True Stories from an Unreliable Eyewitness

by Christine Lahti

  Dedication

  For my family

  Epigraph

  “Memory is a complicated thing, relative to the truth but not its twin.”

  —Barbara Kingsolver

  “Any woman who chooses to behave like a full human being should be warned that the armies of the status quo will treat her as something of a dirty joke. . . . She will need her sisterhood.”

  —Gloria Steinem

  “A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.”

  —Mary Karr

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  1: Free John Funky

  2: The Smile of Her

  3: Make-Believer

  4: Hidden

  5: Walking

  6: Shit Happens

  7: The Wet Towel

  8: The Street Where “They” Lived

  9: Mississippi Baby

  10: Losing Virginity

  11: Kidnapped

  12: What I Wish I’d Known About Love Scenes

  13: Brave

  14: Dear Pregnant Women of a Certain Age . . .

  15: Running on Empty

  16: Panic

  17: Brother

  18: Monster

  19: Mamma Mia

  20: Waiting

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  Why Write Now? (Click)

  This book is a collection of my true stories. They are my emotional memories, the goo that surrounds the facts, the parasitic muck that attaches to them. These are the stories that altered me in some way, even just temporarily. They chronicle events when something inside me stirred or quaked. There was a shift in my focus. A tremor up my spine. A hot flash of injustice, of shame. A humble reckoning with my own imperfections. An acceptance. A forgiveness.

  Some of these stories have made me fight harder. Others are lessons I keep having to relearn; taking three steps backward and wobbling before being able to stand up straight again. Sometimes these stories are simply a quiet reminder of hope when everything in me wanted to give up. These are the kind of memories that have been permanently etched into my psyche.

  My siblings, upon reading some of them, cried foul. “What? I don’t remember that at all!” or “That’s not how they happened!” That’s because, as sifted through my personal filter, these events didn’t happen to them. In fact, my first story, “Free John Funky,” concerns the fallibility of memory; how emotion can sometimes render us unreliable eyewitnesses to our own true stories.

  Even so, I’ve found value in telling the stories that those memories have, over the years, solidified into. Most of mine occupy a place where comedy and tragedy overlap. In that regard, my life has often felt like a Chekhov play, albeit one set in an affluent Detroit suburb and then migrating to New York and Los Angeles.

  Many of these stories are told through the lens of my ever-evolving feminism, the lens through which I see just about everything. I call them my click moments. Back in the 1970s, I was told that I would have only one click; the moment when my feminism dropped bone-deep, from my head into my body. A eureka moment from which there could be no turning back. The veil would be permanently lifted. I’d see the world in a completely different way, and it would turn me into a lifelong activist.

  Part of that turned out to be true. My first big awakening is described in the story “Walking,” but I’ve had hundreds of clicks. I’ve been a clumsy feminist, finding solid footing only to be knocked down again. And I keep finding new veils to be lifted.

  The order of these stories loosely follows that stumbling journey to find agency—from innocence toward experience, from powerlessness toward empowerment. I see this collection as the highs and lows of a feminist who is very much still a work in progress, with all the humiliating, hilarious, heartbreaking potholes along the way.

  In college Chester Martin, an older professional actor who I deeply respected, looked at me through watery, bloodshot eyes and told me I had no light to shed upon the human existence and that I would never make it as an actress. Never mind that he was sloshed and that I had just rejected his inappropriate, aggressive sexual advances. Nevertheless I believed him, and it crushed me. Not for long, though, because I decided soon after that no matter what he thought, I had to act. I saw the film Long Day’s Journey into Night, directed by Sidney Lumet, at the State Theatre in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the autumn of 1970. Unable to stop sobbing, I rode my bike around campus for an hour afterward. I knew by the end of that ride that I needed to be part of films, plays, and stories that would have that kind of power to move people.

  I grew up in a family of six children, four girls and two boys, in Birmingham, Michigan. I was the third oldest. Dad was a busy general surgeon. Mom was a full-time housewife who later became a professional artist. I was born a drama queen, someone with extreme emotions, which didn’t always sit so well in a family that was emotion-phobic and prone to stoicism.

  Mom graced us with unconditional love, while Dad’s love seemed conditional on how successful we were. Hence, I became obsessed with accomplishment. I found theater in the sixth grade: I played the Virgin Mary in the Christmas pageant and a tree in the school play. I loved being able to step inside the skin (or bark) of different characters. But I especially appreciated the applause. It felt like a hundred of my dads clapping just for me.

  I attended the University of Michigan, where I originally majored in languages thanks to a fantasy of working as a translator at the UN. But I quickly switched to theater by my sophomore year. As it was the late 1960s, I also de facto majored in being an activist and hippie. The second wave of feminism was just beginning to emerge in my world, and I would leave Ann Arbor in 1972 a radically different person from the conservative girl who’d entered college as a freshman in 1968.

  Before that, I’d never really noticed gender inequality. It was just “the way things were.” Then I started seeing sexism and misogyny lurking, like vermin, in every corner. For the first time, I felt the chronic grip of patriarchy. It was like when I got glasses in sixth grade. I had no idea that my world had always been out of focus. Then instantly, everything became shockingly clear.

  I moved to New York City in 1973 to study acting. To pay my rent, I started waitressing at places like the Improv (where I threw a drink at Jimmie Walker onstage because he made a comment about my breast size) and the Quiet Little Table in the Corner, where I discovered that businessmen were getting blow-job lunches from their secretaries behind the beaded curtains of their booths. I also did mime in Central Park for tips. Yup, I was one of those incredibly irritating people.

  Then, while making my dutiful rounds, trying to find an agent, I met with an alcoholic one who told me my dreams were much too big for my britches. “Not special enough and too tall,” I could never be a “serious” actress. Apparently most male stars were short and would never agree to work opposite the likes of monster-me. His career advice was that I should move out to LA to do sitcoms. Back then advising an actress to go to LA to do sitcoms was like advising her to become a lap dancer.

  I became determined to prove him and all my other naysayers wrong: I would do whatever it took to make them eat their words. I went on to study with the finest teachers I could find: Uta Hagen, Bill Esper, and Stella Adler. I started getting parts in plays off-off-Broadway, which became my training ground. Cockroaches and mice frequently shared the stage with me. After I got my first professional acting job and Equity card, I remember sile
ntly thanking all those discouraging men. I’m still thanking them.

  I got married in 1988, and my husband and I had our first child four years later. After living in the New York City theater world for twenty years, we moved to the film and TV world of Los Angeles. Just for two years. Which somehow turned into twenty. We raised our three children there, and the second they went away to college, we became bicoastal.

  Now, having worked as an actress and director for nearly forty years, I’m in my mid-sixties, and the more exciting acting offers have gotten fewer and farther between. What the fuck’s that about? I naively asked myself just ten years ago. Why are there so few great parts for women in their fifties and sixties? Aren’t our stories more interesting than ever? There’s a shelf life for actresses? These thoughts hadn’t really occurred to me in my younger years, while I watched successful male actors continue working into their late seventies, sometimes as the leading man. I know. My capacity for denial has surprised even me sometimes.

  So maybe I’m not “fuckable” anymore (a word that always makes me want to say “Then don’t fuck with me!”), but I’m in my creative prime. I’m finally fully charged, at the top of my game, and now I’m supposed to shut up? Nope, not gonna happen.

  In recent years, I’ve been feeling, more than ever, the powerlessness inherent in acting. Actors are dependent on other people to be creative. After all, it’s not much fun acting by ourselves. How many times can we perform monologues? Who is going to applaud? Do we make a laugh track and just run it on a loop? Where the hell do we perform? In front of our dogs? In a closet so the neighbors don’t call the police? I’d rather give lap dances.

  When I teach acting master classes, I always tell my students, especially the young women, that they must become a quadruple threat: they should not only act but also write, direct, and produce. They must create their own projects and generate their own work. I find that many in this younger generation already intuitively understand this. In fact, quite a lot of them seem as if they were raised with an agency they didn’t have to struggle for years to find. (I like to think having feminist mothers had something to do with that.)

  But in the past, whenever encouraged to start my own production company, I always used to say, “Oh no, I’m not entrepreneurial like that!” Finally, in my sixties, I started developing projects and producing. I think it’s safe to say I’m a late bloomer.

  Then, inspired by the urging of my kick-ass twenty-two-year-old daughter, feminist husband, and several close friends, I started to write. Holy motherfucking click. Why did I wait so long?

  These stories cover three main periods: my childhood, my early journey as an actress and activist, and adulthood. “The Smile of Her” charts the evolution of my mother’s smile and how I became a feminist in spite of and because of it. My mother has given me a wellspring of treasured clicks. In many ways I feel I’m living her unlived life.

  Clicks can come in many forms. Like in the form of a hooker on Eighth Avenue who inadvertently changes your day or a sleazy casting director who says you can’t “make it” unless you become a prostitute. “Walking” and “Waiting” follow me along my long path to find agency, particularly in the sexist world of show business. “Mamma Mia” is about the power of empowering someone else, even when I deeply disagree with her choice. “Running on Empty” attempts to understand my father—how he, like most men of his generation, was limited by a narrow definition of masculinity. In “Brave,” “Panic,” and “Shit Happens,” an earthquake, a panic attack on the other side of the world, and a nearly missed Golden Globe serve to pull the rug out from under my chronic need to be perfect, a need that started when growing up as a girl felt like a liability and being flawless seemed the surest way to win respect. You could call me a respect junkie—but respect from others never gave me the kind of agency I was searching for.

  Now, as an adult, I’ve discovered that embracing my imperfections has brought me closer to what I’d really been seeking all along: self-respect. For me, true agency began once I was able to accept all the ways I actually suck. These stories chart that growth from “perfect” to imperfect; as a feminist, a mother, a wife, a daughter, an actress, and a drama queen.

  I may not have much “light to shed on the human existence,” but I sure have come to adore the light beckoning me from my computer screen. It invites me to create with autonomy. It’s been scary at times, but also cathartic—and I love that I can do it with no makeup, and not even a trace of Botox. Although as I type this, staring at my veiny hands, I can’t help but think what a little filler could do to plump them up. Just the tiniest bit.

  1

  Free John Funky

  I just can’t be 100 percent sure anymore that it didn’t come out of my butt.

  I was in first grade, sitting at our writing table, minding my own business, happily practicing my cursive with my freshly sharpened No. 2 pencil. On my left sat my classmate, the unfortunately named John Funky. Short and soft-looking, this fellow had cauliflower ears and a freakishly premature receding hairline. Just as I was making the final swirl in my capital L in Lahti, I smelled something horrible. I looked under our table, and on the floor, right next to John Funky’s feet, sat a couple of fresh human turds. My hand shot up into the air like a missile. I waved it frantically. Our teacher rushed over, and I informed her of this disgusting, law-breaking shenanigan.

  “Miss Beasley, somebody had an accident on the floor!” I said with an urgency that a lit stick of dynamite under the table might have warranted. Miss Beasley, a skinny tree of a woman with a permanent prunelike wince on her face, hissed through clenched yellow teeth, “Where? Who did it?”

  My trembling finger pointed at the poo. Then at John. She looked down. She gasped. “mister funky! Clean up those stools now!” John got up, staring at the floor. His cheeks reddened. He fetched the broom and dustpan and swept up the mess. He was then banished to the principal’s office or wherever kids went to be punished for shitting on the floor of their classrooms.

  Okay. I’ve told that “John Funky” story hundreds of times since I was a kid.

  But now, at sixty-five years old, I’ve discovered that some memories have become a little loose at the seams. For example, not so long ago, I was shocked to find out that my brother and sister barely remembered a terrifying family trip when our dad kicked our mom out of the car in downtown Chicago. How could something so seared into my brain be merely a blip on the childhood radar for them? Did my siblings omit the parts that were too painful for them? Did I exaggerate them because of my own fears? Memory is, by nature, subjective and therefore flawed. So am I not to be trusted to tell my own impactful stories? Even though I was there? In person and close up?

  Let us first examine the facts. This much I know to be true: Miss Beasley’s class wasn’t some ordinary teacher’s first-grade class. In her room, if and when she detected something in the air that just “wasn’t right,” Miss Beasley would conduct her signature “coatroom checks.”

  “One, two, three, all eyes on me! All right children, I need all the boys to line up in the coatroom, please,” she announced, her face cracking with the tiniest hint of pleasure.

  With hushed groans, the boys filed in. Knowing the drill, they marched to their assigned coat hook, faced the back wall, bent over, and dropped their trousers, keeping on their tighty-whities. Then Miss Beasley would stroll by each one of them and with slow, deep inhales, as if she were in a cooking class inspecting freshly made muffins, she . . . sniffed. If she found the guilty party, she hurried him off to the principal’s office. If she didn’t, she barked the most dreaded words that could come out of a teacher’s mouth:

  “All right, boys may return to their seats. I need all the girls to line up, please.”

  Then it was our turn to enter that lion’s den. We went to our coat hooks and faced the wall, but since we weren’t allowed to wear pants, we had to lift our skirts or dresses and bend over. Miss Beasley, once again walking in slow motion, checked
and smelled each of our backsides.

  It’s a good thing for Miss Beasley that this happened in 1957. If she behaved like this today, she’d be stuck having to sniff the underwear of her fellow inmates in the Michigan State Prison.

  So given our perverted teacher, it’s possible I felt a little anxious when I spotted those turds on the floor, but I also know for a fact that they were sitting right next to John’s foot. His name was John Funky, people—of course he did it. Obviously! Miss Beasley believed me, and I have stood by this truth since I was six years old!

  But now, sixty years later, maybe it is time to do some reexamination. Especially after a friend recently pointed out some gaping holes in my narrative.

  First and most critically, he reminded me that John Funky must have been wearing trousers—long pants—given the strict dress codes of 1957. “So, Christine,” my skeptical friend asked, “how did he get them off? How did the crap get to the floor, so very much intact? Even with the baggiest pants known to man, it would have been extremely difficult for him to just shake those bad boys all the way down his legs. However, because you were wearing a skirt or a dress, it would have been a lot easier for you just to . . . let them slip out, right?”

  Now it had never in a million years occurred to me that I could have actually been responsible for this, but my friend’s scenario started to make a little sense. He continued, “Christine, you had to go to the bathroom, but you were so deeply immersed in your beloved cursive practice that you didn’t want to miss one second of it. So you simply let a couple drop and kicked them over toward John. Plus, given your teacher’s depraved sniffing ritual, you felt desperate to blame someone else, and the closest target was poor Mr. Funky.”

  If I were investigating the veracity of my story, I would have to admit that around that same time in my life, I might have been a little prone to lying. I might also have been a bit of a tattletale and drama queen. I could cite as evidence against myself the time I was angry at my older sister Carol for some reason I can no longer remember. She was ten, I was eight. Standing at our orange laminate kitchen counter, she prepared her midday snack. As she meticulously poured her honey onto her open-faced peanut butter sandwich, I stuck my thumb into it and swirled it around, wrecking her obsessively perfect design.