Ask Me Again Tomorrow

by Olympia Dukakis

  A few years after completing Sinatra: The Miniseries, I got another call from Tina’s production company. She was producing a television movie called Young at Heart about a widow who had shared a passion for Sinatra’s music with her husband, Joey. In the final scene, Frank is supposed to appear at her birthday party. He was supposed to take me into his arms and say, “Joey sent me.” After our first take, he whispered in my ear, “I’ve got a little money left—wanna run away?”

  Then Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City came into my life. I was offered the role of Anna Madrigal, the transsexual landlady. This was not only hugely flattering but a stroke of great luck, as actresses on both coasts wanted to play this part. Maupin originally wrote the stories in serial form for the San Francisco Chronicle (à la Charles Dickens), and in these remarkable vignettes he created a universe set around an apartment house in the seventies and eighties. It was a time of discos and drugs, and Maupin wrote about it all via a vivid kaleidoscope of characters that included gays and straights, men and women. At the heart of Maupin’s city is Anna Madrigal, a middle-aged woman who used to be a man; a free spirit who owns a rambling, charming apartment building, 28 Barbary Lane, somewhere in the heart of San Francisco, where many of the other characters end up living. With the same tenderness she lavishes on her marijuana plants growing in her garden, she tends to her tenants, all of whom are searching for happiness and identity.

  Alastair Reed, a British director, directed the series. He told me not to read the books before filming, so I didn’t. I did read books about transsexuals, though, which were tremendously moving. After a few days of rehearsals, Alastair and I talked about how we viewed Mrs. Madrigal. We both agreed that she was a happy person; she wasn’t suffering from her decision.

  Yet she’d been deeply unhappy as a man, unhappy enough to have what some people even in 1993 considered an unthinkable procedure to change her sex. She’d found a way to survive herself. She reminded me of Rose Castorini, who could look in the mirror and say, “I know who I am.” But she also reminded me of me. I always knew I had male and female energies within me, but I had silenced everything that was vulnerable and female until so recently. I hadn’t felt entitled to it. Learning to embrace it, to value it, was a struggle I was very much in the midst of.

  No matter how much I thought I understood the character, I knew I needed to talk to someone who had gone through the experience. Through a member of the cast, I was put in touch with a therapist living in Los Angeles who had been through the same operation as Anna. I called and invited her to breakfast.

  When she walked into my hotel room, the first thing I noticed was that she didn’t seem ill at ease or apologetic or as if she had anything to prove. After a few minutes of small talk over coffee and croissants, I started to ask her questions. “I’ve read how difficult the process is, both physically and psychologically, to change from a man to a woman,” I said. “To change your body so dramatically, to get rid of organs, create new ones, take hormones, to turn your life inside out, to suffer through all the emotional issues afterward—what made you go through with it?”

  Without one second’s pause, she said, “I always wanted the friendship of women.”

  She explained that it was women’s friendships that she’d always felt deprived of as a man. “When women talk to each other, they talk in a special way.”

  This insight was on my mind in one of the first scenes, when Mary Ann Singleton, played by Laura Linney, moves to 28 Barbary Lane and Mrs. Madrigal invites her over for a visit. The script called for us to talk in the living room as we examined various knickknacks that Mrs. Madrigal had collected, but I had a different suggestion.

  “Let’s move the scene to the bedroom,” I said. I wanted to flop on the bed with Laura. Put women in a room with a bed and they’ll naturally gravitate to it. It’s a sign of their easy intimacy and comfort with each other. If the scene in question was supposed to highlight our burgeoning friendship, then the bed would be the place to do it. In the end, Alastair agreed with me and asked the stage crew to make us a bed specifically for the scene.

  Another scene took place on the porch with Chloe Webb, who played Mona Ramsey, another tenant in the building who eventually turns out to be my daughter. I found myself sitting as a man would sit. My makeup artist, who has worked with me for many years, called my attention to it. “You sure you want to sit that way?” he asked. “It’s so masculine.”

  But I did want to sit like that. In every episode, I tried to find at least one moment in which the mannish side of Mrs. Madrigal could emerge.

  This program was wildly popular—several other seasons followed the original—and also generated more controversy than we ever imagined. A Christian fundamentalist group assembled all the “unseemly” moments on a videotape and sent it to Jesse Helms and his colleagues in Congress in an effort to block funding for PBS. As a result of the pressure from the religious right, some television stations pixilated certain scenes; others refused to show the program at all. Yet at heart, the series is simply about a group of young people trying to figure out who they are, and to connect with each other. Mrs. Madrigal is central to all their lives because she’s figured out how to live in the present. She doesn’t dwell on the past, and she’s no longer postponing her life, waiting for something to happen in the future. She’s alive in the moment, alert to all the possibilities of life. Mrs. Madrigal, who has transformed herself, knows that life is transformative, and that sometimes the old has to die so that new life can emerge.

  In the meantime, my mother was becoming so frail, so tiny. She was beginning to withdraw from us in ways that we knew were irreversible. She rarely spoke, and when she did, she was talking to people who were gone—her parents, her brothers and sisters, my father. She no longer knew us. During one of Apollo’s visits from L.A., we went to see my mother, and as she sat in a chair, Apollo began to rub her feet. I stood behind her and massaged her shoulders. Apollo began to weep, and all of a sudden my mother slowly raised her fist and said, in her fiercest voice, in Greek, “Tighten up on yourself!” And again she was silent.

  A few weeks later, Peter and I went over to take her out for a walk. As we wheeled her out into the sunshine, she lifted her head and, turning her face toward the sun, said, “The sun loves me!” I marveled that within her small world, she could still find love. I thought of the hot summer days she would take us to the ocean and realized that she still took comfort in a loving universe.

  Over the course of the next year, I was to lose the three women who had been my most important guides and teachers. First, I lost Marija, whose long battle with cancer finally came to a close. I flew out to see her when she was in the hospital. She was being fed intravenously, but this didn’t stop her from eating the spinach pie I had brought. She wanted to know what I was up to, what I was working on. I told her that I was still trying to figure out how to bring the Goddess work to the stage. She pointed her finger at me and said, “Do it, Olympia! Just go do it!” She introduced me to other women who were visiting her during those last days, women like myself who had been inspired by her work. She wanted us to connect with each other, to become friends.

  My friend Madie, whom I’d met at the Goddess workshop at Omega, came to visit with her partner. We talked about my mother and I told them how her body was deteriorating, as well as her mind, and the feelings I still had: my fear of her anger, how I’d resisted her and finally pulled away, and how I’d never been honest with her—never told her how much I’d resented her trying to shame or beat me into submission.

  Madie said, “You’ve got to tell her.” I fought this idea. “My mother’s ninety-three, she doesn’t even know me. It’s my problem now.” Madie pressed it and I said, “Visiting hours are over.”

  “Visiting hours are never over,” she said, and we drove to the nursing home.

  My mother was lying in bed on her side, so small and thin, like a pencil under the sheets. I gently shook her awake and said, “Mother, it’s
Olympia.” Without opening her eyes she said, “Olympia, I’ve been looking everywhere for you.” This was the first time she had said my name in months. Immediately I started to cry. Then Madie spoke: “Alexandra. Olympia has something to tell you.” My mother said, “What is it, darling?” I told her how I’d been afraid of her when I was young, that her anger really scared me. She never moved or opened her eyes, but said, “It was a difficult birth.” The connection between the difficulties of my birth and her subsequent anger had never occurred to me. It was her way of telling me that she had done the best she could. Still crying, I told her how important she was to me, how much she had given me, that I knew how deeply she loved me and I loved her just as deeply. Then Madie whispered, “Tell your mother that it’s all right to go.” I told her. I told her I was fine, she could go now. Louie and the children were fine. She immediately asked about Apollo and I told her he and Maggie and Damon were fine. “It’s all right, Mother. You can go whenever you want.” With her eyes still closed, she tucked her hand under her cheek, lifted her free hand and opened and closed her fingers, like a child waving, and said, “Bye-bye. Bye-bye.”

  Over the next several weeks, my mother’s condition worsened and she was moved into the hospital. Her heart was failing. The doctors told me that if I didn’t allow them to place a shunt in her chest, my mother would die. Even though I had promised her we would uphold her living will, this really shook me and I called Apollo. “You know what she wants, Olympia.” I had to let her go. But I was determined that my mother wouldn’t suffer. The same doctors who wanted to perform an invasive procedure were now reluctant to give her pain medication. I was livid. The nurses overheard this conversation and one of them came to me and said, “Don’t worry: we’ll take care of her.”

  We began to get calls that the end was near, and we would get to the hospital only to find my mother had rallied enough to be out of danger. I did not want a repeat of what happened when my father died. On my last trip to the hospital, I was walking out of the elevator toward her room as a nurse was coming out. She said, “Olympia, your mother has passed.” Seeing the expression on my face, she added, “She wasn’t alone. I was with her.”

  I went to see my mother. She was so still. I lifted her and held her in my arms and said to her, “Koranaki, koranaki, it’s over, your suffering is over.” I was happy for her that it was over, that these last difficult years were over. I was happy for both of us. I felt she was free.

  My mother, Alexandra Christos Dukakis, died on July 9, 1994, in the same room in the same hospital where my father died. She was ninety-three years old.

  I thought I had been ready to let my mother go. She’d been dying for a long time. But I wasn’t prepared for how it hit me. I would be walking along, caught up in my day, when I would be seized by the sensation of being utterly alone and adrift, so overcome by a feeling of emptiness that I would stop and lean into buildings for support. It still happens from time to time.

  Shortly after my mother died, I learned that Ma was failing. When I visited her at her ashram in Cohasset, Massachusetts, she was eating and watching religious services on TV. I was saddened to see how diminished she had become. We talked, and after watching me, she told Sudha to put in a specific video, about a Catholic priest who, after suffering two heart attacks, had experienced a revelation. In the video, he talked about his first heart attack. As it was happening, he felt as though he were “falling into darkness” and was scared. But during the second attack, he understood the “darkness” as “Her love.” Ma didn’t say anything, but I knew she was remembering when I told her of the voices I’d heard and my fear of losing myself in the love of the Great Mother. She wanted me to realize that what we think of as “the darkness” is actually the deep, rich sea of the Great Mother’s love, and that realization would “uncurse” that place of “darkness.” Even now, though she was clearly turning away from this world as my mother had at the end of her life, Ma was still guiding me, still teaching me. Before I left, Ma told me that she would hold me and my family in her prayers. I knew I would never see her again. I began to weep. “Even after death I will continue to guide you,” she said. Those were the words my teacher left me with.

  Because of my love for my mother, Ma, and Marija—and their love for me—I’ve come to understand that birth and death are part of the mysterious cycle of regeneration. My recognition of this cycle allows me to live in the moment, with all my contradictions. I find that it calms my soul, this insistence on accepting the true nature of things; it keeps things real.

  Divine Mother Heart. Proof of Thy Unceasing Care

  I find in every turn of life

  With many arms dost Thou shield me,

  With many hearts dost Thou love me

  With many minds dost Thou guide me to the road

  of safety

  —The Handbook of Daily Worship

  Epilogue

  IN 1999, Louie and I decided to sell our house in Montclair. It had been a good house for us with plenty of room for three children and later, my mother. It was perfect for throwing the large and crowded parties we occasionally held for the Theatre. The serene lawn and gardens always provided me with a place to “get away from it all,” even if only for minutes at a time. But by then the kids were all off making their own lives—taking with them the piles of sports equipment I’d had to live with for all those years—and the house was too big for us without them. I would wake up at night, thinking I could hear their footsteps, and slowly realize it was just my imagination. That chapter of our lives was over. With no theater, and no children, it seemed right that we move back to New York City, where we’d started so many years before.

  We found a loft in downtown Manhattan and worked with an architect to get the place exactly as we wanted. I began to think of it as my “real” home, where I chose what it looked like from the layout of the rooms on down to the kind of furniture in it. It has become the perfect nest for the two of us.

  Living in the city is oddly relaxing. I am no longer rushing around to get from one place to another—from the theater, to school for a meeting or sports event, to the house to cook dinner, and then back to the theater again. I am no longer riding the Number 66 bus into the city, feeling like that hour each way is my “downtime.” Louie and I are doing exactly what we want to do, on our own timetable. This new chapter seems to have brought us full circle, as we are again living the kind of life we once had in our early courtship and marriage.

  Now there is time to sit in a neighborhood coffeehouse on Sunday mornings and talk over cups and cups of cappuccino. There is the opportunity to steal off in the middle of the afternoon to see a film, the way we did when we were first married. We can spontaneously decide to meet friends for dinner if we have a free evening. And there is always the work. As I write this, Louie is appearing in a Broadway revival of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom with Charles Dutton and Whoopi Goldberg.

  The Goddess Project is an ongoing process. I travel around the country doing “concert readings” of Rose. I continue to take on new roles that intrigue me. I’m inspired by the women who come to the speaking engagements I do and I’ll continue to do them as long as I’m asked. But more than enjoying the continuation of the things I know, I look forward to things I’ve yet to experience. It was good to look back, but I also need to focus on where I’m going. I want to be able to look forward to changing, to taking the next step—and there’s always a next step. “Who am I?” “Who am I going to become?” These questions don’t go away as we get older, unless we allow them to. I don’t want them to go away. They’ve been the driving force in my life and that isn’t about to change anytime soon. Yet, as it was in the beginning, I’m still finding out who I am within the context of being Olympia Dukakis, Greek-American, woman, wife, and mother.

  I realize I’m more Greek than I ever thought I was. I inherited from my father the intellectual curiosity that has driven me so much of my life. From him too, I inherited a commitment to excellence, no
matter how short I fall. From my mother I inherited her humor and life force—a spirit—that has kept me from knuckling under in the face of obstacles. I also inherited her flair for the dramatic. From them both, I inherited the strong passions and indelible work ethic that defined their lives. I take enormous pride in the accomplishments of all the other Dukakises I grew up with: my cousin Arthur spent thirty-three years as the Boston Regional Director for the US Bureau of the Census. My cousin Stratos, after twenty-five years as the Superintendent of the Montachusett Regional Vocational Technical School in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, recently was honored when they named their new arts center the Stratos Dukakis Center for the Arts. Michael continues to impress me with his devotion to teaching and public service and my brother, Apollo, is an ongoing inspiration to me, both through his brilliant acting and his character. I’m a part of a generation that absorbed their parents’ lessons, and I made my contribution through the important craft of acting—giving voice to the stories that make up our lives.

  Acting saved my life. It taught me to be in the moment, not get caught up in what happened yesterday, or what will happen tomorrow. It taught me to acknowledge my feelings and embrace them, rather than be ashamed of them and try to cover them up. Acting validated my desire to define myself. It challenged me to be honest about who I am and what I feel. It forced me to be my authentic self. Acting was the conduit for the unfolding of my spirit. Acting has allowed me to go on.

  I want to continue to find work in plays and movies, roles that challenge me, or better yet, scare the hell out of me. I aspire to do dangerous work that feels risky. I want to travel places I’ve never been. I want to be here for my children and be deeply involved in the lives of my grandchildren. I’m hungry to read books I haven’t read yet, go to every performance of Mahler I can find. I want to write more poetry. I want to continue to experience the love and trust of my marriage, because I’m lucky enough to be married to a man who accepts me, supports my dreams, and eases the way. I want more of our family vacations where we all gather in a big house by the water and eat and play and genuinely enjoy one another. I want more dinners with friends, complete with heated, passionate discussions about politics, feminism, art. I don’t see myself retiring. Slowing down, yes…but retiring? From what? I love the chaotic, contradictory, loving mess that has been my life. I love knowing that in the end, I too will be able to lift up my face to the sun and say, “The sun loves me.”