by Jill Kargman
But I did as I was told: I kept stroking myself until it was time to progress to stroking while standing and then we added slowwww gyrations and then, eventually, finally, we were told to pair off to share a pole. I made a beeline for Divorced Girl. Turns out, she had some serious fire inside her broken soul. She let it out and her mane swirled with her. She seemed lost in thought. The teacher noticed and gave her some solid encouragement. That lit my personal competitive fire—I am not used to not being the teacher’s pet—and I decided I needed to rock it. Unfortunately, I made a weird off-putting screeching sound on the pole and looked like a pony trying to ride a pommel lift. I was all slipping hooves and awkward gripping and sad, fried, keratined head pubes instead of flowing, sexy locks. I could tell this wasn’t my game. My performance was an instant boner wilter.
This was especially apparent once Carol/Stephanie took the floor. She invited us to sit on our mats (crisscross applesauce, not Indian-style, of course) and then she demonstrated what we could be working toward should we choose to buy a class package and commit to ascending to level five. And then: she dimmed the lights, turned on some music, and had her way with the pole. Writhing and climbing and sliding and rubbing herself. Just seeing her thrashing and undulating made me totally see how guys got hot for that stuff, and this wasn’t even with boobs out—it was a fully clothed exhibition! But I couldn’t get it up for this form of exercise. I sheepishly thanked the receptionist and bailed sans purchase, never to return. I’m way more turned on by a yummy boozy dinner downtown or going to a funny play. Maybe I’m lazy, maybe I just am not that into Birkins, but I felt more blah than bada-bing. Harry may not be getting lap dances, but on the bright side, he’s saving lotsa dough by my skipping swiping plastic at Hermès for that Birkin bag. Sexy dances aren’t sexy unless the dancer is feelin’ it, and this tired mom just ain’t. Plus, we’d both probably burst out laughing anyway.
My gorgeous mother was also a source of constant advice for Willie and me growing up, and her guidance went far beyond the don’t-fill-up-on-bread-before-a-meal kind of instruction.
Coco has the biggest heart (she tears up during TV commercials. “Here we go,” my dad says lovingly as she dabs at her eyes. “Waterworks.”) and is one of the most grateful people on earth. Whereas other people preach stopping to smell the roses, she’s got hundreds of snaps on her iPhone of flowers she’s stopped to notice! She never got us to pray before dinner or anything, but she never failed to remind us how lucky we were when we were about to chow down like animals at the table. Gotta be honest: I attribute my appreciation of my life to her sort of forcibly shoving gratitude down my throat. I remember saying, “Mom, yes, we get it; we’re lucky.” Then I went and had kids of my own and realized how with me she still is every step of the way.
Some of her nuggets that I cherish are:
“Slow down! Eat everything like it’s caviar, because to someone else it is.”
My dad, brother, and I used to Dyson down any plate of food my mom placed in front of us. We’d also scarf down every shred of food at restaurants, prompting my mom to get upset because she was looking forward to lingering over the meal and didn’t want it to be over so quickly. Bottom line: We are pigs and she is a true lady. But my mom’s comment about slowing down was less about manners and much more about truly appreciating food and the ritual of eating a delicious dinner. She hated when we snorted our way through it like animals and instead wanted us to understand that food should be savored and relished. Even if it’s something basic, she wanted us to treat it like a delicacy. Now I teach my kids the same thing—and whether it’s an artichoke I spent forty minutes boiling or a dish I expertly reheated, I try to keep my mom’s advice going at the table. She is such a genius cook, though, I can see why she was doubly distressed. She spent so much time preparing it so we could snarf like wild boars.
“The opposite of a social heavy is a socialite.”
The word socialite has always bugged me. There were women who my mom said would “go to the opening of an envelope” just to get their pictures taken. Now, she often had obligations for my dad’s job but made dinner herself and would always rather be home in her pajamas with us. I have a clear memory of her standing in a pink and white ball gown, wearing red oven mitts and taking our dinner out of the oven. My friend Richard Sinnott, my boss at Harper’s Bazaar, used to say, “Your mother is the chicest woman in New York; she could be on every society page if she wanted to be.” But she didn’t want to be. She never used charities to promote herself socially or went out just to be fabulous. On the contrary, her favorite type of night is a cozy one with family.
“You can wear a total schmatte, but if you have good accessories, people will think it’s couture.”
This is true and I have proven it with a scientific study of one test subject: me. I swear, I can wear a Club Monaco shift or Urban Outfitters skirt, and with the right shoes or bag, people ask me if it’s fucking Chanel. It’s insane! It always works. Because of that, I rarely invest in designer things (and never buy retail, anyway—I’m a big sale and Woodbury Commons shopper!) unless I can use them all the time. And I don’t care what any of these Best Dressed lists say, my mom is the chicest of them all.
“It’s all right to cry.”
I’m not sure if Kermit the Frog or someone else in the Muppet family sang a song by that name, but it may as well be my mom’s and my harmonized anthem. In a world where you often hear “Keep a stiff upper lip,” I grew up feeling like it was totally okay to let it out. Not an Olympic Games can be watched without a tissue box handy—and I’m talking curling, people. My mom wells up at movies, shows, commercials, sporting events, concerts, smiling babies, or even just old people holding hands on the street. And I love it. Because I always knew that her comfort with emotions meant I didn’t have to bottle mine up.
“By mourning those we love, we live better.”
My mom’s mom, Nana Sylvette, died of cancer at forty-seven. My aunt Leslie died at fifty, and my uncle at forty-six. On Yom Kippur, aside from starving, we also remember the loved ones we miss and my mom always has Kleenex at the ready. Her heart is so big that it bursts not only at the sad things but also the sweetest. One of my favorite poems is about the tragedy of loss but also the comfort of memory, and I always hold my mother’s hand when we read it:
We Remember Them
by Sylvan Kamens and Jack Riemer
In the rising of the sun
and in its going down,
we remember them.
In the blowing of the wind
and in the chill of winter,
we remember them.
In the opening of the buds
and in the rebirth of spring,
we remember them.
In the blueness of the skies
and in the warmth of summer,
we remember them.
In the rustling of the leaves
and in the beauty of fall,
we remember them.
In the beginning of the year
and when it ends,
we remember them.
When we are weary
and in need of strength,
we remember them.
When we are lost
and sick at heart,
we remember them.
When we have achievements
that are based on theirs,
we remember them.
When we have joys
we yearn to share,
we remember them.
So long as we live,
they too shall live,
for they are a part of us
as we remember them.
I remember the moment I became a gay rights activist like it was yesterday. I was in wood shop. Yes, you read that correctly, wood shop. You see, at my Connecticut boarding school, I learned upon arrival that there was not just varsity and junior varsity but also something called thirds. In other words, the lame-o leftovers. They got to play on a field that was a mile away a
nd had games that started as the sun was setting, after the two more important teams had finished and done their high-five chain/parade thingy. Fuck that. But I wasn’t allowed to be in a play every semester as my ex, or exercise. So I took aerobics. But I wasn’t allowed to take aerobics twice, either, so the third semester, since I despise sports, I found myself in wood shop with all dudes.
A bunch of athletes were in the off-season of their two sports. A couple were fashioning boxes to stash their marijuana, and I set out to make a chair for my dorm room. But within fifteen minutes or so, the tides turned, when one of the pricks (think James Spader’s Steff in Pretty in Pink) started talking about someone and calling him a “flaming faggot.”
I felt the blood run out of my face.
It was in that singular moment that I became obsessed with speaking up.
“You can’t say that word!” I blurted. To seniors. “That’s a horrible word. That word comes from when they burned homosexuals on faggots of wood!”
With my righteous, violent rant, I also knew I’d sealed my fate as a semi-weirdo there. I already didn’t fit in and clung to my closest friends, Lauren and Lisa, who were more normal and social than I, but the truth was I was lucky because I didn’t really give a shit. I think I was born with a faulty Edit button, and when most people grow a huge one in high school, mine just disappeared.
Ashamed, the dudes went back to their pot boxes.
See, they didn’t even know gay people or hebes like me—some may have thought I got my horns removed via scalpel before I arrived. I grew up not only in New York City, a land far more diverse than whence these Aryan Nation bros hailed, but also in a family that always had gay friends around and actual gaybors, gay next-door neighbors. The decorator Peter Dunham was my childhood next-door neighbor, and all his amazing friends came by; and as a tween I’d go after school in my plaid pinafore and plop down on his couch. I remember music playing and cooking smells and lots of laughter. Christopher Mason, the well-known New York songwriter and performer, played the piano as I lounged in knee socks. My dad worked at Chanel, so we often met fashion-affiliated editors, writers, and executives; and at our dinner parties I was always drawn to the gay male couples, and remember asking one pair of older antiques dealers if they were married. They laughed and explained that they couldn’t get married. I remember now how they giggled, as if to say She’s naïve/sweet, that’s funny, as if.
In college, my best friend, Trip, and I talked and made a pact that if we didn’t meet the right guys and were both single at twenty-nine (which felt so old at the time), we would have a baby together. I honestly would have been perfectly happy with that route had I not met the right guy, who, as it turns out, was Harry, a very gay-friendly person who never recoiled with homophobic awkwardness like one person I dated. In fact, Harry was so chill about his own sexuality that we went to a gay watering hole, Marie’s Crisis, after dinner on our very first date. I appealed to him to donate to equal rights charities, and when he wanted to start buying art (that would be within reach of young collectors), I brought him to a benefit for marriage equality, where gay artists donated their work to raise money for the legal battle ahead, and he was totally game. I couldn’t have asked for a more committed partner in my wish to make gay marriage legal. We definitely got into more than a few debates with people who would say domestic partnership was more or less the same thing. But I was sickened to think anyone deserved anything other than the same rights as breeders.
So after growing up in a world of gay men who truly thought the day would never come, I was over the moon—or, uh, rainbow—when SCOTUS delivered the historic decision. And it just so happened that fifteen years after Harry and I met and began sharing that cause, both of us marched in the gay pride parade together. Years prior, Trip had directed an award-winning off-Broadway play called The Last Sunday in June that was about pride weekend, and how some gay men were disgusted by the whole thing and opted out of marching beside grouped gay stereotypes like bears in leather vests over flesh with chauffeurs’ hats or transvestites with boas. They didn’t want to sweat glitter and shit diamonds, they just wanted to have rights without yelling about it. I remember watching that play and understanding both sides—the activists and the ones on the sidelines, as some people are more strident than others. But change always comes with voices, and I have always been a loudmouth.
So when the PR gurus Sandra Lajoie and Liz Schmidt from Bravo arranged for me to ride on the NBC Universal float with Doogie Howser, I was beside myself with elation. In the end, though, rather than be on a double-decker bus, I wanted to walk in the front among the crowds. Staci Greenbaum, our costume designer for Odd Mom Out, made me a white Peter Pan–collared blouse with our show’s logo on it and a rainbow bow pinned at the top.
From the first minutes walking down the street festooned with waving rainbow flags and cheers and music, I heard people chanting “We love Odd Mom Out,” and I realized we had a huge gay audience. I’ve been lucky enough to be so supported by the gay community with my books—in fact, at one reading at the now-defunct Borders in Atlanta, I was expecting moms and found a crowd of mostly gay black guys. Needless to say, it was the best stop on my tour. As for the show, I had already suspected we had a gay following from various tweets that cheered me on with things like “werq” and “yas queen,” but being immersed in the gay community of viewers—on such an historic day, no less—was absolutely a magical high. After a thirty-block walk, we turned onto Christopher Street and I burst into tears. Granted, I was totally on my flag of Japan, on the Godfather day, no less, but I was beyond emotional. It was so breathtaking to go from the wide vista of Fifth Avenue, across to the legendary, winding West Village street that became a symbol of the gay community after the Stonewall riots of 1969. When we got to the famed bar, people were dangling from the rooftops and every window and step. I saw a gay man with one arm who had a unicorn outfit, who yelled “I love you, unicorn!” and I giggled through my veil of tears. It was truly one of the happiest days and experiences of my entire life. Even the Hassidick Jews (I spelled that wrong on purpose) screaming they would all burn didn’t get me down. We were on the right side of history and they looked Stone Age at the Stonewall.
We went to the Pier Dance afterward and shimmied with people in rainbow angel wings, platform glitter heels, leather chauffeurs’ hats, and vests over chests. Or barely anything at all. During a dance of thousands of people (mostly guys—apparently the lesbz were the day before), I danced smack into my friend Marcello who was newly engaged and with his husband-to-be. They both rocked eight-pack abs (not six—eight) and some sort of banana hammock situation. We hugged and I told him it was one of the best days of my life. I couldn’t believe how far our country had come from when I was fifteen. Every time I saw a LOVE WINS T-shirt, I misted. That basement wood shop seemed eons away and the acid of that jock’s words relegated to sawdust.
My only complaint was that there was zero food. Like, nada. Okay, there was one sad falafel stand that looked disgusting. And like my dad always says, “Falafel makes you feel awful.” I shall add another: “Shawarma has bad karma.” As in, callin’ the Kaopectate. Needless to say, rotating mystery meat was not in the game for my innards, and mid-bitch sesh, Marcello stopped me, saying, “Child. We only eat ice chips and drink alcohol. I have not had a carb in months, child.” And so with that, we decided our perfect rainbow giornata had to fade to black so Momma could get some fucking pasta. We walked off, hearing the dulcet tones of Ariana Grande, who I thought, until that day, was a font. We found ourselves at nearby Locande Verde, chowing, when the fireworks began—bright bursts of more colors as a vivid noisy exclamation point to a weekend of bliss kicked off by SCOTUS and ending with couples leaving the piers, streaming in hordes by the large window of the restaurant, arm in arm, and singing.
My parents met Labor Day weekend of 1971 and were married the day after Christmas. Yes, December 26. Just so bizarre. My grandfather Frank Kopelman said it would be a tax benef
it, truth be told, they had that When Harry Met Sally…thing going of “When you want to spend the rest of your life with someone, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.” Though all the guests showed up with a smile and are grinning merrily in every shot in their wedding album, I am certain they were ripshit to haul ass back from their Christmas vacations to snowy New York in a blizzard, no less. But cozy in a hotel ballroom my future parents became husband and wife. My mom was the most beautiful twenty-one-year-old bride and my dad was obsessed with her. Their marriage was the envy of all my friends, who marveled that “Arie and Coco actually love each other.”
As I grew up and swooned over this guy or that one, professing love after five minutes, my parents would say, “Slow down! You don’t love him, you don’t even know him!” My heart-eyeballed defense was always reminding them of their apparently shotgun wedding (it wasn’t), and my dad said in our old kitchen at 45 East Sixty-sixth Street, “If you ever do what we did, I will kill you.” They got lucky. They made it, but so many of their friends did not. One piece of sterling advice my mom gave me, when I asked what made them last, was to not do what I call the creepy Hamptons marriage, where the mom has the loaded SUV outside on the last day of school and schleps to [insert summer community] with the kids till Labor Day and the husband pops up on the Crampton Shitney or commuter airline on the weekends. My folks always stayed together. Not because she feared my dad would bang (but, believe me, I have seen many mice playing while the cat’s away) but because she didn’t want to ever get used to being apart. They’re best friends and somehow stuck it out.
One of the best quotes I’ve ever heard about marital longevity was from the late great Bruce Paltrow, legendary producer and father of Gwyneth, who admitted that his amazing marriage to actress Blythe Danner endured because “We never wanted to get divorced at the same time.” It was so honest and incredible to hear, because I grew up in such a bubble, believing marriage was perfect and some sort of fairy tale.