I Still Have It. . . I Just Can't Remember Where I Put It

by Rita Rudner

  Marge and I began writing sketches together. After we actually sold a few to a television show in Canada, we decided to audition to write for Saturday Night Live. Marjorie was very concerned that my clothing would not be hip enough and came to my house before our meeting to see if she could help me put together a few things that didn’t match.

  Our favorite audition sketch we’d written for SNL featured Snow White, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty, all divorced and all complaining about their princes. We didn’t get the job, but Marjorie soon was hired to write on a television show in Los Angeles, and I began performing on the David Letterman show and HBO.

  I received a call from Marjorie a few weeks after she moved to L.A. She had pitched our divorced princesses idea to a major studio and they wanted to commission her to write it…with somebody else. Of course I wanted to write it with her, but I had no credits and the woman she was working with had written movies. Looking back, I had a point and so did she. The conversation did not go well and we lost contact.

  When I moved to L.A. a few years later, I ran into Marjorie at a comedy club and we immediately began laughing about the whole thing. She had written the movie, it had gotten stalled in development the way 99 percent of projects do, and she had always regretted our argument, as did I.

  Our careers blossomed in different directions, hers as a writer and mine as a comedian. We remained good friends for years. One day I received a call from Marge. She was in New York writing on a new television show.

  “Reetee,” she said, “this television show I’m working on is so bad, I think it’s given me cancer.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I had this terrible pain in my stomach and I went to the gyno. She said it’s not good.”

  The ovarian cancer that had invaded Marjorie’s mother had shown up in Marge. She went back to Canada to have the operation. My heart sank when I talked to her dad on the phone and he told me, “They did their best, but they couldn’t get all of it.”

  Marjorie came to stay with us while going through her first round of chemotherapy. It was challenging, but strangely always funny.

  I’d be on my way out to the grocery store and would ask, “What can I get for you? Anything special?”

  “Nah.”

  I’d return home with a full complement of food for the week, and Marge would wander into the kitchen. “Did you get any matzo?”

  “No.”

  “I’m really in the mood for matzo. I’ll call one of my friends. They’ll bring it over.”

  We had a constant stream of people we didn’t know wandering in and out of our house as well as the scent of marijuana regularly wafting up the stairs. I have never had anything to do with drugs, but to me, legalizing marijuana for people who are going through the agony of chemo is as easy a decision as letting nearsighted people wear glasses.

  Marjorie was not happy with our collection of movies and demanded we obtain Oscar review copies from some of our friends who were members of the Academy. Once I heard strange noises coming from her bedroom. I peeked inside and Marjorie was listening to strangers’ cell phone calls on a police radio.

  “You’ve gotta hear this agent negotiating this contract. He is such a pig!”

  “Marjorie, is this right? Listening to people’s private calls?”

  “Rita, I have cancer. What are they going to do to me that’s worse than this?” she replied.

  It was comforting knowing that Marjorie was just downstairs and we could be there in seconds if she really needed us. I loved sitting on the side of her bed as we ranted about the injustices of show business and commented on the current state of various celebrities’ love lives.

  After going into remission, Marge started working on Seinfeld and wrote a memorably funny episode starring Bette Midler. Always full of surprises, she called me one day from Donatella Versace’s villa in Italy, where she had just been flown on Madonna’s private jet.

  “I’m here at the pool overlooking the manicured gardens. Madonna and Donatella thought it would be good for me to have a little vacation,” she explained.

  The cancer returned a few more times before taking her life. To her credit—or perhaps detriment—Marjorie never accepted the fact that she was going to die. The day before she passed away, she begged her doctor for one more round of chemo and was on the phone with her agent arguing about the finer points of her next year’s contract with Seinfeld.

  I often think of her and want to tell her everything that’s been going on. I want to tell her that Martin and I adopted a baby girl and that two of her best friends have written a hit musical on Broadway. Most of all, I want to tell her that Howie Mandel is bald.

  I know we all bitch about getting older and the state the world is in, but just to be able to wake up every day and live our second act is a privilege that we should never take for granted.

  * * *

  How come when you mix flour and water you get glue? And then you add eggs and sugar and you get cake. Where does the glue go?

  * * *

  On Your Mark, Get Set, Sit Down

  AS PEOPLE AGE, IT BECOMES MORE DIFFICULT FOR them to leave the house. My mother-in-law holds the current world record for getting ready. Many men read newspapers or watch television while their wives are primping and changing handbags; my father-in-law has time to solve crimes. In the four hours it takes his wife to make herself presentable to strangers, he can detect which neighbors are depositing their garbage in his can and which dog is relieving itself on his lawn. If you add up all of the time in their fifty-two years of marriage he has spent waiting for my mother-in-law to get ready, it comes to approximately 18,980 hours. I remind my husband of this whenever he complains that I’m taking too long to leave the house.

  In my defense, I am not what you’d call an organized person. I don’t write people down in alphabetical order in my address book. I write them down in the order in which I met them. It takes me a little longer to find their phone numbers, but it’s more satisfying when I do because it requires skill.

  Being a woman is difficult. It takes time, effort, and creativity. It’s like being a female impersonator every single day. Men don’t understand what takes so much time, and I feel it is my duty to the female sex to at least attempt to inform them of what is involved in our preparations on a daily basis.

  Let us begin with makeup. We cleanse, we tone, we moisturize; we apply concealer, sunscreen, foundation, shading, and powder. Then we’re ready to begin.

  An eye-makeup primer is applied to the eye, either with a finger or a brush. Over that, a lighter color is applied on the inner eyelid and above the brow. At this point we may find stray eyebrow hairs that offend us and we may elect to pluck them. If this is the case, the above steps might have to be repeated. A deeper color is applied to the eyebrow crease using a tapered brush that might have to be cleaned and dried if we’ve chosen to apply a different color than the day before. This is followed by eyeliner that must be smudged for a natural effect, an eyelash-curling session, and mascara. If we sneeze before any of the above products are dry, we’re looking at a restart.

  Blush is applied sparingly to each cheek, beginning approximately one inch from the nose and stroked upward. It is then blended so the woman is not mistaken for a clown. The lips are lined in a color that will blend with our chosen lipstick. Thank heaven lining the mouth in a darker shade is a thing of the past. Not only was it symmetrically challenging, to me it made a woman’s mouth look like a crime scene. We fill in our lips with a tiny brush so as to not overstep our lip boundaries, and then we are ready to tackle our hair.

  Depending on the type of hair a woman has, the time of this part of the operation can vary greatly. A curly-haired woman attempting to masquerade as a straight-haired woman can take over an hour to achieve the follicle lie she is attempting to tell. In a humid climate, this effort will last for only a few minutes. However, the woman will never stop blow-drying and accept the hair for what it is. I know. I am
this woman.

  After hair, it’s time to make the clothing decision. First, we have to evaluate if it is a fat or thin day. We then select accordingly. Our opening move is to stare blankly into a closet stuffed fuller than a clown car and lament that we have nothing to wear. If we zoom in on a dress, the next step will be over quickly. Should we be putting together an outfit, add on twenty minutes. We’re going to try a few different jackets with our skirt or pants. If it is winter, tack on an additional forty minutes. We have to locate coats, scarves, and gloves.

  The first pair of stockings we shimmy into will have a hole in them, and if we’re not wearing slacks that day, they will have to be put back into the drawer and a new pair chosen.

  Once we are dressed, an appropriate pair of shoes is selected depending on how much we intend to walk that day and whether or not we are going to lunch with someone we want to impress.

  Jewelry takes a good chunk of time because the clasps are nearly impossible to fasten. Superman with his X-ray vision would need a magnifying glass to unite the two ends of my favorite necklace in less than ten minutes.

  I’ve saved the handbag for last. Everything in our current handbag has to be transferred into a bag that picks up the dominant color of whatever we’re wearing. Some handbags are not large enough to accommodate the wallet we are using, and this means our credit cards and driver’s license have to be transferred. A new lipstick might have to be selected to touch up our mouth during the day.

  At this point we have to revisit the mirror because, after performing all of the above steps, there is a distinct possibility that our nose has become shiny and we have to reapply a dusting of powder.

  Now, we are almost out of the door, if we could just find our keys. After locating them in yesterday’s handbag, we only need to find our sunglasses and, yes, we are ready to go.

  Wait, we forgot our perfume. Now we’re ready—we just have to go to the bathroom.

  Now the phone is ringing. We’ll just get that. Wrong number.

  Which reminds me, where is the cell phone? It’s charging in the kitchen.

  Wait one second. The dry cleaning tickets are somewhere.

  We’re out the door. It’s just that easy.

  We just have to go back in and grab a drink of water.

  Bye-bye.

  So the next time a man asks you why it takes you so long to get ready, have him read this while he’s waiting. Maybe he will understand a little better what goes into being a woman on a daily basis. It is as challenging for us as it is annoying for them. We need steady hands, excellent vision, and an unerring sense of color.

  It’s different for men. You have one thing. You have a belt…and you still miss a loop.

  Things That Palpably Don’t Work

  1. Those buttons you push when you stand on a street corner that supposedly trigger the traffic lights.

  2. Golf lessons.

  3. Wrinkle cream.

  4. Estimates.

  5. Rat poison.

  Please Don’t Be My Neighbor

  IF THERE IS ONE THING I’VE LEARNED IN MY FIFTY-PLUS years on the punishing planet we call earth, it’s that before buying a property, an inspection of more than just the bricks and mortar of the establishment is essential. When we purchased our first house in Los Angeles, we researched how the house had been built, we conducted a termite test, we obtained a geological report, and we commissioned a land survey. The only thing we forgot to inspect were our neighbors.

  The first few nights spent in our new house were relatively peaceful. In retrospect, I think we were so exhausted from unpacking incorrectly labeled boxes we could have slept through a lightning storm at a Metallica concert.

  “I love living in the hills,” I remember saying to my husband. “At night, I can hear the wind rushing through the trees.”

  That noise eventually turned out to be the man across the street trying to start his car.

  After a week of interrupted sleep, I decided to enlist the help of my espresso machine and stayed up to discover exactly what was occurring. At 3:00 A.M., I peered out of the window and witnessed a large man wearing a blond wig, ripped T-shirt, and baggy jeans stumbling drunkenly out of his front door and into a dilapidated Cadillac. The man proceeded to repeatedly rev the car’s engine for about forty minutes. After revving, he sat in the vehicle and stared into space for a few minutes. Then he proceeded to rev again. Slowly the revver left his car and returned to his house.

  “Why didn’t you just close the window and buy a white-noise machine?” I can hear you asking me through these pages.

  Well, it wasn’t that easy. Our bedroom window faced the road. The house had no air-conditioning, so leaving our window open was a necessity. Furthermore, as I see it, white-noise machines only make things noisier. That’s why they’re called noise machines. A quiet machine would only allow the noise in, so just stop your nonsense or I’ll get stroppy.

  The next day, instead of confronting the bewigged, drunk, large man, I instead decided to approach his elderly, bewigged, drunk, large mother about the nightly disruption.

  “Jimmy’s eccentric, there’s no doubt about it,” she confessed as she sloppily watered her flower box. “He’s just got home from prison and he likes to drink beer and start up his car and sit in it at night. I’m just glad he don’t go nowhere and get into no fights.”

  “It wakes us up every night. Do you think you could ask him not to do it? Or at least do it earlier in the evening?”

  “If it bothers you,” she replied, “why don’t you move somewhere else, you skinny-assed whore bitch?”

  I went in search of a quiet white-noise machine.

  Thankfully, it was only a matter of time before the ex-convict was again a convict. I don’t know what he did, but I heard some strange noises coming from his house the night he was arrested. I hope it involved a cat and not his mother. The only neighbors then left to concern us were the man next door, whose hobby was hauling cars from a junkyard and restoring them in his driveway, and the French photographer, who photographed nude models on his front lawn. My husband wasn’t that concerned about the French photographer.

  We exercised more caution when buying our next house. It was located near the top of a peaceful mountain road. On one side was a vacant lot so steep it was impossible to build on and on the other was an older couple with grown children and a cat. We were busy luxuriating in the swimming pool I had always dreamed of owning when an angry woman opened the gate to our backyard.

  “The steps to your pool are on my land,” she claimed.

  “What?” I replied, removing my goggles.

  “You heard me. The steps to your pool are on my land.”

  She handed me a letter from her lawyer demanding we remove the steps that ran down the side of our house to our pool.

  We later discovered that land surveys in the hills are not always entirely accurate. The lot next door to us was indeed vacant, but between our house and the vacant lot there was a three-foot easement for a water pipe that fed the house that was positioned immediately below us. That house belonged to the angry woman. The steps in question provided the only access for our pool service and our gardener to enter our backyard. Without them, they would have to lug a lawn mower and pool cleaning equipment into our living room, down our stairs, through our den, and out into the garden.

  This was ridiculous. The woman would have to listen to reason. This was Beverly Hills, not the Wild West. My husband arranged a face-to-face meeting with the harridan who was in love with her water pipe. We presented our commonsense case to her, and she presented us with her land survey that showed three stairs indeed extended almost half a foot onto her water pipe easement. She also indicated that there was a distinct possibility that the corner of our pool infringed by a few inches and therefore would have to be removed.

  When she left, not only was I angry, I was panicked. My husband was calm.

  “She wants money. We’ll pay her off and she’ll go away.”

&
nbsp; We contacted her lawyer.

  “She’s a nightmare,” her lawyer explained. “She doesn’t want money. She wants her few inches of land. She’s a crazy woman. Move your steps. She’ll never go away.”

  “But the steps aren’t anywhere near her water pipe. It’s a three-foot strip of land that runs down a mountain. It’s not a vacation spot,” I pleaded.

  “She’ll never go away,” he repeated. “I know. I’m married to her.”

  There is nothing more dangerous than a litigious person married to a lawyer. Such an individual has nothing to lose and everything to gain. Her lawyer was free and she was sleeping with him. The only thing more difficult than getting our expensive lawyer on the phone was getting him off it. He charged by the sentence. Three years and a six-figure legal bill later, we had twenty-five innocent cement steps destroyed so we could reposition three of them four and a half inches farther toward Mexico. The good news was we had obtained a survey that proved the corner of our pool was indeed on our land, and on this issue at least I got to tell her to shove it.

  By this time, the quiet couple next door had moved. It turned out they were only renting the house and the actual owner of the property was eager to lease it again speedily so as not to lose a month’s rent. This meant he was not too fussy about the character of prospective renters. Now, I forgot to mention that our house and the house next door were originally one lot. Our house was numbered 225 and the house next door was 2251/2. This meant that people were constantly ringing our doorbell by mistake. I was now answering my door to a parade of strange women who showed up late at night and asked for Romeo. More important, the new tenant once stole my pizza when it was left on my front stoop. He did. I saw him.