• • •
When Sergey and I did our exhibition performance that night it was nothing short of a comedy routine. Sergey had choreographed the most divine, sexy waltz for us. We called it the “dirty waltz” because it was no DWTS waltz. The story behind it was lovers who just couldn’t get enough of each other but sadly couldn’t seem to stay together.
A huge lawn lies in the midst of extraordinary gardens just in front of the massive villa outside Padova, nearer Venezia. Because Sergey had the job of training all the dance couples, he had little time for us. He created the dance early in the morning, and we had just one go at it in rehearsal. The other dance couples danced on the stage at the end of the endless lawn. Sergey and I had the lawn lit up with periwinkle-colored lights, the same color that was bleeding across the 16th-century villa. Our dance was a barefoot dance in the grass, covering the entire span of the massive lawn.
Wow, it was a sexy dance. It was dynamic and dramatic and riddled with sexual tension. We’d come together and push apart, as lovers do. We would cling to each other and twirl and Sergey had incorporated ballet into the dirty dance—not for me but for him, thank god, with leaps and bended knee and pirouettes. I’d never danced a dance so intense and emotional. At the end of our rehearsal that morning we were sure we would blow everyone’s Italian minds. At the previous event we had danced the same cha-cha that Maks and I had danced on DWTS. It became our private joke: “Should we do the road show?” That’s what we called the cha-cha to Cee Lo Green’s “Forget You (Fuck You).” But this night we were doing our own original rendition of the dirty waltz in front of hundreds of appreciative Venetians.
My dress was a glorious, long, lime-green silk with a train six feet long trailing behind when I walked. It was sexy. I was tan and barefoot. Sergey was tan and buff and wore black jeans and a violet cotton shirt that matched the periwinkle lights projected on the villa. The only difference in that morning rehearsal and that evening’s performance was all the dew sparkling underneath the violet lights and the moon.
We began our dance. We first walked along the edges, each on opposing sides of the dew-laden lawn. A very dramatic entrance. Then we ran into each other’s arms in a frenzy and met in the middle, 50 feet away from the edges, and fell into a lovers’ clutch. I pushed him away, and as I was choreographed to do, ran to the edge of the lawn again, sort of; by this time my dress was drenched with dew. It was soaking wet. The breezy silk felt like water-soaked wool. But I made it to the edge. This was the part where I look over my shoulder at my man doing pirouettes and gallant leaps toward me, to win me back. His pirouettes were sort of goofy-looking, awkward, and his leaps were about six inches off the ground when he burst into my arms and said, “This ground is so fucking wet, I can’t get any height.” I quickly whispered back, “My dress is so fucking soaked, it feels like a wet blanket.” And yet we tried to spin and twirl in an emotional burst that symbolized our lover’s frenzy.
Sergey, it seems, was standing on my green silk dress that had now grown at least 24 inches longer all around the hem.
“You’re on my dress.”
“Pull it the fuck out.”
“I can’t, you’re fucking standing on it.”
Sergey being the pro dancer he is, in a flourish of hand and arm, swept down, grabbed my soaking wet dress, and threw it into the air! I swooped my arm under it so that the massive weight of the train was over my left arm. We continued. All this stuff only took about three seconds but seemed an eternity.
Twirling, whirling, running, sliding doors, opening out, dips, twinkling, shadowing, until my dress dropped off of my arm. Again, “Dip, fucking dip,” he demanded.
“I can’t because you’re standing on my fucking dress.”
Angrily he whispered, “Dip the fuck anyway. This is the finale. Do a back bend, do something. Fuck!”
So I did a back-bend-sorta thing and threw my inside leg up for the extended toe point, the opposite leg that is supposed to be lifted. But fuck, I at least dipped to the soggy ground with my fake blond hair sopping up the dew and my other leg over his shoulder. As we then walked off, arms around each other in the choreographed “walk off the dance lawn,” Sergey was walking all over my dress—again! My straps were hanging to my elbows and we both looked at each other with big, professional, toothy dance grins.
“Fuck you.”
“No, fuck you!”
By the next morning Sergey’s crush status had risen to a level 2.
Sergey and I took our DWTS fundraising format all around Europe and England. We never performed the dirty waltz again. It seemed it was too dangerous to our budding flirtations. We stuck with the road show cha-cha as our exhibition dance.
We were together 24 hours a day, and we got to know each other very well—extremely well. We became each other’s confidants and would talk for hours about life, dreams, and goals. We were inseparable.
By the time we hit Paris, Sergey was a stone cold level 6. The danger zone. We had flirted from shore to shore, joking or not, that it would happen “tomorrow.”
I can’t think of a more free time in my life. There were no rules, no limits. I didn’t have to do an ABC pilot until December and the book I was writing wasn’t due for seven months. I would have to go to NYC sometime in November to shoot a TV commercial, but that was all in the distance.
Sergey and I were always in separate hotel rooms. In Positano I was in a two-bedroom bungalow, far away from the hotel, whereas he had a room on the ocean side of the hotel itself.
Friends would come and go, Italian friends, American friends, Jonathan Knight, assistants. They would stay in my suite in the second bedroom or in a different room in the hotel. Then before we went to Paris, the night before we left Italy, friends just disappeared and it was Sergey and me alone, together.
Nothing much changed. I wrote, he talked to his ex and future girlfriends on the phone and flirted. I flirted with occasional men but mostly we just hung out together and flirted and laughed about “tomorrow.”
We flew away to Paris for our final fundraising dance exhibition. I’d booked us in the Hotel Coste, a trendy, high-class boutique hotel close to Place Vendôme. The last time I’d been there was my last holiday with Black. It’s a provocative hotel, sexy and chic. Everyone who works there looks as if they’ve stepped out of an Armani ad.
The hotel is too cool for anyone, actually, and there is always groovy music, oo-chinka-oo music, club music, Buddha Bar stuff. The hotel has its own soundtrack, for Christ’s sake.
Sergey and I had adjoining rooms for the first time on our journey. The rooms are lush with burgundy red walls which would usually repel me, but in the Hotel Coste it works. The rooms feel like a high-class bordello from the 1930s. Romantic, provocative, oozing sexuality.
Sergey and I went to see Jim Morrison’s gravesite in the famed Père-Lachaise cemetery. We were dicking around with me walking on a short wall while he was beside me in the street. We were holding hands for the sake of my balance. Snap, snap, snap, we spotted French paparazzi scurrying in and out of the historical tombs and little beautiful houselike things where dead people have rested for centuries. Snap, snap, snap.
We joined friends for lunch and looked at artwork. Snap, snap, snap.
We had dinner hours later with the same friends and I decided to have wine. You know, one of my good ideas. We all drank Merlot and Mouton Rothschild, then visited the most extraordinary Parisian home I’ve ever laid eyes on. They were treating Sergey and me like we were a couple. Like we were together as lovers. But don’t the French always have a lover or two tucked in their back pocket? We played word games, drank wine, and laughed and flirted, said au revoir and then walked to our hotel.
I was thinking, Is this “tomorrow”? Are we really going to do this? Of course it would ruin our relationship. He’s a friend, he’s my dance teacher. He’s my children’s friend. Shoo, shoo, off you go, sane realities, I thought. The entire world thinks I’m a cougar, the most overused word of 20
08 to 2012. Was it wrong to take a boy lover? And he isn’t a boy; wasn’t he simply a 23-year-old man!? I’d been married three years by the time I was 23. I’ve gone on dates with men much older than me, years ago, when much older than me existed. And what about all my guy friends who’ve married or dated women 20, 30, 40 years younger? Sure they were all rich and that had to have something to do with the women who fall for older men. Let’s face it, it’s hard to find a woman who fell for a 30-year-old trash collector. And why the hell can’t I be like other people? Why can’t I just have affairs or brief encounters and go on about my life? Do I have to fall in love or be in love with a man to shag him? But I do love Sergey in many ways. I’ll convince myself—yes! The love is there, well, a certain kind of love. And I should do something daring. I should not remain the born-again virgin I’ve become over recent times. And he certainly seems willing and able. He’d propositioned me a hundred times . . . or was he kidding? Oh lord, stop this noise!!
Back at the den of iniquity I could feel my conviction waning. Doesn’t sleeping with a friend always end badly? And especially a dancer friend who hops on and off his partners like a round of leapfrog? Oh my, oh my, I’ve got it! I’ll order some wine.
“What are you doing over there?” Sergey hollered from his adjoining room.
“I’m ordering wine, you want some?” asked the spider of the fly.
“No, I’m good! But you wanna talk?”
“Um . . . er . . . YES I want to ‘talk,’ ” I hollered to the next room.
The wine was delivered by Kate Moss. There were two glasses. “Want one of these?” I said as he walked into my room and plopped down on my bed.
“Nah, I’m sorta tired, why? You wanna have sex?” he laughed. Gulp. He’d only said this to me 350 times during the course of our dance-a-thon. Gulp. He was just kidding . . . I think. He certainly wasn’t paying any attention to me. He was lying on the bed beside me looking at the ceiling and fiddling with his phone.
“Okay, I’ll drink them both,” I resolved. Gulp, down went the first glass. I was still buzzed from the dinner and party wine. Gulp, down went the second glass. Now I was looped.
Parker used to theorize that when I was drinking, you had a 15-minute window of opportunity to shag me: smack between me laughing hysterically and falling asleep.
After the last glass of wine I began to slur and laugh. “Hmmm, do I want to have sex? Hmmmm, do I? . . . Hahahahahahahahahahaha . . .” I was off and running . . . “Let’s see here, hahahahaha,” I nervously laughed. He began laughing out of control, a genuine laugh, not a wine-induced laugh like mine.
“What . . . what?” I continued. “Can I ask a serious question?” Oh, fuck, here we go, now I’m out of control.
“Yes,” he said, with a smile on his little Hummel doll face. “Yes, you may.”
“Um, er, eh, am I drunk enough?” slipped out. He began laughing more, having no idea what my babble meant.
“Ohhhhhhh yes . . . I could say you’re plenty drunk.”
“Okay, here’s the real quersssstion,” I began, slurring the word “question.” “You know how chicks always tell people when they have sex with someone? I mean we alrees tell a girlfriend when we’ve slept wit sormone.”
“Yes,” he said.
“Okay, so, Puppy, if we ever had srex, who would you trell?”
Puppy thought about it for a while as I was getting a minibottle of wine out of the cabinet. I really needed it. I uncorked it.
“Hmmm, now, that’s an interesting question,” he pondered.
In my head all I could think of were my ex-husband’s words: Dude, she was in hysterics and now she’s slurring, hurry up and answer the fucking question, you got 10 minutes to bang the broad or she’ll be out cold.
“Yeah, that is an interesting question. I think I know the answer.”
“Really?” I seductively asked, toying with him as I began to drink my third glass of wine while sitting delicately on the side of my Parisian bed, leaning toward him. “Who? Who would you have to trell, Puppy?” I whispered like a sultry French chat.
“Yep, yeah, I’d have to tell my mother. My mom is a huge fan of yours, ya know, and I always tell her who I sleep with.”
I was out like a light.
By morning Sergey was demoted to a level 0. So was his mother.
For every stunning, smart, well-coiffed hot woman over 40, there is a bald, paunchy relic in yellow pants making a fool of himself with some 22-year-old waitress. Ladies, I apologize for all of those men who say, “Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?” Here’s an update for you. Nowadays, 80 percent of women are against marriage. Why? Because women realize it’s not worth buying an entire pig just to get a little sausage.
—ANDY ROONEY
Closing Notes
SO THOSE are some of my Men stories. There are, of course, many more, but a girl likes to keep some in the vault for her next exhibition.
For the most part I chose to tell you either the funniest stories I could recall or the ones that were most poignant. To the men I didn’t write about: you are not forgotten, but perhaps you might wanna take the funny shit up a notch or create a more interesting story line.
During the course of writing this book I’ve experienced the agony and ecstasy of reflecting on a life well lived, and have had several beneficial epiphanies. For one thing, I realized that I’ve purged all of my misdeeds like some self-appointed confessional, the same way I’ve told my children all the bad things I’ve done at bedtime in lieu of fairy tales. My children never laugh so hard as they do when they learn the stupid shit I’ve done. So I hope you enjoyed the shit, too.
Secondly, I realized that there’s a lot of crap I haven’t done, so I’d like to summarize these “haven’t done” bad things:
I haven’t cheated on a boyfriend or a husband (meaning having sex with anyone else).
I haven’t dated married men.
I’ve not broken up anyone else’s marriage.
I’ve never murdered someone or stabbed anyone in the stomach.
I’ve never slept with anyone for a job.
I’ve never practiced prostitution.
I’ve never set a house on fire (intentionally) or been a polygamist or rapist.
I’ve not done heroin, crack, or crystal meth, and I’ve never robbed a convenience store (intentionally).
It gives me great solace to tell you this, as perhaps it balances out some of the sins of my past.
The next thing I realized was that women actually have had a profound effect on my life. Perhaps their influences have been more subtle, and for the most part, sans the high drama of the men in my life, but I can now clearly see the impact, for better or worse, they’ve had on my life.
But the main thing I twigged on throughout the writing of this book was how terribly lucky and blessed I’ve been to have been surrounded by some of the most powerful, intelligent, loving men walking the planet.
They have each, in their own unique way, shaped me into who I am. The memories of all of them give me something to reflect upon, to be thankful for, and to laugh about. A few have given me nightmares, but nonetheless, they’ve given me something to gossip about.
My dudes adorn the galleries of my life as do the fine paintings in the Louvre. Their brushstrokes continue to shape and inspire my own artistry, for there is no greater beauty nor larger canvas than the one we call our life.
So to all you glorious, crazy-assed, motherfucking men who have contributed to my art collection: I thank you and I embrace the opportunities I’ve experienced by loving you.
Acknowledgments
I want to thank Peggy Crawford for typing my book for me and for laughing at my stories along the way.
I also want to thank my children, True and Lillie, for supporting me writing this book, by not doing any totally idiotic things that would distract me. Now that the book is complete . . . carry on.
My husband whisked me away in a fire truck—this gave a new meanin
g to a “hot” relationship.
Babies who get married—love that Bob!
Shivers down my spine—ahhh, Jake!
“Funny little good for nothing Nicky” and me at the opera in 1982.
Merrit Butrick and I goofing around on the set of my first movie, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.
Tom, Tom, Tom—could you be any hotter? Too bad you were dating my roommate! Hehe
Tom Selleck and I on the set of Runaway—right before Gene Simmons murdered me!
Newlyweds on the town in Hollywood!
This is the best present Parker ever gave me—Cinderella. Jeez! He’s so f’ing handsome—wow.
“Hormone” (Mark Harmon) and I all dressed up on the set of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
Luckiest actress in Hollywood. Hubba hubba.
We came so close . . . and yet so far.
“Oh Woody, I adore you.”
David Crosby—love me some David!
McDreamy before he was Dr. McDreamy.
“True” love.
John and I rehearsing the foxtrot—what? Was this move part of it?
John and I celebrating in Vancouver.
We shared everything—almost.
The Art of Men [I Prefer Mine al Dente] Page 25