My Gentle Barn (38 page)

She sat for a moment, looking at the calves, then said, “I think that one should be Holy.”

“Wow, that is so beautiful.”

“Like, Holy Cow,” she said.

And I broke out laughing. Ellen DeGeneres was doing comedy in our barn.

“And the other one, she can be Madonna … and we’ll have to get her a cone bra.”

And thus our calves were named.

In the following weeks I kept Ellen and Portia informed of the calves’ progress with a weekly e-mail, typing “cow update” in the subject line.
This week, Madonna bloated and we had to stay up all night and pump the air out of her stomach. But she’s OK now
. Or:
Madonna and Holy have turned into lap cows. They’re just so comfortable with
people now
. After several weeks of this, Ellen began doing an update on her show: “Ellen and Portia’s Weekly Cow Update,” introduced by a big mooing sound.

Over the following months, Ellen mentioned the Gentle Barn often on her show and on her website, and eventually she put a “Donate to the Gentle Barn” button on her site and even designed a Gentle Barn T-shirt. I felt like I’d been adopted right along with the calves.

She and Portia came out to see us and the animals again, and Ellen even sent her brother and nieces and her mom and her mom’s friend. It felt like the whole Ellen clan was becoming part of the Gentle Barn family. On her show, in her tweets, and even to us, Ellen would talk about what the Gentle Barn meant to her, saying how much we were contributing to humanity, how we were giving both animals and kids a second chance at life. I would listen to her, equally captivated and baffled. Here was this huge celebrity who had the clout to support anyone she wanted; she could have chosen some big, well-established organization, but she was choosing us, vouching for our work, and calling me an angel. Tears would flood my eyes. The little girl in me who had never been supported for my passion to help animals, who had been viewed by my parents as a nut with a weird obsession, who had been laughed at by the kids at school, was now being showered with the highest praise for doing the very things that had garnered such judgment.

One time, after hearing Ellen speak about the Gentle Barn, I quipped, “OK, I’m good. Ellen just healed my entire childhood.”

Everyone present laughed. But it was true. A deep, wounded part of me was mending.

I had imagined that Ellen’s support would follow a typical Hollywood trajectory: a big flash that faded away, to be replaced by some other fad or cause. But to our amazement and unending gratitude, Ellen stayed
loyal to the Gentle Barn, coming up with one brilliant, off-the-wall plug after another. One day, when she had the heartthrob Channing Tatum on the show—who had also become a fan of our cause—she told everyone: “Go visit the Gentle Barn, because you never know when Channing Tatum will be there with his shirt off.” The following Sunday, we had nine hundred visitors.

We were absolutely thrilled with the increase in visitors, private tours, supporters, Facebook fans, and donations, as well as the stream of other celebrities who followed Ellen’s lead and got on board with the cause. The animals, however, were not as thrilled as we were. We had not been prepared for how to deal with this increase in traffic through the barnyard. We had the same system in place that we’d always had, where people could wander through the barnyards at their own pace, with our volunteer chaperones stationed at each area of each barnyard, making sure that the animals’ voices were heard. We had more than doubled the number of chaperones to deal with the increased crowd, but that didn’t fix the problem. Tons of people would end up crammed into the upper barnyard with the pigs and goats and chickens. By one p.m., the animals—who normally sought out attention from visitors all day long—had decided they were done and began asking people to leave them alone. The volunteers had to apologize and ask people to please not pet the animals. Something had to be done to keep this the happy haven it had always been for its residents.

The increased crowds had come because of Ellen, and the answer to how to deal with the crowds came through Ellen as well. Ellen’s mother’s friend, who worked for Toyota, seemed to be the one who had gotten us nominated for the 100 Cars for Good giveaway. Rallying our Facebook fans to vote for us, we’d won hands-down, and Toyota had come and presented us with a beautiful new hybrid Highlander. Wanting to help us further, Toyota had built us an amphitheater just above the upper barnyard.

The amphitheater! The answer to our crowd control. We would
take fifty people at a time into our amphitheater, where they would listen to a presentation about how we’d gotten started and what our mission was, as well as guidelines on how to listen to the animals’ requests. Those fifty people would then get to go into the upper barnyard to be with the animals. No one else would go in until those people had come out, keeping the crowd to no more than fifty at any given time, and keeping the animals happy and sociable throughout the day.

In the middle of all this growth—with our Facebook fan base reaching 100,000 and with Ellen selling a lock of Justin Bieber’s hair on eBay for $40,000 to support the Gentle Barn—Jay and I actually managed to find a moment to do something special for ourselves. In truth, it was all Jay’s doing. Ever since he had proposed, six years earlier, I had cited one reason after another for postponing the wedding. We hardly had a minute to sit down and take a breath; we had three kids to raise, a hundred animal “kids,” with new ones coming in all the time, and all the programs we were running at the Barn. How were we going to fit a wedding into all that? Jay and I sometimes talked about what our wedding might look like, but to me we were just fantasizing; it didn’t seem like it would ever really happen. Neither did I even need it to. Jay and I were good just like we were.

Apparently Jay had different ideas about the subject.

The day after Thanksgiving in 2010, Jay said to me, “Come on, let’s take the kids and go pick up my mom in Burbank and let’s all go to a museum.”

What a nice idea. I hadn’t been to a museum in years.

On our way to the car, I realized it was colder out than I had thought. “I’m going to go back and get a jacket,” I said.

“No,” Jay said. “Stop! You have a jacket in the car. Let’s just get in the car.”

“I just want to get a jacket, Jay. And make sure the dogs are set up right, since we’re going—”

“No!” he said again. “The dogs are set up. Just get in the car.”

What is his problem?
I thought.
Jeez
. But I got in the car, along with the kids.

As we neared Jay’s mom’s house, he said, “You know, we’re running a little early. I don’t want to rush her, so let’s go get some lunch.” And he detoured away from her house. Several blocks later, I saw a Chinese restaurant that had a neon-green sign in the window with the word VEGETARIAN. Jay and I had an agreement that if we ever saw a vegetarian or vegan place, we would eat there to support them.

“No, no, no,” he said. “I want to look for a Togo’s.”

“A Togo’s?”

“We need something quick.” But he kept driving around and around, saying, “I saw a Togo’s here before. I know it’s here somewhere.”

This didn’t make any sense at all. “You never get lost,” I said. “You have a great sense of direction.” Then my stomach started to growl. “We could have been eating spring rolls by now.”

But Jay was sticking to his stubborn course, taking us down streets that were more and more filled with traffic.

“You’re going to end up at the Burbank airport if you’re not careful,” I said.

And sure enough, we ended up at the Burbank airport.

“What are you doing?”

Jay looked over at me and said, “Will you marry me?”

“Yeah,” I exclaimed, annoyed and confused, “but they don’t have a Togo’s at the airport!”

In that voice of his that could go suddenly smooth as silk, he said, “We’re not going to Togo’s. We’re going to Vegas to get married.”

“Come on!” I said. Why was he messing around like this?

“No, really,” he said. “Kids, is that right?”

And my children, who had been unusually quiet in the backseat through the whole drive, burst out with their answer: “Yeah, Mom, we’re going to Las Vegas!”

“What are you talking about? I didn’t pack.”

“I packed for you,” Jay said.

“But I don’t have a dress.”

“I bought you a dress.” Then he pointed out the window and said, “Look, there are your friends.”

There in front of the entrance to the airport were my two closest girlfriends with their husbands and kids, all standing on the curb. One of my friends held up the most beautiful wedding gown for me to see.

“Oh my God,” I said, “I—I—I didn’t bring any makeup.”

“Don’t worry, I’ve got it all covered,” Jay said.

“I didn’t bring any shoes.”

“I bought you shoes.”

“I didn’t even shave my legs.”

After a beat, he said, “I can’t help you with that one.”

By the time we got to Vegas, the whole thing finally had sunk in. I was getting married to the man I loved. Jay put us all up at the Venetian; I had never seen anything like it. Inside the hotel, there were clouds and stars in the “sky” and canals with bridges and gondolas. That night we went and got our marriage license, and then we all went out to a show. The next day, Jay had arranged for all of the women and girls to get our hair and makeup done, and had included a beautiful diamond clip he had bought for my hair. He ushered us to the salon at the hotel, and then went off with the guys. All of us with straight hair got it curled, and everyone who had curly hair had it straightened. And all the fussing made each of us feel special. After the salon, I put on the dress, and it fit me like a glove. How he had done that was a mystery to me. When we were all finally ready, my girlfriends and our daughters took the elevators down to the main floor.

“It’s over there,” one of my girlfriends said.

“Where?”

“At the other side of the hotel.”

“But that’s, like, miles away,” I said. “There are acres of casinos and restaurants between here and there.”

“Come on,” she said, “we’re going to be late.”

“I can’t walk through all that.”

“Why?”

“Because there are tons of people, and I’m all dressed up like a bride.” I was never embarrassed to be out in the world covered in barn dust and smelling like goats … but dressed in a wedding gown? This was just too conspicuous.

“Come on, Ellie. You’re going to be fine.”

I figured maybe I would just half-close my eyes till we got there. But as we turned the corner and walked into the casino, everyone in there burst into applause. We couldn’t walk ten feet without people stopping us to ask if they could take our picture. “Would you mind holding my baby?” one woman asked before she put her infant in my arms and set off her flash. Someone else flung her parents at me. “Will you be in a photo with my mom and dad?” All along the way, people clapped and called out, “Look at the bride. Congratulations!”

It was the longest fifteen minutes of my life. And yet by the end of it, I kind of felt like a movie star.

The bridge where Jay and I would stand to take our vows was beautiful, with white roses woven all through the railings. I stepped up onto the bridge, which spanned a large canal. Jay was already there at the center of the bridge, and I couldn’t believe how handsome he was. I hadn’t thought I needed to do this; a ceremony that had proven the first time around not to be so binding after all. But in this moment, as I stepped in front of Jay and stood on the precipice of a public commitment to this man, my love for him went to a whole new level. Tears started streaming as I said my vows, and as Jay said his. I was sure my mascara was running all down my face, but I didn’t care. None of that
mattered. What mattered was the depth of love I felt for this man who had toiled by my side to manifest all that we had created together.

To applause, we descended from the bridge and were whisked away by a gondola. I was a princess in my own fairy tale, and there was nowhere else I would have rather been.