Might as Well Laugh About It Now (19 page)

Scatterbrain

As a spokeswoman for Go Red for Women, my focus is on bringing awareness to heart health. I was ready for this appearance thanks to a red Sharpie.

“We’re both scatterbrains.” That was the answer my oldest son, Stephen, gave when asked in what way he was most like me.

I happened to be standing nearby, autographing an album cover for a fan, and overheard his answer.

“I’m not a scatterbrain!” I protested, as I wrote a huge “Love, Marie Osmond” on the cover and returned it.

“You signed right on Donny’s face,” the fan said, in blunt disbelief, and then recovered quickly. “But that’s okay. Thank you very much.”

I apologized and then, before he walked away, I suggested that he should have Donny sign his autograph over my face so it could be a really bizarre collector item. I thought that was pretty quick thinking on my part.

Stephen grinned at me, like I had just proven his “scatterbrain” indictment.

“Stephen, I was distracted momentarily by you and your insult. That’s why I signed in the wrong place,” I said, pointing the really expensive pen I was holding for emphasis.

“This is really pretty,” I added, twirling the pen to see all angles of the etched silver plating. “Is it mine?”

“No. You forgot to give that guy his pen back.” Stephen laughed, putting his arm around my shoulder. “By the way, Mom, did you see where I left my jacket?”

Great faith, kindness, and a sense of musicality are on the short list of attributes that I’d love to say Stephen could have inherited from me. Having spacey neurotransmitters is not one of them. In fact, I’ve never been called a scatterbrain before. Well, if I have, I don’t remember it. I guess one person’s scatterbrained is another person’s busy. That’s what I am. Busy. Busy in the extreme!

Find me a busy woman who hasn’t had to call AAA more than twice in the same day because she keeps locking her keys in her car. I’m not alone in that, am I? In fact, as proof of the saying that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, an AAA card was the most useful gift I ever gave my three older kids. Every time they use it, they think of me. So I know that’s at least three times a week.

One day, as Big Dave, the AAA tow-truck driver, finished jimmying my door lock open, he said to me, “I’m going to go get a sandwich and wait for your next call. Can I bring you a roasted turkey on pumpernickel?”

I told him: “Oh, you’re funny. No, thanks. I’m on my way home. You probably won’t hear from me again until tomorrow.”

I mean, if I truly fit the label of “scatterbrain,” I would leave things behind after going through airport security, right? I’ve never once been called over the speaker system to come back for my computer bag, my wallet, or my neck pillow. I always have time to gather up my stuff while one of the very nice scanner people retrieves my shoes from the other side of the metal detector, where I left them on the floor near the stack of plastic bins.

When I was doing
Dancing with the Stars
I bought each of my kids a cell phone. I told them it was so they could always reach me, even on the set, and also so they would call in every single show to vote for Mommy. Having seven cell phones is very handy around the house, too. I can always ask one of the kids to ring my cell number so I can figure out where I left my phone. Do scatterbrains have
that
kind of common sense? Though I will admit, if every hotel in which I’ve left behind my phone charger cord for the past ten years all sent them back to me at once, it would fill a UPS truck.

Scatterbrain? I’m a creative thinker. I’ve had to be. As a spokesperson for the “Go Red for Women” campaign for the American Heart Association, I go on a publicity tour to raise awareness a couple of times a year. I always remember to wear red and pack a variety of red suits, shoes, and slacks. At the last event, we were in New York and running late for a live appearance on the
Today
show. Once we were in the car, I realized that I had left the earrings that match my red necklace back in the hotel room. It was too late to turn around. I scrambled in my bag and came up with one pair of light blue crystal earrings, which really didn’t go with anything I had on.

I noticed that one of the talent coordinators riding with me was writing notes with a red Sharpie.

“Can I borrow your pen for a minute?” I asked her. In a flash, I had colored the crystals on the earrings with the red Sharpie, as the talent coordinator gasped, “That looks great, but didn’t you just ruin your earrings?”

“A little witch hazel and they’ll be as good as
blue
,” I said.

“I take it you’ve done this before,” she said and laughed.

“A variety of permanent markers should be a part of every woman’s emergency kit,” I advised her. “You can color in a scuff on black shoes, water down the red one a bit to use as a lip stain if you forgot your lipstick, darken a beauty mark with a dark purple or brown, or change the color of almost any kind of jewelry on the spot.”

I choose to see this not as a scatterbrain moment of forgetting my earrings but as a fantastic opportunity to pass along really helpful emergency tips to another woman.

If Stephen has borderline forgetfulness that he believes he inherited from me, it’s probably because I have my mother’s DNA. She was a very busy woman, too, with the nine of us kids, our lessons and our laundry, her newsletters to the fans, bookkeeping, managing real estate sales, gardening, helping out at church, and countless other activities in which she was involved. Once in a while something would fall through the cracks . . . or seep out of the trunk of the car.

One hot summer in the early 1970s we came home to our ranch in Huntsville, Utah, after finishing an extensive tour. We looked forward to having time to be away from the crowds and back to nature, and would often stay put for a whole month, if time allowed.

About a week into our time off, Wayne announced, “The car in the driveway has a really bad odor coming from it.”

Jay added, “I think something is leaking from it, too.”

My father got up from the kitchen table and started to follow my brothers to check out the situation.

I was helping my mother clear dinner dishes when suddenly her eyes flew open wide.

“The groceries!” she said. “Oh, no!”

We dashed out into the driveway, just as Father was opening the trunk. There sat six bags of groceries that had accidentally been left to bake in a 100-plus degree trunk for a couple of days.

“I forgot, I shopped for food on my way home from the post office,” my mother said, and then clapped her hand over her mouth, looking at the results.

Four gallons of ice cream had turned into a moldy lake in the bottom of the trunk. The bag of potatoes had sprouted into small trees and some raw chicken legs and thighs were ready to get up and climb out on their own.

As much as my brothers tried to sanitize the trunk, it always carried the faint odor of rotting food, and no matter where the car was parked, flies seemed to hold their family reunions nearby.

Perhaps that’s why station wagons are better for busy women. It’s harder to forget that you grocery shopped because there is no trunk. Looking back, I know my mother must have really been overwhelmed because it was totally unlike her to ever forget that she bought ice cream. We are exactly alike in that way.

I really am not a scatterbrain. I only need to focus a bit more on the task at hand.

One evening, my fifth-grader, Brandon, was searching the room where I kept all of our crafting materials, desperate for a piece of poster board for a school project. He had forgotten it was due the next morning. As a mom who deals with minor emergencies all day long, I told him I’d make a quick run to the nearby discount store and be back in a flash.

When I arrived back home, Brandon met me in the driveway.

“That was a really long flash. You’ve been gone for two hours.”

“I know,” I told him. “Big Dave is on vacation, so they sent a different AAA guy. He took a while to get there. Help me carry in the bags.”

“Bags?” Brandon asked.

“They were having some great sales.”

Brandon carried the bags into the house and started to shuffle through my good deals: a twelve-pack of white crew socks, two-for-one ink cartridges for the printer, three cans of mixed nuts, a forty-eight-count box of granola bars, SPF 30 sunblock lotion, and a large plastic tub perfect for storing Christmas decorations.

After a minute he distracted me from trying to find my ringing cell phone in the bottom of my purse.

“Mom. Where’s the poster board?”

Whoops.

Being a “creative” mom, I spent some time with Brandon recycling brown paper bags into substitute poster board. It was the best way to teach a lifelong, very useful lesson on resourcefulness and, more than that, he and I figured it out together.

A Poseidon Adventure on the Love Boat

Calling Captain Stubing to the lido deck!

There was a lot of beauty and bluster the week I taped
The Love Boat
in Italy. One extremely strong gust nearly blew me overboard, but I managed to hang on. It wasn’t the weather or even the ocean breeze that almost knocked me off my feet: it was a legendary actress.