Might As Well Laugh About It Now

by Marie Osmond

  As I was preparing my Magic of Christmas holiday tour for 2007, I crossed paths with Cher at . . . of all places . . . a famous costume designer ’s studio in Los Angeles. It was the same one where we used to see each other in the seventies, while having our Bob Mackie fittings. This time, Cher was getting ready to open her new show at Caesars Palace in Vegas, and I would soon be going through the same process for our show at the Flamingo.

  Even in jeans and boots, Cher looked amazing as ever, in great physical shape, toned, and radiant. Probably because I was dressed in my dancing warm-ups, a T-shirt and one of my haphazard ponytails, I thought about my teenage insecurities during my appearance on The Sonny and Cher Show. Time certainly is the great equalizer. Those differences that seemed like the great divide between us at that time have narrowed and filled in with many similar life experiences: parenting, divorce, loss, charity work, and the challenges of re-creating ourselves as entertainers again and again.

  I was smiling while reading the list of entertainers performing in Las Vegas this year: Cher, Bette Midler, Barry Manilow, Neil Sedaka, the Osmond Brothers, Paul Anka, Louie Anderson, George Wallace, the Smothers Brothers, and Donny and Marie. It’s like Vegas hic cupped and the seventies came back up! It seems that, once again, especially with all the troubles going on in the world, people are craving lighthearted entertainment, a time to set aside worries for a while and just enjoy. It makes me happy that my career has now lasted as long as Lucy’s. I know it’s a combination of blessings, hard work, and the tilt of the spotlight that has kept the sparkle in my eyes. Oh, and the audience. Always the audience.

  Dude, It’s for Me

  One more “in-terminal-able” travel layover for my road warrior kids and me.

  My teenagers love to listen to Joni Mitchell—not the latest release, but Joni from 1971, her Blue album. I understand why. The music was written during a year that Joni took off from her rising career to travel the world, to write and paint. That lifestyle has always appealed to teenagers—well, to all of us, really, don’t you think?

  All of my children love to travel and have a blast living on a tour bus, especially when I took my Magic of Christmas holiday show on the road in 2006 and 2007. This was the first road tour for my four younger children. They had never known Mommy as a stage singer and performer. They only knew me to work as a radio show host and doll designer on QVC. My older kids had shown them many of the original Donny and Marie shows on tape, but I don’t think they could make the leap right away that the teenager they were watching then is Mommy now.

  When our family chats it up about good times, my children’s best memories are never about the sights, landmarks, museums, or other remarkable places we visit while on the road. Their best memories are most often about something that happened while we were on the tour bus; really delightful things like being stranded in a sleet storm in Wisconsin, sharing truck stop nachos with cheese so unnatural it glows in the dark, or being catapulted out of the top bunk during a sharp U-turn and plummeting to the floor. Isn’t it interesting how your concept of fun changes after age twenty-one? Suddenly a trip to the emergency room isn’t such a laugh fest. However, getting off the bus with an undiscovered banana peel stuck to your tush will always be funny. Or is that just me?

  Living on a tour bus can be very liberating, once you adjust to the minimal lifestyle. It’s rather freeing to temporarily shed all the distractions that come with an entire house and its contents. My own memories of the kids traveling with me by bus are some of my favorites as well.

  When I was touring the country music circuit in the early nineties, playing every honky-tonk, festival, and fair on the planet, my second son, Michael, was only a baby, and the older three children were under age seven. We had to leave Nashville very early in the morning to arrive at the destination city by early afternoon for the first concert. My kids, still in their footed pj’s, would get on the couch of the bus and watch out of the window until we approached the Krispy Kreme store. Then they would jump up and down excitedly seeing the red “Hot Doughnuts Now” sign lit up, knowing that they would be fresh from the fryer. Warm glazed doughnuts became our traditional “leaving town” food on every country music tour. Their enthusiasm in anticipating a warm doughnut was adorable. Well, it was cute coming from little kids. When the other musicians and I started jumping up and down from excitement the bus driver would shout back to us: “Stop! You’re stressing the shock absorbers.” And by the end of the tour, after many, many Krispy Kreme mornings, it wasn’t just the jumping that was stressing the struts; it was the shocking number of extra pounds all of us had gained thanks to those glazed morsels. It was like we had picked up a couple of additional band members along the way!!

  My children have always been exposed to a wide variety of music, from country to classical, metal to Broadway musicals. Even my younger kids have very eclectic tastes: Matthew listens to and sings Elvis songs; Abigail grooves out to Annie Lennox; and Brianna has the funk down. One day Brandon wanted to hear a Tom Jones CD he discovered in our collection, so I played it during dinnertime.

  After studying the song list and then the cover of the CD, Rachael said, “He can really sing. So, why was he on the Brady Bunch?”

  I guess that dark, short, curly 1970s hair could only mean one thing: the Brady Bunch dad.

  I told them about Tom Jones and how I had appeared on his TV show, and even recorded a duet with him. Then we all jumped to our feet to dance to “It’s Not Unusual” and “What’s New, Pussycat?”

  Some entertainers—people like Joni Mitchell, Elvis, and even Tom Jones—will always be relatable to others beyond their own generation. I still love almost any Loretta Lynn song, and there’s no one like Gladys Knight. Her recording of “Neither One of Us (Wants to Be the First to Say Good-bye)” surpasses generational boundaries because the theme is universal: when relationships go stale, saying good-bye is heartbreaking. The originality of the Pips’ backup dancing has transcended time, too, right into the Osmond Brothers’ dance steps in the seventies, and on into the glittering nineties with groups like Destiny’s Child.

  It’s fun for me now to see more and more teenagers and young people in the audience of our Vegas show at the Flamingo. Some of them only know me as a doll designer or as a contestant on Dancing with the Stars, and Donny as an Entertainment Tonight correspondent. Often, someone under age fifteen will say to me after a show, “Wow, I was totally shocked that you can sing, too.”

  Okay, so maybe “Morning Side of the Mountain” and “Deep Purple” haven’t dominated current playlists. If the teenagers only know me from the television work I’ve done in the last five years, that’s all right. As long as they don’t look at me and say, “She can really sing. So why did she play Joanie on Happy Days?”

  One woman brought her teenaged daughter to the “meet and greet” after the show. She coaxed her daughter to tell me her first Osmond experience.

  The girl turned bright red.

  “It’s no big deal,” she said. “When your talk show was on, I was only three. I couldn’t really pronounce Donny and Marie.”

  This is where the mom jumped in.

  “She used to say, ‘I want to watch diarrhea!’ ”

  “That’s both your names smushed together.” The teenager shrugged, with a grin.

  “Smushed? Okay, enough with the diarrhea references,” I said and laughed.

  “Sorry,” she said. “But I really did like the show. I never wanted to miss it.”

  “It’s okay,” I said, putting my arm around the girl’s shoulders. “Donny and Marie. Diarrhea. Either way, it kept you close to home. And that’s good.”

  I’ve always expected to have some teenage girls as fans, because quite a few of them are doll collectors, too. Once in a while, though, I’m surprised by who wants to meet me.

  I was having a quick salad with a friend in a restaurant and two boys came up to the table to ask for an autograph. They were wearing hip, skateboarder clothes, leather brace
lets, and sneakers with skulls on them, and had long sweeping bangs covering their eyes.

  I asked the first young man if the autograph was for his mom.

  “Dude, it’s for me. I used to watch the talk show you did with Donny when I was little. Me and my mom.”

  Mind you, he was “little” in 2000.

  The other boy handed me a paper on which was drawn a heart with an arrow through it and asked me to sign inside of the heart.

  “Ah. You like older women?” I said only to tease him.

  “Yeah,” he said. “You’re single, right?”

  At this point I looked up at the boy, who raised his eyebrows at me.

  I wanted to burst out laughing and say something like, “My name is not Mrs. Robinson,” but I was already surprised he knew me at all; I didn’t think I could push the point of reference back to 1967.

  Instead, I thought I’d play along.

  “I am single. And I like going to the movies.”

  He looked a bit stunned at my straight-faced answer and then he said sincerely, “Okay, but you’ll have to drive, cuz I’m only fourteen. Almost fifteen!”

  “Well,” I told him, handing him the autograph, “in my day, the dudes paid for the date.”

  “That’s gonna take me a while, then,” he said with some dejection. “Too bad. Cuz you’re a babe.”

  “No, you’re the babe,” I said, laughing. Though I meant it absolutely literally.

  I had to be at least a little flattered. Mostly, I loved knowing that their happy memories of watching the talk show with their families is what propelled them to ask for my autograph.

  Like music, it seems that television shows can transcend time, especially if they are part of a good memory of watching them with family or friends. It’s similar to the tour bus experience. You’re all in the same room, anticipating something fun, and heading to the same destination: entertainment.

  Because of television (our show was dubbed into seventeen languages) our audiences in Vegas come from all around the globe. They have happy memories of Friday nights watching Donny and Marie with their families and friends, and they want to share that with their own kids.

  I’m grateful that they enjoy the Vegas show, but I also know that their pleasure goes deeper than seeing Donny and me. They are there to get a certain feeling back, if only for an hour or two. Even if they are fortysomething, almost fifty, their spirits are still “fourteen, almost fifteen.”

  I think it’s a lot like the way my kids and I still have a hard time passing up a Krispy Kreme store when we see the “Hot Doughnuts Now” sign lit up. It’s not because of the doughnuts anymore. It’s more about recapturing happy memories of feeling safe and loved and together. If any show I did, in the forty-plus years of my career, made other people feel something similar, then all I can say is: “Dude, that’s pretty cool.”

  We Want You Around

  Eight years to put the extra weight on and only four months to take it off, thanks to NutriSystem.

  Whenever I felt self-conscious about weight gain, I would always excuse my insecurities by saying, “Who cares? It is what it is. I’m happy.”

  It was true. I wasn’t unhappy about my forty extra pounds, but I always had to end the statement right after the word “happy,” because adding anything else would be a lie. What was I going to say? “I’m happy to have to unzip my jeans every time I sit down”? Or: “I’m happy that I’m four sizes bigger than I used to be”? Or: “I’m happy that I can’t sleep at night because my knees ache from carrying around so many extra pounds”? The whole truth was that I no longer felt comfortable in my skin.

  I turned forty years old in 1999 and I think I celebrated that milestone by starting to gain one pound for every year of my life! Somehow, an unnoticed five pounds each year after age forty made its way to my middle and stayed, even though it was getting pretty crowded! The pounds that couldn’t squeeze onto my stomach just moved around to my back. It was crafty of them. Out of sight, out of mind.

  Even when I had to admit to being a size ten—really a size twelve, which isn’t good for a size-four frame—I still kept up the internal dialogue that it was only some “water weight” from the salt on the popcorn, or from flying the red-eye from LA to New York. As most third-graders know, a gallon of water weighs eight pounds, yet I managed to convince my brain that I was carrying five extra gallons of water. You know, I was just like a camel. The fact is a camel’s hump is made of fat, and so was mine! However, many women are like camels in that we can take extreme heat in any situation and still keep going. We have to.

  The women I know are superb at crisis management. Like most of the women I know, I feel like I do aerobics all day long because I hit the floor running the moment the alarm goes off in the morning.

  One of my girlfriends sent me an early-morning e-mail with the subject line “This has to be fiction!” The link was to a blog by a woman describing the start of her day with phrases like: “contemplated the stillness,” “loved these moments of peace and quiet as I gazed at my daily list,” and “felt the serenity of the morning dew.”

  Now, there’s a bunch of doo if I ever heard it.

  I saw my friend an hour later in the same place where we catch up for thirty seconds every weekday, the drop-off lane in front of the grade school. She was trying to apply some mascara in the rearview mirror as her kids unloaded their backpacks and sports equipment from the car.

  “Hey!” I called out to her as I wrestled the knot out of the back of Abby’s hair, using my finger nails as a comb. “Thanks for the laugh! I have to run this morning and ‘contemplate the stillness’ of taking my teenager for his driving permit, and then pick up three prescriptions and hurry into the studio to set the sound levels on the song I recorded at midnight last night.”

  “Oh. A slow morning, then?” she said. “If you have time to chat, I’ll be ‘gazing’ at six loads of laundry, and enjoying having to pry the ‘piece’ of gum my four-year-old stuck in the DVD player!”

  “Have fun!” I waved, folding a last-minute permission slip into a paper airplane and sailing it serenely out the passenger door to my eight-year-old.

  As I drove away, I called out to her: “By the way, you have the hose to a gas pump hanging from the side of your car. Love ya!”

  The reality for most women I know is that we take care of our kids, spouses, parents, brothers, co workers, neighbors, community, and brothers. (Did I say that already? Well, mine can be exhausting.) We take care of everybody else, but rarely take the time to care for our own bodies.

  Unintentionally, we proclaim our manic lives like a greeting between friends.

  “Hey, how are you? Would love to chat, but I’m so stressed.”

  There’s a silent agreement that the most stressed mama wins!! But really, she loses out on a lot more in the long run. Especially when, like me, there is a history of cardiovascular disease in the family.

  When my mother had her first massive stroke, I wanted to be with her as much as I could. I would take care of my business obligations during the day, take care of the kids in the evening, and then take care of my mother through the night. I was getting eight hours of sleep . . . per week!

  To energize myself I would get large milkshakes from the hospital cafeteria almost nightly. Ice cream is a wonderful medicine—just ask Dr. Baskin or Dr. Robbins or Dr. Dazs, as in Häagen. This probably wouldn’t have had a huge effect on my weight except that because I didn’t have time to eat all day, I would grab a cheese-burger and fries or taquitos with guacamole or even an ice-cream cone with guacamole on the way to the hospital. There’s nothing like combining your five servings of fruit with your three servings of dairy in four servings of ice cream! I was starting to look like the food pyramid with legs.

  One early, early morning about a month into my mother’s hospital stay, as I was leaning over to kiss her good-bye for the day, she whispered to me, “Marie, don’t do what I did. Take care of yourself.”

  As positive a
s my mom’s attitude always was, she could tell that her chances of recovery had now narrowed, mostly because she never made herself a priority. She was too busy to ever put herself first. Besides helping to take care of my father and both sets of my grandparents, there were the nine of us children that she wanted to be certain were cared for well. She also did hours and hours of charity work and maintained five-page newsletters to family, friends, and fans. I guarantee that when it came to responding to other people, the words “deal with it yourself” never crossed my mom’s lips.

  Following her second stroke at age seventy-seven, she slowly declined over twelve months to the point of being almost immobilized. It was incredibly tough to see my mother ’s youthful spirit trapped in a worn-out body. Her youthful sense of humor, however, never declined.

  After my dad moved my mother home to make her remaining time more enjoyable, day nurses would come to help with medications, breathing equipment, and IVs. In attempting to move her from the bed to a chair one day, the day-care person and my mother both lost their balance and toppled over on the carpeted floor. My father and a close family friend heard the soft thud and hurried into her bedroom. Seeing my mother lying on the floor, unhurt, but with her head halfway under the bed, they asked, “What are you doing?”

  The day nurse was about in tears over the incident. My mother, always the caretaker, said, “We’re just looking for quarters.”

  The nurses would duke it out between them to be the one who got to come to my parents’ condo to take care of my mother. One of them explained, “We take care of people who aren’t nearly as bad off as your mom, but who are so negative. Your mother is so appreciative over any little thing we do for her. She always says thank you, she always makes us laugh, and she always asks about our families.”