Cool, Calm & Contentious - Merrill Markoe [9]
Unfortunately, there was nothing funny to my mother about the embracing of imperfections. She didn’t even attend my high school graduation because I insisted on wearing a pair of shoes that did not match my dress.
For the first few years of college, I didn’t finish a single creative project I started. The more I cared about the work, the less likely I was to complete it. If I declared the work finished, and someone (like my mother) “didn’t happen to like it,” then it would be deemed worthless and ruined forever. I was too afraid to allow someone to puncture my dream. I needed to retain the fantasy that I might add some amazing last-minute finishing touches that would have the power to deflect the eventual onslaught of negative criticism.
Maybe, in the last analysis, that was why my mother never pursued her career as a writer. Her own impossible standards were too tough on her. And it pissed her off.
When I finished reading her diaries, I did have a sense of completion. My lifelong problems of feeling judged by her and coming up short in all areas became both tolerable and funny. After all, I did no worse than the women of Bali. And possibly a little better than certain parts of Venice:
We walked to St Mark’s square and it is one of the most remarkable squares I have ever seen. And in terrible taste. So terribly overdecorated that its very bizarreness makes it almost beautiful.
In retrospect, it seems ludicrous that I spent the first half of my life seeking a positive review from someone who thought Piazza San Marco was in terrible taste. Though now that I think of it, finding the beauty in bizarreness has always been one of my passions. But which part of the thing was the beauty and which was the bizarre would have been one more thing about which my mother and I would have disagreed.
The best I could have hoped for, all things considered, was to receive the kind of review she gave to Charles Dickens when she was a student. In the margin of The Dickens Reader, one of her old hardbound college textbooks from the late 1930s that I had taken home with me as a memento, I found a remark in pencil, in my mother’s distinctive handwriting. “Not one of his better works” she’d noted on the title page of Oliver Twist. “I was not impressed.”
* His detailed discourse delivered to my brother on the topic of “How to Fold a Napkin” remains to this day a classic of its kind. (“Hold both ends of the napkin out like so, one in each hand, and then shake the napkin until it is fully extended.…”) It’s also appropriate to note that on the occasion of the napkin seminar my brother was in his late thirties and had a Ph.D.
In Praise of Crazy Mommies
My mother to me: “So is everything always a joke to you?”
IN THE SUMMER OF 1977, WHEN I WAS IN MY MID-TWENTIES, I made the decision to switch professions from “artist/teacher” to “something in film or TV.” While I was aware that my new plans were both risky and vague, I had been inspired by the filmmaking and scriptwriting classes I had audited at USC the previous year, where I’d had a job teaching painting and drawing to freshmen. I had also noticed that the paintings I was working on—the centerpiece of my career as I then saw it—were increasingly full of plot, language, and humor.
Branching out into a more dynamic form of expression seemed like an exciting next step. After some contemplation of what seemed like the possibilities for new employment, I concluded that the most viable point of entry for me might come through writing.
Though I had never worked as a writer before, I had a sense that it was something I could do, possibly from the years of grammar-related browbeating my mother had provided me. So I sat down and studied all the TV shows of that moment—viewing them for the first time as a possible meal ticket, focusing my attention on the ones I hated least. Then I