Might as Well Laugh About It Now (24 page)

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 bracelets, 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.