Though I’d had a front row seat for many funerals, I had never actually planned one before. Now here I was, at twenty-two, looking at caskets for my father with my mother and my siblings. My parents were separated at the time he died but technically still married, which put my mother in an uncomfortable position. She was being treated like the grieving widow, which she was, but she was also not on good terms with our father when he died. I remember her pulling back a bit while we made these funeral decisions, maybe out of respect for us or just because of the awkwardness of the situation.
I struggled with my feelings for my mom at this time. I felt bad for her—she had just lost her husband of thirty-three years—but I also partially blamed her for his death. I mean, his heart problems were really the fault of red meat and Pepsi-Cola products, but she broke his heart when it was already weak.
I can’t speak for my siblings, but for me, there were too many feelings to be felt at this time. Too many emotional land mines at every turn. I couldn’t navigate them all, I didn’t want to. So I did what seemed to be the most responsible thing to do at that time: denied all my feelings and distracted myself with humor.
At times like this, I’m glad that the Rannells family has a way of lightening the mood when most needed. It’s in our blood. So it wasn’t really a surprise when we all started making inappropriate jokes throughout the funeral preparation process. All of my siblings are funny, but my youngest sister, Natalie, is our MVP of Inappropriateness. Here are some of her best one-liners from the days surrounding our dad’s death.
When our dad was still on life support and lying in his ICU bed:
NATALIE
Hey, Dad. It’s Natalie. I got my period today.
MOM
Natalie!
NATALIE
What? I thought it might shock him out of it!
When we were signing the papers to take our father off life support and his handsome cardiologist was talking us through the process:
NATALIE (SMELLING THE DOCTOR)
Are you wearing Acqua di Giò?
DOCTOR
Why, yes I am.
NATALIE
It smells really good on you.
When we were walking through the funeral home picking out a casket for our dad:
NATALIE (TO THE FUNERAL DIRECTOR)
It would really be helpful if we could see him IN some of these before we make our choice.
Natalie always knew how to toss in a zinger just when someone was crying too hard or things got too tense, as they often did then. It was truly a testament to her strength and resilience. Natalie really had the hardest time of all of us. She was living with our parents when they split and was only nineteen, a freshman in college, when he died.
So here we all were, the whole Rannells family, minus one very important player, walking around the Heafey-Hoffmann-Dworak-Cutler Funeral Home trying to plan Ron’s final party. Some decisions were easy. He would want “On Eagle’s Wings” sung at his service. He would want fried chicken at the luncheon. (Cardiologists be damned!) Other choices were harder, but they needed to be made, and quickly. We decided that we would keep Ron’s last look in the casket more business casual than formal and dressed him in khakis and a polo. He wore a suit nearly every day for work. He would be more comfortable this way. We also decided that the casket should be closed. There was nothing wrong with his face when he died; he was just a more private person. We figured he wouldn’t want people gawking at him in these last moments. We let our mom pick out the readings for the service and the picture for the prayer cards, and we all just sort of filled in the rest.
Because my parents were practicing Catholics, we also had a viewing and a rosary the night before the funeral. This usually happens at the funeral home, but the funeral director suggested that we hold the viewing in the church because “Ron would bring out a big crowd.” I’m embarrassed to say that I was happy to hear that. I guess I had spent too much time in the theater, and the importance of a sold-out house was already seared into my brain. Not that funeral attendance numbers are recorded anywhere, but I liked that people liked my father. He was an easygoing guy, always quick with a smile or a laugh, and was popular at our school and church.
After my grandma died and I realized how much I had let my family relationships slide, I had made a greater effort to stay in touch. Between the distance and my parents’ separation, I had realized that it was up to me to cultivate some kind of relationship with my dad. Between the two of us I would generally be the one who called him to check in once a week. The conversations were brief at first, but as time went on, we got better at communicating on the phone. We really started to nail it when I was on tour with Pokémon Live! I would regale him with tales of disastrous performances or drunken little people getting into bar fights with locals. I loved making him laugh. It was a nice surprise. He loved those stories.
A few months before he died, he was asked to be an extra in a movie that was filming in town, native Omahan Alexander Payne’s About Schmidt. The scene was a funeral for the wife of Jack Nicholson’s character and my father played one of the mourners. He was very excited about being in this movie, not so much about being on screen, but about being on set and seeing how it all worked. Ron loved movies. He passed that on to me when I was a kid. It was one of the few activities we did together, perhaps because it didn’t involve talking.
I remember speaking with him right after he filmed his scene in About Schmidt. I didn’t know he had been a part of it. He let me go on and on about the ridiculous drama of Pokémon Live! and the pitfalls of performing at the Indianapolis State Fair Coliseum. When I finally got around to asking him how his week was, he casually said, “Oh, well…My week was fine. I filmed a scene with Jack Nicholson in Alexander Payne’s new movie.”
Well played, Ron. Well played.
My family felt that some of us should speak at the rosary the night before the funeral. My sister Becky stepped up to welcome everyone because she was the oldest, and I was volunteered to close out the evening because, I guess because I was the actor in the family. Becky’s speech was appropriately heartfelt and emotional. Other folks got up to share stories and condolences. Natalie and I sat next to each other and quietly judged everyone’s speech based on genuine emotion and quality of content.
It came time for me to share my thoughts on Ron. These are the moments when being a performer is both helpful and a hindrance. I was comfortable speaking in front of a crowd, even under these circumstances, but I was also hyperaware of what I looked like and how I would be received. I’m pretty sure I was the only man with highlights in that church and definitely the only one who was so concerned about the fit of his suit. I wanted to be heartfelt like Becky, I wanted to share good memories and say how much I loved Ron and would miss him, but as I started to speak, I realized that didn’t seem right. Our relationship was complicated. In many ways, we were just getting to know each other when he died. My feelings for him were new and precious and they weren’t for public consumption. Or maybe I didn’t know how to articulate them yet. So instead, like any cheap actor might do, I played for laughs. I told the About Schmidt story and it killed. It killed so hard that a couple people started to applaud, like we were at some open mic night. I was pleased but also embarrassed that I had played it up so hard. (But I also figured Ron wouldn’t have minded.)
The next day, back at the funeral home, we had a small visitation before the actual funeral began. (I didn’t realize at the time how much casket moving was involved in this operation. Poor Ron was really getting shuttled around a lot.) There we sat, just our immediate family, looking at our dad, my mother’s husband, lying in a casket. He looked pretty good. The makeup was subtle. He looked relaxed. As corpses go, he looked like a happy one. And yet I was still glad we didn’t have an open casket. Even in the best of circumstances, something alwa
ys looks a little off. I was happy to see him one last time, but also happy not to share that version of him with anyone else.
As mourners started to arrive, Natalie and I realized that the casket lid was still up. We started looking for someone from the funeral home to close it, but we couldn’t find anyone. I decided Fuck it, it’s a lid. I’ll just do it. I was about to shut it when the funeral director came running in. “Don’t!” he shouted. “It’ll smash his face!” It turns out caskets aren’t just boxes, they’re complicated little machines. The funeral director had to do a whole host of things involving cranks and handles, finally lowering my dad into the box so that the lid could be shut and locked. (Locking it seemed a little excessive, but he was the professional.)
The most moving part of the day was seeing all the people who came to pay their respects. It was a real-life version of This Is Your Life: The Ron Rannells Edition. Coworkers, classmates, old babysitters of ours, old girlfriends of his. And the stories they would quickly tell us, the memories they would share, they were overwhelming and incredibly emotional for all of us, but I was so grateful to hear every detail. Until Suzy showed up.
Suzy was the wife of my father’s high school friend Bill. I hadn’t seen her in years, and I don’t think my mother had, either. She arrived looking a little disheveled and clearly distraught. There was something about her demeanor the moment she walked into the room that told me, Oh fuck. She has taken ALL the pills today. She had on two walking casts, one on each foot, and had two canes, one in each hand. Both casts were sloppily wrapped in black trash bags, as if to protect them from the rain. It was sunny out that day, so unless she was worried about lawn sprinklers, I’m not sure what she was protecting them from. Her hair was askew, as was her makeup, and she spoke in a loud and very slurred way. She sounded like Eileen Heckart as Mrs. Daigle in The Bad Seed. (For those of you who got that reference, thank you and you’re welcome.) She hobbled up to my mother and aggressively hugged her. She began shouting, “I loved Ronny so much! I just loved Ronny!” The she lunged for the casket. “Why is this closed?! Please let me see Ronny one more time!” No one really knew what to do. Her husband certainly wasn’t doing anything to stop her. My brother Dan and I stepped in to help her. She was now attempting to pry the lid of the casket open while shouting, “I just want to see Ronny!” Thank God that funeral director had locked it. Now I saw why.
We moved her to a seat, and it was then that she really started to cry. “I just loved your father so much. I loved that Ronny so much.” All of a sudden she stopped. She stared at me for a long time. Then she shouted, “That’s not your real hair color, is it? Why would you do that to yourself?!” The scene was now complete. I started laughing and had to walk away. Pretty much everyone was laughing at this point, maybe because they all wanted to ask me the same question. With that, Bill finally decided Suzy had done enough and escorted her out of the funeral home.
The rest of the funeral was beautiful. It all went as planned and was appropriately reverential and respectful. I only cried twice and only for a brief moment each time. The first time was when the choir sang “On Eagle’s Wings,” because in our church that was the ultimate funeral song. It made me realize exactly where we were in that moment—in this case, my father’s funeral. And the second time was when they played taps before lowering the casket into the ground. Our dad would have liked that. He was very proud of his time in the army.
The good face I had been trying to put on started to crack. I suddenly felt like I had to take care of everyone else and comfort them while they mourned my father. People I didn’t know well were coming fully unhinged while speaking to me about my dad. I was taking care of them, but I wanted to be taken care of. Natalie, Dan, and I made a silent agreement through a series of private eye rolls and looks toward the exits, and then we snuck back to our mom’s house while the funeral luncheon was still going on. We had all had enough for the day. We had some drinks and sat silently with one another. It was a long process and we were glad it was over.
But it wasn’t really over. Over the next week, there were a hundred little details to handle: moving all of Ron’s things out of his apartment, closing his business, closing out his utilities. It was unique explaining to the cable company that, no, Ron wasn’t moving, Ron was dead. Please disconnect his HBO forever. It became my full-time job to dismantle my dad’s life.
I also realized that while I hadn’t been away from home that long, it had been long enough that I no longer had a place there. I didn’t have friends, I didn’t have a bedroom, I didn’t have a car. I felt like a houseguest in a house that felt only vaguely familiar to me. I had been so focused on creating my own life in New York that it hadn’t occurred to me that my family’s lives were all continuing without me. Any gap I may have created when I’d left had been slowly filled in. My siblings and my mother had to start going about their normal lives again—jobs, kids, general life stuff. Their grieving wasn’t over, but it was time to start trying to move forward.
After a few weeks at home, it was time for me to go back to New York. I needed to figure out what was next for me. I felt bad, like I was letting them down somehow. But they were all supportive of me getting back to my version of normal.
My seat on the flight to New York was in the last row of the plane. I didn’t have anyone sitting next to me, which felt like a real win. As the plane ascended, something cracked inside of me. I felt so terrible for leaving. For leaving my mother, leaving my sisters, especially Natalie, who was so young and in such a vulnerable place in life, straddling the line between childhood and adulthood. For leaving my brother, who was in the middle of planning his wedding, which must have been so difficult in that moment. I felt guilty and selfish, and the worst part was that I felt relieved. I was flying away from a lot of sadness and pain, and I was flying back to a place that was all mine. I cried on that plane, while no one was watching, while no one could hear over the sound of the plane’s engines. By the time we leveled off at ten thousand feet, I had stopped. I felt calm and drained.
The flight attendants started to make their rounds with drinks and snacks. One male flight attendant was particularly attentive to me, giving me free champagne every time he passed by. I found myself flirting back. It was a fun game to distract myself from where I had been. As the plane was about to land in New York, he sat down next to me in one of the empty seats. “What were you doing in Omaha?” he asked.
I thought about what to say. Should I be honest? “My dad died.” Or maybe say, “I was at a dental convention.”
“I was visiting my family,” I decided was easiest. I didn’t need manufactured sympathy from a stranger.
“And you live in New York?”
“I do,” I said, smiling.
He then handed me a bottle of champagne wrapped in a white napkin.
“My number is inside. Let’s go out sometime.”
He kissed my cheek, got up, and walked away. I was stunned. And pleased. And relieved that I didn’t have to talk about where I had just been and what I had just done. I was headed back to my life and my grief, and my memories of Ron were my own. I didn’t have to share them with anyone.
The Wisdom of Hedwig…and Britney
After returning from Omaha and the stress of my dad’s funeral, I found myself happy to be in New York and excited to get my life back in order. Freshly graduated from Barnard, Zuzanna was in the midst of setting up her new non-academic life. She’d moved to a new apartment in Brooklyn and was working as a hostess on the Lower East Side and auditioning for whatever she could find. Now we were struggling actors together. Luckily, she still had loads of free time and was there to welcome me back with plenty of laughs and Pinot Grigio to ease the re-entry anxiety.
I got myself an apartment in Astoria, Queens, which at the time was the go-to neighborhood for financially challenged actors. I was feeling somewhat settled, but still a little off. My friend Jenn (
of Theater Barn and Footloose fame) recommended an affordable therapist to me. His name was Thomas. I started going when I could, and I have to say, it helped me sort through a lot of what I was dealing with. Coming from a place where people didn’t talk about their therapists as openly as their dermatologists, I had never really asked myself, How do you feel about this? Or How did this affect you? I was used to just barreling forward and hoping for the best. I should have paid someone to listen to me years ago, I realized.
I had some Pokèmon Live! money saved, but I was jobless for the foreseeable future. It was back to the ol’ audition grind. I scanned Backstage religiously and tried to will an opportunity to magically appear. After weeks and weeks of searching, I managed to snag myself an audition for a show I loved, in a town I had always wanted to visit. The Zachary Scott Theatre Center in Austin, Texas, was doing a production of John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen Trask’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch, a one-person monologue with a killer rock score that follows the adventures of a fiercely determined and wildly passionate young man in Germany who reluctantly becomes a young woman in Kansas and, later, New York City. It’s unique and powerful and was a huge success off-Broadway.
I had never seen the show in its original space at the Jane Street Theatre because it was sold out by the time I’d discovered it. Then, before I knew it, John, the original Hedwig, left the production entirely and I refused to see anyone else do it. (Also, I wasn’t really sure where Jane Street was. This was during my first year in New York, and anything below 14th Street was a total mystery to me.)
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