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Authors: Melissa Francis

Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Personal Memoirs, #Entertainment & Performing Arts

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BOOK: Diary of a Stage Mother's Daughter: A Memoir
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Mom said that before she could finish her sentence, six hands had stripped me down and plopped me in the warm sudsy water. I let out a big laugh and slapped the surface of the water, catapulting a perfectly formed bubble to the tip of Tiffany’s round nose. She giggled.
“Please tell me you were rolling,” the director said to the cameraman.
Mom always describes it as the moment she knew I would be a star, though I can’t swear to any of it, since I was too young to remember. My earliest actual memory is of my first best friend, Brian. Like most three-year-old friends, we didn’t choose each other. We had older siblings the same age who went to the same schools. We were thrown into the same carpools and played on the floors at the same ladies’ casserole potluck luncheons. I still remember how Brian’s mom’s brown loafers looked standing next to my mom’s tan wedges.
Brian was a great playmate. He let me have whatever I wanted. He was a keeper. He had soft blond hair that fell in his eyes as we spent countless hours together playing house. Even when he wasn’t there, I pretended he was. He didn’t say much, either in person or in my imagination, making him the perfect match for a bossy, precocious girl like me.
Brian and I went to a little Presbyterian preschool in Granada Hills, California, that we called Turtle School because of the large turtle that lived on the grass-covered playground. We ran into the yard every morning and force-fed the poor beast dandelions until she escaped in slow motion or just recoiled inside her shell to wait out the storm of toddlers.
Brian and I were blissfully joined at the hip until the day his mom decided she was a lesbian and ran off with her girlfriend. The whole family moved away from our neighborhood in Northridge to Chicago or maybe the moon. Wherever they went, it was tough forgetting Brian, even though he was virtually mute and his mom had a girlfriend (the latter hardly seemed like a distinction, though Mom kept mentioning it). He silently hugged me goodbye, and I cried like crazy.
Brian left on the first day of my second year in Turtle School when I was four years old, and I was unusually blue when I got home. I played lethargically in my room in our tract home in the San Fernando Valley. My room was sandwiched between my parents’ bedroom and my sister’s on the second floor of the house. The carpet in our home was a bright Kelly green, which Mom said made it look as if the perky lawn outside extended inside our home. I liked to trim the indoor “grass” with scissors.
But having recently lost my scissors as a result of some indoor gardening, I wandered down the hall into Tiffany’s room, where she was conducting a kindergarten class with her dolls. I had arrived just in time for reading.
The green carpet stretched to the far wall of her room, which Mom had covered with pink and green fabric printed with a repeating pattern of bunnies and farm scenes. She’d made two pillows out of the same fabric to throw on Tiffany’s bed. The room was perpetually frozen in a cheerful spring day.
Tiffany raised her eyes to mine. “Why are you pouting? Beth is gone too, you know.” Beth was Brian’s older sister. I couldn’t consistently count on Tiffany for sympathy.
“Here, let’s work on my homework.” Tiffany was in first grade now and extremely advanced. She went to San Jose School for the Highly Gifted, which apparently meant she was the smartest person in the universe. I thought that made me brilliant by association. I noticed she tensed her shoulders when Mom sang the name of the school to other adults, emphasizing the words
highly gifted
as if you wouldn’t notice them otherwise.
“Sit here,” she said to me. “Here are the words in the sentence. Unscramble them.” I looked at the words on the page. I knew most of them on sight.
“Here’s a trick,” she continued with the authority of a flight attendant who knows the location of the only emergency exit. “The one with the capital letter goes first.” She pointed at the only word that started with a big letter. Neat trick.
“The one with the period next to it, that dot, goes last. The rest you have to figure out on your own. No more shortcuts.”
I looked at the page; there were only two words left! This was so exciting I forgot to grieve over the loss of Brian for a moment.
“Finish your homework and you can play with my toy,” Tiffany said.
I glanced at the red Mattel box on the shelf with the picture of Tiffany playing with a car on a ramp on the side. I loved that she was featured on a toy box. This particular piece of packaging was so very special that Mom told us we were not allowed to actually play with it or its contents. But she left the alluring red box on the high shelf in Tiffany’s room, so we’d climb up there and get it as a special treat.
You could always hear Mom coming down the long hallway. Even though the hall was covered with carpet, the floor creaked in predictable spots. She’d thundered down it so many times to stop us from wrestling over a toy or making a racket that when we heard the first footfall, we knew exactly how much time we had before she reached the bedroom to murder us both.
This time we were just looking at the toy when the footsteps started. We jumped even though we weren’t technically guilty yet.
“What are you two doing?” Mom asked.
“Missy’s doing her homework,” Tiffany said. Mom looked over at me, sitting on the floor with a workbook open in front of me.
“What’s the assignment?” she asked, as though a four-year-old really could have homework.
“Unscrabble the words,” I started.
“Un-scramble . . .” Mom corrected.
“Yes.” I looked at the page.
I
was easy and was already a big letter so I knew it went first.
Book
had a dot after it, so I knew it was last.
See
was there. That was an easy one too. Jackpot!
“I see the book!” I said proudly. Perhaps I was also highly gifted. Tiffany looked pleased at having orchestrated this show.
“Very nice,” Mom said. “Tomorrow, though, no one is going to school. McDonald’s has booked both of you for a national commercial.”
My sister and I were often booked together because we showed a family resemblance without appearing too much alike. Tiffany was always referred to as “the pretty one.” With her thick brunette hair and heavy brows, she reminded casting directors of a young Brooke Shields, which at the time was a major selling point. By contrast I was always “the cute one,” with my distinctive yellow eyes, a ready smile, and round cheeks. Between us, we had appeared in dozens of commercials already.
 
 
We shot the commercial at a fake McDonald’s on Highland Avenue. Even though the building sat on a major street in Hollywood, the public couldn’t see the production because of a two-story fence that surrounded the lot.
From the outside, the fake McDonald’s looked like any other McDonald’s, except that it appeared brand-new. Inside, an elaborate maze of greenrooms and production storage bins were set up in the basement to accommodate the constant flood of commercials shot on-site.
When we arrived on set, they let Tiffany and me play behind the counter, using the register and running around the kitchen, even touching the stove. No one moved a muscle to stop us. There was something thrillingly wrong about being let loose in what seemed to be a real McDonald’s. I felt like an indulged criminal.
They shot one scene of us ordering at the counter, then one of us sitting with our fake mom in the main restaurant. The latter was much more challenging than I had anticipated. Not only was I supposed to eat a cheeseburger, which I didn’t normally like, but the burger was ice cold and doctored with food coloring to look perfect. It wasn’t exactly toxic, but it wasn’t completely edible either. A grip held a bucket off camera so we could spit out the painted rubbery food after each take. They had stand-by burgers for the rehearsals, and a more realistic “hero” burger for the actual filming
The first time I lifted a hero to my mouth, I grimaced.
“Cut.” The director looked nonplussed. Mom called me over.
“You have to smile and look like you can’t wait to eat the cheeseburger,” Mom said.
“But I don’t want to eat it. I hate cheeseburgers.” Tiffany stepped up to my side, as if she couldn’t wait to see how I was going to get out of this.
“That’s why it’s called
acting
,” Mom said. I didn’t care that much about acting.
“You have to eat it,” she said forcefully, with an edge of panic in her voice. The crew and even the wardrobe girl took turns nervously glancing in our direction.
Then she softened and whispered, “Eat it with a big smile and I will take you to Creative Playthings on the way home and buy you anything you want. Anything.”
SOLD.
 
 
A long tradition of barter was born that day. An extended series of negotiations during which, at exactly the right moment, Mom would promise something irresistible in exchange for my doing something that, ironically, I would usually be willing to do otherwise. But now that I knew there was a potential payment floating nearby, I would extract it. My childish blackmail started with toys and ended with a pony. Naturally. Though by the end, I couldn’t help feeling bought and sold myself.
CHAPTER TWO
 
B
y the time I got to kindergarten, I was an old soul. That’s not to say I was joyless; far from it. I had just been around the block many more times than my peers. I was barely five years old, but I was comfortable working with adults and had the self-assurance of a child twice my age. When a director says, “Action!” and you’re the only one allowed to move or make noise, you get a heightened sense of your own importance. Even Mom wasn’t allowed to make a peep while I did my thing for the camera. And if you did your bit right, the seas parted when you walked off the set.
 
 
I was the last person to arrive at my fifth birthday party that year. Kentucky Fried Chicken, it turned out, was more important. I knew my party was taking place that afternoon, so I was suspicious when Mom announced that we were going to squeeze in a quick callback after school. As Tiffany and I settled ourselves in the back of the brown station wagon, I began to wonder how this would work. I had a sense that interviews, as a rule, were really far away, and generally involved a car trip long enough to make me nauseous.
This happened to be a callback for a national commercial, so it had the potential to run like crazy. Mom was particularly excited because they only called back the kids they were serious about hiring. Tiffany and I stood next to her as we all waited for the casting director to call my name. Mom talked into the receiver of a payphone, whispering orders to my aunt Marilyn, her sister. Marilyn didn’t have children of her own, and spent most of her time with us.
“Just let everyone in. We will be there in fifteen minutes. Get them started.”
Tiffany sighed and rolled her eyes. She knew we were getting hosed somehow, as were the party guests. But I was more optimistic. Today was my birthday, and birthdays were full of surprises, so this interview had to be part of the plan. Maybe they were giving me the commercial for my birthday! Maybe we would get special chicken to bring to the party. I did know we could not possibly get home in fifteen minutes.
When we finally arrived home, my party guests, including my friends’ parents, were huddled on our porch. Piles of children slumped in their parents’ laps, jammed together on the stoop. Marilyn frantically explained that she hadn’t been able to find the keys. Everyone was very quiet. No one said “happy birthday.”
One of the moms broke the silence. “Abby and some of the others left after an hour. Marilyn kept saying you were five minutes away . . .”
I’d never seen party guests so angry with the birthday girl. Luckily, goodwill can be bought with a halfway decent party favor and none of the kids appeared to hold a grudge. I can’t imagine the same could be said of the parents.
By the next day, my friends and I were back to playing my favorite schoolyard game, Star Wars. The main appeal of Star Wars was that there was only one female character. As a result, I could play with all the boys at once, and none of the girls, which was ideal.
If I thought it felt like a Star Wars kind of morning, Mom made two braids on either side of my head and coiled them up into round balls so I would look like Princess Leia. What the hairdo lacked in beauty and style, it made up for in its sheer declarative spirit. When I stepped out of my family’s station wagon and walked onto the playground, the “Leia Do” served as a beacon announcing to my classmates which game we’d be playing at recess.
I jumped and climbed and flew around the jungle gym while Thomas and Mike and Scott sliced the air with imaginary light sabers and shielded me from impending doom. It was glorious. Gloria Steinem would not have approved, but she wasn’t there and I didn’t care.
While I basked in the glow of my favorite Jedi knights, most of the girls made mud pies in the sandbox, an activity that held zero appeal for me. As far as I could tell, sand was hideous. Make it into as many pies as you like, you still can’t eat it, and you still can’t get every grain out of your shoes or out from underneath your fingernails after you play with it. Who was going to buy all these inedible pies? Why put so much time into patting them down tightly into their dish, if no one wanted the finished product? It made no sense to me.
BOOK: Diary of a Stage Mother's Daughter: A Memoir
10.75Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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