All That Is Bitter and Sweet_ A Memoir - Ashley Judd [101]
In a random stroke of fate, one day a man from New York City knocked on the door of our secluded rural home. He was a print ad producer, in the area scouting locations to shoot a cigarette billboard. He was interested in the fields around our house for the ad and was looking for the property owner. Instead, he found a fourteen-year-old girl, home alone, to whom he blurted out, “Have you ever modeled?” I thought nothing of inviting him inside, sitting on the floor with him on my mother’s bedroom floor, and showing him our homemade modeling head shots. He encouraged me to enter a modeling competition in New York City, sponsored by one of the top agencies. It was something I wanted badly, but I didn’t have the money to make the trip. I shared the exciting information with my godmother, and she stepped in to help me.
Piper McDonald Evans is one of the powerful people who were miraculously put in my life at crucial times, times I otherwise might have endured a worse fate or perhaps not even have survived. Apart from my grandparents, she was the first and most influential of these guardian spirits and someone who still holds a treasured space in my life. She was born Linda Ann McDonald, and grew up across the street from my mother in Ashland. In fact, she had introduced Mom and Dad on their first blind date. Her brother played with my uncles; our families were “yard kin,” as I like to put it. Piper had gone to the university, pledged a top sorority, and graduated with impeccable grades. She moved to San Francisco before I was born and became a woman of the world, versed in art, literature, history, and fashion, always displaying considerable intellectual gifts as well as a fantastic sense of humor.
When Dad and I made our road trip to Oregon years earlier, we stopped for a while to visit her in San Francisco. I was in awe of her and spent much of our time in the car with my windshield visor down, looking in the mirror, trying to arrange my hair to look like hers. She has often popped up in our lives at the most auspicious times. When Mom decided to move to Marin County, Piper was there to meet her at the airport (wearing a mink coat, of course) and helped her out while she looked for an apartment. Piper had an inkling of how chaotic our lives were, but there was little she could do except be there for us when she was needed.
Over the years we grew closer, and she became a safe haven for me in my adolescence, much as Mamaw and Papaw Ciminella had been in my early childhood. I don’t remember if she called me or I called her, but one day after school when I was about fourteen, and I was sitting there beside Mom’s bed holding that gun, I ended up talking on the phone to her. While I didn’t mention that I was actually playing with a gun, I did share that I was extremely miserable. Because she knew my mother, she both believed me and did not judge anyone involved. Instead, she expressed her confidence in me and thus gave me something else to focus on: the novel idea that someday I could live differently.
She later gave me a book entitled Tiffany’s Table Manners for Teenagers, and in her inscription she wrote, “If you have the kind of life I think you are, you’re going to need this!” One of the many things she taught me was how to be at ease with all kinds of people, because she was inclusive, celebrated diversity, and honored everyone, even though, paradoxically, she could be an unapologetic