I Still Have It. . . I Just Can't Remember Where I Put It (11 page)

Beware—the knee-jerk no sometimes reappears after you say yes. I have another friend who hated her hair. She said it was too dark and too thin, and she hated the style. I had a hairdresser whom I loved in L.A. I took my friend in and said, “Work your magic.” My friend emerged from her hair therapy a new woman. The stylist had lightened her hair to lesson the hair/scalp contrast, layered it to make it softer, and blown it dry so my friend wouldn’t have to set it in huge rollers and be mistaken for an alien. My friend loved it. A couple of months later my friend sent me a picture of herself at her birthday party and I saw that her hair was back exactly the way it had been when she hated it. I asked her why, and she told me she felt the other hairdo was good for a change, but her original style covered the wrinkles in her forehead and made her look younger. As in the aftermath of rehab, the potential to go back to behavior that is comfortable is always looming.

The biggest change that my husband and I made was moving out of Los Angeles and adopting a baby. When we first arrived in Los Angeles everything was new and possible, and we had lots of fun doing things we’d never believed we would ever do. Writing movies, performing on television shows, and attending those award ceremonies that you see on television and think look glamorous were all exciting and excruciating.

I know this isn’t going to shock you, but Los Angeles is not a place for entertainers to age. One day my husband and I looked at the new fall television lineup and noticed that Christina Applegate was appearing in a sitcom playing a divorced mother of two. At that point she was still safely in her twenties. If I stayed in Hollywood for a few more years, there was a shot that while still in my forties, I could play a great-grandmother. It was time to move.

We looked around at the possibilities. Las Vegas had always been a staple of my career. I had been headlining casinos there for the past decade and we always looked forward to our trips. It was then that my producer husband came up with the idea of a permanent show on the Strip instead of just headlining for a few weeks a year. That was a move that was as dramatic as it was terrifying. We’d also been talking about adopting a baby. We said yes to both and changed our lives for the better in more ways than you can cook chicken.

I have to admit saying yes has also caused me to invest money with a person who had a fictional business, try foods that have made me sick, and date someone who was eventually shot by the police, but the ways it has improved my life are too numerous to mention.

Now, again, my point is not to say yes to everything. My point is to examine why you’re saying no, and if you’re saying no automatically because that’s what you’re used to saying, rethink it. You might find yourself in a better situation.

More things can come through an open window than through a closed door. There, I’m officially out of aphorisms. I’m going to stop now. I’m sounding like a Japanese psychiatrist.

Before I met my husband, I’d never fallen in love. I’d stepped in it a few times.

Overpaying Your Dues

“
W
ELCOME TO THE NEIGHBORHOOD,” THE CASUALLY
dressed man slurred, holding up a glass of white wine. It was our first day in our new house and Martin and I were bleary-eyed from unpacking mislabeled boxes.

“I’m Mitch Kemp,” the man continued. “I’m the president of Sycamore Road. Just wanted to introduce myself…I take care of everything that you need. I’ve lived on Sycamore for twenty-five years. If you have any questions about how this street works, you just ask me.”

“I have a question,” I asked. “How do we get clickers to raise and lower the gates?”

“I’ll take care of that,” Mitch replied confidently. “In the meantime, here is the code—just punch it in. The code is changed every three months for security reasons.”

“What a nice man,” I said as he walked away.

“He wants money,” my husband muttered under his breath.

I have to explain that Sycamore Road is a private street. To stop hurried drivers from using it as a shortcut, it was gated at both ends, and as a result it’s now no longer the city’s responsibility.

My suspicious husband turned out to be right. A few days later a bill arrived in our mailbox. It wasn’t for a lot of money: $125 every three months. With it, we received a list of all the people on Sycamore Road and their phone numbers. Stars were next to the names of residents who had paid the fee. There was an X next to the names of those who were delinquent.

“What does he do for these dues?” my husband complained, mentally adding up how much money this came to each year.

“He takes care of the road,” I explained.

“What does he take care of?”

“He makes sure it’s OK.”

“Does he feed it? Does he take it to the movies? It’s a road. What does he do that requires forty thousand dollars a year?”

“Let’s just pay him. We don’t want an X next to our names; we want a star.”

The next day the clickers that controlled the movement of the street gates appeared in our mailbox.

“See, he gave us clickers,” I said excitedly, happy to have evidence that we were getting something for our dues.

“Wait a second, what’s this?” my husband questioned, pulling out a sheet of paper from the envelope. “Fifty dollars? Fifty dollars for clickers? Where is the bill that shows us how much he paid for them?” he whined.

“He went and got the clickers. He has to be compensated for his time.”

“I bet he’s got a stack of them in his garage. He just wanted to make sure we paid our dues before he gave us the clickers. I’m not paying him for the clickers.”

“We have to. We’ll get an X.”

Sycamore Road was a quaint little street. People jogged, dogs walked, deer even occasionally meandered through our backyard. One day I spotted Mitch stooping down and inspecting a crack in the pavement. I ran back home.

“I saw Mitch do something! He was inspecting a crack in the blacktop.”

“That’s going to cost more money,” my husband insisted.

“No. That’s what the dues are for. I promise. He takes care of the road.”

In the following days, yellow Xs began to appear on all the cracks on the road.

“I guess the cracks didn’t pay their dues,” my husband quipped.

A note appeared in our mailbox:
The upper portion of the road will be repaved on the twenty-second of April and the lower portion on the twenty-fifth. Please use the opposite entrances.

I was vindicated. There it was—proof that our money was being used for something tangible. What the note didn’t mention was that the road was not the only thing being resurfaced; Mitch had also included his extensive driveway. This turned out to be something that a poker player would refer to as a “tell.”

I was too timid to tackle him about it, and ultimately so was my husband. We just kept paying our dues and feeling slightly aggrieved.

Mitch Kemp died a few years later. He was the victim of a sudden heart attack. His wife was the one who was the most shocked. Mitch had not only kept all of the road money in a secret bank account, but he was using it to pay for his mistress in France. Unable to face the people on Sycamore Road, Mitch’s wife put the house up for sale and moved away.

Turns out the people with Xs by their names had been right. If only I hadn’t wanted a star.

I blame my kindergarten teacher.

I never fully understand what goes on in dry cleaning. I know they add a safety pin.

The Second Act

M
Y FIRST WRITING PARTNER WAS A WOMAN NAMED
Marjorie Gross. In the early eighties, we were both just beginning to practice stand-up comedy. We were getting onstage very late at night or, in a positive light, very early in the morning, so we had lots of time to hang out and talk in the bar. I began watching Marjorie’s stage set and she began watching mine.

Writing jokes isn’t easy for anyone, so Marjorie and I decided to meet a few times a week and try to do it together.

The thing that’s unusual about this is that Marjorie and I were about as different as left and right. We had no business writing together and it made even less sense that we were good friends. I was at that point in my life very structured and somewhat rigid; she was a total free spirit whose life swayed wildly depending on her mood. I was neat, she was sloppy; I was always on time, she was always late. We were Felix and Oscar, only we were both women. One of her favorite pastimes was tossing wet tea bags across the room to see if she could hit the garbage can. I think she missed on purpose. She liked the sound of the splat.

We had one thing in common: both of our mothers had died when we were in our early teens, mine from breast cancer and Marjorie’s from ovarian. We vowed to be extra diligent to ensure that didn’t happen to us.

There was no one funnier than Marjorie Gross. I would study the structure of writing jokes by listening to comedy albums, and she would just come out with thoughts that were totally unique. A typical joke-writing session would produce the following.

Rita: Doctors can tell a lot about a baby while it’s still inside the womb these days. My friend is pregnant and it seems the baby is normal, and it’s a boy, and it’s a lawyer.

Marjorie: How do Chinese parents know when their babies are starting to talk?

Marjorie refused to do anything the way it should be done. Her apartment had been broken into repeatedly. Marjorie would call her answering machine once an hour not to check her messages but to make sure it was still there. Eventually she decided to take the law into her own hands. Instead of locking the window and having bars placed on the outside the way New Yorkers do, creating a kind of well-decorated prison, Marge bought a can of axle grease and smeared it over the window ledge. The burglar would simply repeatedly slip and fall when he tried to enter her third-floor premises.

I saw half of many Broadway shows with my friend Marjorie. It was she who taught me the art of second-acting.

“It’s easy,” she explained. “You just stand outside the theater at intermission and mingle with the audience, and when they let everyone back in for the second act you walk in with the real people.”

“How do you know which seats are empty?” I asked stupidly.

“Rita, think. You go to the bathroom and wait till everyone is seated and then you find the empty chairs. Nobody cares. It’s not like we’re taking seats from other people. We’re not even seeing the whole play. If we really like the second act, we can buy tickets and see the first. This will actually increase their business.”

Our scam worked well until Marge got a little cocky. We were second-acting
American Buffalo
when Marge decided to put her feet up on the chair in front of her and kicked a lady in the head. We were asked by an usher to show our tickets and were summarily shown the exit. That is the closest I’ve ever come to breaking the law.

Marge and I began writing sketches together. After we actually sold a few to a television show in Canada, we decided to audition to write for
Saturday Night Live.
Marjorie was very concerned that my clothing would not be hip enough and came to my house before our meeting to see if she could help me put together a few things that didn’t match.

Our favorite audition sketch we’d written for
SNL
featured Snow White, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty, all divorced and all complaining about their princes. We didn’t get the job, but Marjorie soon was hired to write on a television show in Los Angeles, and I began performing on the David Letterman show and
HBO.

I received a call from Marjorie a few weeks after she moved to L.A. She had pitched our divorced princesses idea to a major studio and they wanted to commission her to write it…with somebody else. Of course I wanted to write it with her, but I had no credits and the woman she was working with had written movies. Looking back, I had a point and so did she. The conversation did not go well and we lost contact.

When I moved to L.A. a few years later, I ran into Marjorie at a comedy club and we immediately began laughing about the whole thing. She had written the movie, it had gotten stalled in development the way 99 percent of projects do, and she had always regretted our argument, as did I.

Our careers blossomed in different directions, hers as a writer and mine as a comedian. We remained good friends for years. One day I received a call from Marge. She was in New York writing on a new television show.

“Reetee,” she said, “this television show I’m working on is so bad, I think it’s given me cancer.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I had this terrible pain in my stomach and I went to the gyno. She said it’s not good.”

The ovarian cancer that had invaded Marjorie’s mother had shown up in Marge. She went back to Canada to have the operation. My heart sank when I talked to her dad on the phone and he told me, “They did their best, but they couldn’t get all of it.”

Marjorie came to stay with us while going through her first round of chemotherapy. It was challenging, but strangely always funny.

I’d be on my way out to the grocery store and would ask, “What can I get for you? Anything special?”

“Nah.”

I’d return home with a full complement of food for the week, and Marge would wander into the kitchen. “Did you get any matzo?”

“No.”

“I’m really in the mood for matzo. I’ll call one of my friends. They’ll bring it over.”

We had a constant stream of people we didn’t know wandering in and out of our house as well as the scent of marijuana regularly wafting up the stairs. I have never had anything to do with drugs, but to me, legalizing marijuana for people who are going through the agony of chemo is as easy a decision as letting nearsighted people wear glasses.