Dancing In The Light

by Shirley Maclaine

  Daddy lit another cigarette. “Well, Monkey,” he said, “where do you keep your Oscar?” The talk of death didn’t faze him in the least.

  “My Oscar?” I asked. “Well, I have it in New York on the stage with me now. I have it on the piano, covered with a black cloth. And sometimes I tell the audience that I want them to meet a person who has come into my life who is very special to me. I say he represents many qualities to me: integrity, hard work, experience, longevity, quality, and love. And besides that, I’m sleeping with him. They gasp and look around, wondering who is there. Then I take the cloth off and it’s Oscar.”

  “Right cute,” said Daddy.

  “I’ve only done that a few times. Some people think it’s too self-congratulatory though. So I’ll probably stop. Some people have a problem when you celebrate yourself. They think it’s tricky and smacks of flaunting your success. What do you think?”

  He chuckled. “Well, it’s a lot safer to sleep with Oscar than it is for some of your other people I’ve been reading about.”

  I chucked Daddy on the arm playfully.

  “Warren says we should both bring our Oscars home to you so you can enjoy them. He says he keeps his in a drawer.” (Warren won his Oscar for best director for Reds.)

  “Well,” said Daddy, “we certainly do have a lot of stuff in our house. Why not the Oscars?”

  “No, Ira,” said Mother flatly. “As it is, most of our things Warren and Shirley ought to have.”

  “I agree with you,” Daddy said, “but since they don’t have those things, because they are still in our house, then we might just as well have their Oscars too.”

  Dad and Mom were like a pair of vaudevillians, each endeavoring to top the other for attention and focus. Each was secure in the role they were playing and neither would call it quits and say the show was over. Their twists of mind, their upstaging tactics were more intricate than the finest melodrama the stage could produce. Mother played the tyranny of the fragile and Daddy the insecurity of the tyrant. Their games with each other left outsiders batting their heads against each other. And as I have said, Warren and I had been, in effect, outsiders. Bit players to the two stars.

  They possessed an astonishing repertoire, which bewildered our impressionable minds at the same time that it entranced us. Again, it was inevitable that we would go into show business. First to elicit attention and second to attempt to dissect complicated characters, which we would play in a theatrical effort to work through, and hence comprehend, what had indeed gone on in our own home. Mother’s and Dad’s chickens had come home to roost.

  Daddy looked at his watch. I had been there for six hours. We had had lunch (no salt, no sugar) and many interludes with charmed nurses.

  “Do you want me to take you to the plane station, Monkey?”

  I adored the way he mixed up words. “No thanks, Daddy,” I said. “I think I’ll just get a cab.”

  “Well, you should leave fairly soon because the shuttle will be jammed and you don’t want to miss your show tonight. There’s nothing worse than a dark theater when you’ve just begun your run.”

  I knew how much he had wanted to be up there during his life as a teacher and later as a well-providing real estate salesman.

  “Let me go call a cab at the front desk,” he said.

  He left Mother and me alone together.

  She looked at me longingly. “I’m going to be fine,” she said. “I’m not ready to die yet. I was worried before, but I’m not now. They make this anticoagulant out of snake venom. And snake venom will dissolve these clots.”

  She sounded so involuntarily jarring, so piercingly discordant. Then she turned on an emotional dime and said, “Shirl, I want you to tell me something.”

  “Yes, Mom. What?” I asked.

  “Sometimes, just before I fall asleep at night, I hear some people talking to me in my head. I know I’m not dreaming. I know a dream when I have one. This is something else.”

  “Oh, tell me about it.”

  “Well, we have real good conversations. They make me laugh. They’re real funny.”

  “What do you talk about?”

  “Oh, everything. They are such good friends. I’ve never told anyone else about them. Sometimes they tickle me so much that I sit up in bed. But there’s no one in the room. I know I’m not crazy yet. I know they are real. Do you think they are my spiritual guides who are helping me to know what is on the other side?”

  Her eyes were boundlessly deep, with a longing desperation. “And do you think they are preparing me to die?”

  I didn’t know what to say, yet I felt that what she was saying was true.

  “Well, Mom, you know that you’ll never die, even when you go. If you feel they are real, then they’re real. I would say, yes, they are your friends and you are accepting them because you know you will meet them when you cross over.”

  “They’re real sweet and they love me so much.”

  “Well then, why don’t you relax and enjoy them until you can meet them in the flesh, so to speak.”

  “Oh, good,” she said, “I’m so glad you understand. I love to go to bed because I know we’ll have some fun. Don’t tell your Daddy. He’d probably be jealous.”

  “I won’t. Besides, he’s probably got his own friends that he talks to. Maybe that’s what he’s doing when he sleeps so much.”

  Mother sat back in bed and looked at me with a deep question in her face.

  “Shirl?” she asked. “Tell me again about those spiritual guides you wrote about in your book. Who is this Tom McPherson?”

  I cleared my throat and began to explain that one of my great pleasures was having sessions with accredited “mediums” who channeled the soul energy of beings from the spiritual plane who acted as guides and teachers. I knew she was familiar with the material in my book, but hearing about it from me personally was more real to Mother. She needed me to confirm that what I had written had been my experience. I explained that a nice young man named Kevin Ryerson had found, some years ago, that he had the talent to attune his body frequencies to spiritual beings who themselves were no longer in the body. These beings used the electromagnetic frequencies of Kevin’s body as a channel through which they could communicate with us on the earth plane from the spiritual plane where they resided. Kevin would go into a trance state while the spiritual beings used him as a medium through which to communicate.

  Mother listened patiently. “How do you know it’s not Kevin talking?” she asked.

  “Well,” I said, “the soul beings use Kevin’s voice to talk through, but they are separate beings from Kevin himself.”

  “How do you know?” she questioned with an open-minded tone in her voice.

  “Well,” I said, loving her curiosity, but not certain I could answer to her satisfaction, “I can only say that Tom McPherson, one of the entities that Kevin channels, knew intimate details about me and my life which no other human being on earth knew.”

  “Really, Shirl?” said Mother. “And did he help you with things?”

  “Oh, yes,” I answered, “he helped me with a great many things.”

  “Weren’t you frightened that he knew so much about you?”

  “No,” I answered, remembering my first reactions to the phenomenon of channeling. “No, as a matter of fact it was comforting to feel that I was communicating with a being who apparently could ‘see’ things I couldn’t see. Of course, I was skeptical at first, but not frightened. I had heard about Edgar Cayce and all of his spiritual channeling, so I figured Kevin had the same psychic talent.”

  “Yes,” said Mother, sucking in her breath as she always did when contemplating a new idea. “Yes, I’ve heard of Edgar Cayce. He helped many people when they were sick, didn’t he?”

  “Yes,” I answered. “He channeled all kinds of medical and scientific information from spiritual guides, even prescribing medication and various treatments. Doctors couldn’t understand it because he had no medical training but was alway
s right.”

  “So the spiritual entities speak through this young man called Kevin and they help you with things you have questions about?”

  “That’s right.”

  Mother nodded. “So maybe my ‘friends’ are spiritual beings like them?”

  “I think they might be, yes.”

  “Did they live once on earth?”

  “Usually they have lived. But not always. Sometimes spiritual beings come through who have never incarnated at all.”

  “You mean, have never been alive?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, if they’ve never been alive, how can they be alive now?”

  “By alive I mean they’ve never been alive in a body. But for the most part, the spiritual entities that come through mediums have had the experience of living in a body on earth.”

  “And when they die, they go to this spiritual place and live without bodies?”

  “Yes,” I answered, wondering whether the nurses would mercifully stay out of the room until I finished my explanation. “So,” I continued, “when our bodies ‘die,’ it’s really just that the houses for our souls don’t work anymore. We are souls who only temporarily reside in our bodies. We pass over to the spiritual dimension where we remain until we decide to reincarnate again. Our souls (the real us) never die. They are eternal.”

  “Oh, yes, I believe that,” said Mother.

  “Remember what Daddy was saying about leaving his body during the accident?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, it’s the same thing. If he had really ‘died,’ he wouldn’t have come back to his body. He would be up there on the spiritual plane now, just like this Tom McPherson character.”

  “Oh,” said Mother, “I see.”

  I paused a moment before going on.

  “And remember how you’ve heard about people being visited by their ‘dead’ relatives?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, it’s probably true. Because the relatives are never really gone. They just live in another dimension after they leave the body.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Mother, “I see.” She thought a moment and said, “Well, tell me how this Tom McPherson helped you.”

  I quickly scanned my memory, looked at my watch, and said, “I’ll tell you a story that is really incredible. It actually happened exactly as I’ll tell you.”

  Mother folded her arms across her lap and her eyes lit up.

  “First,” I said, “let me remind you that Tom McPherson speaks from the sensibility of his favorite incarnation.”

  “Oh?” said Mother, “and what was that?”

  “Well, he was a Scotch-Irish pickpocket who lived about three hundred years ago. I was around at that time, too, and we knew each other.”

  “Oh, goodness,” said Mother. “A pickpocket? And you knew him? Don’t get too complicated. Just tell me the story.”

  I chuckled, remembering how difficult it had been for me to absorb some of the finer points of reincarnation.

  “Well, it happened during the Thanksgiving holiday a few years ago. I had been working hard on Out on a Limb to meet my deadline.

  “The evening before Thanksgiving, I was shopping in Beverly Hills on Rodeo Drive. I was carrying a large purse. Inside, I carried not only my money, credit cards, passport, and tape recorder but also tapes that I had recorded during my sessions with Tom McPherson and some other spiritual guides and teachers. I loved those tapes. In fact, I had become dependent on them because I felt that the language of the spiritual guides was more eloquent than my own. McPherson had warned me about my dependence, claiming that I should learn to trust myself more, but I didn’t listen.

  “I walked into a shop to try on a suit on sale that I had spotted in the window.

  “I put my purse on the floor, took off my jacket, and covered my purse (shopping in Beverly Hills teaches you to conceal your purse). I turned around to the rack and took down a suit jacket. I hadn’t turned for longer than five seconds, and there was no other customer there.”

  Mother leaned forward, her eyes wide as saucers, anticipating something dramatic.

  “The salesgirl was busy on the telephone behind the counter. As I turned back to my purse, out of the corner of my eye, I saw my jacket gently collapse to the floor as though there was no purse under it! I picked up my jacket. The purse was gone! I freaked out. It was more than my sense of reality could comprehend. I looked up at the salesgirl and said, ‘Who took my purse? My purse is gone. I was only turned around for five seconds and somebody stole my purse!’ ”

  “Oh, my,” said Mother, “Shirl, what happened?”

  “The salesgirl said no one had come in, she’d seen me cover my purse with my jacket, so it must still be under there. Like a crazy woman, I flapped my jacket up and down as though I was beating dust out of a rug. ‘My purse is not here,’ I said ‘Can’t you see that?’

  “I ran out of the store. There was hardly anyone on the street. I went back into the store, expecting that the salesgirl had somehow found it. Instead, she was on the phone to the Beverly Hills police, begging them to come over and deal with this crazy movie star.

  “ ‘Look,’ I said, ‘I’m sorry. I don’t care about the money or the credit cards or my passport or anything like that. I care about my spiritual tapes that were in there.’

  “She looked at me. ‘Your spiritual tapes?’ she asked more politely than was necessary.

  “ ‘Yes!’ I said. ‘My tapes from my guides and teachers on the spiritual plane. They are so important to me.’

  “I could feel her thinking that she should have called the boobyhatch instead of the police.

  “ ‘Well,’ she said carefully, ‘maybe you could consult your spiritual guides to find out what happened to your purse?’ ”

  Mother laughed. “She made me laugh, too,” I said, “but she had a point. Well, I met with the police and filled out the reports and all that. But I had this eerie feeling that it really hadn’t been a robbery after all. Yet I couldn’t imagine what it really was.”

  “So, then?” Mother said.

  “Two days after Thanksgiving, Kevin Ryerson was in town. I called him for a channeling session, thinking I could ask McPherson what had happened. I didn’t tell Kevin anything about it. He went into trance and McPherson came through. The first sentence out of his mouth was ‘Did you detect the fine hand of my pickpocket capacity the other day?’

  “Then it hit me. Of course, it was McPherson.”

  “McPherson?” said Mother. “Oh my! However did he do it?”

  “Well, I asked him just that, and he said he’d miscalculated: he hadn’t meant to dematerialize the bag completely—just to move it behind the salesgirl’s counter.”

  “He could have made a lot of trouble for her,” Mother said. I laughed because that really hadn’t occurred to me.

  “Well, anyway,” I said, “I had quite a fight with him about it. In fact, I yelled, ‘What the hell do you mean, you miscalculated?’

  “ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I hadn’t realized how much you had actually progressed in your own mediumistic light frequencies. My light frequency mingled with yours and the combination of the two caused the bag to dematerialize rather than simply to move.’ ”

  Mother leaned forward as though she couldn’t believe what she was hearing.

  “I couldn’t believe it either,” I told her. “I asked him if he was telling me my purse with all its contents was hanging around somewhere up there on the spiritual plane.”

  Mother looked confused. I saw I’d better get this over with.

  “Well, he said that would be against cosmic law. But since he was responsible for the mistake of dematerialization, it was up to him to find someone who could karmically profit from it. He said I’d get it all back except for the tapes.”

  “The tapes?” said Mother.

  “Yes,” I said, “it seems Tom gave the tapes to someone who needed them more than I did.”

  “Well, what happened
with all the other stuff?” Mother said.

  “Oh, it all came back, just as Tom had said it would. Including my prescription eyeglasses, which I had been missing.”

  “How?”

  “In a manila envelope, left at the door. No name or return address or anything. The point of the whole thing though, really, was that I had become too dependent on the tapes—they wanted to show me I didn’t need them anymore.”

  “Oh, my goodness, Shirl,” said Mother. “And this really happened?”

  “It certainly did, every bit of it.”

  “Well, what do you make of it?” she asked, longing for a “logical” explanation.

  “I really don’t know,” I answered, “but until something better explains it, I just have to believe what McPherson said.”

  “Oh, my,” said Mother, “I don’t know whether I’d be frightened or not.”

  “Well,” I said, “I figure, unless something hurts me, there’s no reason to be scared. You’re not frightened of your ‘friends,’ are you?”

  “Oh, no,” she said, “on the contrary. They make me very happy and I love to laugh with them. They’re really nice and I feel they are my friends.”

  “Well, then.”

  “Yes,” she said, laughing. “But I don’t know how many friends I’d have left in the neighborhood if I told them about my ‘other friends.’ ”

  “Yes,” I said, “I know the feeling. But I think you’d be surprised how many other people have ‘friends’ they don’t talk about.”

  Mother nodded, sucked in another breath, and rolled her eyes.

  Just then Daddy walked back into the room. Mother put her fingers to her lips and said, “Sh-h-h,” as if this were our secret.

  “Well, Monkey,” said Daddy, “a cab’s waiting. I think you’d better go.”

  I picked up all my stuff, kissed them both goodbye, winked at Mother, and told Daddy to stay with her. I said I’d call them when I got back to New York, so they wouldn’t worry that I had missed my show.

  I left the hospital room and closed the door gently. I waited outside for a moment. Then I heard Mother say in a playful voice, “Ira, are you going to take the rest of this chocolate cake home and hide it so Bird Brain won’t eat it?”