Never Sit If You Can Dance

by Jo Giese

  My parents had always had an easy physical relationship. I liked how Babe sat on my father’s lap with her arms around his neck. So when I hadn’t seen much physical affection between them, I asked her about it. She said, “We don’t have that same chair in the kitchen anymore.”

  Oh.

  As a self-centered preteen and adolescent, I never discussed with Babe what had lifted her depression. I know she never saw a therapist—cognitive or otherwise. But I also know research indicates that genes strongly influence a propensity toward optimism. It’s likely that Babe was genetically predisposed to seeing the glass half-full, or more, and had been thrown off by those sad years of miscarriages.

  In my twenties, I probably spent—wasted?—too much time in therapy discussing my mother’s depression and how it weighed me down. Poor me. That was the 1970s in New York City, where everyone in certain circles on the Upper West Side of Manhattan seemed to have a therapist. I would come to understand that Babe’s was a situational depression—all those miserable miscarriages. Years later, I suffered through a similar situational depression because of infertility and a miserable first marriage.

  Later in life, Babe had evolved. I looked around: Where was the depressed mother I’d spent so much time complaining about in therapy? Babe had outgrown the mental mom I carried with me, and it had taken me a while to catch up.

  Around 2012, when communications with my siblings threatened to break down, I considered returning to therapy. Instead, having grown into being Babe’s daughter, I adopted a personal mantra: In spite of what’s happening, it’s okay to be happy today. Because if I let myself wallow in unhappiness, sink into sadness, descend into depression, then I wouldn’t be any good to anyone—to Ed, my family, my friends, myself. People don’t like to be around depressed people.

  This is decidedly not a superficial, tacked-on, Pollyanna happiness, the happy-happy face of a Hallmark card. This is a deep, hard-earned connection with the vividly positive, instead of the bleakly negative. It reminds me of a quote, attributed to Abraham Lincoln, that is boldly painted on an entire side of a building on Lincoln Boulevard in West LA: “Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.” Babe couldn’t have said it better.

  I’ve passed my mantra on and on and on. When a grandson was teased at summer camp to the point where he packed up and left, I suggested he try my mantra. When a very best friend fell into despair over a financial situation and was torn apart by the prospect of being forced to sue her son, I suggested she try my mantra. When another friend kept delaying a trip home because her mentally ill brother had violently shoved her mother, and both of them had ended up hospitalized, I suggested she get her plane ticket and try my mantra. In spite of what’s happening, it’s okay to be happy today.

  Babe would have approved.

  LESSON 10:

  DON’T BE DRAB

  In March 2011, I left LAX on an early flight to make sure I arrived at Babe’s new place in Houston in time for dinner at five o’clock. As I entered her apartment, the first words out of her mouth were, “You’re wearing that? You used to wear such colorful clothes. You look drab.”

  “Mom, gimme a break. I just got off the plane!”

  I was joining her new friends for the first time in the senior community she’d just moved into, and I’d forgotten that she’d want to show me off. My travel outfit—comfortable black exercise pants, black workout shirt, clunky gym shoes—was, as she would have put it, nothing to write home about.

  “Don’t be drab” was one of Babe’s central mantras.

  Babe was the anti-Eileen Fisher. Always.

  For decades, the fashion industry has written an obituary for color. You know the stores where every rack features the dominant “colors” of regulation black and ash gray? I don’t even bother to poke my head in those places, where it’s so grim and gloomy it looks like someone died. A black-dressing friend confided, “My daughter says my husband and I dress like communists.”

  After Coco Chanel’s lover died in 1919, she began wearing black, and thus was born the little black dress. But the little black dress was created because someone died. Ever since then, women have worn this grim garment as if it’s cocktail chic and not Coco Chanel’s widow’s weeds.

  In contrast, Babe asserted herself through happy bursts of bold color. When she was thirty-nine and pregnant (finally) with my sister, she wore a ruby-red maternity dress. Its knife-edge pleats flared from a floppy bow at the neckline all the way to the hem. I was nine, and I’ve never forgotten when she leaned over the flowing crimson cascade. If ever there was a power dress, that was it: it was colorful, fashionable, and glamorous. Like Babe. Did she also favor red because she knew the color had an extra “pop” against the gray, cloudy skies of Seattle? Maybe.

  She practiced color therapy long before fashionistas codified it, and she never needed to hire a color consultant to determine her palette. She knew color broadcasted how she felt and made her attractive—in that color attracted people to her. She wasn’t narcissistic. It wasn’t, Look at me, how gorgeous I am. Whether she was with the amiable husband-and-wife managers at the corner grocery store who cashed her checks or with a next-door neighbor, it was more, Look at me, I’m accessible and fun. Let’s be friends. She knew that a splash of color added a dose of happiness to herself and others.

  Wearing color was about more than looking pretty, though Babe certainly favored that, too. (Babe’s beauty guidelines included: book beauty appointments; wear makeup; and whatever you do, don’t go gray. Gray isn’t necessary. It just shows your age.) For Babe, wearing color was about being part of the social conversation, being engaged with others.

  I had a memorable experience with the power of color to attract when I was visiting the Taj Mahal and happened to be wearing a saffron-colored kurta with matching cotton pants. I was there at sunrise, the perfect time to experience that immense seventeenth-century white marble mausoleum bathed in dawn’s early glow. Many Indian visitors, because the Taj is also one of their favorite pilgrimage sites, kept bowing to me. “You’re a healer,” they’d say, their hands folded in prayer. To me. The Holy Me. I kept shaking my head no. But my plain saffron outfit, which I’d bought for something like ten dollars at a gas station where our UCLA tour bus had stopped, was the same saffron color of the robes that the Hindu holy men wore. The golden color positively glowed, and maybe I did, too—that trip to India was the first time I’d felt happy since my husband’s death. Finally I realized, If it makes these people happy for a blond, pigtailed traveler from LA to be a holy person, okay. From then on, when the Indian men in their white cotton kurtas and the women in their dazzling saris bowed to me—to the holy, life-giving color I was wearing—I folded my hands in prayer, murmured, “Namaste,” the only Indian word I knew, and bowed back.

  When I was young, Babe dressed us in matching mother-daughter outfits, often ones like the red-and-white-plaid wool suit she’d sewn on her Singer sewing machine, which she operated with a foot pump. Mine had a tiny bolero vest with a pleated miniskirt. (What else could it be but a mini, when I was only so high?) Because of the many photos showing me happily wearing that outfit, smiling so broadly my face squinted, I also know that Babe paired it with Mary Janes and white socks that had a ruffled lace edge. When I was about ten, I rebelled and wouldn’t be caught dead in any of her outfits. A white cotton blouse with a ruffled collar, no way; for me, a starched, tailored shirt with cuff links I’d borrowed from my dad.

  After moving far away from home and recoiling at the thought that I was anything like my mother—I’m a journalist in New York City!—I was struck dumb one day when I looked in my closet and realized how thoroughly I’d become my mother’s daughter. The sea change had happened so slowly that by my fifties, her clothes were exactly what I liked. From what depths had she managed to creep so completely back into my psyche—though probably she’d never left—and my closet? An admission: no matter how much I thought I was rebelling, even during those times w
hen I lived far away—first New York City and then LA—I still went home for every holiday, and never empty-handed.

  According to a poll conducted by the British website Dotty Bingo, by age thirty-one, daughters start to resemble their mothers. I must have been slow, because for me it was decades later. However, by my fifties, my closet was filled with what were essentially mother-daughter outfits. Again. But now I gratefully inherited her hand-me-downs. Hers weren’t designer outfits, but, trust me, these were not little-old-lady items, either: a black Chinese jacket with a fabulous red-and-gold silk lining, a fancy white sweater vest encrusted with pearls, an orange jacket with the sunniest marigold lining. Even her colors—turquoise, pinks, reds—had become my favorites.

  The beauty of learning a lesson and incorporating it so fully that it becomes part of you, as if it were your original chromosomal material, is that you can casually pass it on without even noticing.

  On my first date with Ed, after he rang the bell but before I opened the door, I peeked out the peephole and saw a man wearing the dullest beige plaid flannel shirt. (Flannel in August in Southern California?) Although Ed was a lean, lanky six foot three, that limp sad sack of a shirt accurately reflected how he felt: his wife had died fourteen months earlier, after forty-one years of marriage, and I was his first date. After thirty-eight years of practicing law in Washington, DC, he’d made a fresh break to the West Coast to teach at the law school at Pepperdine. We’d been introduced by a mutual friend, Alice Starr.

  Alice hadn’t mentioned that Ed Warren was from Kentucky. I’ve always been a sucker for a super-smart man with a charming Southern drawl, the kind of down-home accent that cleverly camouflages the fact that his impressive office in Washington, DC, overlooked the White House. On our second date, after we’d gone hiking, attended what Ed referred to as a “hippie party” up in the hills, and lain side by side on the double-wide turquoise chaise lounge on my deck, and after he’d responded tremulously to my touch—I’d never felt a man tremble when I touched him—and after we’d talked about marriage and our getting married (yes, this on our second date), he asked if I’d help him shop for some clothes. In no time, he shoved aside his Kirkland & Ellis suits (they were in my closet already—we married nine months after we met) and in their place hung linen shirts in a rainbow of sensual colors—mango, pumpkin, ocean blue, rooster red. With his tanned skin, he looked gorgeous in these vibrant tones. Even his Patagonia hiking shirts were now salmon and turquoise.

  Ever since I took Babe’s “don’t be drab” lesson to heart, the experience of radiating color, becoming color, happens often, sometimes in the weirdest of circumstances. One morning, a year or so after we met, Ed was scheduled for a colonoscopy, and, after he’d had a miserable night of preparation, I woke up early to drive him to the endoscopy center. To cheer myself up—because, let’s face it, this is a procedure that none of us looks forward to, right?—I reached for the orange jacket with a mandarin collar that I’d just inherited from Mom. It has the sunniest silk lining of fluorescent marigolds, which burst out when the cuffs are turned up.

  At the endoscopy center, Ed had changed into a hospital gown and was in bed, swaddled in layers of warmed blankets. I was sitting on a chair next to him when a woman in scrubs and a shower cap padded in and introduced herself as his anesthesiologist. But, before glancing at Ed’s chart, she turned to me. “I love that color!” she said. In that dimly lit, hushed, antiseptic gray, shiveringly cold pre-op holding area, I was my own little blaze of marigolds. “You’ve made my day!” she said.

  Another time, I was scheduled for spinal surgery for a neck so stiff that I couldn’t turn my head when I was driving. After my internist nixed the surgery as too aggressive for my symptoms, I plunged into a rehab program, and that’s when I met Lana, a massage worker from Croatia. But to call her a massage worker is to do her an injustice, because it felt as though she was realigning all my internal organs, not just the two bulging discs, C3 and C4, in my neck. However, every time this forty-three-year-old woman—who spoke five languages and who had escaped Sarajevo on the last plane when the Bosnian civil war broke out in 1992—showed up with her table, she was wearing frumpy black sweats. She was so anti-Babe I couldn’t stand it. (She looked pretty much like I had that time I showed up at Babe’s for dinner in travel black.)

  This was at a time when my neck was so rigid that when I woke up in the morning, it felt as though it was going to break off. When you’re hurting that much, if you trust someone enough to let them touch that most fragile part of your body, let alone knead it deeply and stretch it, you can form a bond pretty quickly. Because of that intimate connection, during one of my treatments I explained Babe’s “don’t be drab” philosophy and commented to Lana that she always showed up looking so funereal that it depressed me.

  “I’m afraid of being too noticeable,” she said. Her features—shiny black curls, pale skin, a curious expression—were those of an attractive, intelligent individual who was hiding behind a shroud. She explained that, especially for work, she had a uniform: black or gray clothes. “I let my work speak for itself,” she said. “I thought I’d be taken more seriously as a student, a worker, an employee.”

  At my suggestion, Lana added color: a plum T-shirt. It was such a muddy tone it might as well have been black.

  “In my mind, it looks like red,” she said.

  It’s true that someone doing work as intimate as massage shouldn’t wear salacious clothing. But I wasn’t urging her to tart up her look by baring cleavage; I was only suggesting a color other than black. For Christmas I gave her a not-drab red tank top. I suggested she wear it over her black uniform; she wore it under her work clothes. She said it was such a difficult shift to add color that it would have been easier to be naked.

  Unbeknownst to me, I had an ally halfway around the world. When Lana went home to Mostar, Croatia, her father couldn’t stand seeing his gorgeous only daughter, who’d been adventurous enough to leave for America and to end up in the sunshine state, schlepping around in her somber uniforms. He insisted that while she was in his house she wear one of his T-shirts, which happened to be red.

  When Lana told me about her dad, I’d just bought myself a new red T-shirt. I gave it to her with the price tag still attached. “But unless you’re going to wear it,” I said, “don’t take it.”

  Lana had helped rehab my neck, and for her that lipstick red T-shirt was the catalyst for her rehab. She told me what happened next: “The first time I wore your shirt, I wore it to the beach with my girlfriend—just your red shirt and jeans—and she said, ‘Wow, look at you! You’re all dressed up.’ When you got me started, I noticed more red—a bowl of strawberries, the red moon, stop signs, fire trucks, the red on Colgate toothpaste. The world is not black and white. It’s colorful.” By then Lana had also graduated to faded red cargo pants. “If only we could bottle this and share it with everyone,” she said.

  Babe, at ninety-six, still dressed to the nines, with jewelry to match. That Easter she asked me, “Did you get a new outfit?”

  I’d forgotten.

  Henry David Thoreau said, “Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.” Maybe. But Thoreau didn’t know Babe.

  LESSON 11:

  NEVER LEAVE A COMPLIMENT UNSAID

  Sometimes Mother doesn’t know best. I learned a few life lessons the messy way—by doing the opposite of what Babe did.

  By now you know that Babe had a lot of admirable talents and social graces, but giving praise, at least to me, her eldest daughter, wasn’t one of them. Mind you, she liked getting compliments herself; as she said, “They kind of build you up a bit.”

  In 1961, while competing in the Sam Houston High School Speech and Debate Tournament, I won five First Places in Drama, Improvisation, Debate, Poetry, and even Bible. (This was Texas, after all.) At home, I was probably beaming as brightly as my armload of trophies.

  “Don’t be conceited,” Babe said.

  Conceited? I was concentrati
ng too hard on lining up all the trophies and medals single file across the front edge of our Motorola black-and-white TV console to feel wounded.

  “It goes to your head, and it isn’t fun,” she said. “You know, I ironed the blouse you wore.”

  She ironed the blouse I wore. But I earned those First Places. This was back in the day when a trophy still meant something. Way before the era when everyone gets one for showing up. That citywide tournament in Houston had attracted hundreds of competitors, and most had gone home empty-handed. And discovering a talent for public speaking held a special sweetness for someone who had started talking late.

  In the first grade, it was determined that I had a speech impediment. During Mrs. Peffley’s class, instead of reading Dick and Jane along with the other kids, I was sent out of class, up the creaky wooden stairs, to the second floor of Whitworth Elementary, to meet with the speech therapist. Later, when I stumbled accidentally upon an audio recording from that time, it seemed clear that my “problem” was that I was so enthusiastic and excited, so amped about telling stories, that my words tumbled out on top of each other, smashing into each other, so no one could understand the “jabberwocky” that rushed out. What was also impressive about that old recording was that the little girl sounded like the happiest kid: she was bubbling over, oozing delight. She didn’t have a lisp or a stutter or any other speech impediment. Little Jo Ann just needed to slow down, like Mrs. Peffley had written in my report card.