“Tza vet danem,” I said to the woman. Armenians say this to people they love.
“Tza vet danem,” she said.
It means: Let me take away your pain.
I opened my one-woman show, Nude Nude Totally Nude, at the Joseph Papp Public Theater on April 6, 1996. There were many laughs in the show. But for the first time in my life, I dared to not get laughs. It took courage. Not the courage of Tigran the Great, but in my own way, I was defending my people by just getting up there. In my own way, I was preserving my culture, like my boyfriend Mark Finks had preserved his. There may not have been many Armenians in the audience, but getting onto that stage, I was surrounded by three thousand years of history. Like an actor playing King Lear for the first time, I was never alone but embraced by all those who played the part before me. Finally, I belonged. The part of me I’d cut off, I’d found.
“Tza vet danem,” I was saying to the audience.
“Tza vet danem,” I was saying to myself.
Let me take away your pain.
My One-Year Diary, 1958
Property of andrea m.
189 Whitney Ave.
Portland, Me.
January 1, 1958
10 years old
When we were playing tag at school a boy came and pushed my pocketbook right off my hands and Mark F. said “Say your sorry to the young lady” and picked up my pocketbook.
January 2
The other girls were calling me a flirt because I liked Mark Finks.
January 11
I went to the Nathan Clifford Baked Bean Supper. I was very sorry that Mark wasn’t there.
January 15
My birthday. 11 years old.
My mother didn’t let me invite boys to my party because she thought I was to young. So I didn’t have a very good one, even though it was fun.
January 17
Stephen R. sent me a birthday card on my birthday. Mark said that he was going to by me a ring but he never did.
February 1
I went to the movie Old Yellar today. I almost started to cry because Mark wasn’t there and I was sick for the whole day.
February 4
I went to the Children’s Theater today with my girlfriends and my boyfriend, Mark. He held my hand gently, and I was so happy.
February 19
Steven R. sent me a love note. The minute I read it I tore it up because I dislike him very much.
February 28
My dog Cinoman has been lost already for three days. Who knows when he is going to come back? All the rest of my family wants him not to come back but I do. We have looked every where and still not have found him and I have been awfly sad since.
March 7
Today I stopped piano and all my prevleges* will be taken away.
March 12
Today I went back to piano because I couldn’t stand it anymore.
March 19
My doggie has not come back yet for three weeks and I don’t think he ever will.
March 20
Today we got a cocker spaniel, which we had 30 minutes. The old woman was crying because she didn’t have any children and the dog was just like one to her. So we gave it back.
March 23
Today I went to the movie Sing Boy Sing starring Tommy Sands, with my Aunt and sister. It was a wonderful movie because it had alot of singing, loving, and alot of sadness and thats the kind of movie I like.
April 17
Today Steven G. and Stanley Sax were down my house. They came into the little brown hut with me. We talked for a little while then I suddenly fainted and fell on Steven. He put his arm around me and started to tap me lightly. After that Dear Diary, I am never going to try to faint again.
April 26
I went to Steven G. Splash party today at 8 to 11 oclock. I danced with Steven and Stanley the most times. It was the most wonderful party I have ever gone to in my entire life. (even though I am 11)
April 29
Today Mommy + Daddy came back from Florida and boy were they tan. They brought me back some shells for my rock collections, a very pretty dress, and last but not least a stuffed dog and I named him Cinoman.
May 16
Today after school Stanley and I were arguing about why he hated me and why Steven did. He got me so mad I ran away and started to cry. That was the first time I had ever started to cry when I was talking to a boy.
May 23
I found out the other reason that Stanley and Steven hate me. It is because I bounce to one boy to another. So I am going to try to be a lady even though I can’t be.
May 31
Today nothing much happened except my father almost killed me for not coming home at seven oclock. He swore and did everything that was unnessersry.
June 12
Today I graduated from grammar school. I got 5 a’s + 4 b’s. I’ll be in Jr. high school next year but I don’t want to go because I’m going to St Josephs School (catholic). We have to wear a uniform every day. My parents are sending me because I talk to much, fool around with boys and I think they want me to get a better education.
July 4
Today was Cinomans birthday. But no Cinoman.
August 10
Today I went to Girl Scout Camp. But I didn’t want to. I wanted to stay home and watch American Bandstand.
August 11
I’m at Girl Scout camp now. It is in the morning. We had oatmeal with raisons and it was terrible. I know I am going to lose 10 pounds. Everybody is a snob that is in my cabin. Even Jeanie V is as fresh as ever.
August 23
Today I came home from camp and boy I was glad. When I came home what a surprise I had. My American Bandstand yearbook was there. I know now that I am not going to camp next year.
September 6
Dear Diary
I saw the most wonderful picture in the whole wide world the other day. The name is Blue Denim. All about two teenagers who get in trouble, the girl becomes pregnant and they don’t know what to do. They both come from good homes and they are very decent themselves. There afraid to tell there parents so they save up enough money so the girl can have an abortion. She is saved just in the nick of time because the boy finally tells the horrible truth. They get married at the end and live happily ever after. (They are 16 + 15.) Carol Lynley + Brandon de Wilde play the parts wonderfully. I saw it 7 times in a row.
September 11
I sent Dick Clark a letter and a picture I drew of him. But I think I sent it to the wrong address.
September 20
Today I think I started my period but I am not telling anybody. Not even my mother.
September 21
Today I dreamed that Steven slept over my house. When I was sleeping Steven called me over. I came over and he told me to sit on the bed with him and so I did that to. He kissed me and I kissed him back. Then he told me that he loved me. I said that I loved him and then he asked me to go steady with him.
October 12
I hate my mother + Nanna very much. All they try to do is cause fights. They let Marcie and Peter go to Aunties house but I had to stay home. And now I can’t get out of the house until I make my bed. This morning Nanna made every bed in the house except mine while I was in church. And she expects me to make mine now.
December 31
I will always remember Mark F., Steven G, and until the day I die, Kenny Rossi. He is the most wonderful boy in the whole gosh darn world. God bless him forever. I love American Bandstand.
Memorandum
Jeanie Marcus and Janet Shur were almost my best girlfriends. They were smart, cute and not so poor either.
March 26, 1959
12 years old
Today is the first time I have written in my diary for a long, long time. I had been so busy I had forgotten all about it. I think I’m going to get a new diary and start from the start, but I’m still going to keep this one.
And so I did. Kept it for fifty-seven years.
It’s bee
n that long since I’ve taken the diary out of the locked metal security box that sits on a high shelf in my closet. The box holds baby books, locks of the kids’ hair, their first teeth, their first cloth bibs, their first baby brush, birth certificates, school evaluations, and their first pairs of hand-knit booties. I was rummaging through it the other day in hopes that I would find something that would inspire me to write. And there it was. My little plastic and pink (but now slightly dirty) diary with an embossed design on the cover of a ponytailed teenage girl writing in her diary.
It came with a clasp and a lock and, at one time, a tiny key. But over the years I had lost the key, so the diary remained unopened. I held it in my hand and then hugged it close. It was as if I’d found a bottle with a message inside it, a message that had been lost at sea for half a century and had now found its way back to me for a reason. What were the pages going to reveal to me about my childhood? Had I uncovered a pirate’s bounty and was about to strike literary gold? Were secrets that I had hidden from everyone about to be unearthed? Was I going to find clues as to why I had spent a lifetime of uncertainty? Would Freud have had a field day with my innocent confessions?
I took out a pair of scissors and cut the clasp.
I read it from cover to cover, hoping to unlock some juicy tidbits. But nothing stood out as titillating or heinous. It seemed that nothing out of the ordinary happened in my eleventh year on this earth. And yet I wasn’t disappointed. Strangely, I was relieved. I wanted to climb inside the pink plastic covers and get to relive that year all over again.
I remembered the term “boy crazy” and how often it was used to describe me when I was growing up. And yet my “obsessions” with boys seemed so innocent on the page. One boy danced with me, one kissed me, one gave me his ring. Big deal. After all, it wasn’t until I was twenty-one that I lost my virginity. I wish I had kept that year’s diary. That experience could have filled an hour with Dr. Drew.
But at eleven, nothing extraordinary happened to me. I was brought up in the ’50s, in a warm and loving, albeit strict, Armenian household, and was taught decent values and morals. Yes, I might have needed a little more attention from boys than other girls my age. But my need for attention created in me an overactive imagination that for years now has served me in a life in the arts. How many other eleven-year-old girls were developing the fine skill of convincingly pretending to faint in front of a boy, on cue? How many other girls at age eleven were compulsively drawing pictures of Dick Clark and sending them to the wrong address? Or obsessively watching American Bandstand every afternoon and dreaming that one day they’d get to slow dance with a “regular” on the show. Jonas Salk was dreaming about curing polio. And I was dreaming about slow dancing with a sixteen-year-old thug from Philadelphia.
Dick Clark passed away recently, and part of my childhood died with him. I would love to know where Mark Finks and Stanley Sax are today. I would like to make amends with them and tell them I didn’t really faint. I would like to know where Cinnamon ended up. Years after he went missing, my dad confessed to me that he had given Cinnamon away to a farm because of the dog’s incessant barking. I stopped piano lessons but to this day wish I had continued. And although I hated summer camp when I was eleven, I was hired as a counsellor at the Luther Gulick camp, Wohelo, when I was fifteen, and taught drama to kids every summer for years after that.
Blue Denim to this day is still my favourite movie.
Since my eleventh birthday, when I made my first entry in my first diary, I have written in hundreds of journals; scribbled ideas on hundreds of napkins, boarding passes, and magazine covers; and now, thanks to my iPhone, I leave long lists for future essays, in my Notes app.
But I have never had another pink diary with a lock and key.
I wonder if they make them anymore.
* To this day, I still don’t know how to spell priviledges, privaleges, priva-whatever
Afterbirth
Recently, I accepted the invitation to write a monthly humour column for ParentsCanada magazine. What was I thinking? I don’t remember my kids’ names, never mind the way I parented them nearly thirty years ago. Except that I was anxious all the time. Worried that I was not doing it right, whatever “doing it right” is supposed to mean.
In 1986, when my sons were three and five, we moved from Toronto to Los Angeles. I enrolled them in a small private school that Meryl Streep and Dustin Hoffman sent their kids to. This only added to my anxiety. I would study Ms. Streep as she waved goodbye to her kids when she dropped them off in the morning, and feel that my goodbyes paled in comparison. Her goodbyes were the goodbyes of a real mother, so heartfelt, so honest, so underplayed. My goodbyes were empty, desperate, over the top. “Mommy loves you … MOMMY LOVES YOU.” There wasn’t a dry eye in the playground as Ms. Streep handed over the lunches to her kids and, with the brave determination of her Oscar-winning performance as Sophie, made the choice to get in her Volvo station wagon and drive away.
To overcompensate for my parenting insecurities, I volunteered my services at every school function from the time my kids were in preschool until they graduated from high school. And I’m not kidding—every school function. Every lousy school event that no one else signed up for, there was my name at the top. When your kids are growing up, you still believe the extra volunteer work you put in at their schools will somehow guarantee their future success and happiness. I really believed that a guidance counsellor or teacher or principal would remember that I had cleaned out the rabbit cages and, one day, would give my kid a great recommendation for Harvard. So with this insane belief, I emceed the comedy fundraisers, I raced in the bikeathons, jogged in the jogathons, boarded turtles and snakes at my home during school break, picked debris off the Santa Monica beaches, directed the school plays, and made cookies, lasagna, and Armenian bread and raffled them off along with my leopard-skin Edith Prickley hat. I drove the football, baseball, lacrosse, and tennis teams to every game, and spent thousands of dollars at silent auctions on bad crafts made by other well-meaning parents. I even participated, along with Ms. Streep and Mr. Hoffman, in the weekly storytelling hours. I hired a dialect coach and worked with him three times a week, not to be outdone by Ms. Streep and Mr. Hoffman. I recited Wind in the Willows with a German accent (“Vonce upon a time, there vas a vind in da villows”) and The Ugly Duckling with a New York Jewish accent (“What do you want to do, shoot the ducklings, these lovelies?”). I acted out The Velveteen Rabbit as Ratzo Rizzo (“Hey, rabbits, I’m walkin’ here. I’m walkin’ here”).
Of course, none of my volunteering did anything to secure my kids’ places in the world. In fact, all it invariably did was make me more insecure as a parent. Volunteer work puts you in close proximity with other desperate parents, and then you start making small talk and digging for information, and the conversation moves to how many extracurricular activities your kids are involved in and what grades they got on a paper, and you soon find out that your kids are achieving far, far less than the other kids, and so besides spending endless hours making paper hats for the fall fair, you find out you really are a bad parent and your kids probably won’t even graduate from preschool.
Babies and kids have a way of trumping everything. They have an uncanny effect on how we prioritize our lives.
When my oldest boy, Jack, was a mere three weeks old, I was flown to Los Angeles to be a guest on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. For a young actor starting out, an appearance with Mr. Carson was the most coveted spot on any talk show. If Johnny liked you, your career was launched overnight. None of this mattered to me as I sat in the green room with Jack, breastfeeding him, changing his diapers, rocking, walking, and attending to his every need. When I finally did my seven minutes with Mr. Carson, I was a resounding success. My only priority while I was on the panel was getting back to the green room for Jack’s next feeding. I never once concerned myself with how I was coming across to millions of viewers. The conversation with Johnny consisted entirely of baby
anecdotes. I joked with Mr. Carson that my doctor told me I was going to have twins but it just turned out to be a baby with a big nose. I said that Jack looked like Yoda when he was born, and although we thought he was beautiful, we also retouched his baby pictures. Okay, I admit that all those jokes were affectionately told at my child’s expense, but in spite of using him as comic fodder on national television, he is today the most unconditionally loving son a parent could ever ask for.
In fact, Jack and my younger son, Joe, are my most astute critics, and I cherish their opinions. They make my career far more important than it is. The fact is, I don’t think I would have had the career I’ve had if I hadn’t given birth to my two sons. My kids taught me how to listen and how to love, and because of that, I believe I am a better actress. They have given me balance and perspective in a career that is too often all-consuming.
When Joe was about to start his last year of high school, I was offered the lead in a new Broadway musical—not my regular supporting part, but the lead, with a very lucrative contract. The show was called Seussical, based on the Dr. Seuss books, and I was to play the Cat in the Hat. However, rehearsals would start in September and I’d have to sign a nine-month contract. That meant I would miss Joe’s entire last year of high school. Every time I pictured the curtain going up in New York, I thought of Joe, in Los Angeles. I would not be there for his football games, college applications, homecoming, the jazz ensemble, the high school musical, graduation—a year never again to be repeated. I would not be there for my son. I called my agent, who would have benefited greatly from my doing the part. And I will never forget what he asked me: “Andrea, would you rather be remembered as a great Cat in the Hat or a great mom?” I said no to the part. I stayed with Joe for his senior year, and I have never regretted the decision.
Jack (left) and Joe (right)
Today, my sons don’t need me in the same way they did when they were children. Joe is an aspiring actor and a musician, and plays in a band. We both performed together recently in the TV series Working the Engels. I felt fortunate to be able to share the stage with my son. Jack is a music editor for films and collaborates with many film composers, including Hans Zimmer. My sons are both doing great. They don’t need any interference from their mom. But I can’t help thinking that if I drove Joe’s band around, they’d get more gigs, or if I performed for Mr. Zimmer’s Christmas party or even slept with him, Jack would get a bigger office.
Lady Parts Page 3
