Over the years I had learned it takes hundreds of crew members to create a show or a production. Even producers have their respective areas of expertise. Some are great at working with writers while others handle heavy-duty decision-making. Craig and Neil and I were all on the same page when it came to my role as co-producer. We all felt handling the merchandising for the show would be my strong suit. I was extremely confident in my knowledge of merchandising. Going all the way back to The Mod Squad, Aaron’s shows spurred lunch boxes, gum, trading cards, and of course T-shirts and posters. By the time Aaron was making 90210 and its spin-off, Melrose Place, his production company had a partnership with a merchandising company called Worldvision.
What always started out as Aaron asking my opinion about merchandise for a specific show ended up with me assuming responsibility for creating the merchandise. 90210 presented us with a whole variety of youth market options including nail polish, backpacks, jewelry boxes, messenger bags, and of course T-shirts, sweatshirts, and baseball caps. We also made a line of dolls based on the characters with Mattel. Melrose Place had many of the same items, but because the cast was a group of twentysomethings who hung out at Shooters, we also made souvenir shot glasses and T-shirts from the fictitious bar.
My cumulative experience at Jax, Lehr & Spelling, QVC, and of course all of Aaron’s shows gave me an exceptional base of knowledge.
I started by sending inquiries to probably a dozen merchandising companies. Some of them specialized in Broadway shows and others handled concerts and live events but were willing to accommodate our needs. The bids came in, and it turned out to be better to go with a vendor who specialized in Broadway shows. At the end of the day, we produced T-shirts and hats fashioned to fit the style of the show. And of course we had to have the signature bow tie worn by J. Pierrepont Finch. We also had books, scores, and CDs, all of which sold in the kiosk at the theater.
I was very proud of our merchandising sales. The theatergoers went mad for the merchandise. As reported by Playbill, we had record-breaking ticket sales the week of Daniel’s final performance.
That week may have been the last for Daniel, but it was just the beginning for me. I had found the niche I was looking for. When another company offered me the opportunity to be involved with Nice Work If You Can Get It, I was thrilled to jump on board. This show was described to me as “Gershwin, girls, and glamour.” They had me at Gershwin. The show, which takes its name from the Gershwin song, is set in the 1920s Prohibition era. It is filled with the most captivating music and dance numbers. Matthew Broderick, who played the lead role of Jimmy Winter, was just fabulous, and the director Kathleen Marshall honestly just astounded me with her talent.
The show just had its final performance in June 2013. It was nominated for and won several Tony Awards as well as Drama Desk Awards and Drama League Awards. It was nice work for someone who just a couple of years ago was doing some serious soul searching, and now everything was falling into place.
Last year, I had remarkably good fortune once again when I was introduced to Scott Sanders, an Emmy–and Tony Award–winning theater, film, and television producer whose earlier shows included The Color Purple and Evita. He was well on his way to putting together another musical with a brilliant creative team that included Warren Carlyle, Daryl Waters, Isabel Toledo, and Wynton Marsalis’s the Jazz at Lincoln Center All-Stars. He asked me to join as a producer, and it was thrilling to be there for the first preview and see the crowd up on their feet dancing and swaying to the big-band songs of Duke Ellington. Even more exciting was opening night and the rave reviews that followed proclaiming After Midnight a “must-see” for all.
24
Sex and the City of Angels
Somewhere between my writing the book, producing plays on Broadway, and selling The Manor, my girlfriends decided that I needed to start dating. They reminded me that it was one thing to have found my career-woman self, but now I needed to get back to dating so I could have balance.
Saying that my core group of girlfriends urged me to date is an understatement. Forced me is more like it, really. Now in order for me to talk about dating, I need to change the names of the innocent. Just like in Dragnet, “Ladies and Gentlemen, the story you are about to hear is true. Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent.” In this case the names have been changed to protect the guilty as well.
After Aaron died I wasn’t ready to date or even think about dating for quite awhile. To be honest, it was the furthest thing from my mind. After about a year, my friends kept saying that I needed to get out there and do whatever. It was the “whatever” part that made it all so difficult for me. It was daunting to think about. I hadn’t done any dating since I was nineteen years old and started dating Aaron. Except for one or two dates during our breakups before we were married, Aaron was it. How was it possible that I was going to start dating again and at my age? From what I could tell, “dating” had an entirely different connotation than it had more than three decades ago. In my day, a date was dinner and a movie, or if you were feeling ambitious, dinner, a movie, and dancing.
As I mulled it over, I could hear the trumpets from The Dating Game television show with Jim Lange. I tried to picture myself on that high stool, asking questions of three eligible bachelors on the other side of the partition.
The bottom line when it came to the topic of dating was the fact that it simply wasn’t easy coming to terms with the idea that I was no longer a married woman. I’d worn a wedding band for thirty-eight years of my married life and kept it on for a year after Aaron passed away. Even then I didn’t keep it off all of the time. To this day, I still wear my wedding band when I go out if I am so inclined. I wear it with one of the other rings that Aaron gave me over the years. He never gave me an engagement ring, but as time went on, he more than made up for it.
I went online and read that there was a significant increase in baby boomers dating online. There were several sites for my age group, and they all touted their success stories. AARP had their own site called perfectmatch.com. There was also seniorpeoplemeet.com. I certainly wasn’t going to register on highlifeadventures.com since hang gliding and rock climbing are not my kind of thing. I also found ourtime.com and olderdatingonline.com. There were some cougar websites, but I wasn’t interested in younger men. I wanted someone age appropriate. The only site I even considered registering for was youmustlovedogs.com.
I finally agreed to take the leap of faith when a good friend of mine fixed me up on a blind date. Suffice it to say that as the date became closer to a reality, I grew more than a little nervous. Finally the day arrived. I was a nervous wreck. I pulled myself together and dressed in something simple but elegant. I put on my face and made sure to draw on a smile.
The date was supposed to be drinks and dinner, but I ended the evening after just half a glass of wine. Here’s where the protection of the guilty begins. Let’s call him “Oscar” because he was like an octopus and that is a good name for an octopus. Oscar just couldn’t keep his hands off of me. Oh my god. It was so horrible. Really, it was as though he had eight pairs of hands. After what felt like a very long forty-five minutes, when I finally realized that Oscar was too affectionate for me, I finally pushed my chair back from the table.
“I’m sorry, but you know what? This really isn’t going to work for me.” I stood up, smoothed out my blouse, which looked like it had been man-handled, and then I left the restaurant. He was a doctor, so it made sense that being out with him was practically like undergoing an examination.
Okay, so it wasn’t beginner’s luck, but at least I was out there. Another one of my girlfriends became my cheerleader and refused to allow my blind date with Oscar derail me. She fixed me with up with “Larry.” Larry actually sounded very good. He was seventy, educated, and a professional. Like me he had also lost a spouse. I happen to have a friend who’s in the FBI, so I asked him to do a background check on Larry. After Oscar, I figured I couldn’t be too careful. It
was my version of Googling someone. It turns out Larry was really seventy-five. I wondered why a man would lie about his age. Could I trust a man who lied about his age? I guess we’re all entitled to shave off a few years when we get to a certain age, and, I have to say, Larry looked good for seventy. He looked even better for seventy-five.
We went to dinner, and even though it was our very first date, I could tell that he was very into me. In fact, I had a sneaking suspicion that he could see me as his next wife. My womanly instincts told me Larry was the kind of guy who wanted to be married. He wasn’t dating to date. He was looking for a wife to share his golden years with. I knew from experience that widowed men don’t do as well alone as widowed women. It was sweet. Then again it also made me uncomfortable because I just wanted to date.
After Larry and I went to dinner a couple of times, my friend Nancy’s daughter, Whitney, sat me down. Whitney was twenty-seven years old. This wasn’t a friendly chat. It was “the talk.” Even my mother and I never had “the talk.” Whitney felt it was essential to bring me up to speed on the brave new world of dating. She explained that dating wasn’t the same as it was when I was dating Aaron and before I dated Aaron. I told her I had already figured that out. She told me bluntly she wasn’t talking about dinner and a movie versus dinner and dancing. She bluntly said that before there was any sex, I really needed to ask my intended for a health report.
I suddenly felt like a dinosaur in a sex education class. A health report? I was supposed to ask a man I barely knew for a health report? Oh, and we were already talking about sex? I was still dealing with the notion of just kissing another man that wasn’t Aaron. This jogged my memory and brought to mind the days when people warned that you could get mononucleosis from kissing a boy.
How times had changed.
A kiss really is the most intimate thing. The other is just an act that anyone can do. For a woman, at least for me, intimacy in bed is not nearly as personal as a kiss. For women, it’s always the foreplay that’s more exciting. For men, it’s a whole different story.
When I did finally kiss Larry, it just wasn’t the same as what I recalled when I kissed Aaron for the first time and so many times after that. Now I’m not saying I didn’t feel a little “you know” … but it wasn’t the same kind of “you know,” and I wasn’t expecting the kiss to feel the same. To tell you the truth, I think I felt a little guilty that I was kissing somebody else at all.
Back to well-intentioned Whitney and her lecture on the birds and the bees and health reports. She really was so protective of me and clearly wanted to help me protect myself in more ways than one. She went on to say that not only did I need a full health report from my date, but even if I were presented with a clean bill of health, he also still needed to wear a condom. I was just appalled. I had only had sex with two men and I had been married to both of them. I mean, wasn’t it bad enough that I had to ask a man for a health report? Now and possibly worse, I was supposed to ask a man to wear a condom? At that point, any suspicions I had about the difference between old dating and new dating were confirmed.
Apparently in the world of middle-aged dating in the twenty-first century, if you have dinner or drinks twice, it’s almost expected that you jump into bed with one another. Oscar the Octopus measured progress by the drink, and he had a one-drink rule. Here’s the thing: I’m not naive and if memory serves me correctly, in my day, once you’d been dating for months, yes, the issue eventually came up. Romance sure had changed since the 1960s when love was free and not getting pregnant was the only thing that a girl worried about. Larry and I had only gone to dinner a couple of times and seriously, was I supposed to ask him for his medical report and buy a supply of condoms? I listened to Whitney and took everything seriously, but it all seemed a bit premature at that point.
Well, after two months, the subject did come up with Larry. We were kissing one evening and it seemed clear that things might go further in the romance department. I took it upon myself to interrupt the session. I told him point-blank that I needed him to give me a health report.
Talk about a showstopper. Larry was a good sport, though. Maybe he was more aware of the new ways of the dating world than I was. He sat me down beside him like a child who was about to be lectured. I made sure to give him my full attention. In exchange, he gave me a kind and reassuring look.
“Oh, honey, you don’t need a health report from me. I had prostate cancer and my prostate was removed. And besides, I haven’t been sleeping around.”
That was not the answer I was expecting to hear. Suddenly I heard Whitney’s voice loud in my head. I asked him what the removal of his prostate had to do with sexually transmitted diseases. I reiterated that I still wanted a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.
Larry got the picture, and within a few days, he had submitted his report to me. His marks were high. He had an A plus. It makes me laugh that although it really is a serious issue, nowadays having sex is like applying for a job. You require everything but the references. Despite Larry’s squeaky-clean health report, I still had to deal with the condom issue. I commended Larry for the squeaky-clean report but knew nothing was going to happen unless we used a condom.
I had only bought condoms once in my life, and it was just after Tori was born. The doctor instructed us to have protected sex for six weeks. I went into Aaron’s office to remind him.
“So you’re going to get the prophylactics, right?”
Aaron was on the phone, as usual, engrossed in conversation. It was clear the task was up to me. I was in a room outside of Aaron’s office and I picked up the phone and just called the drugstore. I didn’t have the nerve to go in and buy them, so I figured I would just order them over the phone and then someone, or even I, could pick them up in a well-disguised brown paper bag. There I was on the phone with the drugstore when Aaron’s assistant came in and sat down next to me. I had to whisper into the receiver with my hand cupped over the mouthpiece so he wouldn’t hear me.
“This is Mrs. Spelling. I’d like to order some prophylactics please.”
It was all very cloak and dagger, and my whispering was so muffled that the man at the drugstore couldn’t hear me. He kept saying, “What? Who is this? What is it you want? Can you speak up?” Finally it was just hopeless, so I just spoke up.
“This is Mrs. Spelling, and I need to buy prophylactics.”
Aaron’s assistant got a little bit squirmy and looked the other way. You can imagine how mortifying it was for me to buy condoms as newly single woman when I couldn’t buy them forty years earlier as a married woman who had just had a child.
Times have changed in more ways than one. Now that we need the condoms on dates almost in the same way we need breath mints, it’s harder to buy them anonymously. You can’t just pick up the phone and call your neighborhood drugstore anymore. You can order them online, but I worry about what kind of spam would start filtering into my inbox the instant I place an order for condoms.
The more I thought about it, the more I thought it might be time for me to take charge of my life and walk into a drugstore and buy them. I mean, I had learned to use a computer, an iPhone, and an iPad. Maybe this was just part of being a modern woman?
To say I was in a panic as I walked into a mega-pharmacy on La Cienega Boulevard doesn’t quite capture it. I wanted to be far enough away from home that nobody I knew would see me. I also hoped this wouldn’t be on those moments where somebody walked up to me and asked, “Aren’t you …” Maybe I should have worn the trench coat, fedora, and sunglasses with the fake nose after all.
I waited until there was no one else around me and finally found my way to the condom section. I was absolutely stunned that there was what seemed like an entire aisle dedicated to condoms and other male and female intimacy products. It was overwhelming. It was no different than buying shampoo. Shampoos for normal hair, dry hair, oily hair, normal to dry hair, normal to oily hair, straight, curly, more volume, taming, color guard, even shampoos that m
ake your hair grow.
As far as I could tell, it was the same thing with the condoms. There were so many varieties that my head was spinning. Latex, lambskin, polyurethane. Different strengths, sizes, textures, shapes, and I won’t even go into the novelty choices and colors. I was a “Breck girl,” so I had no idea what to buy. I suppose I could have called Whitney since she was my advisor, but I felt that I needed to ask a man. I dialed my son from my cell phone. It all came pouring out in one long, breathless sentence.
“Okay, Randy, you’ve got to be a big boy about this. I’m about to tell you something and it’s going to sound a little scary but I need to buy condoms and I don’t know what kind to buy but I’m in the condom aisle at the drugstore and I can read you the labels and you tell me what I should get.”
I can’t even begin to tell you how uncomfortable Randy was. I wasn’t even sure he was still on the phone until I heard him take a very deep breath and sigh. He agreed to help me. I could tell he was implementing the “don’t ask, don’t tell” rule. With my cell phone cupped in my hand, I started at one end of the aisle and began to work my way through all the packages. I read all the descriptions to Randy out loud while he listened in silence on his end of the phone. Reading the descriptions for the condoms was as tough as reading a contract or blueprints. I can read contracts and line drawings and understand them easily at this point in my life, but all those different condoms were another story. When you consider I was reviewing them with my son, it added another dimension to what was happening on that aisle of the drugstore.
I tried to be clinical as I moved across the shelf. Randy was quiet until I got to the ones that said something like “Magnum Large Size.”
“No, Mom. That’s not good. Not good at all. That’s not what you want to buy. You could make a guy feel really bad if you bought those.”
I can’t remember exactly what kind Randy told me to buy. I waited until the line cleared at the register and when I handed them to the clerk, I tried to act very casual and matter of fact about the whole thing as though I bought condoms every day. Then I skulked through the parking lot and got in the car. I was exhausted. Getting ready for a date sure wasn’t just setting your hair in rollers like it used to be.
Candy at Last Page 13