A One of a Kind Mother

Just the word “Mother” is complicated in itself. Add relationships with mothers, well that’s a whole different story. I had a mother and now I am a mother and although it’s a very different relationship it’s still complex and full of mistakes, albeit different from the ones my mother made.

My mother was a character, a cigarette-smoking, poker-playing, outspoken, judgmental hard-ass and loving mother. There was nothing she wouldn’t do for me. I was her everything and I mean everything. She lived through me, and because I came out of her womb singing like Ethel Merman and tap dancing like Fred Astaire, she was in heaven.

Here was her way out … or her way in … to show business and a glamorous life. Fortunately I was a great candidate because I was born to entertain so it was a “perfect fit,” at least for a while.

Here is just one example of what my mother was willing to do. When I was just 12 years old she took me along with my best friend Beverly to New York to see a Broadway show. By then I had already done shows in summer stock and performed in the Catskills but not yet on Broadway. While we were sitting in the first row of the mezzanine watching Bye Bye Birdie, I can remember poking my mom and whispering “I want to be in this show and I want to play that part.” I guess she heard me because as we were on our way back to Squirrel Hill in Pittsburgh, my mother just happened to have an 8 × 10 glossy of me along with my resume, which she dropped off at the stage door of the Shubert Theater before heading home. Crazy, huh, but that was my mother. She wasn’t quite Mama Rose, but she was a close second.

Surprising to say, the stage manager of Bye Bye Birdie called my mother in Pittsburgh one night while I was doing my homework in the kitchen asking if she would bring me to NY for an audition. They were casting for replacements and he thought I might be right for the show based on my picture. Well of course my mother said “yes.” No, let me tell the truth, she practically yelled