I Don't Know What You Know Me From: Confessions of a Co-Star Read online

  I feel so brokenhearted today about the state of my hometown. As I write this, it’s all over the news that Detroit has just filed for bankruptcy. My hometown is waving the white flag and admitting defeat. Maybe it’s just because I’m from there, but I think there is something special about Detroit. It’s like Detroit is America’s sad family member who can’t catch a break, a cautionary fable to teach our country a lesson—I just don’t understand what the lesson is. Don’t steal? Don’t give up? Don’t burn your shit down the night before Halloween? In my fantasy that city is like the Little Engine That Could. For so many years it was saying, “I think I can, I think I can, I think I can.” Except in the Detroit version of that story, before getting to the top of the mountain, it stopped and said, “I can’t.” I want my little engine to get back to “I think I can.” And eventually to “I know I can!” Detroit was a town of blue-collar workers. It created a middle class and, at one time, good-paying jobs with benefits for anyone, no matter one’s education or color. It has an art museum, a symphony, it is the home of Motown, KISS, Jack White, and a cute zoo with all the main animals. And it made cars! Who loves their cars more than Americans? It has Lions and Tigers and Red Wings and Pistons. There’s water everywhere and another country just a bridge or tunnel away. I am so lucky to be from Detroit, and I want so badly for it to get better, and now I feel terrible for abandoning it, but I have a lot of hope for my first home. It always took such good care of me, and I think it’s time I pay a little back, or forward. There’s still a lot of Detroit left in me, and even though I live in L.A. now, I’ll always be a Punk Rock Pick Locker at heart.

  I Used to Be More Ugly

  I HATE WHEN I TELL PEOPLE I WAS UGLY AND THEY are like, “No … you’re exaggerating.” I really was; I have proof (see Ugly Judy 1). It’s OK, I’m over it now, but I had an extremely long awkward phase that I think I am still (and might always be) recovering from. If I’m being honest, I believe that this is why I think I’m more attractive than I probably am. You see, when you are used to looking at this (see Ugly Judy 2) in the mirror every day for years, when you start to see this (see Pretty Judy), it looks pretty good, you know? I mean, trust me, I know I’m no Angelina Jolie (or insert person you think unreasonably beautiful here), but at least I don’t look like my grandpa. (Sorry, Grandpa, I mean, you still landed my grandma, and she was smokin’ so…)

  Ugly Judy 1

  Ugly Judy 2

  Pretty Judy

  Ugly Grandpa

  Smokin’ Hot Grandma

  When I was a kid, my mom didn’t read me stories at night; she played these tapes of nursery rhymes for me that came with corresponding books. During the story a bell would sound for when you’d turn the page of the book. I got so good at following the bells that I took a book to preschool one day, gathered the other children around me in a circle, and read them my story. I had memorized the whole thing, including when to turn the page. When the teacher overheard me reading a book to the other kids, she freaked out, called my mom at work, and told her that I was a genius and I could read. I was three. My mother asked what, exactly, I was reading, and when the teacher told her, my mom said, “She’s not reading that book; she has it memorized. Is there anything else? I am in a meeting.” My mom didn’t suffer fools gladly.

  My favorite book/​tape my mom played for me was The Ugly Duckling. I felt, even at that young age, that the story of the ugly duckling was about me. I loved how the ugly duckling turned into a beautiful swan, and the older I got, and the uglier I got, the more I prayed that I would be like that duckling. This was the dawn of my ongoing obsession with makeover movies and makeovers in general. Don’t all teenage girls have this phase? Even if it lands them in a Hot Topic or with a horrible perm? In retrospect, I feel like that story is full of shit, because, like, when have you ever seen an ugly duckling? They are the cutest little creatures out there. Not a one of them is even a little bit hard to swallow, visually speaking. But whatever, I didn’t think of that when I was younger. I just wanted to believe that my transformation day would come. And it kind of did.

  The summer between junior and senior years of high school was a big one for me. My hair magically grew overnight, I got my braces off, I started wearing contacts instead of glasses, and I got a real boyfriend!! Eric Campbell. He was cute, nice, funny, a whole year older than me, and about to start his first year of college at University of Michigan! What? That’s not even the best part! He was also a drummer in an actual band that played rock concerts at bars and clubs in Detroit! I got to be a band girl! It was so awesome that I didn’t even care that dating a drummer meant I always had to be there early to watch him set up and I always had to wait approximately one year after the show was over for him to pack up his drums. I didn’t care about anything except that he liked me and he didn’t go to my high school, which meant that he had no idea what it was like for me there. After that summer when I outgrew my “ ’FroMama” phase (thank you, Jason Baranowski, for that delightful nickname), I felt like my life was a John Hughes movie and I was having a major Ally Sheedy circa The Breakfast Club moment. I got a makeover and a boyfriend, but I still realized who I was on the inside and what was really important. Kind of.

  College turned out to be an even better platform for a makeover. Now I was in a completely new place with all new people, and I was ready for a complete reinvention. I bleached out my ’fro and worked hard to shed the Michigan me. My mom’s advice to me before I left for school in Chicago was “Don’t shit where you eat.” So, I also planned on playing impossible to get at my new school, too (it always works to make you more desirable and mysterious, unless no one wants to get you, in which case it just keeps you from hooking up with guys who will talk behind your back, win-win). College was when I felt like I really came into my own, except for one small mishap my first year. After several minutes of debilitating abdominal pain, I thought my appendix had ruptured in voice and speech class, but it turned out it was really just bad gas. Now, I just want to say in my own defense it wasn’t me who demanded an ambulance be called and that I go to the ER—it was my teacher. And it wasn’t my fault that the voice and speech room was on the third floor and that the EMTs had to carry me down three flights of stairs and through the lobby of the building in a stretcher-chair to the ambulance. I’m really not that high maintenance, usually. I did walk home after they diagnosed me as “gassy” in the ER. But besides that episode, I felt like the life I created in Chicago was what I wished my high school experience would have been like. I have always been a late bloomer, but I was really happy there and really grew up in those four years. By the time it was all over and I was ready to move to L.A., I felt like I had nailed it, nothing could get me down.

  There is a TV movie called Who Is Julia? that I saw years ago. It’s about a beautiful woman who gets in a terrible car accident, her face smashed beyond repair, so, as per usual, she has a face transplant. They replace her face with the face of a plain-looking lady who dropped dead of brain death (this is a direct quote from IMDb.com. They describe what happened to this character as “faints and suffers brain death.” I swear I am not making that up). She goes from being this gorgeous woman to being, well, Mare Winningham. Moving to L.A. to be an actress made me feel like the Mare Winningham character in Who Is Julia? I went from feeling like I looked one way to learning that I looked totally different. Everyone here is gorgeous! Remember, this was before Judd Apatow made nerdy/​dork/​stoners the new black. I looked around the waiting room at auditions and felt like I was back in high school again. The people were dressed better than me, they were calmer than me, they seemed to use better deodorant, and most of all they were pretty. Like fashion-magazine pretty. Way prettier than me. For a while I got to audition for the lead roles, but they kept going to Pretty McPrettyson, and I began to get called in to play Pretty’s best friend/​sister/​assistant. I had to stop reading the descriptions for the characters I was going in for. The descriptions, or breakdowns, as we Hollywood folk lik
e to call them, were something like “all ethnicities, all ages, all sizes.” Even my character in The Wedding Planner was supposed to be an overweight, middle-aged British woman. But how could I be upset? I was getting paid to act in a movie. Only one time do I remember my feelings getting hurt when the feedback from a casting director was that I wasn’t ugly enough. In my mind the casting director was saying, “Yes, she’s ugly. The character breakdown did call for ugly, and she is that, but we need even more ugly. Do you have anyone who is even uglier than this … oh, what’s her name … oh, right, Judy Greer, do you represent anyone uglier than Judy Greer?” That one left a mark. But then I remembered Who Is Julia? and it was Mare Winningham who was the star of the movie, not the car accident lady with no face left over, and wouldn’t you rather have a long awesome life (read: career) than be gorgeous but dead (read: living with my parents again?). So maybe I don’t look like Megan Fox, but I do OK, and if I hire a team of people to clean me, dress me, fix my hair, and paint my face and body, I can look above average on a red carpet for thirty minutes, which is plenty of time for my picture to be taken before I toss the Spanx, wipe off my lipstick, get a martini in my hand, and start having real fun.

  Mom

  MY MOTHER IS AN UNCONVENTIONAL PARENT, THANK God. She tried to be a normal mom, she tried to do the normal things, like cook dinner and host my birthday parties, but it just wasn’t her. She is really impulsive. For example, if there was a blizzard outside but she wanted to go to the movies, we would go. We’d slide all over the road in her red Mustang driving there, but we would go. If she was on a diet, so were my father and I, and there were a lot of diets. We suffered through her chewing each bite of food thirty times, serving everything on dessert plates to make your meals look bigger, the Crock-Pot years, the aerobics classes, breakfast for dinner, no dinner. My poor dad … at least I got to leave for college.

  There was also a lot of purging of our stuff and furniture rearranging. My mom has always been an early riser, and it was not uncommon for me to wake up around 11:00 a.m. on a Saturday and find that the living room was now in the dining room and that we actually no longer had a dining room but we did have a brand-new office. My father and I would get used to the changes, but then she would eventually just change them again. Leaving town without my mom could be stressful. You might come home to a new floor plan, half your wardrobe donated, and, sometimes, even a new dog. My dad is the opposite; he doesn’t love change and likes to hang on to his possessions until he’s sure there’s no need or use for them anymore. This is hard on my mom, and during their last move she admitted to me that she was burning some of my dad’s old books, magazines, and papers because she knew he would never get around to sorting through them in time for the movers to come. Like any good daughter would, I immediately called my dad and told on her. I probably should have let them work out their own problems, but I can never keep myself from butting into any situation, like someone else I know and love and am writing about at this exact moment.

  There was always a lot of change happening. I liked it. It was exciting. I always felt the same rush my mom did after a day reorganizing the basement or driving a carload of stuff to the Goodwill. A fresh start, a new beginning, and it was fun spending the day with my mom, no matter what we were doing. She turned on loud music while we worked, and there was always a reward at the end. Ironically, it was usually a trip to the mall to buy new things, or at least put them on layaway, but we felt we’d earned it. And sharing a sundae in a diner after the stores had closed for the night was the perfect end to our day together.

  The relationship between a mother and a daughter is a unique one. And maybe mine with my mom is especially unique, since I’m a daughter and an only child; it seems to constantly change. There were the times I can’t remember—when I was a baby and needed her to survive. Times when her approval meant everything to me, times when I couldn’t stand to be in the same room with her, and times when I would cry and cry because I missed her so much. Sometimes I have felt like a sister to her, sometimes more of a friend. I’ve heard my father say how alike we are; I’ve heard her voice come out of my mouth and seen her hands when looking down at my own. We are deeply connected, and I’d say there’s a chance she was probably my mom in a past life, or I was hers, if I believed in that stuff.

  Here is a brief history of what I know about my mom. She was born Mollie Ann Greer. She is from Carey, Ohio. She had seven brothers and sisters and was the daughter of a social worker/​farmer and a teacher. She was best friends with her sister Judy but is close to all her living siblings. When she was eleven, she was shot in the chest by her brother, who was four. It was one of those freak gun accidents you hear about. After going hunting, her older brothers had left their guns on the ground by a tree, her baby brother saw them, thought they were toys, picked one up, aimed it at my mom through the kitchen window, and pulled the trigger. The bullet missed her heart by a hair. She spent weeks in the hospital healing from her wound. She still has a scar on her boob, and here’s something creepy: I have the same scar. Exactly. It really freaked my mom out when I showed her the first time. I’d include a photo of it, but I don’t want to put a photo of my boob in my book. She actually never has a bad thing to say about that accident; in fact she always says she was glad it happened because that was when she realized that she wanted to be a nurse. She told me the doctors did a great job, yes, but it was the nurses who were the real heroes, and she wanted to do what they did, take care of sick people.

  But, not so fast, Mollie … She took an eight-year detour in the convent before going to nursing school. Yeah, my mom was engaged to Jesus. She got kicked out before she took her final (marriage to Jesus) vows, but she says she has no regrets about that either because she feels like she gave her best (most potentially whorish—my words) years to the Lord until the mother superior finally kicked her out, saying she felt my mom would be better suited serving God in a more “secular” environment. You see, my mom was a bit of a rebel nun. Even then, she always loved a makeover. It was long enough ago that nuns still wore habits—and there was no such thing as casual Friday in the convent, those ladies were covered at all times—but that didn’t stop Sister Mollie from trying to improve her fellow sisters’ personal nun style. She would shave heads, give perms, and pick out new eyeglasses, and she even bought herself a red bathing suit when a local parishioner invited all the nuns to go swimming in his pool one hot afternoon. (He’s no dummy. Imagine if that were today, the YouTube video …) Well, that episode was the last straw, as my mom explains it, and the Nun Boss basically fired my mom, but even though she was a failed nun and never got to marry God, she went home feeling as if a huge weight had been lifted off her shoulders. Apparently, she never heard a calling. She knew she didn’t belong there, and she told me that every time her sister Judy would come for a visit, Judy would say, “Are you ready to come home with us yet?” So, when she broke off her engagement to Jesus, my mom confessed to my grandpa that she’d always really wanted to go to nursing school and that was her true calling. Still to this day, she has no idea how he came up with the money, but her dad found a way to send her to a nursing school in Cleveland. Normally, I’d take this opportunity to plug the Catholic nursing school for girls she attended, but it’s a parking lot now.

  Sister Mary Elizabeth Ann, a.k.a. Mollie Evans

  When she went off to college, she was poor, she had many odd jobs, she sewed her own clothes, she couldn’t go home often, but she was happy. And then she met my dad and got even happier. They were fixed up on a blind date just like my husband and me! My mom wasn’t even supposed to go out with him that night, her roommate was. But the roommate was sick, so she begged my mom to come in her place. I don’t think it was love at first sight for them either (see “Love Not at First Sight,” this page), but she says that they had more fun than any of the other couples they were out with that night. It didn’t hurt that her boyfriend back home had recently been admitted to a mental hospital, so she didn�
�t have anything to lose by saying yes when my father asked if he could write to her from his college in Buffalo. And he did. Every day. For two years. You’d think that there would be some special box in their basement filled with his letters, but no, that’s not Mollie’s style. Unless she’s lying to me, she threw them all out. She claims they were boring, but, Jesus, that’s over six hundred letters … that’s prolific. Maybe they were porny, and she was nervous I’d stumble across them someday. Gross.