My Movie Star Mother

While other mothers were trimming Singer sewing patterns, clipping grocery-store coupons, or calendaring the next Girl Scout leaders’ jamboree, mine was fashioning voodoo dolls from our prim and proper Pasadena dining-room beeswax candles. To ensure victory for the Dodgers, she whiled away Spring and Summer evenings impaling the representative arm of the opposing team’s pitcher on the mound at Chavez Ravine with straight pins from her sewing kit that was never otherwise opened.

“It won’t really hurt him; his arm just won’t feel quite right,” she would offer as justification to any of my friends who happened to drop by during game time, while their mothers were at home baking homemade cookies and preparing the family meal.

While other mothers studied typing or continuing education classes, mine enrolled in a History of Witchcraft class in West Hollywood (she promptly returned home having lingered for ten minutes whereupon she was horrified—her strict Catholic upbringing jolted) and mailed Halloween greeting cards featuring her formal portrait. There she was, the graduate, seated on a broom-straw chair and donning a floor-length, hooded, black cape.

While other mothers were polishing white buck uniform shoes and bagging the next day’s school lunches, I often accompanied mine on a Tuesday night to the baseball stadium. I held her back from loudmouthed, enemy fans, one of whom, having exhausted every tried-and-true derogatory label to describe her and her team, nearly drove her to arrest for assault when he gave it his all, writhed from the grasp of his wife who was attempting to corral him, and hissed at me, “Daughter of a snake.”

While other mothers insisted on perfect attendance at school, mine extricated me from a high-school mid-term exam on the ruse that I “had an appointment for a vaccination.” She shoved me into the car despite my kicking and screaming and hightailed it around the corner so that I might watch the filming of my favorite TV show Batman—seems Wayne Manor was right down our street.

“Isn’t it a lie to tell the nuns I have to go to the doctor when we’re really going to watch them film a TV show?” I held off asking her until after I’d bagged Robin’s autograph and was seated at the dinner table.

“You’ll need that shot someday—it all evens out in the end,” she confidently replied while fingering her rosary beads.

While other mothers spent their homemaking hours emulating Donna Reed, my mother was off on another daytime adventure. She was a cross between Grace Kelly and Lucy Ricardo. Instead of demurely playing bridge, my mother was late to the tournament because she was explaining to the policeman that the reason someone witnessed her tossing pantyhose into an alley dumpster was not because she had been involved in foul play and was disposing of the evidence, but rather because she’d had a runner and needed to change stockings.

This fiercely loyal supporter reduced the boys who didn’t love me to “insignificant dust motes in a small corner of your ballroom life,” and any girlfriend who betrayed me to “evil sufficient unto the day.” For her sake, I underwent the slings and arrows of charm school one summer, rushed sororities even though I was far too shy, and made my dreaded debut with the savings she had stashed precisely so I would.

And since that morning she was taken from her Ralph Lauren bedding and gasped her last ragged breath on stark hospital sheets, I would do anything if it meant I could have one more hour with my astonishing mother who planted daffodils in high heels and sat alongside my best friend and me in 1967 at the Jimi Hendrix concert when he slid through purple haze toward the throng of screaming teenagers—on his knees, clad only purple underwear.

I miss my movie star mother who made childhood a surprise.