Channel.

  I thought I had her convinced but after saying goodnight she said, “I don’t want him driving me to school either.”

  He won’t, honey. In fact, I promise I’ll never let my teenage boyfriend out of my bedroom again. Sweet dreams.

  5 weeks, 4 days

  My mom casually told me this morning that the second doctor she went to see is now referring her to a third doctor, a hematologist. This second doctor is worried that a bone marrow cancer might be the cause of her weakness. So all this time that I have been poo-pooing her weakness and blaming it on her lack of exercise, it may have actually been caused by cancer? I am a more horrible daughter than I had previously imagined. I can’t believe how completely insensitive I’ve been.

  The really weird thing was that my mom seemed unconcerned when she told me. “Well, I’ve lived a long life. I’m 83 after all. It’s not like I have small children at home.” When did she suddenly become so brave?

  Then, last night we got an unusual phone call from my 82-year-old father-in-law. He and my mother-in-law have had some health problems recently, so he told my husband in a very casual sort of way that they had decided to throw in the towel together. My husband thought he was joking at first, so he kept questioning him about it in between their normal small talk. But by the time he hung up the phone, my husband was convinced that his parents were going to “off” themselves. We’re just not sure how and we’re not sure when.

  I don’t know what we are supposed to do with this information. Do we call the police? Their doctors? But what would they do about it even, send over 24-hour suicide protection squad?

  Maybe they were just joking. God I hope so. They had to be joking.

  But if it turns out they’re not, they better damn well take their stinky old dog with them. Cause that creature is not coming here. I’ll be offing myself in the garage before that happens. That smelly little beast barely qualifies as a dog.

  I’m not going to share either of these developments with my children, that’s for sure. There’s really no good way to phrase it. “Hey kids, guess what? Grandma might have cancer and Granddaddy and Grandma B. formed a suicide pact! So, uh, what do you want for lunch?”

  The Bad, Awful, Horrible News

  Upon returning home from a dinner out with friends, my husband began acting strange. I knew something was wrong, but couldn’t figure out what. Our evening had been enjoyable, completely void of sarcastic jabs that might indicate one of us was secretly pissed off about something - something that likely happened days earlier and was only now being coaxed out by the cocktails.

  I cornered him in the kitchen and demanded to know what was up.

  “Nothing. Let’s talk about it after the kids go to bed,” he said, abruptly.

  Oh boy. I was hoping for a simple, “You had spinach in your teeth all evening,” even though I knew he would have quickly told me something like that, since he’s always been good at protecting me from potential embarrassment.

  What I didn’t expect was the delay response. After 22 years of marriage, I recognized that the delay response was never good.

  I worried that he had privately received some bad news. The children were clearly okay, but maybe his parents, or maybe my mom? I had a dozen terrifying scenarios running through my mind – accidents and diagnoses that had to be worse than whatever revelation was in store.

  But no, it turned out that the horrible news my husband had to bear was worse than I could have ever imagined.

  Once the kids were safely in bed, he looked at me as if

  his heart was slowly breaking and said, “There’s no easy way to tell you this, so here it is: you have a hair; a long one, growing out of your chin.”

  “What?” I asked. His words made no sense to me. It was like he had spoken them in another language, like French or Farsi or . . . Canadian.

  “It’s on your chin. There’s one hair that’s longer than the others. I noticed it at dinner, but I didn’t want to tell you because there was nothing you could do about it at the restaurant,” he further explained.

  “Oh my God! You mean, like an old person hair? That’s not possible. Nooooo!” I screamed, as I ran down the hall.

  I flipped on the bathroom light and searched the mirror, inspecting my face and jaw line from every angle. Thankfully, I saw no hair. Obviously he was out of his flipping mind.

  When he walked into the bathroom I confronted him. “I don’t know what you’re saying. You must have been seeing things from that double martini because I don’t see anything. There’s no hair on my chin.”

  But he shook his head sadly and replied, “Here, use these” as he handed me my reading glasses from off the bedside table.

  When did he become so cruel?

  I put on my readers and looked again. Oh God. I could see it now. It was only a couple centimeters or so, but it was there all right. One long hair coming out of my chin,

  like old people have in cartoons.

  But this didn’t make any sense. My mom didn’t get these rogue hairs until she was much older. I remember I was a teenager when she found her first one, and that would have made her at least 40-um . . . oh.

  Oh dear.

  I stared at my reflection and realized that I barely recognized the person I saw in the mirror. I used to pride myself on looking pretty decent. Now my face could ward off the undead. How had I fallen apart so completely?

  It seems like each week brings a new sign of humiliating decay. First it was my eyes. I always had perfect vision, but then one day I couldn’t read a menu. Now I have to get out my glasses ju
st to read texts on my phone. When my kids get sick, they have to read their own prescription dosages. God help me if they’re ever wrong.

  Oddly enough, my ears were next. Suddenly they looked longer, like giant elephant ears. I stopped wearing dangly earrings for fear of drawing too much attention to them. Then gray hairs started appearing at my temples. So I paid extra at the salon to paint them out. Heck, what was a few more dollars?

  With each depressing milestone, I would pout for a few days, bemoaning the indignity of it all. But then I’d adjust to the new norm, all the while deluding myself that my efforts were somehow in a different category than those who Botoxed, surgically lifted, or collagen filled.

  Finally I pulled myself away from the mirror, turned to my husband and somberly said, “I guess I should thank you for telling me, and it was kind of you to wait until we got home.” I appreciated that he hadn’t mocked me in front of our friends or even worse, the kids. I don’t know if I could have used such restraint.

  But I suppose my demise has pained him as much as it has me. After all, I bear scant resemblance to the girl in our wedding photo. Back then we romanticized growing old together, but didn’t fully understand what that meant. We fantasized about our future, kids, and grandkids, and the Alaskan cruise we’d take in our retirement, but our dreams never included rogue hairs, baldness, daily medications, or sagging body parts.

  I remember when we vowed to “Love, honor and protect,” that the last part almost seemed old-fashioned at the time. Protect from what - marauding bears, a neighboring rival clan? But now it’s clear that we really do protect; we guard one another from the hazards of modern life. He notices the brake pads are wearing thin on my car. I spot that darkened mole on his shoulder. And yes, he saves me from the embarrassment of going out in public with an ugly hair growing out of my chin. We have each other’s back.

  It does soften the blow, knowing I’m not in it alone, but still this aging business is hard to accept. Once again I have to suck it up and amend my daily regimen, adding searching for errant hairs to the growing list of maintenance chores.

  Because there’s one thing I know about these old people hairs - they always grow back.

  Five weeks, 2 days

  Between the elderly parent stress and having the children home I’ve actually started to look forward to going back to work where things are ironically more relaxing. My postponed job has now confirmed for the first week of September, coinciding with the day the kids return to school. I’ll be working on another “Comedy Central Roast,” this one for Charlie Sheen. I feel a little bad about working on this show, because it feels like I’m part of a staff of enablers, making money off of a man whose life is in trouble.

  I’ve had worse jobs. “The Glutton Bowl,” a food-eating competition show that taped a week after the September 11th attacks comes to mind. That was a hideous display of Western waste and bad timing, made only worse by the barfing spree that dominoed through the talent and crew backstage right after. I still get nauseated thinking about it.

  I also disliked working on the first “Extreme Makeover” series, the one that did hours of plastic surgery on the down and out. I always worried about how many medical problems the people would have afterwards when the doctors and cameras had vanished.

  But my worst job was working on a beauty pageant where I was given the names of the winners to put in the envelopes before the show even began. That might very well have been illegal.

  I enjoy working on these Roasts, but not because I find insult humor funny. Actually quite the opposite. What I like is the absurd conversations we have in the edit bay after we’ve taped the show. “We have to keep that prison rape joke in or the next one won’t make any sense!” or, “You can’t cut that! It’s the whole payoff for the transsexual hooker joke run. What are you thinking?”

  After we deliver a rough cut version, a sweet woman from the network sends me the Standards and Practices notes detailing what needs to be bleeped or cut out entirely. Inevitably I will be told to call her and argue something like, “Are you sure we have to cut that ‘sex with his sister’ joke? It got a big laugh in the room.” One time I got to announce good news to my coworkers, “The network says we don’t have to bleep ‘shit’ anymore!” Hooray! Score another hit for the decline of our civilization.

  But the downside of working on the Roasts is the effect they have on me when I leave the edit bay. After listening to raunchy, foul humor for twelve hours a day, ten days in a row, I can only think of foul, raunchy humor.

  “Why, I’ll have my martini dry like my . . .” Good Lord, what am I saying?

  I have to struggle to keep the foul-mouthed words inside my head when I’m home. “Mommy says no more motherf ***ing milk! That’s why! Now get in that G**D*** f***king bed!”

  Same thing happened when I edited a NASCAR show once. After spending day after day cutting together montages of high-speed racing, I’d leave the edit bay and drive home like a freakin’ maniac, swerving in between cars and pulling up right behind them like I was drafting, even using double-pedal foot action as I skidded to the stoplights.

  So, whenever I hear people claiming that extended television viewing or video game playing has no effect on people, I shake my head. Because I know better.

  My Madonna Story

  Working behind-the-scenes in variety television has allowed me some personal thrills. I’ve met heroes like Carol Burnett - which was truly an out-of-body-type experience - and I’ve worked on glamorous award shows like the Emmys, Screen Actors Guild Awards, and the Oscars, and music shows with Britney Spears, Coldplay, Mariah Carey, and Lady Gaga. So people assume I have some pretty exciting tales to tell. Oh, if only this were the case!

  Because most of my career has been spent in the script prep department, which is usually hidden away, in a deep, dank and dark corner of a theatre in an area that looks a lot like it could have once been a broom closet. My co-workers and I are always so busy updating script pages, show rundowns, and production schedules that we barely even get a chance to see the show we are working on. “Tell me again why we wanted to work in showbiz,” we’ve often asked each other as we’ve hovered over a broken photocopy machine at 2:00 o’ clock in the morning.

  Sure, sometimes I hear some juicy tidbits, about backstage drug use or outlandish demands, but these tales come to me second hand and retelling them could only attract the attention of lawyers, or, in some extreme cases, the FBI.

  I like telling my story of working in an edit bay with Barbra Streisand while she put the finishing touches on her Timeless television special. I had heard stories of her being difficult to work with and I was truthfully terrified to meet her. Yet she could not have been nicer. When she was considering the proper wording for a graphic that started the show I even

  boldly made a suggestion. Instead of giving me the, “How dare the peasant speak?” sort of look, she surprisingly took my suggestion seriously and bounced the idea around for a while. I’ll admit I wasn’t much of a fan before that day, but since then I surely have been.

  But there’s one other showbiz tale that I can tell with firsthand knowledge that has a juicier sort of edge. It has served me well at parties, by the way. It’s about Madonna so I like to call it, “My Madonna Story.” Clever, huh?

  I was working on the Oscars, which was one of my favorite shows to work on. Even though I wasn’t a big film buff or particularly star struck, something about the energy on that show was like no other. Everything was bigger and more extravagant. These were the Billy Crystal years where there were elaborate dance numbers for movies like The Beauty and The Beast and Aladdin, so between the staff, the crew, the orchestra, and the dancers, there were hundreds of people working on the show. It was easy to get swept up in the excitement watching the many costumed performers and presenters lining up before the show backstage.

  Even the big stars treated the Oscars differently. Unlike the other awards shows where only about 20 % of the stars come to rehearse, on th
e Oscars the actors and performers actually show up. I think this is mostly to make sure that they don’t screw up in front of the millions of people watching at home, and more importantly in front of the other actors and performers watching inside the theatre.

  One year, Madonna was booked to perform a nominated song from Dick Tracy. Generally, a perk of working on the shows was that when the performers rehearsed, we could sometimes sneak away from our desks and sit in the audience to watch. It was like being treated to a private concert. But, on the day of Madonna’s rehearsal we were told that the house was “closed.” Unless you were a stage manager or holding a camera, the theatre was off limits. We were also told that they would be turning off the feed to the backstage monitors so we couldn’t watch her rehearsal on the TV screens in the office either.

  Since I was not a huge Madonna fan, and thought the song from Dick Tracy was rather boring, I wasn’t that disappointed. During Madonna’s rehearsal time I busily did my work, and because the monitors were off, I forgot all about what was happening on stage. So I was quite surprised when the phone rang in the production office and the receptionist yelled, “They need Kristen on the stage right now!”

  “What?” I’m Kristen. Did they mean me? Was there another Kristen? I was baffled and also worried. I assumed the worst. I must have made some horrible mistake somewhere, somehow, and was being called on the carpet.

  It didn’t make any sense though. That year I was dealing with the rehearsal scheduling, the foreign feed and the closing credits, and had nothing to do with the performances or the music. So what could they possibly have wanted me for?

  I dutifully ran to the stage and checked in with the stage manager.

  She told me that I was needed to stand in for Madonna. “What?”

  It turned out that in their zeal to clear the stage of all unnecessary bodies, all the hired stand-ins were told to go home. So now they needed someone to stand-in for Madonna so she and they could see how the lighting looked on her strapless pale pink dress.