Tuesday, February 19, 2008
“Your dad was casting a variety show for his high school, which was the boys school a town over from mine, and he needed someone to distract the audience by screaming. That’s all he needed, just someone to run down the aisle screaming, so that the audience would turn their heads at the right moment for them to pull of some magic trick or whatever. Anyway, as it happened, he walked by me and heard me screaming, so he cast me in the show. That’s how we met.”
Why were you screaming, mom?
“Oh, I don’t know. Probably someone was tickling me. One of my friends, maybe. I can't remember.”
When she’d tell me that story, I would tell her I never knew she was into performing. She’d say, “Oh, I wasn’t. I just screamed the one time,” but that’s a lie. I’ve seen the boxes of pictures, and I know you were up on that stage more than once.
Once, when I was sixteen—funny that I remember this above so many other things—dad came home early on a day when I’d brought a girl home with me. He walked through the front door and right into the living room, where she and I were basically naked on the sofa. I wasn’t expecting him to be home. When he was employed, he was a photo stripper, making plates out of computer-generated photographs for a print shop on the south side. He worked long hours—longer even than mom—and I just wasn’t expecting him to be home. He told the girl—Amy something—to get her clothes back on, and he told me to wait where I was, but didn’t specify if I could get dressed. When Amy was gone, he walked into the kitchen, popped the cork on a bottle of wine, and spent the rest of the afternoon draining and refilling his glass.
There were a thousand stories surrounding this skillet. The family favorite—not mine, but the family’s—was that the skillet had cooked Marie Antoinette’s last meal, a plate of savory crepes, when she was held away from the mob at the Tuileries. I always thought that story smacked of a tall tale. How would this skillet have escaped the mob in Lazar’s possession or his son’s or grandson’s after the revolution? And anyway, who the hell was Marie Antoinette that she should eat crepes while the people around her made due off root vegetables?