Queen of the Oddballs

by Hillary Carlip

  “Hear what?”

  Max broke the news. “Ol’ Blue Eyes shut his peepers for good. Frank Sinatra passed away.”

  My mother gasped. “That’s so sad.” She welled up with tears and opened her purse to find a Kleenex. “Oh, sorry,” she said, embarrassed when she noticed her nicely manicured hands had turned black from the coins she’d been handling all morning. “You girls go ahead to the buffet. I’ll wash and meet you there.”

  My mother caught up with us between the omelet bar and the make-your-own-waffle station. We piled our plates high with empty carbs and moved to a booth.

  “Mom,” I said, chewing on a cold, rubbery waffle, which was more of a wawful, “don’t you think it’s kind of weird that whenever we come to Vegas someone famous kicks off?”

  She looked up from her oversized, most likely genetically enhanced, corn muffin. “Yeah, it is kind of strange.”

  “Maybe we’d better stop coming,” I declared.

  Mom’s lower lip jutted out. “Hill, I don’t understand what you don’t like about Vegas.”

  Then, in perfect timing, as if they magically appeared just to illustrate my point, Cher, Michael Jackson, President Clinton, and Marilyn Monroe sat down in the booth next to us with plates of eggs benedict.

  “Need I say more?” I answered. “Everything’s fake here. Even the hotels are busy trying to be something they’re not—Egypt, Rome, New York.”

  Maxine chimed in. “Mim, I understand why you might have loved Vegas years ago—when Frank and Sammy and the rest of the Rat Pack played here—when Ann-Margret rode onto the stage on her motorcycle. But today it’s just so….” Her voice trailed off, depleted by the depleted scene around us.

  Like a lawyer steadfastly defending her client, Mom inhaled deeply for dramatic effect. Then the words poured out. “I think it’s exciting and alive, like nothing in our everyday lives. I love the noise, the energy. Maybe it’s the oxygen they pump in, but I always feel high when I’m here. Did you notice there aren’t any clocks around? It’s timeless…mindless. It’s like anything goes.”

  I saw it then and there. For as mundane as her life in L.A. was, in Vegas, Mom’s world sparkled. I fell silent.

  We spent the rest of the day dropping coins into the slots, my mother chanting in Sinatra’s honor, “Luck be a lady!” Per usual, she wasn’t.

  Then that night, the lights inside each and every one of the towering casinos, as well as on the perpetually neon-studded strip, were dimmed for an entire minute in honor of The Voice. In the sudden deep blackout, just one marquee remained lit, featuring Frank’s face. Maxine and I hadn’t figured on that. Nice touch.

  When the lights came back on, my mom looked out of our hotel room window at the marquee in front of the Mirage, and read aloud: “Francis—there are not enough towels in the world to dry our tears.”

  “It’s true,” she muttered, drying her own tears with a Mirage-logo’d cocktail napkin from the minibar.

  I excused myself and went into the bathroom, where I couldn’t help but weep. And not for Sinatra, but for my mom. For her struggles, the life she lived with my dad, and the life she lived now without him. My tears were primal, as reflexive a gesture as taking my mom’s arm when we crossed the street or carrying her luggage even if together with mine it was too heavy to bear. I wanted to protect her, to shield her from pain, stave off disappointment.

  That night, in a faux-marbled, fluorescent-lit hotel bathroom, I realized I had become the parent.

  1999. The next year, several months before our scheduled trip, I started trying to talk Mom out of going to Vegas. “If we go, there’s no telling who else will croak just to keep up our family tradition.”

  She didn’t budge. I tried again.

  “I made a list of beloved celebrities in failing health. Do you want the blood of Joe DiMaggio on your hands?”

  But as much as I had been dreading the trip, Mom had been looking forward to it. So faster than you can say “Nudes on Ice,” it was back to Hell.

  This time Maxine couldn’t come with us because of work (lucky her) so I was forced to deal with the torture alone. A couple of days before departure, as I was sharing my dread, my filmmaker friend Jane came up with a brilliant suggestion. “Why don’t you take pictures and make a documentary of the trip?”

  I lit up. A creative project was all I needed to shift my outlook.

  And so, on our first day there, while Mom gambled to her heart’s content, I busily set about taking pictures.

  I posed my mother in insane tableaus…

  …and documented her winnings:

  On the second morning in Vegas, we hit the Venetian early and found ourselves gambling at a row of slot machines with a gang of men and women who all towered over six feet. I caught a glimpse of the badge one of them was wearing. Of course. They were attending the Tip Toppers Tall Club convention.

  By 11:30 we had worked up an appetite. We sat down for a meal at one of the hotel’s restaurants, Delmonico’s. At the table next to us sat a guy wearing a T-shirt that said, “I used to be schizophrenic, but now we’re just fine.” He was talking to his girlfriend in a too-loudy, Vegas-y voice, “I read that just last month Robin Leach was in that glass-walled ‘private’ room over there, and had six women take off all their clothes and cover themselves in whipped cream.”

  “Wait, they did that for the fat, old host from Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous?” his girlfriend gasped.

  “Totally.”

  “Ewww. Gross.”

  The thought of that ancient Leach-lech egging on six whipped cream-swathed babes in public was enough to make me push away my Louisiana Lump Crab Cakes.

  Then I saw it. Something familiar. A crowd gathering around one of the television sets at the bar. And I felt it, too. The buzz, the energy. The only thing that made hardened gamblers in Vegas stop for even a moment—breaking news.

  I threw down my napkin and ran up to the TV. But wait, there was no death montage. Instead, on the screen, was just an image of the ocean. For a long time. Miles and miles of the sea and nothing else. “What is it? What’s going on?” I asked the woman beside me. But before she could answer, I saw the crawl creeping along the bottom of the screen.

  John F. Kennedy Jr.’s plane missing at sea.

  I rushed back to our table. “Mom, I’m freaked,” I said. “You’re not gonna believe this.” I told her the news.

  “Oh my God,” she blurted. “Didn’t you meet JFK Jr. at Daryl Hannah’s birthday party?”

  “Yeah, we all ice skated together.”

  “Oh my God,” she repeated, tears beginning to fill her eyes.

  “Maybe they’ll find him,” I said, always optimistic.

  “I hope to God they do,” she whispered.

  Apparently the gossiping gourmets at the table next to us hadn’t heard the news or noticed the crowd at the bar. The guy continued his story. “The girls started licking the whipped cream off each other, then Robin Leach poured chocolate on one of their asses! He probably licked it clean!”

  Hellooo! John F. Kennedy Jr.’s plane is missing at sea, motherfuckers!

  “Mom, can we get out of here?”

  “Absolutely,” she said. “Let’s go back to the room.”

  As we each sat on our separate double beds and watched the television coverage, I couldn’t help but document the moment.

  “That family has had nothing but tragedies,” Mom said, her voice thick with tears.

  “Yeah.”

  “It makes you really count your blessings, doesn’t it?”

  Boy did it ever. I was so grateful for them all. Especially for my mom. For all she’d ever done for me, for all she’d ever been for me. She was alive and well and doing the best she could.

  I decided right then and there that, damn it, I was going to forever put aside my own personal Hell so I could help my mother feel Heaven on Earth.

  “So Mom,” I asked, “who do you think will kick the bucket when we come back next year?”


  I climbed over to the other bed and sat close to her. “Let’s place bets,” I said. “Double or nothing. Liza Minnelli.”

  My mom perked up. “I’ll take some of that action. My money’s on Ronald Reagan.” She laughed. The sparkle was back. Jackpot.

  2004

  The house in L.A. that I sold because I no longer felt inspired there is where the new owner, Alexander Payne, creates one of this year’s most lauded films, Sideways. (And even names a character after my housemate, Ken Cortland!)

  When President Bush calls for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, despite our “fear of commitment,” Maxine and I make an appointment in San Francisco to get married as an act of civil disobedience. The California Supreme Court orders a halt to gay marriages two days before our wedding date.

  The CIA admits that there was no imminent threat from weapons of mass destruction before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Thousands of troops and civilians have been killed in the war that Bush declared was over in 2003.

  Friends ends after a ten-year run, Frasier after eleven years, and Sex and the City after six. Meanwhile, to help my mother retire, I sell our family business for her, closing the doors after a sixty-year run.

  Two blows at the Jews—Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ and sacred kabbalah bracelets for sale at Target.

  I volunteer for presidential candidate Senator John Kerry, calling thousands of Democrats in Ohio and urging them to vote. We’ll never know if their votes were really even counted or not.

  While I start planning a comeback of Angel and the Reruns, my “all-girl, all ex-con band,” Martha Stewart goes to jail to serve a five-month sentence.

  Trendy Uggs seem more of a wardrobe malfunction than does Janet Jackson’s exposure of her right breast during the Super Bowl halftime show.

  Finding the OH! in Oprah

  I didn’t always want to bitch-slap Oprah. In fact, I used to be impressed by her generosity, determination, entrepreneurial skills, and compassion over Wynonna’s weight. But ever since I appeared on her show, it’s been a different story.

  It’s nine years after that appearance, and Maxine and I are on a long-overdue vacation when she turns on the TV and says three words I never imagined she’d utter. “Let’s watch Oprah.”

  I am stunned. “Are you on crack?” She knows that whenever I see or even hear mention of Oprah, my self-esteem plunges in Pavlovian response.

  Maxine shrugs. “It’s just that she’s talking about her favorite restaurants today, and the local paper said one of them is here in Montecito.”

  We are renting a little house on the beach in a town we loved long before Oprah put it on the map with the purchase of her 55-million-dollar home, where she has sleepovers with her best friend, Gayle. And it’s so incongruous seeing my hardworking girlfriend wanting—and actually having the time—to watch TV during the day, there is no way I can deny her.

  “Go ahead,” I say. “I’ll just read.”

  Let’s face it. The biggest thing that can happen to an author is to appear on Oprah. In 1995, when my book Girl Power: Young Women Speak Out was released, I pulled out all the big guns in my effort to manifest this goal. I set my intention, chanted, affirmed, visualized, prayed, and, well, spent way more money on a publicist than I could afford or had earned from the book’s advance. But I was determined.

  While the publicist worked her expensive magic, Maxine and I took another long-overdue vacation. We went to New Orleans, a place neither of us had been. Despite the city’s allure, I called home almost hourly to check my messages, as this was back in the days before cell phones. Our itinerary went something like: folk art stores, pay phone; jazz on Bourbon Street, pay phone; jambalaya, crawfish pie, chili gumbo, pay phone.

  Then, on our third day, at some random phone booth in the French Quarter, I checked my messages, and there it was—like some New Orleans lucky gris-gris bag full of magical charms and amulets—a message from the publicist.

  “We did it. You’re going to be on Oprah.”

  Nothing could top the exhilaration I felt—not even the city’s famous chicory coffee and beignets, which one day earlier had ranked high on my list. It was only when I beeped in and listened to the message for the third time that I actually heard the details: “They’re dedicating the whole episode to you and your book.”

  I broke out into a sweat and had to sit down, neither of which was included in my previous visualizations.

  I was so thrilled that I was going to appear on Oprah that I didn’t mind a bit when, three weeks later, the episode’s producer called and asked for some pre-production help. Since my book included writings from teenage girls from all walks of life, the producer had decided she wanted six girls from the book to appear on Oprah with me; she also wanted to pepper throughout the show pre-taped segments of twenty additional girls reading their excerpts from the book. So one year after writing Girl Power, I had to track down the twenty-six girls she’d selected, no small feat since most had moved or gone off to college. This could have been quite enjoyable sleuthing work for me—had there been a little thing called Google at the time. As it was, I had to make an average of five calls per girl to finally locate them all (that’s 130 calls total, but who’s counting?).

  I talked to all the girls, and from my conversations narrowed the list to six for the producer’s approval. When some didn’t work out, I had to pick others, then still others, until, at last, the final six were set.

  Oh, but my job wasn’t finished. I then had to obtain permission and signed releases from the girls’ parents and legal guardians, get copies of the books to all of the girls so they’d know what writing of theirs they would be reading, and sift through thousands of submissions I had received so I could find, gather, and then FedEx each of the twenty-six pieces in the girls’ original handwriting. All in two weeks. But I was more than happy to do everything the producer asked. After all, I was going to appear on Oprah.

  June 5, 1995

  Maxine and my ex (and still good friend) Danielle fly with me to Chicago on Oprah’s Official Carrier—American Airlines, Something Special in the Air. I have so often heard the announcer at the end of each show tell us that “Guests of the Oprah Winfrey Show stay at the All-Suites Omni Hotel, located in the heart of Chicago’s Magnificent Mile,” and I still can’t quite believe that one of those “guests” is now me.

  After we check into our room, which, according to the plaque on the door is the Authors Suite (and let me tell you, I’m feelin’ like an author—I’m going to appear on Oprah!), we find three of the six girls who have arrived, and we all go out to dinner. The teens are bubbling with confidence, totally psyched for tomorrow’s taping. I play along like I am, too, but actually, I’m scared shitless. I haven’t performed in years, and I’ve been much happier behind the scenes. And even when I was performing, I always managed to hide behind either a character (like Angel) or something distracting (like juggling and fire-eating). This is the first time since Art Linkletter’s House Party that I am going to have to appear on television as just me.

  The next morning my fear intensifies when I wake with a start from a nightmare in which I was on Oprah’s stage in front of a huge studio audience, completely naked, except for two large cinnamon buns I held in front of my breasts.

  I take a long hot shower and pull myself together. The limo picks us up and we’re whisked to Harpo Studios, where a production assistant leads me to the green room. I take deep breaths to calm down, and I almost succeed—until I see the breakfast spread, which includes large cinnamon buns. I don’t let my breasts anywhere near them.

  I am greeted by the producer, whom I’ve chatted with day and night for the past two weeks, and we hug like we’re old friends. As she ushers me into the makeup room, she informs me that this is the last day of taping before Oprah’s hiatus. Great. I’m sure Oprah’s mind is already in Hawaii, sitting at a luau eating four-ounce protein portions of roast pig and baked-not-fried taro chips. I try to talk myself d
own, but it’s not helping that the makeup woman is shaping my eyebrows into severe Cruella De Vil arches.

  O’s a professional, I silently tell myself. Even though it’s her last show of the season, she’ll be focused. No doubt she read the book—or at least skimmed it. She’ll relate to the adolescent tales of hardship; she’ll weep, clutch the book to her bosom, and proclaim: “I LOVE GIRL POWER. EVERYONE SHOULD READ THIS BOOK,” catapulting it to the bestseller list. I have faith in Oprah.

  The producer takes me and my scary eyebrows into the hallway to meet up with the girls. Then she escorts all seven of us onto the stage. The studio audience has already been seated. My heart races when I see the familiar Oprah set, where just this morning I sat naked, and it slows only a bit when I find Maxine and Danielle in the audience, radiating strength and comfort. The producer seats each of the teen girls on the stage until, like some tragic musical chairs game, I am left standing. I laugh off the mistake until the producer takes me by the arm.

  “Come with me,” she says.

  She then leads me to my seat…IN THE AUDIENCE.

  I am thrown into a rinse cycle of emotions. I’m baffled—had they told me I wouldn’t be on the stage but I missed that tiny detail in the pre-prod prep frenzy, or just blocked it out altogether? I’m furious—I’m not up there, representing MY book. I’m relieved—I won’t be so nervous if all eyes aren’t on me. I’m ashamed—this should be all about the girls anyway, not me. But mostly I feel ripped-off. How will viewers think the girls got here? That Oprah just happened upon them? Her producers searched high and low for them? Damn it, I spent almost two years crisscrossing the country, leading writing workshops for teen mothers and girls in gangs, participating at powwows and rodeos, attending surfing competitions on far-flung beaches and open mic nights at inner-city hip-hop joints, judging a teen beauty contest, and volunteering at a residential treatment center for at-risk girls. I nurtured, encouraged, and collected these girls’ writings, and then I included their excerpts with my own writing so that I could help give them, and other teen girls, a forum, a voice, an opportunity to speak out. These are my girls, damn it, they’re not Oprah’s. My hands are shaking.