I admit I pick up the kids’ food if it falls on the gravel and give it back to them, but only if I’m positive no other parent can see me. I also admit that if it weren’t for the Skittles I smuggled into the batting cage, my boys would never hit the ball. Am I worried that Skittles are a gateway drug to steroids? Yes, but then again if my boys ever get to the point that they’re considering taking steroids because they are that passionate about a sport, I’d be impressed, because I’ve never been very athletic.
If my boys get hurt on the field I’ve been strictly instructed to stay back and not come to their aid, because in Drake’s words “Your face makes me cry.” At first I didn’t know how to take it, but then like most things I just decided to take it as a compliment. I also do this when it comes to comments made to me on Twitter. On Twitter, unlike Facebook, you can write to anybody; you don’t have to be their friend. My Twitter name is cleverly titled @HeatherMcDonald and I’d love to hear from you. Most people write nice and funny things to me and I really enjoy it, but there was this one person named @FionaJewSilverstein who would write to me every day saying things like “You’re not funny. Why does @ChelseaHandler let you on her show.” Or “You’re so ugly. You look like the puppet Billy in the Saw movies.” Well I’m not into horror movies so I Googled “Puppet Billy in Saw” and you know what, I kind of look like it. I can’t lie. But at least I resemble someone who was a lead in a major motion picture with several successful sequels. And then I decided to finally respond to her and I wrote “Dear @FionaJewSilverstein I’m sorry you don’t like my comedy or my face but I will continue to pray that Jesus allows you into heaven.”
I recently went to a benefit silent auction at St. Ignatius on a mission to corner one of the nuns who was also active at my old all-girls high school that I wanted Mackenzie to also attend. Mackenzie had gotten a bad grade in science because of not putting in enough work on her seventh-grade science project, but I knew she could do the work if she tried and was more open with Peter and me.
I was able to talk to Sister Therese, whom I knew from my time at the school, and she made me feel better about getting Mackenzie in and told me to make sure on her application that it was clear she was my daughter. When I returned to the table I said to my friend Liz, “I knew she’d get a bad grade on that science project. It was so unoriginal, watering plants with three different kinds of water, please. What she should have done is taken tampons and soaked them in vodka and see how quickly the girls get drunk.” Liz’s pinot grigio shot through her nostrils. Wow, a captive audience at the St. Ignatius auction, I thought, I’m going to make up for last year. So I continued, “Not her friends, of course, I’m not that inappropriate, but I do know three girls at Chelsea Lately, four if you count Fortune, who would be willing to participate on any given Tuesday afternoon. How great would it be if you get different kinds of tampons and different types of vodka. You can chart the whole thing with graphs based on how long you let them soak versus the girl’s height and weight. Then we could use Peter’s Breathalyzer he bought off the Internet that he keeps at all times in his glove compartment just in case it is above .08 and we need to call a cab.”
A good friend of mine recently asked me to perform at a comedy night to benefit his charity. I initially said no because I know my act is not clean enough for most fifty-year-old Christians, and he is a fifty-year-old Christian. But he kept pressing me so Peter suggested I invite him and the event planner to my show so they could see the language and tone of my stand-up for themselves. They saw me perform, and convinced me to do their event. I began to get very excited about the charity. It’s called “Mercy of the Valley,” and it feeds and provides shelter for the Valley’s homeless and their pets. I thought, what a perfect charity for me, it even has the word “Valley” in the title. Since it’s also nondenominational, non-political, and basically nothing like a Catholic charity, I figured I wouldn’t have to deal with the scandals that have rocked the church or its stance on gay marriage. I was simply feeding the homeless and their pets—who could argue with that?
We had a big meeting about the date, the theater, and all the press they were going to line up. I made it my introduction on Chelsea Lately so people would know where to buy tickets and told everyone about how great and non-discriminatory the charity was. The event was supposed to take place on November 2nd, and they decided to use the cover of this book to help promote the show. About six weeks before the big event, I was getting my morning coffee and starting to make the kids lunch when Peter said to me “The Mercy of the Valley event has been canceled.” I turned quickly around “Why?” “Well they said since you are holding a big glass of Chardonnay on the cover of your book it is not appropriate for the image that the Mercy of the Valley homeless alcoholics want to be associated with.” “What?” I yelled. “They’re homeless in the Valley and I don’t fit their image? That is amazing. Here, I chose them over the Catholic Church because I thought they’d be more inclusive. At least I know with certainty that I’ve never been to a Catholic event where there wasn’t alcohol, including Mass itself! The only person they’re discriminating against is me!” There is nothing like trying to go out of my way to help and then essentially being told that I’m not good enough. I now know what it must feel like to be a Republican politician who chooses a rock song for their campaign, only to get an angry call from the artist saying “Can you please stop playing my song at your rallies?”
When it comes to sex, after twelve years of marriage it is not the greatest form of foreplay to hear your husband say, “These condoms are about to expire so you want to do something about it?” The only thing that is more of a turnoff is when he knows I’m in the bedroom and he’s in the bathroom sitting on the toilet with the L.A. Times and he grunts and says, “I can’t do it. It’s too big. It’s crowning. I need an epidural, stat.”
The other morning we were able to squeeze in sex before Brandon started pounding on the door yelling, “Open this door, lady.” Peter let me relax in bed and got Brandon’s Froot Loops, and as I laid there under the covers Mackenzie came in to ask me something and that’s when she looked at my bare shoulders and then down to the floor where my pajamas were crumpled in a ball there. She arched her brow and asked, “And why aren’t you wearing pajamas?” I never felt like such a dirty slut as I did in that moment. So of course I avoided eye contact with my twelve-year-old daughter and mumbled, “I got hot during the night.”
We don’t watch porn, but we do watch Game of Thrones and Spartacus, which is basically porn with a history lesson. The other night I was trying to go to sleep during an episode of Spartacus when I heard, “I’d like a whore on my cock.” So I popped up and asked, “What year is this supposed to be happening?” Peter pulled out his iPad and quickly answered, “Seventy-five years before Christ. Don’t you know that?”
“Well, you didn’t know it. You just looked it up. Wow, if there was really this much fucking going on, this really makes Mary being a virgin even a bigger deal.” As I continued watching, there was a scene with a naked woman in a bathtub with her one lady in waiting washing her back while her second lady in waiting was getting her off all while she was having a conversation with her husband. So I said to Peter, “This is so unreal. Look how huge that bathtub is. Do you know how long it would take to fill it with buckets of hot water from a well? By the time it was full it would be freezing and everyone’s horniness would have cooled off. These girls look like they should be at a nightclub on Sunset Boulevard, not in Rome BC. At least they should grow out a full bush for authenticity.”
How awful for these actresses to call home and say, “Hey, Mom and Dad, I got a guest role in a TV series. I play a maid who also has to bring her boss to orgasm in a bathtub while she and her husband plot her sister’s death. I don’t have a speaking role but I groan a lot.”
I feel bad for girls like this, but not as bad as I still feel for Monica Lewinsky. I just really feel she was before her time. If a woman got caught giving Obama a blow job
today she’d be revered by gold diggers of all ethnicities. She’d have a reality show and a nail-polish color specifically named after her. But since Monica became famous in the 1990s she barely got a handbag line off the ground. It’s downright tragic.
Because Peter and I met before texting existed, we missed the whole sexting thing. I tried a few times to do it, but he didn’t put much effort into writing back and I absolutely hate emoticons. I don’t know why they piss me off but they do. It’s just too cutesy to see a heart or a smiley face. So when I received a text from Peter starting off with a thumbs-up emoticon saying, “We have a foursome set for tomorrow morning,” I immediately wrote him back saying, “This is your wife! What the hell is going on?” Luckily there was not a doubt in my mind that it was a foursome for golf and not a foursome of swingers. Peter wrote back, “Oops! That’s funny. At least I didn’t text ‘Let’s fuck at 9am.’ ” And he’s right. I’d rather have him cheating on me with other heterosexual middle-aged golfers than women, even if the game takes several hours and for some reason no cell phone works on any golf course in all of North America, not Verizon, not AT&T, not T-Mobile, or at least that is what Peter tells me.
Peter is still cheap to the point that he tries to renegotiate the kids’ library fines based on the book’s current value on Amazon.com. I can’t blame him; he is a mortgage broker. It is in his blood. So when he boasted that he got us front-row tickets at the circus, I was impressed, but then realized why the front-row seats were available, because no one else wants them based on the fact that you are just a few feet away from giant elephants dropping shit pounds at a time even as they dance and twirl about.
Peter once made us pretend we weren’t a family because he had two coupons for a Mexican restaurant, but you’re only supposed to use one coupon per family. I ordered with my daughter, Peter ordered with the boys, and then we sat at two different tables. Halfway through my burrito bowl Drake tried to talk to Mackenzie and she whispered in a panic, “No, Drake, we’re not supposed to know each other. What Dad did was illegal, he could go to jail. We could lose the house, go away!”
The last couple of months I’ve been running into Adrienne Maloof from The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills at events around town and I really like her a lot. She has a nine-year-old son and six-year-old twin boys, exactly Drake’s and Brandon’s ages, and she sends them to a Catholic school just like ours but on the other side of town. Her husband met Peter and they talked golf. We planned on getting our families together and I couldn’t have been more excited. I thought, This is the family I’ve been looking for all my life! To top it off she’s a Real Housewife and he is a plastic surgeon! I couldn’t wait to go swimming at her Beverly Hills mansion and be waited on by her staff while her husband injected me with Botox. We made tentative plans for a group family date, but a few days before we were supposed to meet up news broke on TMZ that she and her husband were getting divorced. I wrote Adrienne telling her I was sorry to hear what she was going through. I then went back on Craigslist to check whether any other families had responded to our ad.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’d like to thank my parents, Bob and Pam McDonald, for being the two best people in the world to have raised me. Thank you for always supporting and never doubting that I could accomplish what I set out to do. To my sister/built-in best friend Shannon McDonald Goldstein, thank you for being a defense attorney and helping me out of those two speeding tickets that I got a week apart on the same corner.
Thank you, Chelsea Handler. If it wasn’t for your success and your example of hard work and perseverance, I would not be here today. I am so grateful for the past five years and for working for you on Chelsea Lately. And yes, working on Chelsea Lately is the most fun job ever mostly because I get to work with Tom Brunelle, Sue Murphy, Chuy Bravo, Brad Wollack, Sarah Colonna, Jen Kirkman, Chris Franjola, Jiffy Wild, Fortune Feimster, Steve Marmalstein, Josh Wolf, Dan Maurio, Dan Brown, and April Richardson. You are more than just “The Others” to me, you are my friends for life, whether you have agreed to it or not.
I’d like to thank my incredible book agent and good friend Michael Broussard and his dog Dino, who is much healthier than Michael leads us to believe. To my awesome editor Matthew Benjamin, Kiele Raymond, Jessica Roth, Elisa Rivlin, and everyone else at Touchstone for making this book all that I dreamed it could become. Also to my managers at Roar, Jordan Tilzer and Bernie Cahill, everyone at William Morris Endeavor, Alex Spieller at IMPR, and Rich and Justin at Super Artists. Also to my special girl Sue Carswell aka my personal trainer, we’ll always have Whitney. Dick Sanders who took my pregnant pics at www.DickSanders.com.
To my best friend Liz Killmond-Roman, who still has yet to miss a birthday party of mine. To Tara Klein for allowing me to call her every morning on my way to work to talk about our lives and the lives of the reality stars that intrigue us most. To my other dear girlfriends Kris Jenner, Maia Dreyer, Stacey Jenks, Anna Bercsi, Laney Ziv, and Lori Smith, I am so lucky to have attractive people surrounding me.
And to all my friends I’ve met through coming to my stand-up shows or on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, thank you. And thank you for reading this book and laughing at me.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Heather McDonald is a full-time writer, performer, and story producer on E! Channel’s top rated show Chelsea Lately, and stars on the show’s spin-off, After Lately. Heather is also a featured performer on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and has been a guest star on the hit television series Frasier, Malcolm in the Middle, Reno 911!, and Nickelodeon’s Drake and Josh. On the big screen, Heather cowrote White Chicks with the Wayans brothers and had a featured role in the film and in the Wayan’s film Dance Flick. Heather’s writing has also been featured in Redbook magazine, Reader’s Digest, The Hollywood Reporter and she has contributed to New York Magazine’s Vulture. In addition, Heather continues to perform her stand-up at sold out shows across the country.
Heather has been married to her husband, Peter, for twelve years, with whom she has two sons and a stepdaughter. They reside in the San Fernando Valley next door to her parents just in case they run out of milk, Chardonnay, or need one of her dad’s Vicodin.
www.heathermcdonald.net
ALSO BY HEATHER McDONALD
You’ll Never Blue Ball in This Town Again
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Touchstone
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Copyright © 2013 by Heather McDonald
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Touchstone Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.
First Touchstone hardcover edition February 2013
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Jacket photographs by Robert Sebree
Designed by Claudia Martinez
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McDonald, Heather. My inappropriate life : some material not suitable for small children, nuns, or mature adults / Heather McDonald.—First Touchstone hardcover edition.
p. cm
1. McDonald, Heather. 2. Women comedians—United States—Biography. 3. Television personalities—United States—Biography. I. Title.
PN2287.M5455A3 2013
792.702'8092—dc23
[B]
2012040782
ISBN 978-1-4516-7222-0
ISBN 978-1-4516-7224-4 (ebook)
My Inappropriate Life Page 19
