ROSEANNE ARCHY
Dispatches from the Nut Farm
Also by Roseanne Barr
MY LIVES
ROSEANNE: MY LIFE AS A WOMAN
ROSEANNE ARCHY
Dispatches from the Nut Farm
Roseanne Barr
Gallery Books
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First Gallery Books hardcover edition January 2011
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Manufactured in the United States of America
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Roseanne, 1952–
Roseannearchy : dispatches from the nut farm / Roseanne Barr.—1st Gallery Books hardcover ed.
p. cm.
1. American wit and humor. I. Title.
PN6165.R667 2011
814’.6—dc22 2010027413
ISBN 978-1-4391-5482-3
ISBN 978-1-4391-6007-7 (ebook)
This book is dedicated to those I love and to those who love me. May we always think for ourselves and continue to rebel against the Confederacy of Dunces who now rule the earth.
Contents
Foreword
Introduction
POSTINTRODUCTION: What the Hell . . . Let’s Go!
PREFACE: Right Is Wrong, and We Need to Straighten It Out
CHAPTER 1: Chosen and Humbled
CHAPTER 2: Borderline, Bipolar, Paranoid, Obsessive-Compulsive, Jewish, and Mormon
CHAPTER 3: Antisocial or Allergic?
CHAPTER 4: The Curse of the Cute Cousin
CHAPTER 5: A Tale of Two Bubbes
CHAPTER 6: Eat, Pray, Love, Conjure Satan
CHAPTER 7: On Writing My Book
CHAPTER 8: What Is a Jew?
CHAPTER 9: JILFs
CHAPTER 10: Left of Center in Denver
CHAPTER 11: Rants for a New Century
CHAPTER 12: S-E-X, Do We Have to Talk About It?
CHAPTER 13: Looking Back at the ‘90s
CHAPTER 14: Marriage, Cheatin’, and Dirty Dogs—This Ain’t a Country Song
CHAPTER 15: Love and Marriage
CHAPTER 16: My Shameless Showbiz Name-dropping
CHAPTER 17: Pig Politics
CHAPTER 18: The D-word and All That
CHAPTER 19: Celebrities Dropping Like Flies—What I’ve Learned
CHAPTER 20: Flattery Will Get You Everywhere
CHAPTER 21: Eat, Pray, Shit, Shower, and Shave
CHAPTER 22: The Great Escape
CHAPTER 23: Buck Stops Here
CHAPTER 24: True Tales of Ten Turning Spheres
CHAPTER 25: Exorcism: Becoming One
CHAPTER 26: Gethsemane
CHAPTER 27: The End
CHAPTER 28: The Real Big Super-duper Perverse Reverse Secret
Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin’s American Prayer
Acknowledgments
Foreword
by Bill Pentland
I had no idea, when I carefully pored through the shallow cardboard box of Roseanne’s hand-scribbled ravings in 1973, I would one day be writing the foreword to her third book. This is somewhat of a literary hat trick for me: As a nine-year-old boy, I received my first rejection letter from Rod Serling; years later, as a young cub reporter, I witnessed the first burgeoning seeds of the Watergate scandal. But commenting on the inner workings of Roseanne’s mind is something else entirely.
The scathing diatribes you’ll find herein are very much like the tracts in that cardboard box that she hesitantly allowed me to view almost forty years ago. She was shy and protective of her writings then; a motley collection of handwritten essays, thoughts, poems, and rants scribbled on random scraps of napkins, notebook paper, and colored memo pads, and stashed under an unused bunk in our eight-by-forty-six-foot trailer. We had recently moved up in the world—a young hippie couple vacating their mountain cabin, pump, and outhouse for the relative luxury of a 1956 Alma trailer, complete with electricity, working lights, a refrigerator, and, wonder of wonders, indoor hot water on demand! No longer would we have to tramp into two feet of snow to fill a galvanized bucket with water from our hand pump to heat on the stove. It was only natural, now being comfortably ensconced, that Roseanne could free up the time to pursue her passion of writing and telling the world specifically what was wrong with it.
Writing came naturally to this early Roseanne; punching a time clock did not. She found the restrictions of steady employment a drain on her muse. How else could one explain her predilection for wearing corporate baseball uniforms to her job as a fancy restaurant hostess or her insistence that I punch in on her time card to do her dishwashing shifts for her? How else to explain her excitedly watching, from behind a kitchen door, poet and singer Rod McKuen munching a biscuit at her very own hostess station? She later told the staff that he ordered “a glass of water, please. By the sea, by the sea, by the beautiful sea . . .” The staff cracked up and a monster was born; that day, she learned she could do better in life tossing off sarcastic one-liners than ever holding a steady job.
And she was in good company. Georgetown, Colorado, was nothing if not filled with the most eclectic ragtag band of Bohemian misfits and social renegades this side of Prague. Head chef Andy Ivory would often cook in the nude, reluctantly wearing an apron only to keep boiling grease from splattering his genitalia. Six-foot-eleven Stretch might tell us about the young ghost in his room the night before, and One-Armed Carlos would bus a table with his single appendage ten times faster than a busboy with twice the armage. Mad polka music would fill the bar on Sunday evenings and the suds would flow; with my frosty mug stashed in the ice-cream freezer, I washed the Texan-spattered dishes earmarked for Roseanne.
Georgetown was a little like Greenwich Village then, a little like Nome, and a little like Dodge City. Artists, writers, exiles, and hooligans of every conceivable stripe were drawn there, taking low-paying jobs to keep a roof over their heads and their hopes alive. I believe this milieu of total creative anarchy made a firm and lasting impression on Roseanne, who was all of nineteen years old. We fancied ourselves “Alpine Bohemians,” and not the white trash we would have appeared to most people. Then again, it’s hard to avoid the “white trash” label when you live in a trailer and have to bring your sewer pipe inside at night to keep it from freezing, or steal change from a motel cigarette machine to buy hamburger meat.
But bit by bit, Rosie began to morph into a housewife, and we finally decided to tie the knot in 1974—after seeing The Exorcist, we were convinced that Satan had possessed us. We came to the realization that although Alpine Bohemia was nice, eating was nicer. We got tired of scraping for pocket change and composting garbage and fixing our VW with chicken wire. We aspired to own a home without wheels one day; we wanted to have kids without having to borrow money from a paycheck-cashing service to cover the maternity bills; we wanted a TV with a picture y
ou could actually see instead of the static that passed for entertainment at 9,000 feet above sea level. We even dreamed that someday we might own a Sony Trinitron!
Therein followed our next life course, which was to admit defeat as hippies and crawl to Colorado Springs, where I would finally pursue the civil service career my father had been pitching to me for years. We took out a loan, bought another trailer, and began what would become for Rosie five years of self-imposed agoraphobia and scattergun childbearing. We had three children in thirty-nine months (again with the “white trash” labels!), eventually moving to Denver and plunking down $25,000 on our first real home. Thus began our inexorable descent into mainstream establishment Amerika. We traded in our patched blue jeans for new Levi’s, patchouli for Obsession, our Gremlin for a Ford Country Squire station wagon. I went to work for the U.S. Postal Service, while Roseanne stayed home with the kids and slowly went insane (or sane, depending on your frame of reference).
For five years, we played Ward and June Cleaver, and I foolishly believed we were just living life. But apparently Roseanne was recording every synapse, meltdown, revelation, and resurrection to create the persona that would become Roseanne Barr/Connor. Somewhere, around the time our youngest left diapers and I left the graveyard shift, Roseanne had what I viewed as a psychotic break. She began to explore radical feminism and Wicca, and went to work at a women’s collective bookstore, staffed by the angriest bunch of ball-bustin’ babes I had ever met in my sheltered white-bread Lutheran upbringing.
Frankly, I was threatened by her involvement in women’s studies; my only interest in the feminist movement at that time was seeing a picture of Gloria Steinem in that Playboy bunny outfit. Of course, it didn’t help that Roseanne’s rad-lib sister, Geraldine, was living with us. Geraldine and I were in a constant battle for Roseanne’s soul then; I wanted Rosie in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant, and I suppose Geraldine had some silly idea about Rosie having an identity outside of our suburban Denver home. (Geraldine would provide the basis for the character of Jackie and her love/hate friction with Rosie’s husband, Dan Connor.)
Roseanne would eventually try stand-up and incorporate the people in our lives into her routine, eventually evolving the template that became one of the most accurate portrayals of a blue-collar family in history. Although our three kids were the primary models for Becky, Darlene, and D.J., Rosie would weave real details, peccadilloes, accents, clothing, etc., from actual people she knew. One of our hillbilly trailer park neighbors provided Roseanne with some great grist for the Connor mill, with her backwoods Kentucky accent, lanky protofeminine swagger, and the chutzpah to praise her four-year-old daughter’s hot-dog-eating abilities. “You just keep on doing that, darlin’, and you’ll never have want of nothin’,” she would say. “Men just love that, I don’t know why.” You can’t write stuff like that, but you can sure as hell absorb it and splinter it off into another five or ten characters. Not to mention the subliminal feminist ramifications!
Roseanne continued with radical stand-up, alienating every white male within a 2,000-mile radius (a talent she maintains to this day, incidentally). As the threatened male-dominated Denver clubs began to close their doors to her, she instead branched out as a fledgling producer and integrated herself into the Denver art scene. But as her stand-up became more mainstream, more and more of our daily workaday lives melded themselves into the Becoming Roseanne Connor Family. By couching a radical feminist doctrine in a safe, chubby housewife, she was able to go inside the stereotype and eventually, I truly believe, enact real, measurable change into the consciousness of the average American woman.
While this has been a generally positive development, Roseanne’s persona unfortunately spawned its own Moriarty. While it talks like Roseanne Connor, the leviathan Sarah Palin is busy going inside her own stereotype as well. I only hope that when they remake The Dead Zone, they cast Tina Fey in the role originally played by Martin Sheen. You really can’t blame the Palin phenomenon on Roseanne, I guess, but I’ll bet Ms. Palin would have presented herself differently had there never been a Rose-anne Connor.
Eventually, destiny came to Roseanne in the form of Johnny Carson. Her five-minute monologue on The Tonight Show fired the opening salvo in the real war of the sexes. A new sheriff was in town and, baby, she was loaded for bear. The Friday night her monologue aired, I was driving across the moonlit Wyoming tundra with our three kids asleep in the back in what was to become our last “normal” year of life in Denver. Things would change very soon, and they would change hard. Overnight success has its own agenda. There is no preparation for this, no support group, no legend, no diagrams; you simply hold on to the barrel as you cascade over the falls. In 1988, shit would come in so fast and so hard that it is only now, twenty years after the fact, that I can even get my head around it.
When Roseanne first exploded across the national consciousness, the tabloids began their crazy dance. One has to live through shredding one’s billing statements, peeling off prescription bottle labels, separating booze bottles from the regular trash, and erasing planted calls off answering machines to fully appreciate the horror of the microscope. But it can be fun, too. When NBC and Fox aired their competing (and unauthorized) “Roseanne” biopics, we gathered around the television, panning the actors who had been cast to play our extended family.
Roseanne has written of her creative struggles with ABC in prior works, but I was there and I saw what she did. She not only talked the talk, she walked the walk. Much of the Hollywood establishment simply viewed her as a spoiled brat, an 800-pound gorilla, a histrionic, salivating she-bitch. And she is. The reason Roseanne prevailed is because Roseanne Connor was Roseanne Barr, and no one understands that better than she. She knocked the network suits on their asses by the simple virtue of presenting the truth. I can only hope someday the rest of the world will catch up to what she was saying all along.
For nine years, Roseanne Connor held forth on her bully pulpit; Roseanne Barr has held forth a lot longer than that. Within these pages, she will once again regale you with her unique vision, her misanthropy, and her general intolerance of slack-jawed, drooling dunces. You will learn of her impending decline into her golden years and of smelling like pee, her obsessions with serial killers, conservatives, Satan, and blaming everything on everyone else. Pure vintage Rosie, and the final maturation of those scraps of Rocky Mountain paper. Read this book and enjoy once again that special descent into the catacombs of her mind. It’s all here; you just have to look for it.
And don’t be afraid.
ROSEANNE ARCHY
Dispatches from the Nut Farm
Introduction
The first thing I asked myself after making everyone I know check around to see if they could get me a book deal was, Why the hell am I thinking about writing another book? After all, everywhere you look, some pouty intellectual is whining about how we live in a postliterate age, which means that nobody reads anything longer than a text message, and even those are just a few dumb-ass abbreviations strung together—LOL (laugh out loud), LMFAO (laughing my fucking ass off), ROFLMAO (rolling on floor laughing my ass off), TTYL (talk to you later), or LOLSTC (laughed out loud scared the cat!).
Now here I am, almost fifty-eight years old, being completely honest with myself as I begin to approach middle age (LOL), full to the brim with wisdom, grandmotherly love, and the kind of gas that only a whole head of roasted garlic can generate, so you, dear reader, are in for a treat. I wanted to write the kind of book that I’d like to read, but my publishers, who just got bought again (this time by a Chinese hedge fund or something), told me that trashy crime novels full of lurid sex and gory details that forensics freaks love to revel in are just rotting on the racks. So I went straight to Plan B: a timely, eclectic book by a Baby Boomer that even younger people could take home and read, if they could in fact read after coming up through our skool systom (ROFLMAO).
Speaking of younger people, my five kids (I used to be pro-life), who
think of me as a Mominatrix who has somehow always managed to both cruelly neglect them and butt into their lives too much, are glad I’m writing it. In fact, my whole formerly estranged extended family is happy about it. I think it’s because it’ll give them a chance to really consider my words carefully, get to know me all over again, and then see if there’s anything in here that would give them grounds to sue me. God love ’em.
I know damn well that there are a lot of people who never really got to know me and still don’t like me, but this really isn’t a book about ex-husbands. Some people are almost incurable hardcases, and despite the fact that legions of Roseannethropologists have determined that I’ve done our desperately diverse, dynamically dysfunctional culture way more good than harm, some folks just won’t let me live down that night all those years ago when I started the National Anthem too high, and ended up sounding like a screechy but brittle blend of battlefield surgery and a pterodactyl with its tit in a wringer. I’ve said I’m sorry a million times! I know this is a Christian nation and all that, but can’t they at least consider forgiving me after all these years? Talk about going the extra mile: I’m a Jew and I dressed up like Hitler and baked little burned people cookies to atone for my poor performance! What more can I do, for Christ’s sake?
I know that there are a lot of books out there right now by well-known people in the comedy business, people who are utterly brilliant and have timely, relevant things to say—funny things, poignant things that go straight to the heart after tickling the funny bone. Some of these talented figures, many younger than I, have enjoyed big success on TV more recently than I have, and they’re getting rave reviews. I’m not too proud to say that I hate those people. But I can’t let the jealousy I feel for them and my inability to focus keep me from trying to show them up and get out there and have my say, too!
I just know this book will be wildly successful and well received because I’m someone who surrounds myself with positive energy and light, someone who doesn’t let negative, demoralizing words like failure or disappointment or exercise even begin to creep into her life. I learned an important, valuable lesson years ago, when I used to smoke three or four packs of cigarettes a day: I am no quitter! I do whatever it takes to make things work—to make them fulfilling and joyous.
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