Spilled Milk

(Originally published in the Huffington Post)

I never thought when I started building my kids a treehouse that it would turn into a competition. A competition inside my mind — the worst kind. What follows is the sad story of how two hot daddies got under my bark.

hot daddy /hät ‘da-dē/ adjective + noun: the father of a kid at your kid’s school, who, instead of aging, balding and gaining weight like you and the other dads, somehow manages to show up on campus looking like the Marlboro Man or worse, a Calvin Klein underwear model.

As any mom won’t tell you, hot daddy sightings make trips to school more fun. They just do. Still, in spite of these occasional diversions, you sometimes wish they’d refrain from breeding. It makes your kids look bad.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s flash back to the sixties.

I grew up in South Carolina, on the edge of a small town in a new development oddly named Pitts Meadows. Oddly named because no Pitts families lived there, and there were no meadows, just lots of woods. Which made Pitts Meadows a perfect place for treehouses, great news for the explosion of kids moving in. Every May there’d be tons of new construction. When the workers would knock off around 5, swarms of us non-Pitts termites would descend, devouring every last scrap of wood we could steal for our treehouses.

This went on all summer. Deep in the woods, with no adults to supervise or tell us what not to do, we combined unfettered imagination with a staggering lack of skill to construct some of the most awesome, ramshackle masterpieces in the history of treehousing. Nothing was planned, nothing was level and, best of all, nothing was safe. Our treehouses were flammable, unstable deathtraps. And for good reason: we literally loved them more than life.

Somehow we understood that danger was a key element in the successful treehouse equation; where’s the fun if there’s no risk of backing into a nail, slicing open your leg or falling 10 feet and landing on your brother?

It was a different time. Safety issues never seemed to bother our parents — as long as you made it home for supper alive with no visible signs of sexual molestation, they seemed content. These were the brave men and women who protected us from the elements by putting asbestos roofs over our heads, tucking us into bunks with no railings and driving us to school in smoke-filled cars where cigarette lighters came standard but seatbelts didn’t.

Hindsight apologists will say no one knew the dangers back then, but I don’t buy it. The pill was not yet in wide use and families had lots more kids. Nobody says it out loud, but it’s pretty clear to me the asbestos, second-hand smoke, and lack of seatbelts were deliberate strategies for thinning the herd.

Back to the present. I’m now married with two kids and living in the Hollywood Hills. Living in the hills can be a challenge when raising children. Kids roll down hills. (See “Jack and Jill.”)

When our first child was on her way, our real estate agent encouraged us to sell our house and buy something in a more kid-friendly neighborhood, code for a flat backyard and a fat commission for her. I’d worked hard for a house with a view of the Hollywood sign, and I wasn’t about to trade it in just so my kid could have a yard that took all the challenge out of walking. So we kept our hill but dug a few holes, sank some posts, put in a retaining wall and voila: a lovely, level yard built into our existing hillside. And still, across the canyon, H-O-L-L-Y-W-O-O-D, conveniently located for alphabet lessons.

A few years later, after our son was born, something strange began to happen. A pine grove on the hill below began… calling to me. It was almost like music. I would stand on our deck watching those five stately pines caressing the sky with their graceful, newly-needled branches, and I could actually hear a melody, a two-syllable lyric floating on its perfect, five-note chords:

“Treehouse. Treehouse. Treehouse.”

Convincing James and Elizabeth was a snap; they were jazzed from the word “go.” We discussed what they wanted, I sketched out our basic idea and we set about our work. Once the basic shape of the floor was framed and level among the five pines, I laid down the floor, and we were off and running.

Then it happened.

Enter Hot Daddy No. 1

.I had spotted him months before at one of our school’s Friday-morning sings. Ruggedly handsome, a dark, silent, solid type, he bore a striking resemblance to the Marlboro Man. Beyond noting his resemblance to a cigarette ad, however, I had no feelings about him one way or another. Okay, maybe a couple. Until the night Kelly and I found ourselves at his and his wife’s home for a school fundraising event. I had just finished admiring their kitchen re-model and art collection, when I stepped into their back yard and saw it: The Thing.

Rising 30 feet in the air, it was the most spectacular-looking treehouse I’d ever seen. There was a staircase starting at the ground and climbing all the way up to the main structure. It was so high in the trees it towered over their actual people-live-in-it house. I found myself attracted and repelled at the same time, the way I feel when I see spider or drive through Beverly Hills.

I knew I had to see The Thing up close. As I started up the treehouse staircase, my legs began to buckle. I tried to calm myself. “It’s just a treehouse,” I repeated over and over, under my breath. But it wasn’t. I knew it and the treehouse knew it.

When I got to the top of the stairs, I entered the main structure, the house part of the treehouse. It was similar to what the kids and I had sketched out, with a flat, eight foot high ceiling and a real sliding barn door mechanism. Fine. Cool. I could handle that — I was planning a pitched roof and three sliding doors. But it turned out that the main structure was just a preamble to the main event. The money shot was a catwalk jutting out and over the entire length of their backyard. It must have been 25 feet long, complete with cutouts that allowed branches to grow through, setting the perfect scene for pirate sword fights and Star Wars paternity showdowns.

I began to feel sick.

After we got home, Kelly paid the babysitter while I went downstairs and shook my children awake from their sleep: “Get up, kids. We need to talk.”

“What’s wrong, Daddy?” Elizabeth asked, rubbing her eyes. “Is it an earthquake? Did somebody die?”

“It’s our treehouse.”

James, five-years-old and groggy, just looked at me, confused. “It died?”

“Not yet, but it will if we don’t up our game.”

“What are you doing?” Kelly’s voice and silhouette now filled the door frame.

“Just kissing the children goodnight,” I lied. I hugged the kids, whispering in their ears, “We’re being trounced. I need ideas by breakfast.” With the image of the Marlboro Man’s Thing seared into my brain, I got no sleep at all that night.

The next morning, I told the kids in detail what I’d seen. We spit-balled our new, improved treehouse over eggs and toast.

“We could splatter-paint the inside,” said Elizabeth.

“Can we have a fireman’s pole? I want a fireman’s pole!” cried James.

“Who doesn’t?” I agreed, jotting down notes.

After fielding a few more upgrades, I quickly drew a sketch of our new plans. When I was done, we all that agreed the revision looked fierce. After dropping the kids at school, I drove to Home Depot to buy studs, where I ran into the real thing.

Hot Daddy No. 2.

I’d met him a couple of times. He’s a nice guy, so nice, in fact, that he’d grown a scruffy beard to cover his flawless bone structure so that the other dads felt less ugly. It didn’t work. His scruff was like Brad Pitt’s scruff, a monumental failure, like trying to hide Michelangelo’s David under a layer of Saran Wrap.

I said hello to Hot Daddy No. 2, we chatted about our boys and their progress with shapes, and he asked what I was doing at Home Depot. I told him I was there buying supplies for a treehouse I was building.

“No way, dude, I’m building a treehouse for my kids!” he crowed, showing a more animation than you’d expect from a Calvin Klein underwear model.

Because, you see, he actually was a Calvin Klein underwear model. Long before his son was coloring dinosaurs next to mine, images of Hot Daddy No. 2 in his CK briefs inflamed libidos across the land. News reports had it that in Arizona people actually burst into flames. His sizzling photos were everywhere — magazine covers, bus shelters, multi-page spreads in Vanity Fair. For nearly a year he stood over a 100 feet tall on a Times Square billboard, smoldering at the gawkers below wearing nothing but a packed pair of tighty-whities and a naughty smile.

And now he was standing in the lumber aisle of Home Depot smiling at me, but the only photos I cared about were the ones he was showing me on his iPhone, photos of his treehouse. His Thing made the Marlboro Man’s Thing look tame. It had a custom-built, spiral staircase leading up and around a tree trunk to architectural wonders so ridiculous I had to avert my eyes, fearing I would burst into flames.

The shame I felt was piercing.

I’ve always been good with my hands. I’m a man who can build things; it’s a skill I’m proud of. I had set about doing a noble, classically American, Norman Rockwellian dad thing: building a treehouse for my kids. What are the freaking odds there’d be not one but two other dads in one kindergarten class doing exactly the same thing, only looking miles hotter than me in the process?

After Hot Daddy No. 2 left in search of materials for what would no doubt become an escalator to his kid’s treehouse media room, I called my husband to report this latest emotional indignity.

“It wouldn’t bother me if they looked like Bob Vela or even Tim Allen,” I unloaded. “But dammit, handy’s all I’ve got. How the hell do they get to be handy and hot? It’s not fair.”

As usual, Kelly saw the situation for what it was and patiently clarified things:

“So what if they’re hotter than you. Big deal. That’s not what’s this is about. What’s really bothering you is the fact that their treehouses are hotter than yours.”

Marriage is a cruel institution. He had nailed it with a high-decibal, pneumatic nail gun. Straight through my heart.

When I picked up the kids from school that afternoon, they took one look at my face and leapt for joy. Without my saying a word knew what was coming: a bigger, better treehouse for them.

Elizabeth: “Let’s put in a loft! With bunk beds!”

James: “And a trap door! I want a trap door! And a swimming pool.”

That was a year ago. We’re nowhere near done, but in keeping with the times I’m happy to report we’re officially underwater. On our treehouse.

I don’t begrudge the Hot Daddies. They’re both cool guys who, like me, are just trying to create something special for their kids. I have, however, subsequently learned a couple of things they initially failed to mention:

1) The Marlboro Man paid someone else to build his kids’ treehouse; and

2)The Crotch of Calvin Klein owns his own construction company, no doubt has a crew of workers and will probably be contracting out the escalator.

And, I’m guessing, their structures are probably built to code, something I would never sink to doing. Building to code is fine for houses. For treehouses, never. It eliminates the key element in the successful treehouse equation: raw danger.

My kids understand this in their bones. Because our treehouse is located way down the hill from our house, you actually have to rappel down a rope to get there. The entire thing has been built one board at a time, with me hanging on to that rope for dear life, climbing down backwards with boxes of tools, cartons of nails and splintery plywood clutched under my arm. I’m never happier than when we’re heading down there for another summer day’s work.

When Kelly announced his plan to build steps leading from the back yard down the hill, to make access to the treehouse safer and easier, the kids’ reaction was merciless and swift.

“No!” cried Elizabeth. “It’s way more fun to go down on the rope.”

“Yeah, no steps!” yelled James. “We like sliding down on our butts!”

Jack and Jill. I could not have been more proud.

(Full disclosure: It is established fact that my husband is the hottest daddy at school, and I’m not just saying that because he’s sitting here watching me type this. Hotly.)

December 6, 2017

 

As we decelerated, the plume of smoke belching from underneath our hood began to panic my unflappable daughter. I tried to calm her as Kelly looked for a place to get off the road. “Think of it as an adventure, honey! We’re inside a fire-breathing dragon who just lost a leg!” She began to cry.

Somehow we managed to limp across four lanes of traffic to the next exit and turn down a hill into the welcoming parking lot of a visitors center that overlooked a picturesque lake. A visitors center with bathrooms and vending machines and other kids to play with. A visitors center we soon noticed had a chain-link fence around it and a propped-up sign gloating, “Closed for Renovations.”

“Look, an abandoned castle!” I tried, failing.

We called AAA Roadside Assistance and waited. Turkeys cook faster. An hour and 40 minutes passed as my iPod faded from Gaga to gone and the sun sank deep into the lake. The battery on our cell phone now dead, our world turned pitch black and eerie quiet.

When our Triple-A savior finally arrived on the scene, I could have jumped for joy. Instead, I froze. The white knight who showed up for our rescue turned out to be a physical composite of every high school bully I ever suffered: a tattooed skinhead-type, complete with soul-deadening stare and missing front tooth.

I hesitantly approached the massive flatbed tow truck idling before me and handed up my membership card through the cab window. Barely looking up, he grunted, “You know we only tow free for seven miles. After that it’s 10 bucks a mile. You got about 15 miles to the next town.” I asked if he could fit a family of four in his cab. His shrug said he’d manage.

After finishing his paperwork in silence, he finally lumbered down from his cab and stopped, getting his first, long look at my family. He stared at Kelly, then at me, then at our kids, finally speaking in the slow, guttural tones of a wife beater:

“These kids y’all’s?”

We answered that yes, they were.

Traveling as a two-dad family can have its challenges. Twice a year we visit my parents in South Carolina, a state so welcoming that its constitution bans not only same-sex marriage and civil unions but birth control and bagels. On its face, California might seem an improvement, until you find yourself stranded in the dark off I-5 in one of those counties where Prop 8 passed with 98 percent of the vote.

This man, whom I had now cast as the bastard love child of Ned Beatty and his horny hillbilly in the sequel to Deliverance, stared at us for what seemed a heart-thumping forever. Then he moved off. He spent the next few minutes hauling out huge, heavy chains with giant metal hooks. In my mind I pictured him encircling them around Kelly and me after he’d shot us, to more easily sink us to the bottom of that all-too-convenient lake.

After attaching the giant hooks to our Odyssey — of course, to complete our family portrait and ensure our suspect status, we were two men driving a minivan — he moved to the side of his flatbed and began pulling mysterious levers that caused his vehicle to groan as it slowly tipped its flatbed to meet our homosexual automobile.

This was too much for our youngest, James, a boy so Bam-Bam butch that for years we’ve referred to him as God’s joke on the gay daddies. By now he truly was jacked up by the adventure of it all. Biologically drawn to the smell of metal and grease like a moth to a blowtorch, James pushed forward and started peppering our AAA guy with questions: “Is our car dead?” “Do you have a bathroom in your truck?” “Who knocked out your tooth? Was it Batman?”

At this point Kelly intervened: “James, stay back so he can do his work.” Mr. Triple-A stopped what he was doing and looked at us. “His name’s James? I got a boy named James.” He had six kids, he informed us, all named after famous people in the Bible. Of course you do, I thought. A home movie began unspooling in my mind, starring a toddler Moses and barefoot Bathsheba helping their brother Goliath blow up frogs by sticking firecrackers up their butts.

Then he did something unexpected, something… perfect. This man whose menacing silence and sidelong glances had me rattled took off his work gloves and asked James to hold out his hands. He then began to gently pull the huge, oil-stained gloves over our son’s tiny fingers. Next he asked if James wanted to help him work the levers on the side of the flatbed so that he could haul our minivan up onto the truck. Mute with awe, James could only nod. As the chains grew taut and our car began to make its slow ascent up the ramp, James’ eyes widened to the size of the moon that had finally peeked through the clouds overhead.

Before long we were all crowded into the cab of the tow truck for the ride to the nearest town. I never would have thought it possible, but somehow the five of us fit. My family was safe. Jesse — he had a Biblical name, too — pulled out his phone and handed it to us so we could see pictures of his family. As the glow from the faces of his wife and kids lit up the inside of the truck, he looked at Kelly and me and said, “So… did you guys get married when y’all had that little window a few years back, before the Prop 8 thing?”

We said that we did. “That’s good,” he said. “My mom did, too. She called up me and my brother and sister and told us, ‘Me and Maggie’s gonna have a wedding. You got a week and a half to figure out a way to get here.'”

From there on out, this man I was so sure I had pegged continued to upend my preconceived notions. When he learned we live in Hollywood, he told us that as a teenager he’d been bused in from the suburbs, commuting 20 hours a week to attend the Hollywood High magnet program in theater arts. Theater arts?

“Yep, it was great. For P.E. we took dance. Spent English readin’ Shakespeare. Instead of shop, we built sets for musicals. I loved it.”

He never charged us the $80 he should have for the extra mileage. Instead, he directed us to the one motel in that truck-stop town that had a swimming pool for the kids. Then he advised us which mechanic to see the next morning and which taco stands to avoid. And before lowering our big, gay minivan into the parking lot of the auto shop, he stopped to put his gloves on our daughter so she could work the levers this time, sending her into a spiral of rapture. After that he offered to drive us to our motel.

After we’d said our goodbyes and settled into our room, we made sure to sit the kids down and tell them how lucky our family had been that Jesse was the one sent to help us. Being kids, they got it: somehow the five of us fit.

After Kelly and the kids fell asleep, I got curious and Googled the name Jesse. Turns out it’s Hebrew for “God’s gift.”

March 3, 2012

 

 

(Originally published in the Huffington Post)

I met her in November 1988. She was guest-starring on an episode of a short-lived NBC television series called Tattinger’s. A one-shot playing the star’s mother Franny, a seen-it-all former Broadway chorus girl. Cinch casting and among the first of many guest-starring tough mama roles that became her bread and butter in the decades ahead.

At the time I was a theatre guy trying to learn what I could about how television is made, hanging out on the set at the generous invitation of Tom Fontana, Tattinger’s creator and exec producer. Elaine Stritch was a Broadway legend. Of a certain age, trailing a difficult reputation (drinking, obstreperous behavior, narcissism). She had recently given up booze and was trying to remake her career in the United States after a number of years living and working in England.

There she’d had a four-year run on a 1970s sitcom called Two’s Company, playing an American author living in London, who needs to hire a butler and does. That was pretty much the show. Lightweight, a footnote even at the time, but that’s where I first encountered Elaine Stritch, thanks to my dad. I was home from colliege and he’d stumbled across an episode of Two’s Company being rebroadcast on PBS.

I could hear him calling from down the hall. “Bill! Come in here. You’ve got to see this woman.”

He knew me well. I did have to see that woman.

The show was funny enough. But that voice. That timing. That delivery. Even in a middling British TV import, this was an actress who immediately established the most basic fact about herself: She would not be be ignored.

I knew nothing of Stritch’s stage work that night, but was soon catapulted up to speed. All it took was hearing her iconic recording of “The Ladies Who Lunch,” from the original cast album of Stephen Sondheim’s Company, a stark look at marriage in America, set to music. At the time I was a rising junior preparing to audition for a college production of Company (I know, a college production of Company). I remember very little of what happened onstage at the University of Maryland, but my ears have never recovered from that first assault of Elaine Stritch ripping through Sondheim’s career-defining anthem to toxic conventionalism.

There it was again. That voice. That timing. That delivery.

My infatuation became insatiable after the watching her steal the show from a boatload of Broadway stars in the PBS airing of “Follies” in Concert in 1985. Again, utter flabbergastration. Not a word, but the only one that will do.

So when I spotted Elaine Stritch pacing the soundstage of Tattinger’s before her first scene was to be filmed, I had to introduce myself. If only to hear the words “Get away from me, you fawning stagestruck sycophant, can’t you see I’m working?” hurled my way with that voice, that timing, that delivery.

But that’s not what she said.

Once I’d introduced myself and told Elaine Stritch — eloquently I thought, in as non-sycophanty a manner as possible — how much I enjoyed her work, not as a mere fan but an informed connoisseur of her oeuvre, she stopped her fretful pacing. She smiled at me, hesitantly, seeming almost relieved. But only for an instant. That’s all it took for her to clutch my arm as if trying to puncture a life preserver, and erupt.

“I have NO FUCKING IDEA how to play this mother. None! And no one will help me. Nobody. Not the director, not the writer, they’re all too busy. I’m from the theatre, you know that, why don’t they? I need backstory, history, some sense of who this woman is. How can they expect a performance from this,” she said, rattling her script as if the dialogue were printed in dog shit.

“Who the HELL is this woman? Fucking television.”

It was as if heaven itself had opened up and swallowed me whole. And then she was gone, called away by an assistant director.

Of course I watched her film her scenes. I wasn’t about to miss my first chance to see Elaine Stritch perform live. Even if it was in an underwritten guest role in a television series that wouldn’t last 13 episodes.

She was a total pro. Leaving for the day, she spotted me in the hallway outside the makeup room, called me aside and asked how I thought she’d done. I told her she was great.

“Bullshit. But thanks.”

She asked if I’d mind doing her a favor. Her car was waiting in the parking lot, and she didn’t want to keep her driver waiting. She handed me a small envelope, told me it contained a $20 tip for her dresser (“Do you think that’s enough?”) and asked if I’d deliver it for her.

It was more than enough. Tipping your dresser is a theatre tradition utterly alien to TV actors.

After delivering Elaine Stritch’s tip, I was about to start the five-block trek on foot to catch my subway at 23rd and 8th, when a black town car stopped about 20 feet from me, its back window rolled down and I heard that unmistakable growl:

“HEY YOU! GET IN HERE!”

That voice, that timing, that delivery. Whiskey on sandpaper, aimed at me.

As I hesitantly slid into the back seat next to Elaine Stritch she announced, “It’s too cold to walk to the subway.” She instructed her driver to take me back to my apartment, wherever that might be, after he dropped her off at hers on the Upper East Side.

And for the next 15 minutes a legend regaled me with stories from her career, every word of which I transcribed in my journal as soon as I got back to my apartment on West 103rd Street.

The tale I remember most vividly is her acid recollection of a failed TV pilot in which she been cast as Mary Tyler Moore’s mother:

“Jesus Christ! Of course it failed! How could it not fail? Who’s gonna buy me as Mary Tyler Moore’s mommy?! The fuck! They even shot a sequence of us riding a bicycle built for two in Central Park. Can you believe that, Bill?” (She’d remembered my name.) “Of course you can’t. Who could? Me. And America’s Sweetheart. On a bicycle built for fucking two. Christ!”

We were never friends — I’m not sure she had friends — but I saw her several times over the years after that. A couple of backstage visits on Broadway (A Delicate Balance and Showboat) and a memorable dinner one night in Greenwich Village during which she fed me a gigantic shrimp from her overpriced shrimp cocktail. “Want one? Of course you do. You like shrimp. I can tell by the way you’re looking at it.” Then she dipped it in sauce, reached across the table and stuffed it in my mouth.

Nice isn’t a word you often hear associated with Elaine Stritch, but on that night in 1988 Elaine Stritch was nice. To her dresser. To her driver. To me. And I’m pretty sure to anyone else she encountered that day whom she sensed shared her frailty.

“HEY YOU! GET IN HERE!”

Rest in peace.

July 17, 2014

(Originally published in the Huffington Post)

In early November 2005, our son James received his first formal invitation, to Sunday afternoon tea at our friend Richard’s house.

As he’d only been alive for five weeks, this presented our boy with unique social challenges. He didn’t know how to wear shoes, for instance. Was restricted to a diet of baby formula. And lacked the fine motor skills to RSVP with anything more legible than a brusque footprint.

Still, he was five weeks old, not stupid. While pretending to nap, James had in fact overheard us discussing in hushed tones how to handle this social conundrum. Normally, we’d have declined, at least until James had grown into a larger diaper. But Richard is English. Knowing this, and putting two and two together, James no doubt feared that refusing an Englishman’s invitation to tea had the potential to escalate into a serious international incident. Rather than risk his country being forcibly restored to British rule, James, an American patriot, overcame his misgivings and indicated to us via spit bubble that we should accept on his behalf.

Though we arrived two minutes early, I waited until precisely 3 p.m. to ring the doorbell. Because I know they value that sort of thing across the pond. Richard welcomed us with a broad, warm smile and posh public school tones: “Well, look who’s arrived at my front door. Good aaaaafternoo–”

His mellifluous greeting was cut off by a low moan. A keening almost. Looking down I realized it was coming not from James but our four-year-old daughter Elizabeth, her dainty mouth contorted into the sort of grotesque, frozen rictus you only see on Italian widows just before they howl and throw themselves into their husband’s freshly dug graves.

“It hurrrrrrts!”

She now had one hand clapped to her ear and was hopping up and down on Richard’s brick walkway in what I can only describe as a dance of the damned. I shouldn’t have been surprised that our daughter had chosen this worst of all possible moments to experience the first and last ear infection of her life. This sort of impeccable timing had announced itself in Elizabeth’s infancy when, as she was placed in her beaming grandfather’s arms for the first time, she instinctively realized this was the perfect moment to empty the contents of her stomach.

As I dug around in James’ diaper bag for some liquid Tylenol, Richard bent down and asked Elizabeth if she might be more comfortable lying down in a back bedroom. “Is there a TV?” she whimpered. As I watched him whisper to our daughter as he tenderly led her down the hall, I was struck by his special brand of kindness, something I find unique to the childless. Those patient smiles and encouraging words I always imagine mask a silent, internal mantra: “Thank Christ I never reproduced.”

In the living room, Kelly balanced James with one hand while Googling earache remedies with the other. My girl did in fact calm a bit as we lay her down on the guest bed, but all it took was Richard switching on the TV for the crying to ratchet up. Richard thought it was the volume, until I assured him it was PBS. The Antiques Roadshow always has that effect on children.

In just under four seconds, 27,682 Internet sources had informed Kelly that a warm, damp washcloth on our kid’s ear might ease her pain. Remembering the advice of a homeless man I’d once passed while pushing Elizabeth in a stroller, I piggybacked on this idea, suggesting to Richard that he might soak the washcloth in bourbon in case she got thirsty. But Kelly nixed this idea, loudly, from the next room.

In lieu of alcohol, I had no choice but to suggest a more insidious narcotic — The Disney Channel. As it always did, my finger began to twitch uncontrollably as I reached for the remote, but somehow I managed to switch on The Suite Life of Zach & Cody. I felt terrible for Richard. This very nice friend had invited my family into his lovely home and how had we repaid him? By infecting it with the death of culture.

I’m pretty sure no sane adult has ever voluntarily subjected himself to children’s programming. Except of course those rare cases when emergency contraception is called for. I was reminded of this as Richard, unaware of what we were watching, walked in on a Disney moment so cloying it seemed to knocked him backward as if he’d been the victim of a blunt force trauma. Tossing the washcloth over his shoulder, he kept walking, announcing that tea would be served in five minutes.

Tenderly placing the warm, damp cloth on my daughter’s ear, I had to admit she seemed better. Sometimes soulless dialogue, bad acting and apocalyptic role models really are the best medicine.

I joined Kelly in Richard’s cozy, immaculate, antique-filled living room. As my husband sat on what I felt sure was called a divan and fed our son his afternoon bottle, I bit into a tiny cucumber sandwich and relaxed into the sort of adult surroundings I rarely got to enjoy anymore. Admiring the carefully placed bric-a-brac and Richard’s impeccable collection of early twentieth-century photography, I allowed myself to be carried away by the first thought that crossed my mind — that a truly motivated toddler could destroy this place in about three minutes.

“There we are,” Richard said, entering with a tea set I felt certain had been in his family for generations. He gingerly set the tray on the tea table in front of us next to an assortment of sandwiches, scones and jellies he’d no doubt assembled from scratch. Soon fragrant steam filled the room as Richard expertly filled each of our cups and proceeded to make the appropriate fuss over James, asking how Elizabeth was adjusting to her new brother and if Kelly and I were getting enough sleep. We showed him the Halloween photo we’d taken the week before of James looking adorably heroic in his tiny Superman onesie. We thanked our friend for this rare afternoon out and told him how much it meant to us that he’d found such a unique and personal way to celebrate the arrival of our son.

A moment James seemed instinctively to understand called for a personal response. And that’s when he obliged our host by adorably cocking his head, widening his eyes, and spewing what I swear had to be a good quart of white upchuck all the way across the room. I recall watching in open-mouthed amazement at the sheer physical power of it. As a perfect arc of Carnation Good Start began to make its way across Richard’s immaculately laid tea table, time seemed to stand still. Picture that hail of bullets in the The Matrix — only vomit — seeming to freeze in midair before resuming warp speed and landing with a loud splat next to a very large, sleeping dog. Then picture said dog bolting from the room, galloping into the back bedroom and landing on your daughter’s bad ear.

Her bloodcurdling scream is the last thing I recall of that afternoon.

Miraculously, by suppertime Elizabeth’s ear seemed all better, leading us to believe our daughter was either the next Meryl Streep or a witch.

James wasn’t so lucky. That night he was unable to hold down any food. The next morning an x-ray revealed something called incipient bronchitis. It wasn’t uncommon at that time of year in a child so young, our pediatrician told us. A nurse brought in a machine called a nebulizer and taught me how to give James breathing treatments at home. I was instructed to administer one every four hours and return two days later for a followup so the doctor could monitor our son’s progress. I did as I was told.

No one lets you know how quickly things can go south. In our case it was overnight.

Three days after the Great Tea Debacle, I found myself in the back of a speeding ambulance, watching a man I’d never met use every trick he knew to keep my eight-pound son’s drowning lungs going long enough  for us to make it to the hospital.

We spent the next eleven days in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit of Tarzana Regional Medical Center. I try not to revisit those days, but moments flash unbidden from from time to time. Here’s what I recall:

On the morning of our follow-up at the pediatrician’s office, placing my son in his car seat and being struck by how listless he seemed, his pallor now gray. Instinct screamed that something was very wrong.  I tell my daughter that we must skip the preschool drop-off and take James straight to the doctor. “That’s stupid, Daddy,” she says. “You’re supposed to take me to preschool, then take James to the doctor.”

Not being able to see James’ face because of the rear-facing car seat, and the shuddering chill when his big sister says from the back row, “Daddy, James looks like he’s running out of batteries.”

Our pediatrician’s face going white as he moves his stethoscope across James’ back and urgently mutters to a nurse, “Call an ambulance. He’s got crackles. Crackles everywhere.” And me, panicked and clueless, asking what “crackles” means.

Phoning Kelly at work and telling him to leave work immediately. I give him the address of the hospital and tell him what I know: that “crackles everywhere” means our son has something called RSV, a temperature down to 92 degrees and life-threatening pneumonia in both lungs.

Trying to read my daughter a Care Bears book as nurse Bobbi administers an emergency breathing treatment to James, then the sound of Bobbi’s alarmed voice as she calls out the door and down the hall, “He’s turning blue! Get the doctor back!”

A doctor and three nurses in the room now, struggling to revive our blue boy as my daughter asks, “Daddy, what’s happening? What are they doing to James?” Trying to keep him from dying, I think but don’t say.

James coughs. “That’s good,” says the doctor. James is breathing. I’m not.

And suddenly he’s not either. The tiny room fills. Three doctors now and four nurses. I can’t even see my son. It takes over a minute before he starts breathing again.

The feeling of having risen out of my body as I was a neighbor arrive to get my daughter out of there and take her to preschool.

Nurses pushing furniture and families against the walls of the waiting room so my son’s gurney can make it out the door and into an ambulance.

The weird, greenish lighting inside an ambulance, the flop sweat beading on the burly EMT worker’s face looking down at this tiny baby it’s his job to keep alive.

The random, chilling realization that if we’d taken my daughter to preschool first as planned, James would have stopped breathing in my car.

Kelly arriving at the hospital, unaware of all that has happened since I called him, our son turning blue, ceasing to breathe, twice. Every doctor and nurse piling into Examining Room 6, working to revive him. Unable to relay any of this, I collapse in his arms, sobbing.

The feeling of utter powerlessness as a small army of strangers hook one tiny boy to countless machines and drips and monitors. Dying a little every time they stick another needle into him.

Being told James’ lungs are no longer able to breathe on their own. My husband and I giving the doctor permission to put him in a virtual coma so a breathing tube can do the work for him, and keep him from instinctively trying to tear all the wires and monitors off his body.

Five days of watching my son lie unconscious, unable to look into his eyes.

Offering the only comfort to my son I know. Stroking him and singing “Sweet Baby James,” the one thing that always calms him. Willing myself to believe he can hear me.

Being told, after James’ third day of round-the-clock intensive care, that somehow his right lung has collapsed.

Swapping shifts with Kelly so we can be sure our son will see one of our faces when he wakes up from this nightmare.

Both of us trying to make things feel normal at home for Elizabeth when nothing is normal.

My only moment of pleasure each day — eating a chocolate chip ice cream sandwich in the cafeteria.

Clergy from the church where Kelly and I met arriving to offer us communion over our unconscious son’s hospital bed. Twice.

Waiting for the elevator and running into a TV star I’d once written for on a popular sitcom. I tell him about James, he tells me he’s waiting for his mother to come out of surgery. I’m struck by the incongruity, realizing that no amount of clever plotting or snappy dialogue can fix his mom, or my kid.

The numbing phone call from my father, a physician well acquainted with the fragility of life, the sound of his voice as he gently tries to let Kelly and me know the gravity of our plight, telling us that we need to prepare ourselves that “this might not end well.”

The blinking joy of being there to see my son open his eyes for the first time after five days. Very weak, but looking me straight in the eye and reaching for my finger.

Five days later, moving out of pediatric intensive care into a room with actual windows. Singing to my son as he lays on my chest. And the palpable, physical sensation of knowing that despite any genetic connection, we share the same heart.

Thanking our team of nurses led by Marisa Purchio, and Carmen Botero, James’ pediatric intensive-care physician, who has made herself available 24 hours a day, and restored our son to us.

Watching James’ eyes dance again, in a face so bloated from steroids we can’t decide if he looks more like Mao Tse-tung or Roseanne Barr.

 *.  *. *.  *. *

On Sunday, November 20, James came home again and, with flawless timing all his own, smiled for the very first time. In the weeks that followed, he thrived, confirming what he’d known from the moment he picked his first Halloween costume. He was Superbaby.

The same neighbors who’d helped look after Elizabeth while we were at the hospital now brought home-cooked dinners to our door every day. As we shared a meal with one of them, the phone rang. It was Wendy Barrie, one of the priests who’d served communion over the rail of James’ hospital bed as he lay unconscious.

“How’s our boy?” she said. Doing pretty great, we assured her.

“The reason I’m calling is that the entire vestry has taken a vote and it’s unanimous. We want James to play Baby Jesus in the Nativity pageant next month. If he’s up to it.”

“Wow, really? Baby Jesus?” Even I was starstruck. It’s kind of the ultimate brass ring for Christian-leaning infants.

“Actually, we’d love for the whole family to be involved. We thought Elizabeth could play an angel, and you guys could handle Joseph.”

“Which one of us?”

“Both of you.”

“Wait a minute. What? You want us both to be Joseph?”

“Why not? We’re a radically inclusive church.”

I laughed out loud. “What are you planning on calling this thing? Brokeback Bethlehem?”

And that’s how at the 2005 Christmas pageant of All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, California, Baby Jesus ended up with two daddies.

Which, as even the Holy Virgin would confirm, is kind of historically accurate.

December 23, 2012

“There’s a place where I can go and tell my stories to. In my room… in my room.”

The haunting Beach Boys classic springs to mind because that’s where I find myself as I’m writing this: in my childhood bedroom.

The same room, in fact, where I first heard that song. The aching harmonies of “In My Room” give voice to a longing shared by every American teenager: the need for a safe space, four walls to call your own. A place where you can shut out the world and be alone with your private thoughts. And dreams. And hormones. It helps to have a reliable lock.

Very little has changed up here over the years. Coming back is like sneaking into the past and inhaling my childhood. Same built-in desks, same bumpy ceiling tiles, same odd little troll dolls standing guard, their frozen smiles and eerie, unblinking stares making them dead ringers for the Olsen twins on Full House. The Hardy Boys Mysteries line the same shelf they always have, bookended by the purple foot I sculpted in Betty Fryga’s Tuesday afternoon art class. The foot no one understood.

My older brother and I first moved up here around the time Batman hit the airwaves. I was in fourth grade; he was in sixth. The birth of my youngest brother had forced our parents to make some new sleeping arrangements. As a consolation prize for giving up our downstairs rooms, they converted the unfinished attic into what they envisioned as a boy’s utopia for Jimmy and me, a sprawling Batcave of our own.

They wisely had the builders install separate sets of his-and-his furnishings: identical desks, bookshelves, closets and dressers, all built-in. Everything matched. Except my brother and me. While Jimmy jumped around in front of his mirror working out his latest Batman moves, I stood posing at mine, perfecting my flawless imitation of Mrs. Thurston Howell III on Gilligan’s Island.

The utopia my parents hoped for never happened. Some fish are meant to swim alone. As even a pimply, first-day clerk at Petco can tell you, never put two bettas in the same bowl; they’re genetically programmed to kill each other. During the years Jimmy and I shared this space, those bumpy ceiling tiles saw it all: epic battles, final visits from the tooth fairy, dueling puberties and me, lying on the bed, daydream-believing I was Davy Jones in The Monkees.

All these decades later, the only noticeable change in my room is the fact that, instead of two brothers, the beds are now occupied by two dads of the homosexual variety, and their kids. It’s spring break for our son and daughter, which, as usual, means Kelly and I have flown them cross-country from California to visit my parents in South Carolina.

To my children this is and always will be Mimi & Pop’s House. To me—regardless of my current address—it’s home, the place I feel safest. Returning is one of my great pleasures in life.

I love my parents for a million different reasons, but mostly, lately, I love them for not dying. I can’t help believing that staying put in this house has played a role in that. Meal by meal, task by task, dream by dream, each day they continue building a life together here, an architecture of shared intangibles. To my everlasting gratitude, they’ve resisted every urge to sell, downsize, retire to the Presbyterian Home or — that most deafening of death rattles — buy a condo.

I realize it’s selfish of me to be grateful for this. My folks are in their mid-80s; any of those options would make their day-to-day lives easier. But they’d hate it. And so would I. These walls contain the permanent record of my youth.

All I have to do is walk through the back door before random kernels of my past begin popcorning into memories. Before long the memories become stories, stories my kids can’t get enough of.

It’s empowering for kids to hear their parents recount tales of themselves at the same age; it levels the playing field, brings us closer. Through the backward lens of time, we cease being their parents, the powerful to their powerless. Hearing our stories transports them, for a few giddy minutes, from a world of Us versus Them, to nirvana: us as them.

I describe for my daughter Elizabeth how — at the very desk where she’s sketching mermaids — I worked for days on my “Louisiana Money Crops” poster. Worth every perfectionist minute, I tell her, recalling how I created vast cotton fields with my mom’s makeup puffs. I was the only one in class to earn an A+ from our pruny 4th grade teacher, drawing rare praise for the clever way I chose to illustrate the money crops theme: by gluing bright, shiny nickels on top of the O’s of LOuisiana, MOney and CrOps. My daughter laughs as I revel in the glory of it all.

I have her take off her shoes and feel around with her toes until she finds a stiff, chunky spot in the carpet. That, I tell her, is where I spilled a bowl of Elmer’s glue mixed with sugar (Louisiana’s prime money crop) and I managed to conceal my crime for days by telling my parents I’d redecorated. By hauling our bunk beds to the middle of the room.

This story delights her. But fifth graders are now being armed by their teachers with dubious new weapons like “critical reasoning.” Which means Elizabeth has begun to… question some of my stories. Among these is the tale of how her Uncle Jimmy routinely forced me into sadistic re-enactments of what she’s been taught to call Cowboys and Indigenous Peoples of the Americas. My son, 6, listens in rapt, thrilled horror, but this time Elizabeth rolls her eyes as I recount how my brother hogtied me to the foot of my bed, gagged me with a washcloth and tried to scalp me with our dad’s new set of steak knives. I’m not even done before she’s grabbed my iPhone and started searching for Uncle Jimmy’s number. She dials, then puts him on speaker to refute my lies.

Of course he can’t and doesn’t even try. Instead, Uncle Jimmy gleefully leaps in, providing tons of detail — things done with binoculars, atrocities involving dental floss and toothpaste — I’ve spent a lifetime blocking out. I hang up and break for a cocktail.

Jimmy was a lot bigger than me, a fact he routinely used to his advantage. My son understands this sort of thing all too well; he’s nearly five years younger than his sister. Which might explain why his favorite story is the one of how I exacted my revenge. I recount how I bided my time until the day Uncle Jimmy returned from the doctor, having been diagnosed with a rare bone condition. I was stunned when they wheeled him in, imprisoned from his chest to his feet in a full body cast. It may have been the happiest day of my life.

In a Zen state of rapture, I floated to our room and began planning how to best seize the moment. It doesn’t take long when your prey can’t run. My son hangs on my every move as I re-enact my silent, leisurely stroll from the bed to the pencil sharpener, the very same pencil sharpener I used that fateful night. I pause to point out that what I did next was the most cruel act I ever committed as a child, something he is NEVER to replicate no matter how much he thinks his sister might have it coming. Like Jimmy did. “Okay, I won’t! I won’t! Tell me the story!” blurts James, the suspense nearly causing him to wet his pants. So I do, recounting how my immobilized tormenter, now saucer-eyed with panic, watched helplessly as I slowly selected a teacher-approved, yellow #2 pencil, ground its tip to a fine razor point, and stabbed him in the toe.

Misty watercolor memories of the way we were.

My parents were known locally for their determination to repopulate our town with penises. We were known simply as the Walker Boys — Jimmy, Bill, George and Andy. To outsiders we appeared harmless. On days like scalping day, or pencil-in-the-toe day, or the day George dumped a cup of warm urine on the rest of us, we could have given riding lessons to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. How our mother managed to survive without becoming a boozer, or drowning us all in a lake like that women a few counties over, mystifies me. A lot.

I have only one son, and I swear, watching him jolt to life each morning is like witnessing the birth of atomic fusion. When James was two, I had to pry him off the top of the refrigerator where he’d discovered six juice boxes and guzzled every last one. Seating my two-hundred pound self squarely on his flailing, sugar-shocked body, I dialed my mom. “You did this four times?” I shouted, as my Juicy-Juiced changeling pummeled me with an addict’s rage. “How the hell are you even still alive?”

She laughed a dismissive, bell-like laugh. It was no big deal, she said. Boys are fun, boys are cute, she loved raising boys. I knew by her answer that one of two things was true. She was either lying or a mutant.

About the time I moved into junior high and my body began to pubertize, a vision of my future began taking shape. It dawned on me that I was meant to be an Artist. I don’ t know why; maybe it was the purple foot. I didn’t know yet what kind of artist. I hadn’t landed on specifics. Poet. Painter. Movie star. Bassoonist. Movie star-bassoonist. I didn’t really care. But fame was key.

I thought it might help if I studied a wide variety of artists to see what they all had in common. So I hit the books at our local college library, casting my net wide. I researched every great artist I could think of: Picasso, Horowitz, Marlon Brando, Jimi Hendrix, Shari Lewis. It took weeks before I isolated the single, crucial ingredient they all shared. My heart sank. It was the one thing I lacked in spades: a traumatic, tragedy-laced childhood.

My home life was way too vanilla, which I now knew was a disaster. I immediately set about rectifying the situation. I tried everything, determined to kick-start a little drama in our humdrum family life. Nothing worked. I would launch into violent weeping fits at the dinner table. “Pass the peas.” Announce that I had a terminal strain of acne. “Use Clearasil.” Fake a grand mal seizure, tumbling down the stairs and foaming at the mouth (frothed-up Colgate). The minty smell blew it.

After a few days, my mom had just about had it. “You want drama?” she finally snapped one afternoon. Opening her desk drawer she pulled out an envelope. “Write me a check and you can have four dramas. And a musical,” she said, waving season tickets to the Greenville Little Theatre.

She didn’t get it. I was a Walker Boy who wanted to be more: a Beach Boy. A Hardy Boy. Perhaps most of all, Davy Jones in The Monkees.

But nothing was happening at 710 Calvert Avenue to traumatize me sufficiently. You know that aerial footage they show on CNN after a major tornado? Graphic helicopter footage of utter devastation, miles of suburbs flattened in seconds? And there, amid row after row of roofs ripped off like cat-food lids, tree after tree cradling Volvos and washer/dryers, stands that one house, untouched, twiddling its thumbs and whistling in the dark like nothing ever happened? That was our house.

It wasn’t as if our town was drama-free. It was a cesspool. At school I’d eavesdrop as other kids whispered their parents’ screamed threats of divorce and castration, wondering why they got all the fun. I’d hear a classmate recount the terrifying afternoon she arrived to babysit a neighbor boy, just as his mom’s killer was escaping out the back window. And I’d think, “Why didn’t the Alberghettis ever ask me to babysit?”

What I didn’t know — was completely clueless about — was that a full-scale natural disaster was brewing inside my own home at that very moment. A truth so unspeakable, a scandal so damnable, that had the scandal become public, our home would surely have been red-tagged and bulldozed immediately. And it wasn’t just happening in our house. It was happening in my room. To me.

As I write this, my son and six plastic Marvel action figures are taking a bath in the same tub I used as a boy. As we were filling it, James asked what action figures I used to play with in my bath. I tell him my first choice would probably have been a Barbie doll, only I didn’t have sisters and my parents wouldn’t buy me one (dammit). “I would have bought you a Barbie doll,” says James, in a voice so sweet it makes me want to hug the soap right off him. Instead, I tell him it didn’t matter, because I rarely even got to use my own bathroom once Uncle Jimmy turned 13.

“Why not?” asked James.

“Oh, he kind of hogged the tub,” I say. “He’d lock the door and barricade himself in here for hours.”

“Which action figures did he like to play with?” asks James.

“Only one,” I say, and quickly change the subject.

I’m not ready to tell my 6-year-old the whole truth. If I did, James — the straightest son of two gay men ever to walk the earth — would be in there now, sniffing around to see if he could find the Playboys Uncle Jimmy swiped from our neighbor’s dad and stashed in the heating duct.

But this incongruous, comical, slightly disturbing image of James clutching his first Playboy does ring a distant bell. As I type these words, I realize I’m lying in the very spot where one fine spring afternoon long, long ago, flipping through that Bible of rock music, Tiger Beat magazine, I had my first epiphany: I don’t want to beDavy Jones in The Monkees; I want to touch Davy Jones in The Monkees.

It was the first secret I remember telling this room.

In the movie Tootsie, Jessica Lange, lying on her character’s childhood bed, tells Dustin Hoffman, “I made a million plans looking at this wallpaper.” We all make those plans — who we’ll marry when we grow up, what we’ll accomplish as President. I put mine on hold the day I realized I wanted to touch Davy Jones. And Tom Jones. And Joe Namath. And Bert Convy. And Wayne Adair, the youth minister who ran our teen Bible study.

I confided lots of secrets to lots of rooms after that. There were years of secrets, and deceptions, and lies as I struggled to conceal the natural disaster I imagined myself to be.

Until one boisterous, overcrowded winter night in New York City (where I’d moved, for the excitement). I found myself where I’d told myself I should be, trapped in Times Square, jammed in a mob of thousands, all gathered at the “Crossroads of the World” waiting for the New Year’s Eve ball to drop. As I stood there, jostled and freezing, watching five drunks fight over a taxi, I had my second epiphany:

I’m not really cut out for drama.

It seems that when I wasn’t looking, my parents inoculated me against it. In the quiet, undramatic home they continue to share, maybe without even knowing, our parents gave my brothers and me what I could finally see is the greatest thing a parent can give a child. Stability. A solid foundation: plain, boring, simple, strong.

When it was time to send me out into the world, somehow my parents sent my room with me.

I don’t know how they did it. They may not know themselves. But every day, Kelly and I hope we’re doing the same for our children.

The great gift of my life is that it didn’t turn out the way I planned. Or feared. Who could have planned what I have now? Who could have known I’d be back in this room two or three times a year, falling asleep to the same distant train whistle, lying next to a man I adore, as our children dream beside us?

I think my room knew. From the beginning.

“In My Room” lyrics by Brian Wilson and Gary Usher

April 24, 2012

 

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(Originally published in the Huffington Post)

Just how does one go about locating a fairy godmother? It’s best if they appear at your daughter’s crib when she’s quite young, wag a finger and say, “I wanna be her fairy godmother.” 

That’s how it happened for us.

It all started at a Club Med, as so many things do. Years before I became a dad. I was nursing a pretty devastating heartbreak and needed to get away, so I’d booked myself a solo pity party at Club Med Playa Blanca on the Mexican coastline.

I know what you’re thinking. Aren’t those Club Meds kind of … cheesy? And it’s true, there are lots of cheese platters, most of them repurposed from earlier cheese platters. But I wasn’t there for the cheese. I was there for the all-inclusive, up-front prepayment. Club Med is one of the few vacation spots where you pay one lump sum for everything before you arrive, including tips. Which means that for the rest of your trip… no thinking. Thinking just aggravates depression, especially thinking about money. Thinking is the last thing you need when you’re trying to focus on what’s important: overeating, over-tanning and moping. Which you can never overdo. The only thing Club Med could have done to improve my stay would be to have someone stick a needle in my arm and feed me intravenously by the pool.

But they said no, so I was forced to take my meals in the dining room. They don’t like people eating alone at Club Med. It’s practically an actionable offense, so I was presenting a problem for the GOs. Club Med originated in France; staff members are referred to as GOs, which stands for gentils organisateurs. Roughly translated this means “pains in the ass.” The main task of these overzealous smilers is to encourage guests to mingle, socialize, connect. My mission was to disconnect. So whenever my GO would approach, trying to coax me into joining a group table, I’d put up my hand, signaling my GO to STOP.

I might as well have been flipping him the bird. My GO became more and more discombobulated, his smile finally collapsing under the weight of all that sweat now pooling on his lip. That’s when I noticed him nervously glancing over his shoulder at his gentil supervisor, who was standing behind a palm glaring at us both. And that’s when he whispered, “Please, señor, I am on probación.” Finally it dawned on me: Great, I’m about to get somebody fired, which would mean feeling guilty, which would mean thinking, which was unacceptable. So I moved to a group table.

It was there that I met a gentle, soft-spoken man with huge blue eyes and a huger mouth. He introduced himself as Clinton Leupp. All I knew about Clinton was that he was (a) from the Bronx; (b) wickedly smart; (c) delightfully funny and (d) like me, being harassed for dining alone. We immediately became pariahs-in-arms and took most of our meals together after that. We’d ogle the bronzed Adonises crowding the group tables around us — they tend to travel in packs with a single suitcase for all their Speedos. Clinton and I couldn’t help fantasizing what it might be like to poke one of their balloon pecs with a fondue spear to see if it would actually explode.

It was probably our second or third lunch before I got around to asking Clinton how he’d come to be at Playa Blanca by himself. Sipping his tea he casually remarked, “Oh. I’m doing a show here Saturday night.” Alarm bells went off inside my head. There’d been an excruciating show the night before. You have no idea how much can go wrong when a hypnotist stutters.

“What kind of show?” I asked Clinton, casually. He dismissed my curiosity with a wave of his hand.

“You’ll see.”

So I was concerned, to put it mildly, as I took my seat in the outdoor theatre on Saturday. I don’t remember exactly how the show began. I do remember that the lights dimmed as the announcer introduced a woman with an unusual name. As she stepped into the spotlight I took her in from the bottom up: sensational legs, iridescent blue minidress, killer rack and lovely… Adam’s apple. Smiling at the crowd were the same huge blue eyes and huger mouth I’d been lunching with all week, framed by a deep orange wig with a perfect That Girl flip.

Miss Coco Peru had landed.

Actually, “landed” is exactly the wrong term. Seeing Coco Peru in person for the first time is like watching a spaceship blast off, fiery and dazzling, shooting straight into space and taking you along for the ride.

Over the course of the next ninety minutes, striding the stage on a pair of tasteful yet practical high heels, this spectacular creature—well over six feet tall—defied not only the laws of gravity, but any expectation I might have had. Not because she was a man in a dress. Men have been putting on dresses since the dawn of taffeta. Because she was this man in a dress. Though I’d never heard of Miss Coco Peru, I realized immediately I was in the presence of a true original, somehow wildly improbable yet inevitable at the same time.

When film critic Pauline Kael famously wrote of Barbra Streisand, “Talent is beauty,” she could have been describing Clinton as Coco Peru. Anyone can do drag; it’s Clinton’s writing that dazzles. Expertly combining monologue, song and hilarious storytelling, you soon realize, as odd as it seems, it’s the humanity spilling out from under that vermillion wig that makes it impossible not to be mesmerized.

Miss Coco achieves this by weaving a complex tapestry of tales from a singular life. Growing up in the Bronx as an effeminate boy, chased home by bullies and mortified one day to discover that his mother had painted their house pink. A life-changing fall through a glass shower door as a teenager, from which he nearly bled to death. The day he discovered the thrilling voice of soprano Eva Marton, whose name he hilariously mispronounced, along with “Wagner” and Tristan und Isolde, to a withering New York record-store clerk. All this combined with songs, stories of his unflappable, devoted mom Helen, exotic tales of world travel, his childhood ambition to form a tribute band to Josie and the Pussycats, meeting his husband on a nude beach in Spain, cocktail party disasters and tribal vision quests in — where else? — Peru. Every word of it delivered in a thick Bronx accent.

But most amazingly, by the end of his show, this man in the minidress and ridiculous wig had somehow pulled off the impossible: He made you feel Miss Coco was you. Whoever you were. Over the years, I’ve brought many people to see Coco—straight neighbors, work friends, my mother-in-law, our children’s egg donor and her husband. They all come away with some version of the same reaction. That was me up there. It’s sort of transcendent, while at the same time being—-did I mention?—pee-your-pants, gasping-for-breath funny. That is the sublime gift of Coco Peru. Somehow she connects us.

Clinton and I have remained friends since that first day as dining room pariahs at Club Med. On one of my first dates with my husband, I took him to see Miss Coco’s Glorious Wounds … She’s Damaged. I knew it would make him love me more, and it did. As a bonus, I had the pleasure of introducing two of my favorite people.

Soon after our daughter was born, Clinton visited us all with his mom Helen (lovely, and exactly as described). He brought Elizabeth one of her first baby gifts, the book On the Day You Were Born, which celebrates the uniqueness of each individual who arrives on this planet, signed, inevitably, “Love, Aunt Coco, a.k.a. Clinton Leupp.” We still read it. As we laid our baby girl down for a nap in her crib, Clinton declared then and there that Miss Coco Peru would forever be Elizabeth’s fairy godmother.

And so she has been. On Elizabeth’s first birthday, she received a lovely, very small gift box from Aunt Coco. Inside? A perfect, tiny, white feather boa, with the inscription, “For Elizabeth, because you deserve it.” It came in very handy for dress-up princess teas. There have been birthday presents and cards ever since, and whenever Kelly and I attend one of Coco’s shows, she always sends us home with a gift for her fairy goddaughter, usually a purse with lots of sparklies.

Though she’d heard of Miss Coco Peru all her life, seen a photo or two and received gifts bearing her name, Elizabeth recently began to wonder whether her fairy godmother really existed. Once you’re past the age of 5 or 6, unless you’re Cinderella, the scuttlebutt is that they don’t.

To Elizabeth, Coco might as well have been a unicorn.

So she began asking to meet her. I told her that Miss Coco only appeared on stage, at night, and that she was too young to see the shows. The best I could offer was to see if we could arrange for Elizabeth to meet the man who played Miss Coco Peru. Of course Elizabeth was disappointed, but I explained that it takes hours for Clinton to transform into Miss Coco. Besides, asking a drag queen to get dolled up, in daylight, for no money, is like asking a drag queen to get dolled up, in daylight, for no money. But they are the same person, I assured her. “Coco may be the wrapper, but Clinton is the candy.”

Clinton was delighted at the invitation, and since both Elizabeth and Clinton love tea, we decided to meet at the Tea Rose Garden on a Tuesday afternoon in Pasadena. In my email to Clinton confirming our date, Elizabeth asked if she could type him a personal note. She wondered if he might—please?—consider bringing along Coco’s red wig. I think she wanted proof. We got a nice note back from Clinton stating that though he was very much looking forward to tea, “The wig stays at home!”

The next day I picked Elizabeth up from school. In the back of the car she brushed her hair and changed into her most elegant red dress and low heels. We arrived at the Tea Rose Garden running a few minutes late. After jamming some coins in the parking meter, we rushed up the sidewalk and opened the glass door, already mouthing apologies for our tardiness to Clinton. But Clinton wasn’t there.

Sitting at a table about twenty feet away, smiling at us, was Miss Coco Peru.

Gravity could not contain my daughter. She leapt up and down in the air, clapping her hands, and went flying into the arms of her fairy godmother. Clinton smiled at me through Coco’s makeup, his eyes saying, “Come on, Bill, how could I not?”

For the next hour and a half, Elizabeth might as well have been having tea with a unicorn. It was that magical. And that rare. Coco Peru doesn’t appear in the daytime. Ever. Spotting her at three in the afternoon—in Pasadena?—you’re more likely to see a herd of unicorns galloping through Target.

Elizabeth was in heaven. Over scones and finger sandwiches, she launched into a flurry of questions, the sort any child might ask: “When did you start wearing a dress?” Why did you start wearing a dress?” “Can I touch your wig?” “Do you go grocery shopping like this?”

“Well, Elizabeth,” smiled Coco. “First of all, here’s how I explained it to one of my nephews. I said to him, ‘Do you like getting dressed up for Halloween?’ He said, ‘Of course! I love getting dressed up for Halloween!’ So I told him, ‘Well, so do I. So think of this as me getting dressed up for Halloween. Only… I don’t have to wait for Halloween.’”

“Elizabeth,” Coco said, “that’s all I had to say. He got it completely.” So did my daughter.

Coco went on to tell Elizabeth that as a child she’d never enjoyed doing “boy things” like sports, and had always gravitated to “girl things, like—”

“Like my dad!” said Elizabeth.

“Exactly, only…” Coco glanced at her press-on French-tip fingernails, “I’m guessing a lot more.”

Coco related how she’d been bullied by her peers from an early age as a child for being different. “I was a really nice kid, but all they could see were the things that weren’t like them. Like my funny voice and my funny walk, which I didn’t think were funny at all.”

“I love your voice!” exclaimed Elizabeth.

“Well, thank you,” said Coco. “And I’ve loved yours since all you could do was gurgle. Tell me, have you ever been bullied?” I’d mentioned to Clinton that Elizabeth was going through some painful mean-girl exclusion at school. Elizabeth quietly nodded. “Sort of.”

“It feels pretty terrible, doesn’t it? And you have no idea what you’re doing wrong, right? Because you’re not doing anything wrong. You’re just being you. And they treat you horribly. It’s very hard to understand as a kid. I know. But those kids are wrong.”

Elizabeth was riveted.

With a matter-of-factness devoid of self-pity, Coco went on to spell out how things had gotten worse once she became a teenager, long before the advent of “It Gets Better” videos. She learned to hide the “girl” part of herself, partly for her own survival, partly in a misguided attempt to please her parents and partly to protect them from learning what her days at school were really like.

“Then, when I was about 20,” said Coco, “something major happened. I began to read about these Native American tribes, and how in these tribes there were these people called ‘two-spirits.’ They were called this because their bodies were thought to manifest both masculine and feminine spirits. And I thought, ‘That sounds familiar.’ But unlike where I came from—the Bronx—instead of being bullied and tortured and mocked, these two-spirit people were celebrated by their tribes. Celebrated for being exactly who they were. They were considered by the tribe to be spiritually advanced, special. Well, Elizabeth, it rang a bell. It dawned on me that I was a two-spirit. Which could only mean one thing. Far from having anything wrong with me, I was special. Just as you are special and your dad is special and that lady serving us tea is special. I decided to embrace who I was. And that was the moment, Elizabeth, that Coco Peru was born.”

Now Elizabeth had been studying Native American culture in school, but somehow they’d never gotten around to the chapter on two-spirits. I had a feeling she was going to bring it up the next day.

Coco went on: “I soon realized that as Coco, I could celebrate the very things I’d been taught to hate about myself. And I began to turn that celebration into entertainment — because I am a performer — so that future generations of kids like me wouldn’t have to go through what I went through. You see, my goal is that by the time I finish a show, my audiences don’t see a man in a dress, they see the person underneath. And in that person, they see themselves.”

It took a moment before Elizabeth finally spoke: “So, are you going to finish that scone?” They both burst out laughing.

I told you it was magical.

Of course Miss Coco had brought gifts: a bottle of pale green fingernail polish and Elizabeth’s first set of false eyelashes. Which I will encourage her to put to good use in a science project about caterpillars. She’s 11.

As we were leaving, in true, selfless, superstar fashion, Coco handed Elizabeth an 8×10 of herself, autographed in Sharpie. How could she not? She is an entertainer.

That night, I got a call from Clinton. In his delicious Bronx accent, he began, “Bill, I had to call and tell ya what a lovely afternoon I had with you and your daughter today. But I gotta be honest, I almost didn’t do the drag. It takes hours, you know, the makeup, the wig, and besides, I knew I didn’t have to. I knew you weren’t expecting it. But then I thought to myself, ‘Coco… how often do you get invited to tea by an 11-year-old girl?’”

Then he went on, and his voice became less steady. “But Bill, when she walked through that door… when she saw me, your beautiful daughter… and her eyes lit up and she…” His voice began to falter. “… And she jumped in the air like that and she came running at me with her arms wide open to give me that big, beautiful hug, I just…” He began to cry. “It was worth it.”

“It was just so worth it.”

It was then I realized how unexpectedly powerful the afternoon had turned out to be for Clinton. In giving so kindly of himself, he’d received the one thing that had eluded him as a child: the complete and total acceptance of another 11-year-old.

Two spirits.

An inscribed 8×10 glossy now sits framed on my young daughter’s desk. It reads: “Dearest Elizabeth, Keep making the world beautiful. Love, Aunt Coco Peru.”

I’m sure there are many people who’d rush to call me a bad parent for taking my daughter to tea with a drag queen. I’d say they’re wrong. I think every kid in America could benefit from an afternoon with Miss Coco Peru.

It might just change the world.

May 9, 2012

(Originally published in the Huffington Post)

A question for today’s modern parent: What would it take, how desperate would you have to be, to consider prostituting yourself for the sake of your family?

Before I had children, I’d have said never. But children change things, as Lifetime TV makes crystal clear in their probing, popular new TV series The Client List, a show about a mom recalibrating her moral compass to keep her fatherless family in high-quality kitchen appliances. It stars a deeply cleavaged, adorably conflicted Jennifer Love Hewitt. Don’t think I mention J-Love’s cleavage gratuitously; as any viewer can tell you, it’s integral to every storyline. So integral, in fact, that some weeks it gets its own subplot.

If you doubt the importance of Jen’s assets to the stories being told, I submit the first sentence of the New York Times review: “The Client List is being advertised with billboards on which each of Jennifer Love Hewitt’s breasts appears to be the size of a studio apartment.” (That sentence alone almost got me to fork over $35 a month for an online subscription, until my son spotted me pulling out my credit card and snatched it, throwing on his fake sad face and reminding me how many Go-Gurts that could buy.)

Here’s The Client List in a nutshell: J-Love plays a woman named Riley Parks. Because Jennifer and Riley look uncannily alike, I call her Ri-Love. After her husband disappears without paying the mortgage, Ri-Love is forced to keep her family afloat financially. When her search for cartography and quilting jobs turns up nothing but dead ends, our heroine naturally takes the only other career path left open to her: She becomes a masseuse at a fancy Texas day spa called The Rub (you can’t make this stuff up… oh, somebody did).

If this were the real world, Ri-Love’s clients would mostly be bloated housewives with receding gums who say “ow!” a lot. But this being unreality television, coupled with the fact that Lifetime needs to recoup its investment on the Love Hewitt breasticles (a friend’s son invented that word, while eating Go-Gurts), most weeks her clients are men. Again, not the sort of real-life Texans who might actually seek out a day-spa masseuse (flatulent Karl Rove types with crippling hernias). No. Most weeks, Ri-Love’s table is stuffed with cut, hunky Abercrombie & Fitch alumni who would never in their bronze-nippled, twelve-packed lives have to pay a woman to massage them.

But you see where this is heading. Very quickly, Ri-Love learns that the other girls seem to be pocketing a lot more in tips than she is. So naturally, she starts asking questions, at which point one of the girls tells Ri-Love that if she ever hopes to replace her noisy Maytag with that fancy Bosch dishwasher her kids have had their eye on, she’s going to have to knead more than trapezius muscles. So Ri-Love bites her lip, buys a jug of hand sanitizer, and gets to work.

Get any parent drunk enough and they’ll admit that sometimes, the scruples/practicality balance has to get shifted around some. Still, at the end of the day, we love Jennifer, because, A) she wasonce a Disney kid, and B) technically, Ri-Love’s not selling her whole body, just her dominant hand.

Which I could never do. I know this because of something that happened one night on a trip to New York City back in the ’90s, a time of crossroads for so many of us.

I was single then. The television series I’d been writing for had just wrapped, so I had pockets full of cash and plenty of time on my hands. It was my first night of a two-week vacation, and my flight had arrived too late for me to catch a Broadway show. So, after checking into my hotel, I headed to the Upper East Side to catch a 9 p.m. movie.

As the audience streamed onto the sidewalk after it let out, I noticed a very attractive, I mean unusually attractive, young guy in front of me. Picture a pre-James Franco James Franco. Tall, dirty blond, wearing jeans, a white T-shirt, and a leather jacket. Sizzling. He emerged from the multiplex before I did, setting off in the same direction I was, maybe 15 paces ahead.

Then it happened. He turned back and smiled. At me. Not once, but twice, then three times over the course of a couple of blocks.

And why not? I was handsome. (Ask my mother.) And, like I said, single, flush, and fancy-free. Still, this sort of thing never happened to me. It happened in movies. It happened in books. It happened all the time in ads for products with names like Summer’s Eve and Femfresh. But never to me. Mesmerized, I found myself following him, until he smiled over his shoulder one last time and ducked into a bar.

I stopped myself. Anyone who knows me will assure you that I have a hipness quotient of zero. Even old-maid English teachers who wear orthopedic Hush Puppies as a fashion statement find themselves disgusted by my lack of cool. Her name was Miss Shealy. (Please don’t give me flack for calling her an old-maid schoolteacher; that’s how she referred to herself, proudly, just as she proudly mowed her own lawn.) One day, having had about as much as she could take of my tendency to over-enthuse, she approached me in the hall as I was talking with friends and suggested that I “tone it down.”

“Tone what down?” I asked, baffled.

“Everything,” she said. “Whenever I see you, Bill Walker…” — she paused, grasping for the right words — “…you always tend to look like someone just ran up behind you and shouted, ‘Boo!’”

I can’t help it. I’m overeager — always have been. I lack that gene that warns other people to hold back, take a moment, and survey the situation before diving in, which is why I’ve spent a lifetime cannonballing into swimming pools that have just been drained for cleaning.

Not tonight. Being on vacation affords the opportunity to try out new selves. Who’s to know? Tonight I was determined to rein in the impulses that, on any other night, would have had me crashing through the door and sniffing out every corner of the bar until I’d found Smiling Guy, like some truffle pig in a cheerleader uniform.

Tonight, I was going to play it cool. Slow things down. It was a struggle, but instead of immediately following him into the bar, I found a phone booth and called L.A. to check my messages. Nothing major, just a few sales calls and my mom saying something about a relative slipping into a coma.

When I realized that not enough time had passed, I walked around the block, practicing my pout. Only then, after an agonizing 10 minutes, did I enter the bar.

The place was dark, lit only by the glow of two television screens over the bar and some deftly placed track lighting. It was crowded, so I took a seat at the bar, glancing casually around to see if I could spot him. I couldn’t.

The drinks were very expensive, even for the Upper East Side, so I ordered a cranberry and soda that still cost more than my wallet. As my eyes began to adjust to the darkness, I noticed that the decor was very upscale: dark, burnished wood, lots of mirrors, gleaming chrome, and thick, lush plants that looked like they’d been bottle-fed Evian by a Hungarian nanny. This was no dive, which I took to be a good sign. To hang out here, Smiling Guy must have a good job, which would mean going Dutch on dates, always a good idea at the beginning of a vacation fling. Which I knew nothing about.

And then I spotted him. Only Smiling Guy was no longer smiling. He was sitting all alone, smoking at a tall bar table about 10 feet away. I imagined him to be calculating his missteps, replaying scenarios of what he’d done wrong, why I hadn’t showed. But I had, so he could relax. I sauntered over, counting down the seconds until I’d see that smile again.

“Hey,” I said.

He nodded impassively, like he’d never seen me before.

“I finally got here,” I said over the music. Nothing.

He was staring off into the distance, like someone who’s farsighted and forgot his glasses. Then I got it. Oh, he’s pissed I took so long getting in here and made him wait. He’s so good-looking he’s probably not used to waiting. I can smooth this over. Which I started to do, until I remembered that smooth is not an arrow that came with my quiver. That brought me back to my original thought. Maybe he’s not focusing on me because he can’t. Maybe he is farsighted and forgot his glasses. At that point I took a step backward, crashing into a barback carrying a large tray of empties.

After I’d helped him clean up the broken glass and offered to pay for the damage, I turned back to Smiling Guy, who was now not-smiling even more severely.

“I had to make a phone call before,” I said, trying to recover. “Out there. On the sidewalk. My mom’s uncle. He slipped into a coma.”

“That’s what old people do,” he said distractedly. “They slip on stuff.”

It was a strange joke, both lame and kind of sick at the same time, but he was trying, so I laughed.

And that’s all it took. Finally, his face broke into that charming, familiar smile, and the sun was out. So he had a strange sense of humor. He also had great teeth. And they were smiling. At me.

Only they weren’t.

They were smiling past me, toward the men’s room. I turned to see a dumpy-looking guy in his 60s ambling our way. My first impression was that he was a dead ringer for the Kaiser dentist who’d botched my wisdom tooth extraction, which triggered an immediate impulse to flee. But I didn’t. Instead, I tried for a genial smile as he hoisted himself up onto the stool I was about to sit on and said in a thin Midwestern accent, “Sorry that took so long. Takes me forever to pee. I’m on a new medication.”

I waited to be introduced, imagining this guy to be my guy’s elderly neighbor, or maybe an uncle, in town for a convention. But nothing. I was starting to feel like a third nipple. Then, finally, Smiling Guy pulled me close, looked me dead in the eye, and, with the skill and tact of a Vegas ventriloquist, hissed through his perfect, unmoving teeth, “Later, dude. I’m booked.”

Suddenly, my pupils adjusted to the size of quarters, and I could see in the dark, as clearly as if someone had flipped on a bank of fluorescent overheads. The clientele in this particular establishment broke down into two distinct categories: unusually good-looking, buff young hotties and the much older quack dentists who were buying them drinks — which I now realized were nonrefundable security deposits.

Miss Shealy might as well have charged me in her orthopedic Hush Puppies, screaming, “Boo! You just cannonballed into a hustler bar!”

As for me, I was mortified, sweat-drenched, and all set to hightail it out of there. Now, before some old dude who looked like my cat’s vet got the wrong idea and tried to swipe a credit card down my ass crack as a down payment on God knows what.

Then something strange happened — okay, on top of all the other strange. Suddenly, the intergenerational chit-chat had ground to a halt all around me, and I noticed all the not-neighbors/nobody’s-uncle were staring in my direction.

I started to panic. “Stop looking at me! Go back to your sex talk! I’m not for sale!” I almost shouted. Until I realized that they were all staring over me, at one of the TV screens. “Oh, my god,” blurted the quack dentist with the iffy bladder. “Jackie…”

I turned to see what he was staring at, what they were all staring at.

Over a network banner blaring “BREAKING NEWS” rose the image of an instantly recognizable face and two lines of text:

Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis

   1929-1994

In what was as close to a come-to-Jesus moment as I’ve seen since my teenage holy-roller days, “clients” spontaneously began leaving their seats and moving closer to the bar as their clueless rent boys looked at each other, mouthing, “Who the hell is she?”

Some of the men had tears in their eyes as the images of a remarkable life began flashing across the screen: Jackie at the inauguration; Jackie on the White House lawn with her kids; Jackie in Dallas, shell-shocked in her blood-stained suit; Jackie’s surprise wedding to the Greek billionaire.

“I’ve never called her Jackie Onassis,” said one of the men, echoing the sentiment of every woman in my mother’s South Carolina bridge club. “I refuse. She’ll always be Jackie Kennedy to me.” At that point another of the men asked no one in particular, “Wasn’t there a drink named after her?” One of the bartenders looked it up. There was. It was called the Jackie-O, and before long the bar was cluttered with the pink-orange champagne and vodka cocktails. I was reaching for my wallet to pay for mine when a handsome older gentleman put his hand on my shoulder and said to the bartender, “It’s on me.”

Oh God. “That’s OK,” I stammered. “I’ve got it. Let me buy you one.” But he insisted. Anxious to make clear that I wasn’t some cocktail he could order out of a book, all I could do was sputter. “I’m not… I mean, I just came in here to…”

“You just came in here to what?” he smiled. “You’re not… what?”

Finally I found the word: “Selling. I’m not… selling.”

He just looked at me for a minute, then back at the TV screen.

“You remember, don’t you?” he said.

“Remember what?” I asked.

“All of it. Her.”

I did remember. I was in the second grade when the assassination happened, making Jackie Kennedy a widow a thousand times over on our TV screens. But no one had seen the TV images yet. The younger kids like me had been sent home early from school with no explanation. I pedaled fast on my bike, confused and wondering what was going on and why the teachers were crying. But there was no one home when I got there.

So I listened to the news pouring from the red radio that sat on the counter near our back door and just got more confused. In the days that followed, I remember feeling truly scared for the first time in my life, because the grownups were scared. All of them. Which was terrifying.

“Yeah, I remember. I thought she was a queen.”

“Of course you did,” he smiled. “We all did. And for you and me and half the gentlemen in here, she always will be. As for the rest of these boys… she’ll never be more than a cocktail.”

Suddenly, he was the most interesting man in the room.

“That’s why I’m getting your drink,” he went on. “Because you remember. Not because I thought you were…” — he paused, amused — “…’selling.’ Not to burst your bubble; you’re cute, but nobody in this bar thinks you’re here because you’re selling.”

Boo!

Most people can’t tell you the date they realized they’ll never be young again. For me it was May 14, 1994, the night that Jackie Kennedy died, in a hustler bar.

Allow me to rephrase. Jackie Kennedy died at home, surrounded by loving friends and family. I died in a hustler bar.

Needless to say, this is a story I’ve never shared with my children, and never will — until later this week, when one of their friends shows them this column and I have to start answering questions.

Even so, it’s a story they know the ending to. My 11-year-old daughter erased all doubt when she recently forgot to knock on my door and ended up permanently damaging her retinas after stumbling onto my rear view as I was changing out of my underwear.

At which point she buried her face in a basket of laundry and spat out this cultured pearl: “Daddy, please! Don’t ever make me see that again! Your papayas are so past their expiration date.”

I’m happy Ri-Love still has what it takes. Long may she knead. Her kids need a quality dishwasher with an ultra-quiet cycle and no visible buttons. I just hope their mom has enough left over for a comprehensive medical plan that doesn’t exclude carpal tunnel syndrome.

Mine does, and for that reason alone I could never make the brave choice that Ri-Love makes each week, or, given my expired papayas, the even more noble choice of full-service professionals, who on a daily basis must sacrifice not only their hand but everything that’s attached to it.

I don’t judge these civil servants. I just know that I could never sell my body. Because if it ever came to that, we’d starve. It’s a fact I came to terms with the night I learned that one of our former First Ladies died, in a hustler bar.

A First Lady, I recall, whom I’d once had to defend against some pretty nasty charges made by Barbara Acheson, a woman in my mother’s bridge club. When Jackie, then a young widow, suddenly remarried a rich Greek guy 28 years older than she was, a lot of women in America went a little nuts. Mrs. Acheson called her some ugly names, accusing Jackie of selling her youth and beauty, not to mention her good name, to a short, ugly rich dude for some quick cash.

But being a child at the time, I knew what was going on. Her kids wanted a new dishwasher.

July 30, 2012

Proposed state constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage increased the turnout of socially conservative voters in many of the 11 states where the measures appeared on the ballot on Tuesday, political analysts say, providing crucial assistance to Republican candidates including President Bush in Ohio.

 

The amendments, which define marriage as between only a man and a woman, passed overwhelmingly in all 11 states…. [T]he ballot measures also appear to have acted like magnets for thousands of socially conservative voters in rural and suburban communities who might not otherwise have voted, even in this heated campaign.

 

— The New York Times, November 3, 2004

November 4, 2012

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(Originally published in the Huffington Post)

Daphne Brogdon is teaching me to cook. On TV, in my den. In line at the grocery store, on my phone. Discovering Daphne Dishes saved my life. And my children’s. This isn’t mere hyperbole. The kids were starving. Daphne was my intervention.

It’s a long story.

My mother rocked the kitchen. Betty Walker was a purist. She combed magazines for interesting new recipes, then conquered them. From scratch. On the rare occasion when necessity forced her to open a can of peas, you could see the flash of failure in her eyes.

Three meals a day, 365 days a year, Mom delivered. The planning, the prep, the presentation, all of it in high heels and pearls. What she did in the kitchen every day was tangible proof of her love.

Cooking was expected of moms back then, especially in the South. No shortcuts, at least not in my mom’s circle. The discovery of one TV dinner carton in the trash was enough to warrant immediate expulsion from bridge club, followed by a public electrocution.

Mom never cooked to keep up. She led the pack. Because of her, I remember my childhood in forkfuls. The tens of thousands of meals she made in that kitchen — still makes in that kitchen — are among my favorite memories of home.Except for three:

Liver. No matter how it’s prepared, liver always ends up tasting like what it is: a bovine internal organ designed to rid toxins from the blood of cows. Responsible moms were forced to serve it back then. Something about the iron. My mother was never able to explain this in a way I understood, so I grew up thinking that if I didn’t eat liver I’d never learn to iron. Which explains the way my shirts look today.

Spinach Swirls. They weren’t swirls, they were balls. Green globs of spinach, chopped, mixed with some binding agent (liver?) and pressed into spheres the size of plums. When Mom proudly set them before us on a plate, my brother Jimmy immediately pointed out that they looked like the round clumps of grass a lawnmower spits out when you mow it wet. Mom froze. But it was George, five at the time, who really nailed it: Spinach Swirls were dead ringers for those little green horse turds. “Wow, they look exactly like the BMs horses drop in the summer!” George was banished from the table. But so were the Spinach Swirls. Never served again.

Chicken Elizabeth. This is a dish so infamous in my family that the mention of it at a family gathering is guaranteed to turn my mother to stone. So we bring it up often. Mom found the recipe for something called “Chicken Elizabeth” in one of her women’s magazines. So sure was she that this would turn out to be her crowning culinary creation that she saved it for Mother’s Day.

What made Chicken Elizabeth such an extravagance was that the recipe called for chicken breasts only, unheard of at the time. Ten huge breasts, sautéed in butter and baked to perfection under a chunky sauce of onions, celery, blue cheese, sour cream and vermouth. My mother’s devotion to perfecting it was so single-minded that she didn’t even go to church that day. Mom only skipped church when giving birth. But both of my grandmothers were visiting from out of town, and was determined to blow them away.

When Mom triumphantly set her silver-platter masterpiece down in front of her mother-in-law, we were all blown away. But not in the way Mom intended. And while none of us ever got to taste her jewel, Norman Rockwell missed out on the Mother’s Day magazine cover of his career: my grandmother choking, then vomiting all over the Chicken Elizabeth. Also, never served again.

But these were the exceptions. Most days Mom killed it in the kitchen. I assumed all moms did.

It was only after I started spending the night at other houses that I began to learn the truth. There were lazy moms, and they cheated. Taking in the landscape of their kitchens — boxed mac-and-cheese, Hamburger Helper, frozen pizza, TV dinners, takeout burgers and pizza — how was I to know I was looking into a crystal ball and seeing my own future?

It’s true. Destiny fated me to become one of the lazy moms. When I left home for college, I had no idea I’d never eat so well again. But it wasn’t until I had mouths of my own to feed that I realized cooking isn’t genetic.

The argument could be made that Chicken Elizabeth Sunday scarred me. How else to explain the fact that despite the excellent model of my mother, I’m a washout in the kitchen? Entire days have gone by when I’ve not realized until five in the afternoon, “I forgot to feed the kids.”

It’s not that I can’t cook. I do a great Thanksgiving dinner. It’s an exact duplicate of my mother’s. The first time I prepared it for friends in New York, she had to talk me through the entire meal as I was cooking it. Over the phone. From South Carolina. The long-distance cost more than the food. My dad had cereal for Thanksgiving that year.

I also make excellent birthday cakes. From scratch. Kelly and the kids each have a signature cake I create just for them every birthday. Delicious. So I’m capable. But a sprinter. Able to deliver on selected holidays, but hibernating when it comes to feeding my family the other 361 days of the year.

For this reason I’ve always avoided the Food Network. Who needs the shaming? All those spiffy chefs in their pressed aprons and glossy kitchens make me want to puke all over a Chicken Elizabeth. They make cooking look easy. Cooking is not easy. Bobby Flay never dropped an open bag of flour, staggered through a gluten cloud and crashed into his refrigerator.

My daughter loves the Food Network, can watch it for hours. I never understood why until I realized that for Elizabeth it’s aspirational. It’s her way of pretending there’s actually food in the house.

Which brings us to Daphne Dishes, my favorite new television show. How, you ask? I will tell you.

Last fall I was contacted by my son’s 4th grade room parent to see if I’d lend a hand chaperoning 66 fourth graders on a field trip to the San Juan Capistrano Mission. I have the utmost respect for room parents. Room parent is a job so deadly it would make the leader of ISIS choose immolation. It’s thankless, constant and brutal. It makes all the other parents feel less than while simultaneously thanking Jesus it’s not them.

Since our kids were in kindergarten, Daphne Brogdon has volunteered for this task almost every year. So when Vivien’s mom asked if I’d help chaperone these kids to the mission, how could I say no? My only stipulation: Could chaperones maybe skip the bus and drive the two hours each way together in a separate car?

It was on this car ride to San Juan Capistrano that Daphne casually mentioned — as casually as if she were repeating the weather forecast — that she’d just been offered her own show the Food Network. I don’t know where you live, but even in Los Angeles there’s never been a room mom who got her own show on the Food Network.

Despite my rocky relationship with the Shame Network, I promised Daphne that James and I would tune in to watch her debut show. It was the least I could do to repay all the times she’d punctured herself stapling together parent contact sheets and washing glitter  and glue out of her hair.

In the entertainment industry, tuning in to someone’s first episode is what’s known as a “courtesy watch.”

It turned out to be an intervention. A kitchen intervention. Like most interventions, everyone knew I needed it reckoning desperately, except me.

In days my family was feasting on real food, cooked by me, food that didn’t start life surrounded by cardboard.Right away I loved the title: Daphne Dishes. It was easy, breezy and fun, like Daphne.

But I almost turned off that first episode after hearing the theme — “Mom’s Gone Healthy.” Too many triggers. But I stuck with it because it was Daphne.

I’ve always liked Daphne. There’s nothing phony about her. She doesn’t mind looking as crappy as you at 8 a.m. Zero problem showing up at drop-off with her hair flying, no makeup, wearing a shirt with eggs on it. She’s also the mom who, on a 2-hour drive to a mission, makes sure to point out every single David Beckham underwear billboard. That’s a mom I like.

On that first episode, James and I watched as Vivien’s mom explained in terms any fool could understand every step of what she was doing and why. I was immediately comfortable because I’ve been in that kitchen before — it’s not a set; they film at her house. The nooks and crannies were known to me: I remember where the jelly’s stuck to the side of the refrigerator from last September because I slipped there! That’s where I tried to chug the dregs from a bag of Cheetos and clogged Daphne’s pasta maker! That’s the sofa cushion where I hid James’ nine cookies, sat on them, then forgot about it!

Daphne on TV turned out to be the same Daphne I knew from school, only with makeup and hair because the network insists. Daphne’s funny on her show. She spills things. I could totally see her staggering through a gluten cloud.

For that first show Daphne made a Pecan-Stuffed Chicken Breast, Blistered Tomatoes and Feta Cheese along with something she called Crowd-Pleasing Couscous. She topped it all off with a little treat called Dark Chocolate Sauce Over Fresh Berries. Which turned out to be dark chocolate sauce over fresh berries. I love that.

The big surprise was that Daphne made me believe I could do this too. The next day I took a list of all the ingredients and that night I tried to re-create the entire meal from “Mom’s Gone Healthy.” It went amazingly well. The only hard part was skewering the chicken breast. But I’ve never been good with a skewer and string.

After Daphne’s first few dishes, I began to hear sounds at the table I’d never heard before.

Like Mmmmmm.

And that’s when James something he’d never uttered in nine years:“Daddy, this is the best meal you’ve ever cooked! Can you make this every night?”

And I did. Until after the fifth time the crowd-pleasing couscous was no longer pleasing the crowd. But that was okay, because by then it was time for Daphne’s second show, “Comfort for a Friend.” (Pan-Roasted Chicken with a Creamy Mustard Sauce, Horseradish Mashed Potatoes, Crispy Brussels Sprouts and something called Cafe Bengali. I had no idea what Cafe Bengali was, but it didn’t matter. At this point I was hooked).

I was at the store the following morning armed with my shopping list. “Comfort for a Friend” became my family’s new favorite meal. And it went on like that for seven weeks. New week, new meal. My husband, my children were saying things that brought tears to my eyes, things like:

“Daddy can cook!”

“I know. How dope is that?”

It was almost like magic. I felt as if I’d somehow managed to pull a twenty-foot scarf out of a turkey’s butt.

June 4, 2015

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