Points for partial honesty.
Ron pins a wig to the mannequin form and walks over to me.
“Did you ever call your sister back?” he asks.
The man never misses a thing. He must have seen my cell ringing at Church of Mary. He knows how I refer to Trudy. He must know she’s been on my mind. He knows...everything.
I shake my head.
Ron smiles sadly and touches my arm. Sid meets my eyes.
“Look, you didn’t ask for my advice, but I’m going to give it to you anyway because I’m the oldest around here,” he says, using a makeup wipe to scrub the dark lines off his forehead that make him look even older on stage.
“By far,” I add.
“Don’t look back,” Sid continues. “All you’ll see is your tuchus, and you can’t change that either.”
The room explodes into laughter.
“Feel better?” Ron asks.
I nod. “What should I wear to Streetbar?” I ask.
Barry looks at me, considering.
“No knits. Bad tits.”
“Nothing sleeveless!” the rest of the girls yell in unison.
They head out the side door of the theater.
“Coming?” they call back to me.
“Meet you there!”
When the door slams, I walk back into the theater, still dressed as Dorothy.
I stand on stage all alone.
“You come into this world alone, and you leave this world alone. Always remember that.”
This was one of my father’s favorite lines.
“But you sent me into the world alone as a kid, Dad,” I say.
There is a world of difference between being lonely and alone, and there is a yawning void between the family we are born into and the one we choose.
I square my shoulders, lift my head and say one of my favorite Dorothy lines ever, the one that sums her up best, reveals she isn’t actually a pessimist but a realistic optimist.
“The bottom line is, in life, sometimes good things happen, sometimes bad things happen. But honey, if you don’t take a chance, nothing happens.”
I take a bow to no one.
Like millions of people, I watchedThe Golden Girlsevery Saturday night at 8:00 p.m. sharp with my mom. The only difference was that—for many years—my mom and I watched it separately but together across the country from one another.
My mother would sneak upstairs after Daddy had fallen asleep on the couch downstairs watching sports and downing a six-pack of Stroh’s and call me from her red rotary phone. I could always picture the handset held to her ear, the cord snaking as far as it would uncoil from the hallway to her bedroom, a pretend umbilical cord stretching from Michigan to California.
John would always tease me about the dinners I’d make when I’d watch the show long-distance with my mom: appetizers that ranged from Funyuns with French onion dip to Jeno’s Pizza Rolls, a dinner of Cheeseburger Macaroni Hamburger Helper, Manwiches or TV dinners, a dessert of Hostess Fruit Pies (I loved all things lemon now that I lived in Palm Springs), and acouple of watermelon Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers to wash it all down. You can take the boy out of the country, I always told John, but you can’t take the country out of the boy.
