Crazy Enough (36 page)

“I guess not. God, I hope not, for your mom's sake, and, let's forget about all this for now. Okay? God.”

“No, no, it's fine. It's just all this stuff . . . a lot has begun to make sense to me about my family, my mother especially. I just love and appreciate her even more for knowing what she must have gone through as a young girl. Even if she wasn't . . . my goodness . . . what a life.”

“My mom used to always say her real mom was raped. There's no way to know for sure, of course, but it would be too awful and weird if she'd been right.”

We didn't talk much more about it, but stayed in touch. Grace is
a kind, Christian woman who cared enough to reach out to a stranger and offer comfort even though she didn't have to.

“So, no one went to the hospital for mental stuff?”

“Well . . .” She was quiet again. Then, “Mom did. She attempted suicide a few times. There was a while there, during high school, I was scared to leave the house out of fear of what she might do to herself.”

“Wow. Grace. You have basically described my mom. She did the exact same things.”

Grace didn't let me finish.

“My mom knew that suicide was the most selfish act in the world, and my mom was
not
selfish. I truly believe the thing that saved her wasn't the pills or the doctors or any of that. It was our love for her. We loved her enough to bring her back. Once it really hit home, and she got how much we loved her, how we would never give up on her, she stopped doing all that.”

I bit my lip and listened to her. My aunt, this sweet woman who barely knew me, was willing to share so much about her life, as well as her mother's life, with me. And she did it for no other reason than to help me understand my mother a little better, and to maybe bring me a little peace. It was clearly painful for her to go back to that scary time, but she loved her mother so much, and maybe, in a way, my situation helped her get a little peace as well. I was grateful to Grace's openness and honesty, and did my best to not betray the fact that my heart was crumpling in my chest like a cold ball of tinfoil.

After we said goodbye, I called my brother John.

“Sterm!” He answered in his usual gruff, big-brother voice.

“Hey, Jern,” I said in our usual fake Swedish accent that we, somewhere along the way, started using to address each other with.
I made as much small talk with him as I could, while pacing in the January rain outside the coffee shop. It was a cold, mean rain.

“Okay. Hey, Jern, could we have saved her?” I started to cry.

“What?”

“Could we have saved Mom, did we not love her enough?” John was quiet as I cried in the rain.

“When are you gonna be done with this book, Sis?”

You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.

—
NIETZSCHE

I
t's impossible to say whether or not love could have fixed my mom. It's a blade that guts me, still.
Did I not love her enough? Was it my fault?

On good days I can safely say it wasn't my fault, but most days, I believe I could have done more. Maybe that's what drives me to do more now. Before it was just to get away from her, to be nothing like her and be free of it all. And in the end, everything I did in
reaction
to her, created the same loneliness in me. The thing everyone called crazy, with all of its endless names and diagnoses given to it, I think was just that. Loneliness. Feeling like you don't belong, you are unlovable, and, ultimately, unloved.

My whole life has been about the search for love:
Will you love me?
No? Okay, what if I change? Please tell me who should I be, who do you want me to be, so you will love me?
So in the end, Dr. Lovey was right. I did end up just like my mom. The sad inheritance of her innate loneliness has dragged me through this life like a runaway carnival horse.

But what a ride it's been.

I have known plenty of seriously damaged minds, so I'm not saying that all mental illness can be fixed with a hug or that it is all some evil conspiracy drummed up by pharmaceutical companies in cahoots with the psychiatric industry, but the crazy my mom was and what she gave me were definitely undeserving of the chemical and electrical hell she went through. There are studies and stories about some mental illness being directly correlated to creativity as well. One psychologist, when he was diagnosed with ADHD, exclaimed joyfully, “
That's
why I'm so awesome!”

I'm not a doctor, but even I can make that connection. Some of the most brilliant people I've ever known were twisted in some way. And Mom had a sweet magnetism, like a movie star. She could sing and dance and draw and, boy, did she love an audience. I am just like her in that way. Maybe, because of when or where she was born, she was told that energy was only meant to attract a husband, and, once she was married, she was supposed to put it away, be quiet, stop drawing attention to herself. Maybe, if my mother had been born into a musical family or a circus family, or if she had been encouraged to sing, dance, or pursue a creative life, her sensitivity would have been an asset instead of a bunch of evil, destructive voices in her head. It's too late to know that for sure, but her big, raw heart had never found its voice, and that, too, could be the crazy she was. If I had listened to all those voices, in my head and elsewhere, telling me to be quiet, small, and normal, I would have needed some medicated lockdown myself.

After I got off the TV show, I toured pretty much nonstop for a year. When that started to ebb, I thought it might be nice to work closer to home. That was the main reason why I considered doing
Cabaret
at Portland Center Stage.

“We want you to play Sally Bowles in
Cabaret,
” said the handsome artistic director at Portland Center Stage. He said it in a way people tell you things expecting you to say OH MY GOD NO WAY! YES OF COURSE, THANK YOU! Sally Bowles is a plum role, and here I was, some reality TV, club singer, being handed the thing. He had no idea if I was any good at acting, but he knew that my fame was still viable from the TV show, and having me on his stage would be like having a unicorn at a petting zoo.

“No.” I said, repeatedly over the many lunches I made the poor guy feed me.

One of the perks of being an artist is, when people talk business with you, you often get a meal out of it. Most artists are broke for the majority of their careers, hence the term, “starving artist.” I have been fortunate in the latter half of my career to stuff my face while some business or industry types pick up the tab. Charities supply good eats as well. I have raised, easily, more than a million dollars performing and volunteering at countless charity events because I'm a fucking sweetheart and they always have food, and look the other way when I show up with a canvas tote full of Tupperware.

Maybe it was the Vietnamese pho at that last lunch, maybe it was because it was time to suck it up, and admit I was not going to be a rockstar for real, but I said yes. It scared me to do something as highbrow as theater, and galled me more than a little bit to prove the folks at the American Academy right, but for four months I hiked up my garters and
hoofed it through the Kit Kat club while the Nazis took over, I got decent reviews, the theater was packed every night, and I had a blast.

“We want you to write a one-woman show about your life,” said the handsome artistic director, after the success of
Cabaret
and my not so sucky turn as a unicorn.

“Sure! Sex and drugs and rock and roll, baby!” I said, shoveling brown rice into my mouth.

“Sure, a little of that, but it should be about your childhood, and your mom, too . . .” he said.

Mmmmm . . . yeah . . . no fucking way.

“What a stupid idea, me getting up and talking about my mom? It's a sad story, not funny or cool . . . right? Stupid. I told him
NO FUCKING WAY.
” I bragged to James the next day.

“So, you chickened out?” James smirked.

“What? No . . . It's a stupid idea, nobody wants to see that.”

“You chickened out. It's okay, I understand, it's scary.”

Calling me chicken was a cheap, manipulative trick. Throw in the added swipe of ego tickling . . . “You know, you totally
could
pull it off, though.” Plus James always had yummy vegan snacks laid out for meetings or rehearsals. The little bastard had my number. So, once again, faced with the urgings of the handsome artistic director and a few more bowls of Vietnamese pho, I said yes.

A great artist once said that the thing that scares you the most, is the very thing you must do. Now, I have sung on stage naked with extra boobs drawn on my chest, learned ten songs in five different languages in six days, then sung them with the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center, and sung for millions of television viewers, just
to name a few hair-raising pulse-quickeners in my career. However, the idea of turning some of my sadder, less-than-flattering snapshots from my life into an entertaining evening of musical theater was easily the most terrifying thing I have ever done.

Every single night, before stepping into the pitch-black, I would pace the concrete floor in the dark backstage, convinced I was going to have an intestinal event
on
stage. I would sweep back and forth in the tight hallway lined with glossy programs with my picture on the cover.

“You ready?” the assistant stage manager would ask me, holding the door for my entrance.

“If by
ready
you mean am I gonna shit my pants, then yes . . . I'm ready.”

It would go like that every night for the first month or so. And just when I started getting used to it, baring the not too pretty bits of my soul to a packed house night after night, and I stopped feeling flulike symptoms preshow, my boyfriend of seven years starts to
feel different.

“I feel different,” he said one night in bed.

“You fucking someone else?” I said.

“No . . . I just feel different,” he said, I imagine hoping I would get it and leave without much fuss.

“Um . . . okay.” Then we screwed, hard and passionately, all end-of-the-world style. Then we broke up. I moved out of his house and commenced couch-surfing and house-sitting for a couple months.

It made going to work pretty hard, since I kind of referred to him in the show as the love of my life. The one who came along and changed everything.

“Somebody slap me! PLEASE!” I begged as I got to the theater
one night, after stupidly looking on Facebook to see sweet thank-you notes to my ex for SUCH A FUN NIGHT . . . from girls younger than my van.

OMG! Sooooooooo nice to meet you! LOL

I had been popping Xanax and fighting the urge to vomit all day. I couldn't stop crying. You can't sing when you're crying and you shouldn't sing after you puke.

“Please fucking hit me. James? SOMEBODY!” The band was in mid–sound check and people were gathering in the lobby to get in early. The show was sold out. They all were. What I had thought was a terrible idea, had turned into a smash hit in Portland.