Might As Well Laugh About It Now

by Marie Osmond

  “Wait!” I said in disbelief. “How do you know what you gave away if you never looked inside?”

  “I don’t,” she answered. “It was really liberating. It’s the new bra burning! I’m protesting being smothered by too much stuff.”

  Her enthusiasm was convincing.

  “I hope you didn’t accidentally give away any heirlooms,” I said.

  She assured me that she knew exactly where she had stored everything of personal value to herself and her family. She was guessing that the unopened boxes had contained all types of unnecessary things, from old Christmas decorations to coffee mugs, from toys long outgrown to high-fat cookbooks that were no longer useful.

  “Probably full of ugly stationery, mismatched picture frames, outdated evening bags, and all of those things that had been packed up and stored in case I needed them someday.”

  As my friend summarized, “If ‘someday’ hasn’t come up in the last two years, then somebody else could probably make better use of whatever is in the box.”

  Her new goal was to not use storage at all, except for extra sheets and blankets and maybe one box of tree lights and ornaments.

  In America, where one in ten households pay for an off-site storage space, and over 1.8 billion square feet is being used to hold our personal belongings, doesn’t it appear obvious that many of us have a “stuff” problem?

  I hate to point fingers, but in my house it’s mostly because of the kids. Really. I kept track for an entire week, so I have scientific proof.

  I started on a Monday, and this is what entered my house via a person under four feet eight inches tall within eight and a half hours: a scouts manual and neck scarf; a thirty-two-ounce empty pineapple juice can that was supposed to be converted into a small hamburger grill as a project; four Happy Meal Star Wars toys with eight switches and buttons and bobbling heads; two empty nugget cartons; a box of sixty-four crayons along with twenty-four washable markers; two birthday goodie bags each containing seventeen loose plastic objects; a hammock pillow; a stack of permission slips from sports organizations; a crumpled ribbon of stickers; and book club order sheets. In addition to that, new sneakers, a fake tree branch for the real lizard, video game cartridges, football shoulder pads, a Razor scooter, and a combination lock were all unloaded from the car into the house. Two plastic lightsabers (borrowed from a playmate), a blow-up air mattress for sleepover pals, and a DVD of SpongeBob SquarePants: Pest of the West rounded out the accumulation of stuff we had acquired from eight a.m. to four thirty p.m. I think I missed the partridge in a pear tree.

  I’d need a spreadsheet to give you the details of Tuesday through Sunday, but let me just say that 0.0001 percent of it belonged to me.

  Truly, I can’t seem to even acquire a much-needed new four-dollar spatula to flip the French toast after the last utensil was consumed by my rabidly efficient garbage disposal. After watching shards of silicone fly through the air, I now use an extension rod to turn the disposal on from across the room! It’s so ferocious that the other day when my teenager’s little black poodle went missing for a bit, we all turned to look suspiciously at the garbage disposal. We’ve nicknamed the disposal “Jaws.”

  Recently, I was in New York for a press junket and to appear on a number of morning shows. As the car that picked us up from the airport drove through the streets of Manhattan, I started to notice that an “organizational” or “container” store had sprung up on almost every city block—huge two-story shops that sell stuff to help us hold all of our stuff.

  As we neared the hotel where we were staying, I asked my longtime manager, Karl, if he had much stuff put away in storage. He burst into laughter.

  “I pay ninety dollars a month to store five sets of water skis we used twice in the mideighties, a saddle from a horse that passed away fifteen years ago, and a treadmill that was cutting-edge technology in 1996,” Karl said, shaking his head. “And, if I’m not mistaken, we have the minibike we gave Brett for his twelfth birthday.”

  Brett is now in his thirties, married, with two sons.

  “Brett probably doesn’t even remember that bike,” Karl said with a sigh. “I don’t know why we still have it.”

  “How many years have you had the storage space?” I asked him.

  “Twenty-eight,” he replied, shaking his head. “That’s over twenty-eight thousand dollars I’ve paid to store about three thousand dollars’ worth of stuff.”

  We couldn’t help but laugh. “Maybe Jimmy Hoffa’s in there,” I said.

  As I looked at Karl’s sweet, sentimental father face, I tried to remember what I had been given as a child, the possessions I thought were so necessary to my existence, which were now long forgotten. I still have a couple of baby dolls that were the very beginnings of my collection, but almost everything else has been shuffled out of my memory bank except, oddly enough, some purchases I made with only one penny.

  On summer days in Huntsville, Utah, when I was a little girl, my mother would give me one penny to take to the corner store. Being in a small town, this tiny one-room shop was the “everything” store. There were two or three choices of laundry detergent on the same shelf as the boxed cake mixes. (Ever had a devil’s food cake with a Dreft aftertaste?) Garden hose or panty hose, fishing waders or boxed stuffing mix, they were all available. Paper dolls, thumbtacks, canned fruit, and packs of bobby pins shared a display bin on a countertop. I had my personal favorite section of the store. On the end of one crowded aisle were bins of little toys like tiny plastic telephones, magnetic dolls that kissed, plastic jewelry, and water pistols. I would study each toy as if it were a museum piece, something to be hoped for in the future, but nothing I could have today just because I wanted it.

  Above the toy section was a row of penny candy in jars, and I remember the distinct feeling of being lucky enough to have a penny to spend. It took quite a while to choose because I knew there was no second chance. One penny was all I had, and one piece was all I would get, even if I regretted my choice.

  To this day, I couldn’t tell you what shoes I wore to the Emmy Awards in 1999, or even what jewelry I wore on QVC last week, but I can remember exactly the look of a grape Pixy Stix, a red jawbreaker, and the line drawings of children playing that were imprinted on a Tootsie Roll wrapper. It wasn’t how much I wanted the candy that keeps this memory ever present in my mind; it was the process of learning how to be selective. The power I felt as a child in choosing came from actually having to choose, and then in appreciating that I had figured out what I really wanted. I doubt that I would even recall this time of my life if I had been given a dollar every day.

  As our next generation zigzags down the Short Attention Span Disposable speedways that our society seems to encourage, we’re paying a lot of money to store away too much stuff that barely had any significance from the beginning.

  I decided that it was time for a family project. I gave to each child a cardboard box with instructions to pack up the toys they hadn’t played with in the past year. And if it was broken or missing pieces, they were to put it in a separate box. With some moaning and groaning, as if they had been asked to literally separate the wheat from the chaff, as in biblical times, they began to choose which possessions to box up and which ones they cherished.

  I told them that I would clean out my own cosmetics drawer and shelves next to my bathroom mirror. I had no idea how many products I had and never used until I started to sort them. I was preoccupied for so long that at one point my eleven-year-old rolled an orange through the door to me and said: “You better have a snack, Mom.” Well, I was starting to feel weak.

  By the end of the day, four cardboard boxes of toys had been sealed closed with packing tape and put in the car.

  “Where will our toys be?” my nine-year-old asked.

  “Probably in a lot of different homes all over this city,” I answered. “Won’t you feel good knowing that some boy or girl will play with them and appreciate them every single day?”

  The
re was a momentary gasp and then slowly some secret smiles. I’m always touched by the joy my kids get from knowing they helped someone else. Their eyes sparkle and they always seem to stand a bit taller.

  Brianna carried my box of unused cosmetics to the car. “Who is going to need all this makeup?” she asked dryly.

  “I don’t know, sweetheart. Maybe there’s a clown school in town.”

  My twelve-year-old picked up the carton of broken toys. “Where does all this junk go?”

  I could have sworn I heard a rumbling sound, like an empty stomach. It came from the kitchen.

  The kids looked at each other and my nine-year-old yelled, “It’s Jaws!”

  In Search of a Last Name

  The brilliant Ray Bolger re-creating his Scarecrow, talented Paul Williams as the Cowardly Lion, and the wonderful Lucille Ball as TinWoman. Donny and I were the luckiest kids in showbiz.

  “We’re four people in search of a last name.” Cher said this line onstage while wearing a bright red sweater with a giant sequined C on the front. The S, D, and M occupying the sweaters next to her laughed along.

  This was before Madonna came on the music scene and long before the introductions of Usher, Shakira, or Jewel. At that time, hardly any performers were recognized on a first-name basis only.

  Donny and I were the D and M, appearing as guests on The Sonny and Cher Show in 1976. A couple of months before, they had appeared on our show. Every variety show before Sonny and Cher’s and ours had used full names in the titles: The Red Skelton Show, The Andy Williams Show, The Carol Burnett Show, to name a few. I guess Sid and Marty Krofft, who produced our original show, thought “Donny and Marie Osmond” sounded like a married couple. The brother-sister thing seemed obvious to us, but when our talk show aired twenty-two years later, there were still people who thought we were husband and wife. That’s just gross, okay?

  Sonny and Cher had been through a very public divorce the year before. They had each tried to launch separate variety shows, but it seemed that no one wanted to think of them as unhappy and apart, and so they joined forces once again for a new show. As Sonny reminded the audience: “Together, but no longer related.”

  We had been invited on to sing a silly love song. Literally. The four of us stood side by side to sing Paul Mc-Cartney’s number-one hit on the Billboard charts, “Silly Love Songs.” Supposedly, Paul wrote this song in response to the music critics calling his music lightweight. I don’t think he expected it to zoom up the charts, but that was what people were into then. People loved the song. The Vietnam War had ended the year before and people were looking for lighthearted entertainment. Their mood rings were blue, they adopted pet rocks, I guess to prove that everything deserved love, and even a simple yellow smiley face T-shirt was a best seller. It’s probably why the Sonny and Cher producers wanted Donny and me to come on the show. The deepest issue we were bringing to public awareness at that time was our different tastes in music. Me: country. Him: rock ’n’ roll.

  Donny and Sonny stood between Cher and me, but a lot of other factors seemed to separate us, as well.

  By age seventeen, Cher had already begun her serious relationship with Sonny; at sixteen, I wasn’t even allowed to date. Cher’s singing voice is deep and rich; mine was sweet and high. She had gorgeous, thick, waist-long hair; I wore a wispy, chin-length pageboy. We ice-skated on our show; Cher skated over anything Sonny had to say with a hysterically funny cool glance and a sharp tongue. Cher had exotic, captivating features; mine were extremely “teenager.” Even though Cher and I both had the famous Bob Mackie design our wardrobes for the show, the results were as far apart as could be possible. Cher’s costumes were bold and daring for that time, even exposing her navel; mine were much more modest, barely exposing my neckline. Looking back, Bob probably was able to create my outfits from the yards and yards of material he had left over after making Cher’s! I felt like the ugly duckling. Cher always made a splash, no matter what she did. I thought I was going to drown in my awkwardness.

  I was starting to constantly feel like a girl who was way out of her league. Standing onstage next to Raquel Welch and comparing my appearance to hers was enough to send me into a “hating myself” tailspin. It was pretty hard to leave my dressing room feeling like anything other than a poser playing dress up. As Donny and Marie became a hit on ABC, the most stunningly beautiful women celebrities of the day signed on for guest-star spots on our show. Among the many were Farrah Faw cett, Barbara Eden, Tina Turner, Jaclyn Smith, Cher . . . and two other gorgeous Chers who seemed to have it all: Cheryl Ladd and Cheryl Tiegs.

  I wanted so much to be in my twenties and thirties, thinking that it would finally be the time when I didn’t feel shy and self-conscious as a gawky-looking teenager.

  When men tell me now that I was their first crush, it makes me smile. I have always been surprised that anyone even gave me a second glance, especially since Farrah Fawcett’s famous red bathing suit poster had most young men walking around in a hypnotic trance that they didn’t shake off until the 1980s.

  Knowing that feathery blond hair and a red bathing suit would never be me, I was completely open to absorbing advice from that most famous redhead with the one-word name: Lucy. She appeared as a guest on our show in 1977. She was sixty-six years old, had starred in three television shows of her own, won multiple Emmy Awards, had great roles in movies, and was the first female owner of a large Hollywood production studio (Desilu). Beyond that, she was a comic Einstein, recognized around the world. She shattered the stereotype that women couldn’t be the central character in a show, and proved that they could be both beautiful and brilliantly funny. She changed the scope of what was possible for women in entertainment forever.

  I wasn’t envious of her; I was terrified! She was a force of nature.

  She walked onto the set of the Donny and Marie show as if she did it every day. She gave directions to everyone from the director to the seamstress to the sound engineer and the security guard at the stage door. Perhaps she stepped on the toes of some, but she never asked for time or effort from anyone that she didn’t put into the show herself.

  What I learned from Lucy in that brief rehearsal week has been useful for my entire career, including some practical advice that I apply to almost every interview with every camera crew.

  “Let me show you something, kiddo,” she said to me the day before we taped the show. She grabbed a mirror from the backstage makeup table and handed it to me.

  She tugged on my elbow, walking me out to the center of our stage.

  “As a woman, never allow this if you want to last in this business!”

  I was worried that she was going to want to rewrite part of the script, but that wasn’t her intention.

  She tilted my face up toward the stage lights hung up high over our heads.

  “Look in the mirror. This is very unattractive lighting for the female face,” Lucy told me. “The light is too high. It gives women dark circles under their eyes and exaggerates the jowls.”

  She pointed out the results to me on her own face.

  “Now watch!” she said, asking the crew to lower some of the lights to more of a straight-on position.

  The results really were effective. The light was caught up in her eyes instead of under her eyes. Her whole face looked more lively and expressive.

  Then she jostled me toward the camera.

  “See how this lens is lower than my face?” she asked me. “This is a horrible angle for a woman. It creates a double chin, I don’t care how young you are. You look awful. The camera is forgiving of men, but never of women. Got it?”

  I did get it. I was taking a crash course in Lucille Ball entertainment wisdom and I knew that the lessons were ones I would use my entire career.

  It seemed that Lucy knew how to make everything look better. On the morning of the taping, I came in early to have my hair done. Lucy was having her hair braided into numerous small braids. The hairstylist then pulled them tightly toward th
e back of her head and pinned them down, and put her wig on top. The effect of the braids being pulled back gave her a very natural-looking face-lift. I’m sure it was somewhat painful, but the results were pretty amazing.

  Though I’ve yet to try her braiding trick for erasing the years, I have applied Lucy’s other techniques whenever and wherever I can. Some camera crews, especially in Los Angeles, New York, and Utah, know what to expect now and are ready with beautiful lighting when I arrive. This past June, I was taping an interview for the American Heart Association. When I arrived on the set that day, I was greeted by one of the technicians, a guy I’d worked with several times before, with a good-hearted nature.

  “We’re all ready for you,” he said, smiling, leading me to the chair in front of the camera. “Check out the Lucille Ball lighting. Pretty good, right?”

  It was good, and much appreciated. After all, as Lucy taught me, there is no harm in giving yourself the best advantage whenever it’s possible. And it’s a lot more productive than worrying about aging.

  It didn’t seem that Lucy wasted any time wishing she could change anything that was out of her control. She worked with what she had and she turned it into genius. It was through Lucy that I learned early on that the way you feel about yourself at sixteen will be the way you feel at thirty and even forty, especially if you waste time always comparing yourself to others.

  My initial fear of Lucy turned into a deep admiration when I understood the reason she didn’t worry about what Donny or I or anyone else working on the show personally thought of her. She focused on only one thing: that she did her job well. She was there to entertain the audience in the studio and the millions of viewers at home. After all, that’s supposedly the reason all performers get into the business. Isn’t it? Though Donny and I may have been too young at the time to fully appreciate being exposed to the committed work ethic of stars like Bob Hope, Sammy Davis, Jr., Paul Lynde, John Wayne, Andy Williams, Milton Berle, and even Groucho Marx, we know that those early lessons have definitely contributed to our long successful careers.