It's Always Something (16 page)

After I’d been going to The Wellness Community for about two months, Gene and I went to a Friday-night potluck dinner. We brought Chinese chicken salad. The same room where the sharing group meets was filled with people and food. There were lots of husbands there with their wives going through cancer and vice versa. I have never been at such a good party. Usually you go to a party and there are judgments going on. You feel judged—people look at what you are wearing or they move away from you if they don’t think you are interesting, or they all are looking for someone or something. But a party at The Wellness Community is about celebrating every glorious day of life. Joanna’s son was there with a synthesizer and he was playing old tunes from the thirties and forties and everybody was singing and dancing along with him. The voice teacher had us all, about 120 people, make a noise one at a time, till all our noises blended in one huge noise of all different pitches and tones, and we felt held in the hum of the noise.

My friend Helen was there with her eleven-year-old son. She is a single parent who teaches third grade in Santa Monica and is a painter. She had melanoma and is in the middle of radiation therapy. Her son wouldn’t eat any of the food there because he thought it would give him cancer. I said, “My husband’s here and he doesn’t have cancer and he is going to eat.”

During the party I watched this little boy. It was the first time he had been at The Wellness Community. He was hating it and thinking it was awful, which I am sure is the way he felt about his mother’s cancer. By the end of the evening, he was playing ball on the front lawn with other kids and laughing. When I asked him, “What do you think of the party now?” he said, “It’s not so bad.”

My friend Linda was there with her two children. She has breast cancer which has metastasized to the bone and she has been in and out of treatment for four years. She is very active in The Wellness Community, especially in activities involving parenting and cancer. She is a beautiful woman, funny and creative. We linked arms and sang every song at the top of our lungs.

By coincidence, I met another woman at the party exactly my age, who had the same operation I had, two weeks before me. While in the hospital recuperating from her surgery, she saw the
Enquirer
article about me and wrote me a letter. She never mailed it because she didn’t know where to send it to, but it said she was going through the same thing. She is a schoolteacher. She was one treatment ahead of me and we couldn’t stop talking to each other about everything. “How did this happen?” “What was your blood count on that?” “When is your second-look operation?” She had a scarf on, not a wig, and I kept wanting to just kiss her head because she had the same amount of hair I had—
none.
It was like going to a party when you were a teenager and meeting someone you had so much in common with that you just couldn’t believe it. That night when we got home from the party, my head was swimming trying to relive the moments of it. It was like falling in love. Gene was invigorated seeing cancer patients dancing and singing and laughing and celebrating life.

To this day I have the highest regard for the work of The Wellness Community. I wish there were a thousand more of them. There is nothing woo-woo or mystical or weird about The Wellness Community. The concept is simple and honest. I often said to Joanna or Gene that it reminded me of the early days of “Saturday Night Live” when we had our innocence and we believed in making comedy and making each other laugh. We were just working together to entertain, like kids playing together. The Wellness Community has that same naïveté and honesty. Its sole purpose is to provide a community for people who have cancer to come and play in, to make their lives better, to have an opportunity to help themselves and to help other people.

The hardest part of committing myself to The Wellness Community and becoming friends with people was learning later that someone who had become close had died. The course of cancer isn’t always what we hope. I was learning that death is part of life. But if I hadn’t gone to The Wellness Community, think of all the love I would have missed. While we have the gift of life, it seems to me the only tragedy is to allow part of us to die—whether it is our spirit, our creativity or our glorious uniqueness.

I
grew up in Detroit, but my mother couldn’t take the winters so every November my family would go to Miami Beach and live for maybe four months, and then come back to Detroit. During those four months in Florida, my father traveled back and forth to oversee his hotel business. I would start school in Detroit in September, and by November my parents would take me out of school and take me to Florida where I would attend school for November, December, January, February and part of March. Then we would go back to Detroit and they’d put me back in my school there until the summer. This went on all the way through fourth grade. I couldn’t get attached anywhere, and the same thing happened to my brother. I can remember waiting behind the door to go into a classroom in the middle of March where all the kids had been together the whole year. They would think a new girl was coming and it would be me, that same old girl from September. I didn’t have any friends. I was a big risk as a friend. Who would want to be friends with someone who wasn’t going to be there half the time?

My birthday parties were desperate. There were never any school friends to invite. I always had to have my relatives. My brother has some film of all my birthday parties starting from one year old. It’s so sad because every birthday party has the same relatives—all a year older. In Florida there was one girl in my class I kind of made friends with. I invited her over to my house for dinner. During dinner I had a crying tantrum over something that I can no longer remember. It must have been a huge thing or I wouldn’t have done it in front of this potential friend. The next day there was a “show and tell” time and she stood up and told the whole class how she went to my house and I had a temper tantrum at dinner. It was horrible.

My brother and I ate ourselves into little balloon children. We looked like no-neck monsters. I was just a mediocre kid. My parents sent me to summer camp every year and every year I was scapegoated. It wasn’t so much what the other girls would call me, but they wouldn’t let me play with them. In “the princess game” there would be controlling girls and pretty girls. The controlling girls would make a pretty girl the princess and the controlling girls would be advisers to the princess. The fat girl would be the servant or something, and that would be me. At night, I’d be in my bunk sneak-eating Tootsie Roll Pops and pistachio nuts that my mom had sent me and thinking about how to belong. I couldn’t be as pretty as the pretty girls and I couldn’t be as controlling as the controlling girls. It wasn’t in me.

My father was very funny. He loved jokes and he loved life and he had great spirit. He would do silly jokes like, “Don’t suck your thumb because it’s got a nail in it.” He thought that was the funniest joke he had ever heard. He was corny and he loved to watch me perform. He called me his “little ham.” My mother has a great sense of humor. She isn’t consciously funny, but almost the only thing that gets through to her is to make her laugh. She has an infectious response to humor so it was a way of getting to her when nothing else worked.

My parents put an ad in the paper for a live-in nurse, or nanny, when I was four months old, and Dibby came. Her real name was Mrs. Elizabeth Clementine Gillies, and she was from Canada but she was visiting her cousins in Detroit when she saw the ad. After she met my parents, they took her upstairs to see “the baby.” She says that I was lying on my stomach in my crib and I turned my head on the side and smiled at her and I won her heart. My parents hired her right away. My mother insisted that she wear a white uniform, white hose, and white shoes. She bought those that day and came back the next day and stayed for eighteen years with our family. She was in her early fifties and had been a widow since after World War I. She had raised three children of her own, and now was starting a whole new life. When I learned to talk, I couldn’t say Mrs. Gillies so I called her Mita Dibby, then just Dibby.

Dibby and I became inseparable. I owe a lot of my humor to her. When I would come home crying because someone called me fat at school, she would tell me, “Say you’re fat before they can. Let them know that you are fat and you don’t care. If they say you are, just make a joke about it and laugh. Just you tell them before they get to it.” She coached me through my teens, and humor became my tool for handling life.

Dibby is the person I modeled Emily Litella after on “Saturday Night Live.” Emily Litella was the spunky editorialist on “Weekend Update” who got everything wrong but was emphatic about it until she found out she had misheard. “Never mind,” Emily Litella’s famous response, is straight from Dibby’s mouth.

Dibby turned ninety-six years old in March of 1989. Last week she told me on the telephone (we speak every week), “I can’t hear and I can’t see and I can’t walk, but other than that I’m fine.”

I grew up in the midst of that indomitable spirit.

When I was ten years old, I asked my parents if I could go to a private school. The girl who lived across the street went to an all-girl private school on the east side of Detroit, and she liked it. I remember going like an adult to negotiate with my parents about wanting to go to this private girls’ school. Of course it cost a lot of money to go there, and I think I told my parents that I thought I would get a better education. They agreed to it. By this time, my brother was in high school and it was becoming more difficult to take us in and out of school.

I loved the Liggett School for Girls. I loved my fifth-and sixth-grade teacher, Miss Cole. She had a thick Irish accent and she was the best teacher there could ever be because she rewarded academic excellence with creativity. It was a wonderful plan. If you did well in mathematics, you were allowed to be in Miss Cole’s oil-painting class. And if you did well in geography, you could be in her dancing class. She taught us girls how to ballroom dance. I still lead now because of her class. If you did well in general, you could be in the plays that she wrote. She was rewarding me with the things that I loved the most, so I started to do well. I went from being a mediocre student to being a good student. Today I can’t remember half the things I learned in my life in school, but I remember what Miss Cole taught.

I stayed at Liggett from fifth grade to my high school graduation except for my junior year in Mumford High School, the school Eddie Murphy went to. I wanted to meet guys that year; I felt confined in an all-girls school. But in senior year I went back to graduate from Liggett because I missed my friends and the school’s traditions. I had found myself there. My personality was formed there. I became an excellent student in high school. I sang alto in a double quartet (two girls on each part, singing in harmony), I was on the dramatics board and I worked on every play that got done. When I was a senior, I directed a very serious mystery called
Anti-clockwise.
It was a drama but the audience started to giggle halfway through and continued laughing till the end. I didn’t go to school for two days afterward.

I enjoyed performing at Liggett. In
The Mouse That Roared
I played Tully Bascombe, the male lead. I always got the male parts because I had a strong voice. When we actually gave the performance after rehearsing for weeks and weeks, somebody spoke the wrong line in the first act and skipped to the second act, and we finished the play really fast. As a result most of my part was cut, but everyone said I was great—and the loudest one. During my Liggett years, I found out that I was funny. Humor became the foundation of my life. But if humor was the foundation, men were definitely the first floor.

To a great extent my life has been controlled by the men I loved. I don’t think I am ambitious. My biggest motivation has always been love. I would see a guy that I would fall in love with and then I would just want to be with him and go wherever he went. I’d go until I didn’t want to be with him anymore or he didn’t want me. Then I would see someone else and go wherever he went and do what he did. I have always found men who were funny, irresistible. It’s rare that I ever based love on looks or superficial things, but if a guy made me laugh—and that didn’t mean he had to be in comedy professionally—I was hooked.

After graduating from Liggett, I spent six years at the University of Michigan as an undergraduate majoring in public speaking and oral interpretation—six years because I dropped out whenever the opportunity presented itself. Sophomore year I went on a date and stayed out all night. Rules were strict in 1965. I got in so much trouble that the dorm board said I’d have to stay in every weekend for that school year. So I dropped out that semester and returned in the summer. I never took a full load of courses and I spent hours in the dean’s office convincing him that there was too much pressure for me academically. What a mouth I’ve always had. In the meantime, I was very active in the Theater Department and began to make a name for myself. I had comic roles in University of Michigan productions of
Lysistrata, Hotel Paradiso
and
Camelot.
My photograph was in the window of the five-and-ten-cents store downtown advertising the opening of the Ann Arbor Civic Theatre’s production of
She Stoops to Conquer.
I thought I’d stay in Ann Arbor forever, an eternal undergraduate. I almost did.

In 1969, while National Guardsmen lined the streets of Ann Arbor and the air was filled with pepper gas, young people were moving to Canada, angry over American political policies and resisting the draft. I moved too, but because I fell in love with a Canadian sculptor and” wanted to be his wife and a homemaker. I have always had this fantasy that I would live on a farm and wear a print dress and have lots of kids and animals and a life filled with hard work feeding the kids and animals. I would farm the land and at night sit on the porch in the print dress with my husband and watch neighbors walk by and traffic go by. To pursue this fantasy, I left my burgeoning career in Ann Arbor Civic Theatre and moved to Canada. I never graduated from the University of Michigan. Years later they put Roseanne Roseannadanna on the cover of the alumni bulletin, so I figure Roseanne graduated for me.