Might As Well Laugh About It Now

by Marie Osmond

  The day we returned to the studio my assistant gave me a stack of fan letters and e-mails that had arrived. Many were congratulations on the baby, but there was a large handful that really caught my attention. They each contained a different version of the same message: “I had my baby the same time you had yours. You look fabulous but I still have a lot of extra weight to lose. How did you do it? What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I drop these pounds?”

  I felt as though I had sent scores of postnatal women to the back corners of their closets to cry in shame. I wanted to write to each of them personally. Nothing was wrong with them. It’s completely natural to have extra weight after giving birth. The body needs time to recover. Knowing that the altered photos of me looking slender two weeks after giving birth were making new mothers feel bad broke my heart and changed my mind forever about body image.

  My mother imparted this bit of wisdom to me a number of years ago. She said, “You spend the last half of your life fixing what the first half did to you.”

  Now I know she was absolutely right, but I’d like to believe that we could shake the earth with thinking differently about our weight and focusing more on how true beauty comes from being healthy, both physically and emotionally.

  I’ve decided that I’ll no longer flee the thought of having a true female body. And I’m going to stand and fight for my own daughters to be healthy, no matter what their natural body size. I wish I could have all the countless hours back that I spent worrying about my weight or believing the media-supported illusion of what constitutes a perfect woman. I’m not embarrassed by my weight anymore. I’m more concerned about wasting another moment of precious life on self-criticism.

  Sure, I’ll still carry on my makeup when I fly to make sure I have lip liner for touchups and powder to conceal the red veins on the sides of my nose, and I’ll still hold in my stomach when I’m in front of a group of people, but I won’t hold in my thoughts about how important it is to love and accept yourself as you are. Then, when the ground moves and you find yourself out on the lawn, you don’t have to pack up your self-esteem. It will carry you forward through anything that comes your way.

  And, as a side note: Your seventy-two-hour emergency survival kit should never contain an eighteen-hour girdle.

  WXR-Pee

  Each year for Halloween, I go green as Witchelina. The year I did my radio show, Donny dressed up as me. Scarier than my witch garb by far, mostly because he has better legs than mine!

  Here’s the major benefit of having a radio show: Wake up. No makeup. All you need to be ready for work is your voice and a sense of humor. Being heard but not seen sounded like heaven to me, especially after growing up in a business where it was unfathomable to have a blemish. One zit was enough to get me sent to a dermatologist when we were doing the original Donny and Marie show. The culprits were vacuumed out, sometimes weekly. To this day, my pores still cringe when I turn on the Hoover to clean the carpet!

  In the fall of 2003, a national radio company approached me with an offer to host my own syndicated afternoon show. They suggested the show be broadcast right from my neighborhood in Utah. I immediately said “yes” and “thank you.”

  A studio was built into the top floor of the building where my office was located, and along with a three-person staff and a handful of interns from the local universities, Marie and Friends hit the radio waves.

  I’ve always had a love for radio. The public’s awareness of my brothers’ music skyrocketed in the 1970s because of radio. I’ll never forget the day their career was truly launched. We were in our church’s parking lot on a Sunday morning, listening to the popular DJ Casey Kasem count down to the number-one song on his show, American Top 40. Our father had let us duck out of the service a bit early knowing that “One Bad Apple” was somewhere on the charts. None of us had any idea what number it would be.

  As Casey announced song number nine, number six, number four, we wondered if it might have already been played while we were in church. Casey announced the number-two song, “Knock Three Times” by Tony Orlando and Dawn. My brothers looked at each other, barely daring to have a what-if expression on their faces. When my father got excited about anything, he would make sniffing noises, and now his nose was going crazy. Then there was a 120-minute commercial break (really only ninety seconds or so, but it seemed much longer), and the anticipation to hear who took the top spot on the countdown was nearly unbearable.

  I remember Casey finally coming back on the air to say, “The number-one song in America is the Osmond Brothers with ‘One Bad Apple.’ ”

  We all whooped and hollered and jumped around the car and a couple of my brothers actually screamed. After that week, their concert schedule doubled, their fan base quadrupled, and it was the teenage girls who were screaming, not my brothers. Well, to be honest, Jay has been known to shriek a time or two. I’d hate to embarrass him by describing an incident in the Genting Highlands resort when some moths flew out from the opened curtains. That’s for Jay to tell—not me.

  Radio helped to create the same “overnight” success for me two years later when I was thirteen years old and “Paper Roses” went to number one on the Country and Billboard charts. I got the news backstage at my brothers’ sold-out Madison Square Garden concert. I started to cry, but I don’t think it was from happiness. It was mostly from fear, as I remember it, because Alan said, “Find something to wear, Marie. You’re going onstage to sing your hit song tonight.” Little did Alan know that his request would make everything change so rapidly, not just my pulse rate. I had been onstage many times before, but never to sing completely alone. After my debut that night I began touring with my brothers full-time and the name of the group had to be changed from the Osmond Brothers to the Osmonds. Yes, one of the original boy bands had permanently been infiltrated by a little girl power.

  I already knew how much radio could change the life of a recording artist, but it wasn’t until I hosted my own show that I found out how much the listeners could change my perspective on life, too.

  My show business friends came through for me with heartfelt and funny interviews. Wynonna called in from her tour bus and we talked about our common lives: growing up in the business, being moms, and dealing with weight issues. Larry King and I discussed baseball and fatherhood, his life-threatening circumstance with heart disease, and his own growing up without a dad. Mary Hart and I had fun singing in Swedish and chatting about her favorite Christmas memories, and even hard-to-get Garth Brooks came out of retirement for twenty minutes to catch up with me on the air about his decision to divorce, his love for his daughters, life with Trisha Yearwood, and his Halloween pranks. There were many other celebrity interviews, all interesting, but what I looked forward to most was talking to the daily listeners and hearing their unforgettable stories. Every day at the studio I laughed like crazy and shed some tears, too. You name the topic and chances were the phone lines would light up with true-life stories that were more compelling than any Hollywood studio could produce.

  With almost one in four Americans living as single adults now, one of the big topics was dating and trying to find love.

  One woman called in to complain that she would never go on a blind date again. A friend had set her up with a guy who seemed a little quiet and shy, but very nice. They went out for sushi and then to a movie. After the movie, she invited him to her condo for dessert. He offered to clear the coffee cups to the kitchen before he left. At the door he leaned toward her for a good-night kiss and a block of cheese fell to the floor and hit her shoe. She said she recognized the half pound of smoked cheddar because she had bought it earlier that day. Her blind date had stolen it from her fridge.

  It’s a good thing this caller was laughing, too, because I couldn’t stop.

  “Where did the cheese fall from?” I asked, in disbelief.

  “I think it was tucked into his pants,” she answered.

  I couldn’t stop myself from saying, “Gosh, I’d hate to imagin
e where he was hiding your crackers.”

  Then, another woman called in to say that her date the night before had literally pocketed the cheese right in front of her. They had been in a Mexican restaurant, and when her date noticed she hadn’t finished her cheese quesadilla, she offered it to him. He wrapped the uneaten quesadilla in a napkin and put it into the breast pocket of his suit coat as she watched in total horror.

  I told her, “Maybe he was planning to take you salsa dancing later!”

  Soon another woman called in to say: “At least she got to go on the date.” She was a single woman in her fifties who decided to go by herself to visit New York City and see some Broadway shows. While riding a stationary bike at a crowded YMCA, she spotted a nice “balding but cute” man who was lifting weights. He began to flirt with her a bit, much to her delight. As she said, “He was single and I had been through a bad breakup three months earlier. It was really fun to flirt again. Earlier that morning I had asked God to give me a sign if it was time to date again.”

  After exchanging the basic information of name, jobs, and home state, she decided to head to the locker room to get cleaned up. She washed up, reapplied her makeup, and took a couple more minutes to fix her hair.

  She said on air: “I was going the extra mile because I was certain he was going to ask me out before I left the gym. I was really looking forward to a fun evening in Manhattan . . . with a man!!!”

  As she entered the gym, she saw two paramedics hovering over a body on the floor, doing CPR. She looked around for her new friend to find out what had happened, then she realized that it was him they were working on. A woman exercising nearby said that he had keeled over unconscious as soon as she had left the room.

  The caller said when the paramedics lifted him onto a gurney and rushed him out the door, she had to wonder if she “had missed the more subtle signs that maybe it wasn’t time to date again.”

  Then she asked me if I had ever been on a bad blind date. I had to admit to one, although it wasn’t a disaster because of the guy. I was the one who made him want to wipe me out of his memory bank forever, I’m certain.

  About a year after “Paper Roses” became a hit, my brothers and I were out on a tour. Our popularity was really growing rapidly and we were playing sold-out venues across the country. During the summers we often played to huge state fair crowds. At one of these shows I was introduced to a really cute boy whose father was working backstage. My parents didn’t allow any of us to date until we were sixteen, but that evening after our show, my mother said that I could go on some of the carnival rides with this boy, his friend, and a girlfriend of mine who was traveling with us at the time. I have a tendency to laugh more when I’m nervous. Usually it’s a good way to release energy, but that night, something completely unexpected happened.

  The four of us were in a funhouse attraction with crooked stairways, trick mirrors, and a steep, moving ramp that led to the top of an enclosed circular slide.

  My girlfriend, who was trying to be so mature in her miniskirt, was having a hard time being graceful with all of the obstacles and unsure footing. As we stepped onto the ascending ramp, she turned to look at the boy who was her date. That’s when she slipped and sat down hard as the ramp continued taking us rapidly to the top. Because her feet were higher than her seat, she couldn’t manage to stand back up, and it was all she could do to not roll backward. None of us could help her, either, as letting go of the railings would have caused us to topple over on top of her.

  I’m horrible when it comes to someone falling down. I want to be kind, but my first reaction, if they are not injured, is to laugh. And laugh hard. My mother was the same way. It’s her fault that I come by it naturally.

  I burst out laughing. My girlfriend started to giggle, then guffaw. We couldn’t stop, even though our dates seemed to be getting embarrassed by our snorting and gasping for air.

  Finally, we got to the top of the incline and it was our turn to go down the slide. The boys let us go first and then they followed close behind.

  By this time we were hopelessly hysterical, and then even our bladders gave up trying to remain dignified. Our poor dates slid right through the puddles we were leaving behind. Now a normal person might start to feel bad about this, but we both laughed even harder at what was happening. By the time we reached the bottom of the slide I knew I could never look the cute boy in the face again. I grabbed my girlfriend’s arm as soon as our feet touched the ground and shouted, “Let’s get out of here.”

  We ran all the way back to the tour bus, still laughing, though I’m sure the boys we left behind with pee-soaked jeans weren’t all that amused.

  The other bonus to doing a radio show, or even writing a book, is that you can admit to embarrassing experiences that you would never tell in person. However, somewhere out there is probably a fortysomething good-looking guy who still tells his buddies, face-to-face, the story of when Marie Osmond didn’t leave him “high and dry.”

  Oh, well. At least no one had to call the paramedics.

  Live from Orem

  Two people who deserved applause for a job well done: our mother and father.

  Before Robert Redford made Park City a destination spot for hip people who love independent films, my father and brothers decided to relocate our hit television show from Hollywood, California, to Orem, Utah.

  It was a family vote. That was how we made all major decisions. Majority rules. The majority had voted to move to LA from Utah in the 1960s when Alan, Wayne, Merrill, and Jay were offered a contract on The Andy Williams Show. Ten years later, following the first season of the Donny and Marie variety show on ABC, the vote was on the table whether to move the family back to Utah. I was in the minority. I wanted LA.

  It’s 652 miles from Los Angeles to Orem, but for me, at age sixteen, I might as well have been traveling back to the year 652 B.C. (bye-bye, civilization!), because that’s how isolated and out of touch the whole geographical location seemed to me. I had become a full-fledged LA girl. I couldn’t fathom how my brothers were willing to give up our access to Beverly Hills shops and cutting-edge fashion and four-star restaurants and polluted haze for snowcapped mountains, fresh air, no traffic, and privacy. “What are they thinking???” I wrote in my journal, noting that something must truly be wrong with the way the male mind functioned.

  Just when Yves Saint Laurent’s hot new “peasant look” was taking over the LA fashion world, I was apparently going back to Utah to live like a peasant. Or at least it seemed that way to me.

  As ancient legends tell it, many who made the journey before me, missing their Neiman Marcus fix, would go to the local pond in Utah and cry buckets of tears. Thus was created the great Salt Lake. Believe it or not.

  I was leaving the land of sprawling consumerism for a half-a-block downtown that had a fabric store, a drugstore, a hair salon, one shoe store, and a couple of apparel shops. Not one single pair of Jordache jeans (the trendiest denim of 1976) could be found for fifty-five miles! There was no Rodeo Drive in Utah, only rodeo clowns.

  There were no cell phones yet, or instant messaging or World Wide Web, in either LA or Orem, but at least in LA the lead story on the evening news wasn’t about an agriculture class raising alpacas.

  Driving wagon-train style in our packed-up cars towing multiple trailers along I-15, heading northeast across the desert, I knew that I was saying good-bye to the exciting lifestyle that I was really just getting into. Now, as a parent, I can see how that was the main reason my father wanted to get us “out” of LA. Donny and I were the youngest-ever television hosts (and we still hold that record), and between us we had an estimated value of over $40 million. But our estimated value didn’t matter to our parents—our values did.

  Our parents weren’t concerned if we understood high fashion, gourmet food, how to pose for the paparazzi, or the newest “glam rock” music craze. They wanted us to be people of integrity with a rock-solid foundation in faith and family. They knew that the value o
f both is more easily understood through working hard and having a humble heart. Heaven knows I had worked hard to keep us residing in LA, but now my heart was definitely being humbled on that road to Utah.

  The Osmond Studios were built and the Donny and Marie show started a new season . . . taped live in Orem, Utah, with Mount Timpanogos replacing the famous Hollywood sign as the scenery we saw every day on our way to work. Mount Timpanogos resembles the profile of a sleeping woman. Other legends tell (and I’m not kidding on this one) that the mountain was named for an Indian maiden who died of grief after being forced to separate from her love. I wondered if she was forced to leave LA, too.

  Our new studio became the venue for new life lessons. Not only did my brothers and I perform in the shows, but we performed almost every task needed to make the shows happen, from choreographing dance numbers to stocking concessions, engineering the sound, writing songs, and even painting the walls. Our new catered food meant remembering to boil a couple of eggs before we left home for the day and bringing them to the studio with us. Any time we didn’t have a microphone in hand onstage, chances were we were holding a toilet brush or a broom and putting it to use backstage. In the course of an hour I could go from being in the spotlight wearing a Bob Mackie designer gown to sporting bright yellow gloves designed by Rubbermaid, scrubbing the spots off the bathroom mirrors.

  One night I arrived back home, exhausted from a full day of studying my schoolwork with a tutor, then rehearsing songs, sketches, and dance moves. I was ready for one thing—collapsing in bed.