Growing Up Laughing_ My Story and the Story of Funny - Marlo Thomas [90]
Terrified of being any part of the fantasies of teenage boys, I found the mornings especially challenging. I never left the bedroom in a robe or any kind of casual wear. I was always completely dressed, hair in place, as if their father and I had been having an all-night meeting in that room down the hall.
And I was working hard to keep my feminist values up front, teaching Phil the smallest of things. Like what a hamper was for. What really got to me, though, was that all of them kept asking me where their things were.
“Where are my shoes?” Phil would constantly ask.
What is it about men? They think we women have a radar attached to our uterus. And the thing that killed me was that I knew where they were. I knew where Phil’s shoes were. I knew where all four boys’ shoes were.
How did this happen? Had my mother secretly planted a chip in me at birth that would activate when I said “I do”? I was beginning to understand why there hadn’t been a female Shakespeare or Mozart. There wasn’t room in their heads for symphonies and sonnets—their brains were cluttered with where everyone’s shoes were.
And through it all, I kept thinking, Now my mother is completely happy. Terre and Tony had been settled for some time, but that hadn’t stopped her one bit from continuously nagging me to join the betrothed battalion. And when her rhapsodizing about the glory of it all hadn’t made a dent in my resolve, she brought out the big guns: “You’ll die alone!” Nice.
So when Mother called me in Chicago, where Phil and I were living the first summer after our May wedding, I regaled her with my marital adventure. I was Marloizing Phil’s house with new closets. I’d gotten the boys to come out of their rooms at the same time for the family dinner hour. I’d color-coded the towels.
And brimming with newfound maternal pride, I told my mother that Phil was bragging to everyone about how I could talk to his sons individually.
“She got the book on each of them very quickly,” he’d say. “Most people speak to them as a flock.”
As I went on and on to my mother, knowing how thrilled she’d be by all of this, she interrupted.
“What about your career?” she crisply asked.
Yep, it stopped me, too. This woman had hounded me to get married for most of my life, but here it was: Underneath it all, she had been as conflicted about it as I was.
I had always made the joke that I was “my mother’s revenge.” But like all good jokes, it was rooted in truth.
ROUGHHOUSING with RITA . . .
“I love being married. It’s so great to find that one special
person you want to annoy for the rest of your life.”
—Rita Rudner
“I think men who have a pierced ear are better prepared for
marriage. They’ve experienced pain and bought jewelry.”
—Rita Rudner
“I want to have children, but my friends scare me.
One of my friends told me she was in labor for 36 hours.
I don’t even want to do anything that feels good for 36 hours.”
—Rita Rudner
“It wasn’t that no one asked me to the prom,
it was that no one would tell me where it was.”
—Rita Rudner
“Marriages don’t last. When I meet a guy, the first
question I ask myself is: Is this the man I want my
children to spend their weekends with?”
—Rita Rudner
“When I eventually met Mr. Right,
I had no idea that his first name was Always.”
—Rita Rudner
. . . and ROSEANNE
“As a housewife, I feel that if the kids
are still alive when my husband gets home
from work, then hey, I’ve done my job.”
—Roseanne Barr
“Experts say you should never hit your
children in anger. When is a good time?
When you’re feeling festive?”
—Roseanne Barr
“The quickest way to a man’s heart
is through his chest.”
—Roseanne Barr
“Women complain about PMS,
but I think of it as the only time of the
month when I can be myself.”
—Roseanne Barr
“My husband said he needed more space.
So I locked him outside.”
—Roseanne Barr
Chapter 44
The Making of a Wisenheimer—Tina Fey
Like the rest of America in the fall of 2008, I couldn’t wait for the