Praise for Blow Jobs: A Guide to Making it in Show Business or Not!

“Dolores DeLuce is more than a Counter Culture Diva, actress and writer. I regret that I didn’t have her as a guest on my show while she was the reigning Alternative Queen of Los Angeles. My Bad!” *

—David Letterman, Late Night Talk Show Host

“Who knew this fashion forward Diva had a wit as dry as my vagina. Reading Dolores’ book made me wet myself.”*

—Joan Rivers, comedian, writer and star of Fashion Police

“Dolores DeLuce was made for greatness. I loved her sauce.” *

—Dean Martin

“This book is the best food for thought I have ever read, more delicious than Chasen’s chili. Enjoy its lusty lusciousness.” *

—Elizabeth Taylor, academy award winner

“Dolores DeLuce has a biting humor that tore my heart out. Get this book and let her glamorize you like she did to me.” *

—Alex Skarsgard, actor best known for vampire role in True Blood

“DeLuce’s Blow Jobs are not only honest but they exemplify my life’s philosophy: The best thing you can do for the poor is not to be one of them.” *

—Rev. Ike, Minister and Prosperity Guru

“The Counter Culture Diva is a filthy whore but the bitch can really write. These words came to me as I awoke with an erection. I had been dreaming that Divine was writing the quote with liquid eyeliner on my penis and with each word my penis grew like Pinocchio’s nose.”*

—John Waters, Film Director and Author

*Quotes by celebrities if they were still alive or had bothered to read my book.

Also By Dolores DeLuce

My Life a Four Letter Word: Confessions of a Counter Culture Diva

Blow Jobs: A Guide to Making it in Show Business or Not!

Dolores DeLuce

Copyright © 2014 Dolores DeLuce

All rights reserved.

Double Delinquent Press

www.counterculturediva.com

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or parts thereof, in any form, except for the inclusion of brief quotes in a review.

For agents, managers, casting directors,

producers and directors who passed me up

for a bigger name.

"That's Life"

That's life (that's life), that's what all the people say

You're ridin' high in April, shot down in May

But I know I'm gonna change that tune

When I'm back on top, back on top in June

I said that's life (that's life), and as funny as it may seem

Some people get their kicks stompin' on a dream

But I don't let it, let it get me down

'cause this fine old world, it keeps spinnin' around

I've been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn and a king

I've been up and down and over and out and I know one thing

Each time I find myself flat on my face

I pick myself up and get back in the race

Lyrics by P. Anka, J. Revaux, G. Thibault, C. Frankois

Chapter 1

Bargain Basement Beauty Queen

After four years under the tutelage of drag queen mentors in San Francisco, where I perfected the craft of over-acting, I suddenly had a burst of ambition to make it in mainstream entertainment. I returned to the City of Angels armed only with the knowledge of how to put on a show in the backyard like Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney did in their early movies. It didn’t take long for the big fish I had become in the small pond of San Francisco to realize I would need something special to make a significant splash in the Hollywood talent pool.

In the 60s I turned on, tuned in and dropped out, but the wretched ‘80s was dawning and Ronald Reagan was about to give me a loud wake-up call. Living on welfare to subsidize my artistic pursuits was not going to work anymore. Now that I had a legitimate career to consider, topless dancing and drug dealing were no longer options to supplement my addiction to the stage. The proverbial casting couch was also not an option, although I did have an offer once not to sleep with a closeted producer friend whose name will remain anonymous. He paid me to stay off his couch but that’s for another story.

Finding an agent and getting membership in the entertainment guilds was not an easy task. I discovered you had to have worked on a union show before you could join any of the film or television unions, but you had be a member of one or more unions before any agent worth having would see you or any film production company could legally hire you. I found a way to get around the catch-22 by auditioning to be a contestant on The $1.98 Beauty Show.

The $1.98 Beauty Show, a showcase for amateur talent, was produced in 1978 by Chuck Barris, the infamous producer who was rumored to be a hit man for the CIA. Barris was also credited for creating his other big hits: the Gong Show and the Dating Game. The union rule was that if I appeared on an A.F.T.R.A. show (American Federation of Television and Radio Actors) I would then qualify to join S.A.G. (Screen Actors Guild). All I had to do was make an impression at my audition. Fortunately the requirements were not as grueling as the talent shows of today like American Idol or The X Factor, where a performer shows up in a stadium at five AM with 10,000 other hopefuls to sign up. To be a $1.98 Beauty you didn’t even have to be beautiful. All you needed was a bathing suit and an act. Even a bad act would do.

For my audition I chose to sing a song from one of my favorite musicals, Grease. I wore a ’50s taffeta thrift store prom dress and my transsexual friend Ruby teased my bouffant wig into a beauty school dropout’s dream. Then, just as I was about to step out on to the stage, I dipped my Aqua Net lacquered wig into a bucket of water and put it back on my head. The music was cued up and as I stood there singing the lyrics, “It’s raining on prom night, my hair is a mess. It’s running all over my taffeta dress.” My fabulous wig dripped throughout the verse, wrecking my heavily made up black cat eyes which then spilled on to my dress. My audition won me a spot on the show.

On the taping day, Rip Taylor, the comic host, came on stage dressed like the Wizard of Oz. He started off by introducing the candidates one by one and I took my place in the lineup among six contestants. Rip, like so many flamboyant men I’ve known, was intrigued by me. With a quick glance at my bright floral print circle skirt, he licked his lips and said, “Contestant #3, the lovely Dolores Deluxe, looks like the top of a scrumptious cake.”

During the first commercial break, we made quick changes into our costumes. Under my taffeta formal, I wore an actual Maiden Form quilted corset and stuffed the bra cups with tissues, increasing my double Ds to triple Ds. When it was my turn, I took the stage like a pro and began to sing and drip, and drip and sing. “It’s wilting the quilting in my Maiden Form and mascara flows all down my nose because of the storm.” As I sang, I plucked the tissues out from my bra, one by one, to wipe the running mascara off my cheeks. “I don’t even have my corsage, oh gee! It fell down a sewer with my sister’s ID.” As my cup size diminished I had Rip Taylor, the judges, and the audience in stitches.

After the next commercial break the bathing suit contest commenced. As each contestant took her turn walking the steps in heels and her bathing suit, an off-camera announcer made commentary, giving our stats, including age, height, and measurements. Since I am not your perfect 36-26-36, I used my stature—or lack thereof—to my advantage on the walk of shame. As I passed the celebrity judges’ table, I paused in front of Jaye P. Morgan, Dorothy Lamour, and Peter Lawford and made a point to emphasize my short and zaftig shape. I pushed up the flab from under my left upper arm with my right hand and then flexed my new bulging muscle made from excess fatty tissue. Like a body builder, I turned to camera and did several more weight lifter poses. From the corner of my eye I could see Chuck Barris standing in the wings chuckling at my antics. After more commercials, all the bathing beauties stood in a row for the last segment while the judges tallied our scores. Then, with fanfare and confetti, Rip Taylor announced that I was the winner and held the title of the $1.98 Beauty Queen until next week’s show.

As soon as the taping was over I ran straight down to the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists’ office on Hollywood Boulevard and signed up. Not only did my first job in television usher me into the industry guilds, the first screening of my shenanigans on network television brought me another showbiz opportunity.

Some gentleman from New York City contacted the Chuck Barris Production office looking for my contact info. Since they never gave out contestant’s numbers, the production office called me with his name and number and a message stating he had a job offer for me in Manhattan. That day I was working a temp job with a complicated switch board at a large Beverly Hills Law firm and couldn’t wait until my coffee break to return his call. For the next hour I drifted into a fantasy about what this job could be; perhaps something on Broadway.

When I placed the call, a man with a crackling voice answered. He introduced himself and began to speak with excitement. “My best friend owns an establishment midtown Manhattan. It’s a theater that I frequent often.”

Not wanting to sound over-anxious, I said, “And how do you fit into the theater community?”

“I’m one of the investors. Whip Lash is a theatrical dungeon in Hell’s Kitchen which is Broadway adjacent, you know.” As the excitement in his voice increased my hopes hit the floor. “When I saw you on The 1.98 Beauty Show flexing your stuff, I just knew you would make an ideal Dominatrix. As I said, the owner, ‘Madam No Nuts Nonsense,’ is my good friend and trusts my opinions. She is always looking for strong girls with big muscles and raw talent.”

“Mister, I think you have me all wrong,” I protested. “I don’t know where you got the idea that I’m a dominatrix.”

This was not the first time my theatrical spoofs were taken the wrong way. My mind flashed back to 1974 in Golden Gate Park when I straddled a giant dildo wearing black leather and cracking a bull whip, while my four gay roommates in their underwear were chained to the dildo and pulled me to the stage. This stunt put me on the map in Gay San Francisco but I do recall afterwards encountering new friends who didn’t realize I was doing a parody and thought I was seriously into S and M.

My wanna-be employer went on to argue that the job on offer at Whip Lash was no different than any other acting job and it was in a theater, after all.

“Yeah,” I said, “I know Broadway adjacent, no thank you.”

He tried to keep me on the phone and sell me, but the more he rambled the more I imagined the Marquis de Sade drooling in a padded cell on the other end of the line.

When I began to hang up, he blurted out, “I’ll send you a first class round trip ticket to N.Y. if you’ll just meet me. We’ll have lunch, no hanky-panky. We can meet in broad daylight at a nice restaurant, how about The 21 Club? No strings; just a free trip to New York City and a free lunch.”

Since I have family on the East Coast, I accepted his offer and cashed in the first class seat for two coach tickets so that my nine year old daughter, Viva and I could visit our friends and family in Jersey and Manhattan. Since the ticket was already mine, I didn’t even have to show up for the lunch date, but I was curious and kept my word. I had never been to The 21 Club, the once Prohibition-era speakeasy, and I was impressed with the décor of red and white tablecloths and toys hanging from the ceiling and there was still a lunchtime dress code: men had to wear jackets and neckties and no sneakers or jeans were allowed. It’s a good thing I wore a dress and boots that day.

My date wasn’t at all what I was expecting. He was a conservative middle-aged man, resembling a Republican politician with sagging jowls and a bloated belly. The restaurant was abuzz with patrons and waiters and as soon as we were seated the waiter delivered champagne and a few starters to our table. My gentleman explained that he took the liberty of ordering our appetizers beforehand. As I looked over the country-club-classic menu he jumped right into the subject at hand; me, leading lady with a whip. I listened politely for about five minutes as he described the so-called performances at the Whip Lash Dungeon. He spoke at a frenzied pace while slurping up oysters from their shells. “For the most part, the girls perform your average beatings or walking men on dog leashes around the neighborhood, and other forms of humiliation. He dabbed the juice from the oysters rolling down his chin just before it hit the table cloth. “Of course, our clients often request to be urinated upon. It’s not my thing but you’d be surprised how popular those golden showers are; so much so, we had to build a special stage. It’s an all-rubber padded cell.”

I listened politely, enjoying the Mumm’s and the cornmeal-crusted crab cakes. He took a breath to suck down another oyster and with his mouth full he went on to describe the rare client who requested castration. That’s when I stopped him. It was a good thing I wasn’t thinking of ordering the sweetbreads on the menu.

I turned the tables on him and started to interview him about his life. The more I got him talking about himself, the more he revealed who he really was: just a sad, lonely old man with too much time and money on his hands. He told me he was a widower who never had children and was seriously mourning the loss of his wife. He even admitted that his S and M interest was a distraction from his grief. By the end of the lunch I had gotten more out of him then a shrink could in one hour. If only I had finished college, I would have made a good therapist.

He never uttered another word about torture and the dungeon and at the end of the lunch he paid the check and gave me a little hug goodbye. I never saw him again.

On our trip to the Big Apple, Viva and I stayed in Greenwich Village with my good friend Tommy when we weren’t at my folk’s house in New Jersey. Viva loved her Uncle Tommy who was closer to her than any of our blood relatives and he had loved playing her gay daddy ever since we all lived in San Francisco in her formative years. One of those mornings while I slept in, Tommy took Viva out for breakfast. That day as they walked down Bleecker Street on their way back to his apartment with my bagel and coffee, they passed a couple sitting on a stoop. Tommy heard the man say in his New York accent, “That’s the most beautiful fuckin’ kid I ever saw.” Tommy took pride in thinking that strangers thought that my pretty child with her wild curly locks and soft mocha skin was his daughter. When Tommy looked up to acknowledge the compliment with a smile, he realized the words about Viva were coming from none other than Robert De Niro. He was talking to his friend, the beautiful Lauren Hutton.

When Tommy got back with my bagel and a grin ear to ear, he was buzzing, “Girl, you won’t believe it, but we just saw De Niro down the block and I heard him say that he thinks Viva is the most beautiful fucking kid he ever saw. And Lauren Hutton the hottest model in the world agreed with him. Get dressed so we can go back and see if he’s still there. Ya never know, maybe Bobby will give the kid a part in one of his movies. Since you turned down that freak show offer you could use the money.” We all had our Hollywood dreams.

Well by the time I got out of the apartment De Niro and Hutton were long gone from the stoop but I was content with my $1.98 career for the moment and my new union card and I was counting my blessings: a fancy lunch and free vacation, and a special blessing on my daughter from a favorite movie star. Not bad for my first paying gig in Hollywood.

A year after my $1.98 Beauty win, I ran into Rip Taylor in Palm Springs. He was having lunch alone in a booth at a diner. I went over and re-introduced myself, reminding him of my antics on his show. He remembered me and asked me how my career was going. I shared the S and M Dungeon story with him and he got a big kick out of it, as I knew he would. He even asked me why I didn’t take the job.

A few years later I decided to try my luck again by entering another beauty contest. In 1981 a documentary film of The Miss World Pageant was made and the infamous drag star, Divine, was the emcee of the Pageant. To promote the screening of this newly released documentary, the Fox Venice Theatre advertised a live event, The Miss Alternative Los Angeles Beauty Pageant that was to take place during The Miss World premiere week. The three contest segments would be spread out over the week’s screenings. I had just finished a short run of a show I wrote and performed called Primetime, that won me rave reviews, but good reviews did not translate into any paid acting work so when I heard about The Miss Alternative Los Angeles Beauty Pageant I jumped at another opportunity to take L.A. by storm.

The judges were D-list celebrities of the eighties, including Doctor Demento, Weird Al Yankovitch, and Edie Massey, famous for playing Divine’s mother Edie, the ‘Egg Lady,’ in John Water’s cult classic Pink Flamingos. Edie had recently moved from Baltimore to Venice and opened a small thrift shop on Abbott Kinney Boulevard. I had not met Edie yet but I had been very close friends with Divine in the early 70s, at which time Divine had been my greatest theatrical influence and responsible for getting me in my very first show with the Cockettes in San Francisco.

The first night of the competition was the talent portion. This was a no brainer; I knew I would reprieve my winning performance from the $1.98 Beauty Show. It was a sure crowd-pleaser and the wig and taffeta dress were still hanging in my closet. By the end of the night, I was one of a dozen finalists chosen to return for the second round to do battle for the crown.

Among the finalists, ten were female impersonators of the conventional sort and the only other real lady was no competition at all. She fancied herself a dominatrix but her act was tired and her leather duds were uninspired. I had been there and done more than she could muster when I rode that cock monster dildo float through Golden Gate Park with my leather queen slaves. The bitch didn’t stand a chance.

My competitors in Los Angeles had no idea of the deep roots I had in San Francisco and when I came out on the second night with guns loaded for the obligatory bathing beauty spectacle they were about to get a clue. After all, I had been mentored by Divine and she was the queen of all drag queens. Divine had taken me under her motherly wing and transformed me from an ugly duckling into a beautiful swan in her image.

For the bathing suit walk, I designed a layered look, offering some modesty before the big reveal. To create my bathing suit cover, that morning I dumped my trash out into a neighbor’s can and gave my can a good scrubbing with disinfectants. This was an actual L.A. City issued trashcan and since I was planning to wear it, I didn’t want to risk getting scabies. In order to get in and out of the can I had a friend cut out the bottom of my can with a blowtorch for easy access. Once my can was cleaned and dry, I spray painted the word TRASH in large neon letters all over the outside of it.

When I hit center stage I dropped my can and stepped out of it as gracefully as I could, revealing my ample décolletage spilling out of a tight black bustier, which had my cup size advertised by double neon letter D’s sewed onto the tips of my bra. This original design was beyond fashion forward. In the words of Christian Soriano, the season seven winner of Project Runway, “Girl, I was fierce!”

On the final night, the evening gown competition was followed by the winner’s coronation. For this last round even RuPaul’s Drag University had nothing on me. I wore a gown that my friend Scrumbly had designed and made originally for my show Broken Dishes in 1976. It was a fitted sequined number, trailing yardage of fish netting tails, à la Divine’s style in Pink Flamingos. The front of the gown was cut out into an hourglass shape and filled in with clear vinyl. To cover up the big surprise, I made a giant plastic bubble wrap cape with a standing collar that made me look like the evil animated queen in Snow White. I held the bubble wrap cover tight around me until I reached the stage and then, once I got in front of the judges, I opened my cape to reveal the front of my dress. Under the clear plastic, my naked fleshy curves were pressed like a prom corsage for safekeeping. Only my nipples were covered with black X’s and I wore a tiny blond afro puff over my pubic area that matched the color of my big blond bouffant wig. Once the judges got to inspect the goods, I turned toward the audience and opened the cape wide to reveal my natural splendor, and the audience went nuts.

The emcee bantered, “Don’t wet yourselves. It’s too bad the seats are not made of vinyl. It would be a lot easier to clean up that way.” And the crowd just kept on cheering. I had a few friends and Venice neighbors in the house, including my daughter and her pre-teen friends.

I stood in the lineup of finalists while, one by one, the judges began to hold up their score cards. They all gave me 10s. As each judge weighed in, I overheard one of the finalists dissing me to another finalist standing next to her. Miss Princess Honolulu was a 6’2” scrawny queen in a sarong, six-inch heels, and heavily accessorized coconut tits. As she flipped her long tacky black Cher wig, she whispered to her sister drag queen, “I can’t believe I rode all the way here on a bus from Pomona in my drag and now that hag is going to take home the crown.”

Then Edie Massey, the last of the judges, held up her scorecard for me. As she displayed the final 10, she proclaimed in her high-pitched, little girl voice, “I love her best, because she looks just like a baby Divine.” Edie didn’t know that I had always thought of Divine as the mother I wished I’d had. I often gave Divine credit for teaching me everything I knew about beauty. To get that public recognition for my true lineage from Edie was the best part of winning the contest.

When the emcee announced that I was the winner, the tall Island Princess came up from behind me and tried to lift me up on her shoulders. It was a cheap attempt to steal my spot light. Lucky for me the bitch wasn’t strong enough to lift me, so she gave up. Then Edie came out from the judges table and awkwardly placed the coveted crown over my giant bouffant. The crown kept slipping off and Edie had to hold it on me as the emcee handed me a dozen roses and proclaimed me Miss Alternative Los Angeles.

When we got home after the show, I asked Viva what she thought of my performance. Viva said, “My friends think you’re cool.”

“But what do you think?”

“It was funny and I’m glad you won, but really, Mom, nobody likes to see their own mother naked wrapped in plastic.”

I wish I could tell you that becoming Miss Alternative L.A. propelled me to stardom, but the only official offer that came with the title was an invite from the marketing department of the Landmark Theatres a few weeks later. They asked me to make a special appearance at the Fox Venice Theatre alongside Russ Meyer at the screening of his film Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! All I recall of that evening was me standing alongside Russ as he totally ignored me while showing favor to his super vixens. I guess my 44DDs were just not big enough for him to consider me a Real Beauty.

The only other hope I had to leverage my win was the videotape my friend David Miller made of the contest. I decided to send the tape to David Letterman one night after watching a lame segment on his Late Night show where a pile of dirty melting N.Y.C snow was a highlight. I wrote Dave a letter telling him all about my Miss Alternative L.A. win and promised that I would make a more entertaining guest than a pile of dirty snow. My psychic friend Margaret looked over my clever letter, did her healing whammy on it, and assured me that I would be getting a positive reply from Dave and an invite to make an appearance on his show. But that never happened either. For all it’s worth, after twenty-four years, I am still the reigning Miss Alternative Los Angeles because to my knowledge there has never been another contest since. So suck on that, all you “real” beauties.

Chapter 2

Bad Mommy

In 1985 I took my daughter Viva to see A Chorus Line. As we sat in the cheap seats way up in the balcony, I began to sob uncontrollably when I heard the lyrics, “Who am I anyway. Am I my resume?” I had been a single mom for fifteen years and I had had more day jobs than runs in a street hustler’s fish net stockings. Forever the consummate temporary gal, I made a point to steer clear of any job that required long-term commitment.

Since my daughter was an infant, I had taken her to the movies. She’d sleep peacefully in my lap until the soundtrack would jump up suddenly and jolt her from her slumber. I’d slip my nipple into her mouth and she would nod right off for the duration of the film. As a single mom I did my best to never leave her, but I think in some instances she would have been better off if I had hired a sitter. Like the time when I took her with me to see the horror classic Carrie. She had just turned six and was so terrified that she kept hiding under her seat until I forced her to get off the sticky theatre floor of the Castro Theatre in San Francisco. To this day she blames me for her inability to enjoy a good scary movie. I hadn’t realized how badly I traumatized her until she brought it up with me over a lunch we shared with my therapist friend. My friend asked her if she still held resentment about it and she said, “I forgave Mom because going to the movies was the only way she could afford to study her craft of acting.”

This dialogue brought up a whole slew of sins I realized I had to make amends for to my daughter. From 1973, when I packed my three-year-old and all our worldly possessions in our VW bug to move to San Francisco to perform with The Cockettes, Viva remained in the wings and watched every rehearsal for every show I ever did up until 1977. While other kids played with kids their own age, her early companions were the drag queen performers I lived and worked with. They were a lot of fun, but it wasn’t always easy for her to get a word in.

She knew all the lines better than the actors in our shows and whenever anyone dropped a line, she would cue them from the sidelines. I told her that waiting in the wings was how Eve, in All About Eve, got her big break and that one day she’d get her turn to take the stage.

I did my best to stay sober enough so that the scenery and the other actors wouldn’t fall on her while she waited, singing and dancing alone, preparing for her big break. Although many of them did not set good examples, I got a lot of help from my roommates who lived in our theatrical commune. One of my roommates loved to take her shopping. It didn’t take me long to learn that he was using Viva as an accomplice to his chronic shoplifting. He paid for the produce but would hide expensive steaks in her underpants. Once I discovered this I put a stop to it and reprimanded him, but it wasn’t easy to give up the free meat.

One day Viva came home after school looking like a miniature Patty Hearst. When I asked her about her new look, I learned that my only female roommate, Debbie, dressed her in a trench coat, beret and dark glasses so she could take her into a gay bar on Polk Street where she passed her off as a lesbian midget. Viva said, “She treated me to a Shirley Temple and I felt like a big girl when she left me alone at the bar. While I sipped my cocktail, she was cruising for a trick.”

Today, most of my friends who aren’t dead or in prison can’t believe how ethical a young woman my daughter has grown into despite such poor examples set in her childhood. I tell them bad behavior skips a generation, and it was because I was a delinquent that my kid turned out so good. Or maybe I just got lucky and my daughter learned what not to do because of the poor examples we set.

After those four years of hard work on the fringe stages of San Francisco’s Gay Underground we moved back to Los Angeles, where aboveground I had high hopes of swimming with the big fishes in Hollywood. I admit to bouncing lots of reality checks during those years. Just before Viva’s tenth birthday, I got fired from one of my many waitress jobs. Unemployed again, I thought it was the Universe’s way of telling me it was a good time to take a vacation in Mexico. The story goes we had a gay old time in Mazatlan and even a greater time in Jalapa, a remote peninsula off the Mexican coast we reached on a speed boat flying over the ocean with no life jackets on board. All in all, the entire trip was fun until we tried to leave the country.

By the time we checked in at the airport in Guadalajara with only twenty minutes to boarding, I presented our non-refundable cheap tickets to the clerk and was told I owed Mexican airport tax. This was 1980 and I had never flown out of a foreign country before, nor did I have a credit card. I had spent every last peso we had, except for the quarter I was saving to call my friend Dick to pick us up at LAX when we got home. This was the first time I realized my daughter was scared and she started to cry. “Mommy, please, why don’t you sell our clothes so they will let us go home?” Luckily we were rescued by a handsome federal officer who took pity on the stupid single mother with her crying daughter and gave us the ten bucks to pay the tax and board the plane back to L.A.

I was lucky. What’s that saying, “God takes care of fools and children?” About a year ago when I told Viva I was writing this cautionary tale about the hazards of a life in showbusiness and shared my working title with her, she immediately tried to persuade me to change what she considered a lewd title.

“Mom, I think this could be an important book. You want to be taken seriously. It could save lives or at least the cost of analysis that children of showbiz folks like me will pay throughout their lives.”

Chapter 3

Knitter to the Stars

When I was in third grade, my mother noticed I was afflicted with an addiction. It was 1954 and my sister and I had just been transferred from P.S. #25 to St. Anthony’s Catholic School. Each night before sleep, my sister and I would get on our knees to say our mandatory children’s bedtime prayer: “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” Then Mom would tuck us both under the covers in the same big bed we shared and give us our good night kisses. My younger sister Ginny would fall right off to sleep the moment her curly head hit the pillow, but I would remain awake in the dark, suffering a strange anxiety brought on by the gruesome thoughts of my early demise suggested in our bedtime prayer.

By day, the nuns at St. Anthony’s hammered into us the horrors of sin and the fate of going straight to hell without even so much as a stopover in purgatory. While Protestant and Jewish kids got to play freely in a public school yard before the school bell rang, we Catholic kids sat inside a dimly-lit church for Mass, which we attended a whole hour before our classes in catechism, math, history, and geography lessons began. There we witnessed Christ hanging on a gigantic cross, bleeding all over the altar, while a priest reenacted in Latin the drama of poor skinny Jesus dying for my sins. It was a gruesome reality for a young girl with my creative spirit, but it was what my parents wanted for me: a Catholic education. Not only did I suffer the burden of my own little sins, I worried constantly about Mom and Dad’s eternal damnation too. The nuns taught us the difference between venial and mortal sins. Venial sins made our souls spotted with darkness that could be burned off in purgatory, but if you committed a mortal sin your soul would be completely blackened, just like the fire roasted red bell peppers Mom would burn on the stovetop before marinating in garlic and olive oil. But unlike the peppers that got peeled and cooled in the jars in the fridge; our souls went straight to hell to keep burning for all eternity.

Since my folks never attended Mass, and Mom cursed like a drunken sailor and told dirty jokes, I imagined Mom and Dad’s souls looking like a shriveled roast that Mom forgot in the oven one day when she was having one of her nervous breakdowns. And since my parents never went to confession to get absolution or do penance, I knew in what direction their souls were headed. When I tried to warn them about it, they laughed it off and said, “Do what I say, not what I do.” That was their religion. With all that sin lurking around the house and the thought of dying in my sleep, it’s no wonder I needed an outlet to alleviate my anxiety.

Like many little girls who hid their hands beneath their covers to touch themselves, I knew it was way too risky and would guarantee a trip straight to hell before dawn, so I sought another handy activity above the sheets to lull me into slumber. I’d lie in bed in the dark and with my right hand I’d pluck the cotton tuffs out from my floral chenille bedspread. This went on for several nights until mom finally noticed that half the flowers were missing on my side of the bed, leaving a gigantic hole in the floral pattern of the pretty pink and baby blue bedspread. Mom consulted with my aunts, who had the good sense to suggest I needed a distraction to occupy my hands.

I’m so grateful that right about that time my older cousin Loretta moved into our house temporarily while her husband went off to Korea with the Navy. She offered to teach me how to knit. If it hadn’t been for Cousin Loretta, I don’t know where my compulsive addiction would have led me. For all I know it could have dangerously escalated into home invasion bedspread plucking. But I took immediately to the craft. After my prayer, Mom would let me leave the light on for a bit while I practiced my knitting. As a kid I never imagined that this gift of becoming a knitter would take me to high places in Hollywood. But it did.

My knit business began when I started to barter my crafty handy work for acting classes and workshops. Even Tony Robbins traded his fire walk seminar for a gorgeous sweater for his wife. Walking over hot coals with Tony put a fire under my ass and before long I was knitting like a nut in my Meisner acting class where other actors and models who were earning big bucks took notice. The next thing, I was in the knit business without a plan or investors. My hobby went from making the occasional sweater for starlets to accounts at Saks Fifth Avenue, Henri Bendel, and Bergdorf Goodman, as well as high-end boutiques, and wearable art galleries from Brentwood to SoHo, Rodeo Drive to Madison Avenue and Las Vegas to Aspen.

During my daughter’s wonder years she had to wonder why our apartment turned into a mini sweatshop. Every day after school, Viva came home to make her way through a maze of stacked cardboard boxes, and two Mexican guys knitting on machines in our dining room while I sat on the couch doing all the hand and finishing work before I packed sweaters into boxes for shipping. With yarn strung from one end of our apartment to the next, more often than not Viva found angora fuzz balls mixed in with her peanut butter and jelly after school snack. Although I was working 24/7, I still never had any money. Whatever little acting money I was earning went directly into materials for production and making my sample lines for my bi-coastal sales reps. To keep Viva entertained on weekends, I would take her to movies and knit in the dark. I even made her my fit model and whenever she was coming or going I’d stop her to try on new sweaters for sizing and eventually she became my fashion model too. I have a picture of Viva when she was only twelve years old in a sexy peek-a-boo angora and lace sweater that was my best seller at Saks Fifth Ave and Henri Bendel in New York. The fashion photographer made her up to look eighteen. After two years of working like a slave I gave up the wholesale business and went back to knitting one-offs for celebrities and other high end clients.

It’s a good thing I’m not a stalker, because I knew how to get onto every studio lot in Hollywood, where I became known as the Knitter to the Stars. For over two decades I made and sold sweaters to most of the sitcoms and soap operas that filmed in Los Angeles. In the process I met many of Hollywood’s A-list stars, including Julia Roberts, Lily Tomlin, Roseanne, Fran Drescher, Linda Hamilton, Jenna Elfman, Leah Thompson, Alicia Silverstone, and Tory Spelling, to drop just a few names.

My two favorite clients were Lily Tomlin and Ellen Burstyn. On top of being a major fan of their impeccable artistry, neither Lily nor Ellen ever made me wait endlessly, like so many other important stars did. Both were classy dames who were nothing but kind and always treated me with respect. Lily Tomlin not only bought sweaters for herself and her partner Jane Wagner, she also recommended my work to the costume department of the Murphy Brown show. After one of my sales trips to that set, Lily took valuable time from her half-hour lunch break to help me pack up my bags and carry them out to my car. I was humbled by her act of kindness, and also embarrassed for her to see my dirty old clunker parked outside her trailer. Nonetheless, a few days later she sent me a lovely thank you note, singing my praises.

On my very first meeting with Ellen Burstyn in 1986, I had a similar experience. I met Ellen’s assistant after my jazz dance class while I was showing sweaters to the owner of the Santa Monica Dance Academy, hoping to barter some for dance classes. When Ellen’s assistant saw my work, she introduced herself and told me that if I could get to New York, she would set up a sales meeting to show my work to Ellen. I just so happened to be planning a visit with my daughter to see my family in New Jersey that month, so I packed a giant duffle bag, larger than my own height and weight, and we schlepped my entire inventory along on our vacation.

On the day of my appointment with Ellen on the set of the Ellen Burstyn Show at ABC studios in Manhattan, Viva helped me maneuver the impossible bag on a bus from my sister’s house in Glen Rock, New Jersey, to the Port Authority in New York City. When we arrived, Ellen was in the middle of a table read with her cast members, Megan Mullally and Elaine Stritch, who played her daughter and mother in the new sitcom. The minute Ellen lifted her head off the page and saw me waiting for her on the sound stage; she excused herself from the cast and announced to everyone that she didn’t want to keep me waiting. She came over and greeted me and Viva warmly and offered to help us with the bag to her dressing room.

It was encounters like these that brought me to that 0 degrees of separation from greatness, and made me grateful for the solution to my childhood anxiety.

I wish I could say that all my star clients were as generous and gracious as Lily and Ellen, but that was not the case when I encountered one Miss Julia Roberts. I met her through the wardrobe department while she was filming I Love Trouble with Nick Nolte in 1994. Julia had just returned from her honeymoon with her first husband, Lyle Lovett. As I unpacked over thirty sweaters for the pretty woman to sift through, she ignored me as she bantered with the film’s costume designer and wardrobe supervisor, bragging about the prowess of her new husband, Lyle. She kept repeating the phrase, “Good gracious, I’m so sore down there,” indicating the size of Lyle’s love offering. I chalked it up to her youth and insecurity. I thought that it was her way of saying to the world, “My hubby may be short on looks but damn, he’s long on penis.”

Julia finally chose a sweater from the pile and asked me the price. I quoted her about $200 for a multi-colored, short, double-breasted crop cotton sweater. She tried it on and then asked me if I could add a few inches to the neckline. It just so happened that I had a bit of the same yarn in my bag with me. I told her I could do the alteration right there in the wardrobe department but it might take an hour or so. While I knitted away, Julia was called back to set. When the alteration was finished, an hour and 45 minutes had passed. I gave the sweater to her assistant and told her the price would now be $225, adding $25 for the time to make the alteration. Although Julia was earning over a million dollars for her work on that lousy film, she sent her assistant back with a check for only $200. The assistant informed me that Julia refused to pay any more than the amount I had previously quoted her.

Another big name that kept me on my toes was Roseanne Barr. Encounters with her were always unpredictable. I recall the first time we met on the set at the CBS Radford lot in Studio City where they filmed her hit series. While Roseanne tried on a sexy red cotton sweater with lots of diamond-shaped cutouts along the sleeves and down the back, she bragged about her latest cosmetics lifts. I loved her lack of modesty as she stood braless and showed off her reduced upper arms and new perky boobs. As I helped her into the complicated sweater in the mirror, Roseanne noticed the difference in our heights and gleefully blurted out, “Geesh, you’re a friggin’ midget. I’m only 5’ 2” and I tower over you.” Then she let out that recognizable cackle of hers. Roseanne could be quite charming if you got her on one of her good mental health days, but there were other fittings that were not so funny; like when I sat waiting, grateful that her rage was not directed toward me, while she screamed unapologetically at her poor assistant for twenty minutes for some infraction.

My title Knitter to the Stars also led me to occasional work, styling for the stars. As an assistant to designer/stylist Rob Saduski, I had the privilege of sitting with David Bowie in his dressing room during a daylong shoot for his album cover, Tin Man. In between different looks David would relax in his underwear and share funny stories with me as if we were just two friends, both artists who shared a common bond. It was a time when David was newly sober and had recently married Iman. He was so happy, open and warm, I just melted. At the end of the day, Viva showed up on the set to meet David. It was instantly obvious that he had a fondness for chocolate beauty when he met my bi-racial daughter. David Bowie kissed us both on our cheeks when saying goodbyes and I went to bed that night vowing to never wash my face again.

I’d travel from high points like dressing David Bowie and then slid down the scale to low life celebrities, like Courtney Love who when I met her was not a celebrity yet but a chubby wanna-be and extra in a Ramones video, I was hired to style.

After seeing the costumes I made for my one-woman show, The Last Dance of the Couch Potatoes, in 1988, Bill Fishman, a film and video director cast me in a part and asked me if I could also style the Ramones video I Wanna Be Sedated.

He gave me a budget of $300 to dress over 20 extras in different character looks. More than 80% of the wardrobe came out of my own personal closet. When I fit the then plump Courtney Love, into a precious 1940’s vintage satin wedding dressed I owned, I asked her in the nicest way possible to be extra careful with it since it came from my private collection. The shoot quickly turned into the job from hell and made me want to be sedated.

Before lunch break Courtney was high and drunk on her ass and rolling in the gutter in my priceless dress. She managed to totally destroy it while making it obvious that she was proving a point; nobody was going to tell her what to do. Do I need to tell you how much I still resent the fuck out of her to this day and believe that if anyone did not deserve success in Hollywood, it is her.

Of all the celebrity sweater clients I have ever had, there was one who really took the cake. Renee Taylor, a writer and actress for many decades, is most recognized for her role as the mother to The Nanny in the long-running hit sitcom of the 90s. Renee became my regular client back in the late 80s when I met her through my designer friend Shawn Barry. On our first encounter, we were in her living room in Beverly Hills as she sifted through my bags while a Hispanic workman was on a ladder doing some repairs. Renee was excited about my work and completely oblivious to the workman in the room as she stripped off her top, without a modicum of decency. The poor guy almost fell off the ladder.

This encounter with Renee was just a glimpse into the many selling adventures I would have with her over time. Despite her meshugganah ways, my designer-client relationship with Renee went on for decades and I continued to jump through hoops to make her happy because I admired her work as a writer and actor. Years before we ever met I had done scenes and monologues from the many successful plays and movies she and her husband, Joe Bologna, had written and laughed out loud watching them act in their movies. I guess you might say I was a little star struck.

Many years later, on the night before Christmas Eve, Renee led me to an ice rink in Culver City. I was almost out the door, on my way to a Christmas party in Silverlake with Viva and my friend Jennifer, when the phone rang. As I slipped into my silvery opened-toed pumps, I heard the brash tones of a Queens, N.Y. voice on my answering machine. “Hi, it’s me, Renee, returning your phone call,” she squawked. “Is this ‘the Sweata Lady’?”

This was still a few years before her long-running hit, The Nanny. I had been trying to pin Renee down to a time and place for a private shopping appointment since October, but it was the night before Christmas Eve when she finally had found an opening on her calendar. She wanted me to come immediately to meet her at a big industry holiday skating party. To entice me, she said, “There’ll be lots of other stars there who might want sweatas.”

I explained I had previous plans with my friend and daughter and then Renee said, “It’s a party, bring them along.”

When I hesitated, Renee pushed further with, “This is the only time I can meet with you. I’m leaving for Egypt early tomorrow morning for the holidays.”

“Okay,” I acquiesced. “I guess the Culver Rink is not that far out of my way in the route to Silver Lake.” The truth was that I didn’t even have enough money to buy my daughter a special Christmas present that year. So I asked Jennifer and Viva if they minded stopping off at a Hollywood party on our way to the other party, where our host was serving a traditional Mexican Christmas Tamale dinner. In our party clothes, Jen and Viva helped me lug three heavy bags full of knits down the steps and into my car, and we made our way to Culver City.

We showed up at the skating rink around 8 p.m. and found it cavernous and cold, with benches lining the walls for folks to put their skates on. Over the loudspeakers Christmas music was blaring and lots of young pretty people were skating in circles on the manmade ice. I felt out of place as I sat like a bump on a log in my holiday attire, keeping a lookout for Renee and other celebrities while Viva and Jennifer went off to see if they could find some free food since we were all starving. After some time they came back with shaved ice cones. I hadn’t spotted as much as a D-list celebrity in the crowd. It appeared that this was the kind of event where the stars pass their invites on to their personal assistants; swag, assistants earned for a year of service while the stars themselves went off to Aspen or Switzerland to do what stars do on the holidays: ski, not ice skate on an empty stomach in Culver City.

By nine o’clock, my blood sugar was dropping and I was turning blue and Renee had yet to show. Viva and Jennifer found some young folks to chat with and since they weren’t complaining I decided to just wait it out. These were the days before cell phones and text messages. By ten o’clock my toes felt frostbitten and I had given up on the idea of hot tamales in Silverlake. To ward off a diabetic coma, I devoured a sugary snow cone. I had invested all that time and effort in the pursuit of a sale, and even though my teeth were chattering I decided not to quit before the Christmas miracle. Finally Miss Taylor arrived, dressed inappropriately to the nines. She was wearing a skintight black leather mini skirt with a see-through, black lace stretchy top.

She made no excuses for her tardiness and brashly asked, “Where’s the sweatas?” I suggested we go off to the ladies’ room for privacy to try things on but she declined. “Let’s just do it here.” Her husband, Joe knew how to tune out Renee’s antics, and went off to get a drink as I pulled several pieces out from my three bags full. As soon as Renee saw one to her liking, she quickly whipped off her lace blouse, revealing a push-up bra sized too small to contain her ample décolletage. There were dozens of people standing around, but Renee was oblivious to her surroundings. She had chosen two of my sexiest peek-a-boo angora and lace designs and began to stretch one over her ample bosom. With the plunging neckline and see-through lace, Renee in my best selling 80s design was a post-menopausal Madonna. She loved both pieces and had to have the black one and the red one. There was only one problem: both sweaters needed alterations to make them fit properly. She asked, “Can you add a few inches here and there and get them to me by tomorrow before 7 a.m. when we leave for the airport?”

“Sure, no problem,” I replied.

By 11 p.m. I finished packing the sweaters back into the bags. I left feeling guilty for ruining my own party plans. After dropping Jen off, Viva and I got home by midnight. I heated up some leftover cold pasta for us and spent the better part of the night working on Renee’s new “sweatas” so that I could collect the payment before she left for Egypt in the morning. In the wee hours I sat knitting away while watching the classic film A Christmas Carol, fully identifying with poor Bob Cratchit, who had to work on Christmas.

After tying off the last stitches, I dozed off about 4 a.m., inhaling angora fuzz and awoke to the phone ringing in my ear at 6 a.m. The shock and awe of Renee’s alarming tones screeched, “Are my sweatas ready? What time will you be here?”

I pulled the stuck macaroni off my cheek and suggested that we meet at the airport, since it was closer than Beverly Hills for me. What I could not understand was why Renee needed to have two long hair angora sweaters in Egypt. Wasn’t it hot there at this time of year, I wondered, but didn’t mention it to Renee because I needed the money.

I got to LAX before 8 a.m. and through the rush of holiday travelers I met Renee and Joe in a long check-in line at their terminal. Joe excused himself to grab a coffee as I took out the two sweaters. Then Renee left me watching their bags as she rushed off to the ladies room to try them on. I remained alone in the queue, pushing their luggage, enough baggage to leave the country for a lifetime, along to the check-in point. Thank God, Renee returned with the good news that the sweatas fit, because if I didn’t make that sale after all I’d been through I might have gone postal. Joe got back with his coffee just in the nick of time to help lift their bags up on the scale for the check-in agent. As the airline agent looked over their passports and tickets, Joe wrote me a check for the sweaters. They went off to Egypt and I went home and took a nap before I did my last-minute Christmas shopping.

The year The Nanny started to shoot I was still taking private chef and catering assignments too. I got a call from Renee’s best friend Beverly, who was hosting Renee’s 60th birthday party. Her friend didn’t know I knew Renee and while we were planning the menu, I told Beverly that I was the designer who made Renee’s sweaters. Right then the phone rang and it was Renee calling. Beverly told Renee that she just hired me to cater her party and Renee asked Beverly to put me on the phone. “Bring the sweatas,” Renee ordered.

On the day of the buffet luncheon for twenty of Renee and Joe’s closest friends, I loaded all the food into the party and I went back to the car and schlepped the additional three duffle bags filled with sweaters. I put the food in the kitchen and the sweaters in the den for later, then put on my apron and got to work. Knowing Joe was Italian, I had made a vat of Ziti with meat sauce and several antipasto appetizers and cannoli for dessert. I hired another actress to help me serve and clean up. That afternoon, I met Fran Drescher for the first time with her husband Peter, the executive producer of The Nanny. They had just hired Renee to play Fran’s mother on the show, and the two couples were becoming good friends.

The luncheon was a huge success. Everyone raved about the food, and once the men went off to the patio to have their cigars, the ladies gathered in the den for an impromptu sweata party. I took off my chef’s hat, put on my designer demeanor, and out came the sweaters. This was the one time when Renee finally delivered some Hollywood clientele for me. Her friends loved my knits even better than my meatballs, and that day I made more than half a dozen sweater sales on top of my catering money. Fran herself bought three pieces for her personal wardrobe and then invited me to the taping of the pilot episode of The Nanny and introduced me to her designer Brenda Cooper, who bought my knits every season the show ran. Fran also recommended my work for her film, Beautician and the Beast, and I got to make three sweaters that she wore in that film.

The year before The Nanny’s final season, the show hired extras through Central Casting to be professional laughers. Fran was in the middle of a divorce from her executive producer husband Peter and due to her vulnerability wanted to avoid taping in front of a live audience. I knew the casting director, April Webster, who recommended me for the professional laugher job and I ended up working on the show every week, making more money laughing my ass off while knitting and eating for eight hours a day, and earning union wages. The double-dipping really paid off because I would also sell sweaters to other actresses and some crew members on the show. I guess I owe Renee big time for that gift that kept on giving. That was a very good year to be the Knitter to the Stars.

Chapter 4

Maid For This

Bleary-eyed and woozy from Windex fumes and silver polish, I laid my head on two inches of plush shag carpeting. I glanced up at the shelves and fixated on a photo framed in spotless silver of my boss, with cocktail glass in hand and his arms around Frank and Sammy. On the other side of the wall, with only one slim degree of separation between us, my illustrious employer was in his bed, taking his daylong nap with the aid of Valium and Xanax, while I reflected on the events that brought me to this moment.

With my own dreams of stardom placed on pause, I stared at the glamour glossies under squeaky clean glass: the sparkling Liza, with a Z; Shirley in a dance pose; and a sweet teenage Brook (his Gemini sister), as her inscription read. On the lower shelf, anonymous starlets, ex-wives, and assorted gold-diggers and ding-a-lings mocked me with flirtatious poses. To my right, on the altar of power and prestige, the world leaders were regaled: Prince Charles, the Queen Mother, Ron and Nancy, and even Pope John Paul II posed with my gracious host. But my favorite photo sat all by itself in a corner nook. Right there under the glass I had just Windexed was the DNA of the young and radiant Marilyn Monroe. The inscription read, “To my lover boy, Norma Jean,” and, just below her signature was a bright red lip print of her kiss. I wondered how much I could get for that picture on the paparazzi black market.

These shelves of fame only shamed me as I pondered on how my personal plans for stardom had gone awry. I had everything riding on that one commercial I did for Planter’s, ‘Everybody Loves a Nut Campaign.’ I was convinced that the image of my short, chubby body, pushing the limits of pink and aqua polka dot spandex, alongside an old-time accordion player who pumped away at Take Me Out To The Ballgame, while I tapped my little heart out on a large sheet of bubble wrap doing our rendition of pop music, would be my ticket out of servitude.

How did I know that spot would only run during baseball season and only on cable at that? When I complained about my plight to my good friend George, a more successful actor/writer than me, he loaned me rent money for the second time in six months and reminded me that this would be the last time. As he signed the check he looked up, winked, and said, “Cheer up, honey, one day you’ll be as famous as the ‘Where’s the Beef?’ lady and you’ll be able to pay me back.”

Even though I knew George meant well, the thought of waiting until my eighties to finally attain fame and fortune and then croak shortly afterwards was not exactly uplifting.

So with all my reality checks bouncing, a day job was my only solution. Was I doomed to dusting the forty gold records and ironing the forty pairs of silk pajamas until I’d made it big one day? I didn’t relish the idea of being a maid, but it beat being the cliché, actress/waitress. After all, I wasn’t just any ordinary maid, I was Dean Martin’s maid, the Dean of Martin and Lewis, the Dean of When the Moon Hits Your Eye Like a big Pizza Pie, that’s –a— my Deano. It had caché in Hollywood and I was sure I’d find a way to work it.

The good news was that Dean never had company and, for that matter, rarely left his wing of the house, so the house never got very dirty. He’d ask me to hold his calls and wink at me as he said, “Dear, tell them I’m golfing.”

We were kindred souls, both Italian Americans and great lovers of the nap. So with Dean in bed all day I had the run of the house. If I had ironing to do, I’d just drag the board into the living room in front of the giant TV screen that offered every premium channel. It was important for an actress to research her craft. Another fringe benefit was that I got to bring in my personal laundry and other projects while on the job.

The only other employees on the premises were the two security guards, off-duty cops who rotated their twelve hour shifts. The guards would never say a word, but I’m sure they were a bit suspicious of me as I’d come through the garage entrance with my very large loads of laundry. If I had been a bit more ambitious, I could have made extra dough taking in my neighbor’s laundry too, but I didn’t want to push it. It was bad enough that on some days I’d come to work dressed as the maid, and then midday I’d run out frantically to squeeze in a quickie commercial audition, dressed as a waitress, a nurse, a gypsy, a glitzy tap dancer in a sparkly corset, or my favorite opera character, Brunhilde.

And if this job didn’t get me anywhere in Hollywood, at least it carried great weight back home in New Jersey. I told my mother that I was hired to cook for Dean. It sounded better than maid or housekeeper. It wasn’t a complete lie, because one of my duties was to make Dean a scrambled egg sandwich on white bread every morning after I served his coffee.

Like any good mother, my mother loved to embellish her children’s accomplishments. She’d brag about my culinary skills and how much Dean loved my “sauce!” As far as Mom was concerned, she thought working for Dean was the biggest break I’d ever get in Hollywood.

My workday started at 8 a.m. After putting the fresh grounds into Mr. Coffee and filling the water tank, I’d wait for Dean to buzz on the intercom. As soon as I heard the buzzer, I’d flip on Mister Coffee and ready his tray with the morning paper and then carry it into where he lay in bed. I was expected to always address him as Mr. Martin, as per his manager Mort’s instructions. To my “Good morning, Mr. Martin,” he would always reply, “Good morning, dear.” I just loved the way he called me “dear.” I really got a kick out of being that close to him and was always impressed with how handsome he still looked in his late seventies. It was all I could do to keep myself from crawling into bed with him. To me he was like a god, and a sweet one at that, the poster boy for ample bed rest and prescription medication. He even looked good without his teeth, which on some mornings remained in the tumbler at his bedside. Since Dean rarely left his room except for his evening dinner outings, I was instructed to use this morning coffee and paper delivery constructively. Like a cocktail waitress, I would discreetly dump the ash trays and wipe up around his end tables, then change the trash liner, pick up dirty laundry or day-old papers, and hang up the freshly-ironed silk pajamas. I was told Dean owned forty pairs, one for every one of the millions he was worth.

I can’t recall a day when he was not pleasant. Dean was so easygoing and if he did have a particular need, he’d ask me in the manner of a humble servant rather than a king. He was rarely chatty but every once in a while he’d open up and say more than just, “Good morning, dear.” Once I came in while he was watching a Cary Grant movie. When I commented on how much I loved Cary, his eyes got misty and he told me that he and Cary had been really close friends. He repeated more than once that Cary was a real gentleman. I thought, wasn’t that code for queer? And then he went on about how much he missed him. It led me to wonder if Dean was trying to come out to me. Those moments were fuel to keep me going and made the job worthwhile. I always wished I had known him in his prime, but at this time of his life he suffered deep depression from the loss of his son who had died in a plane crash. He only left the house to work once a month in Vegas. He never had visitors except for his daughter Deana, who would come by to drop off his favorite food, “pasta e fagiloli” or, as we say in Southern Italian dialect, pasta fazool; hence the lyric, “When your love seems to drool just like pasta fazool, that’s amore.” On only one occasion I met his wife Jeanie, who had a separate residence in the neighborhood.

Dean only went out in the evenings, almost always alone for dinner at the Hamburger Hamlet or La Familia. That’s when I had to do the hard work. From the moment he pulled one of his cars, the Rolls Royce or the Mercedes, out of the driveway, I’d rush in like a beat-the-clock contestant, because in less than two hours I had to change his linens, vacuum the carpet, clean all the surfaces, dust his room, scour the double sinks, scrub the toilet, polish the marble, wash the floors, and Windex the mirrors. On the weekends I’d have a little more time, when he’d have dinner at Jeanie’s house with the family. The rest of the time he stayed in bed. But nonetheless, there I was, a poor struggling actress/maid, hanging out with a legend in his bedroom.

Of course, my job fueled my mother’s fantasies too. She’d pump me for every detail. She’d say, “What’d ya cook for Dean?” and I’d make up recipes to make her friends mouths water. And she’d ask me if I ever met his wife Jeanie.

“She’s the second wife, right?”

“Yes, Mom, she’s the one Dean divorced to marry his third wife but then divorced her and re-married Jeanie.” Then of course she’d want to know why she and Dean didn’t live together if they were married again.

Sometimes I felt like a paid informer giving my mother all the dirt, but I knew it brightened the lives of the poor widows at Leisure Village. They really lapped up the story about Dean and Cary. Of course, in my mother’s re-telling it, Dean blubbered in my arms like a baby.

And then there was the time when I got to meet Sammy Davis Jr., right around the time the second coming of the Rat Pack, which was getting ready to go out on tour. Frank had gathered the old boys together to recapture the glory days of their first infamous Rat Pack tour. I didn’t meet Sammy at Dean’s house, but actually ran into him outside my dance class while I was cooling off in the parking lot in between routines. I walked smack dab into him. When I said hello and told him I worked for Dean, he opened his arms wide and gave me a very warm hug. I just couldn’t believe how sweet he was. I think he liked me instantly because we were almost the same height. He happened to be rehearsing for the movie Tap, with Gregory Hines, in the studio next door. If that wasn’t grand enough, Sammy followed me back into my class and had me introduce him to my teacher, Hama. All the other dancers in the class were impressed that I knew Sammy Davis Jr.

Not long after that event, Dean left home to go on the second U.S. tour with the aging Rat Pack. Less than two weeks into it, the media reported that Dean Martin had taken sick and had to quit, and was replaced by Liza Minnelli. When Dean came home, I told him I was sorry to hear he was sick and asked if he needed anything special. He responded with, “Yeah, I was sick alright, I was sick of Frank, but thanks for your concern, dear.” He then winked, retired to his room, and reminded me to hold his calls and tell everyone he was golfing.

About a year into lying around Dean’s house, passed out on the couch after polishing off the contents of chocolates in his mini bar, I was inspired to re-work my one woman show, The Last Dance of the Couch Potatoes. The next day I came into work, passed the guard in the garage carrying about ten yards of chicken wire rolled up under my arm, and asked if I could borrow the tool box on the shelf. I took full advantage of the pool area and used it to construct my prop for the show poster. As Dean snoozed, I worked feverishly, turning the chicken wire and Dean’s old newspapers into a giant papier mache potato costume. One day the guard got curious and came in back to see what I was up to. He assumed that I was of an ethnic minority that might build a coop to raise chickens by the pool. By the time I finished the potato suit, it was so heavy and cumbersome that I was afraid to move it out of the house. I waited until Dean was due to go to Vegas for his monthly gig and I arranged for the poster shoot to happen in Dean’s living room in front of the big screen TV. It was the perfect location. All I had to do was figure out how to sneak a photographer past the guard in the garage.

I felt like Lucy trying to break in to John Wayne’s house in one of her harebrained schemes with Ethel. I got one of my back-up singers to take the photo and told the guard she was a girl I was interviewing as a sub. Once we set up the lights, she and I carried the potato costume into the house and she helped me into it. I used Dean’s serving tray as a prop and piled it high with multi-colored bags of junk food. With the strobe flashing, I posed like a high-paid fashion model, assuming many different poses.

The actual image used for the couch potato poster was from the very last shot. With me standing on the couch, my photographer/back up girl set the automatic timer to allow her to jump into the frame. Posing as my servant, she held up the tray of junk food as I jumped on the couch for joy. Right in the middle of this shot, Dean came home unexpectedly with Mort, his manager. They had cancelled the Vegas gig because he wasn’t feeling well. Dean, unruffled, passed me with his usual greeting, “Good afternoon, dear,” and went straight to bed, leaving his manager to his job.

It wasn’t long after that when I got my notice. I was being replaced by one of Dean’s ex-housekeepers, an elderly lady who wanted her job back now that her husband had retired. Mort the manager explained that Mr. Martin preferred to have two older, stable people in his employ. Besides, they were getting two people for the price of one.

Less than a year later, my mother and her friends sent their regrets when they read in The National Enquirer that Dean Martin had died. I was not invited to the funeral, but I still have and cherish the letter of recommendation that Dean asked his manager to write for me on his personal stationary, with the cocktail glass in the top left corner. It reads, “From the Desk of Dean Martin, To Whom It May Concern,”…

Chapter 5

High Times in the Low Life

I believed in that self-help book, Do What You Love and the Money Will Follow, but I’m still waiting. If I had a nickel for every compliment I ever got, I would be a millionaire. I love praise and good reviews; who wouldn’t? But my God-given gifts haven’t always paid the rent. On the other hand, my struggle to climb the ladder to make it in this dog-eat-dog world wasn’t all bad. There have been many perks on this bumpy road less traveled and I have had fabulous friends and times that even folks in high places would envy. What is success anyway?

I have a successful friend in the music business I met when I was twenty-one and he was only sixteen. It was 1966 and I had been away from home for over a year. Eddy was playing drums in a pop music duo at the Scheppes’ Pizza Parlor, where my mother waited tables back in Paterson, New Jersey. That year I had allowed my mom to lure me back from California by telling me her doctors suspected she had a heart condition. Since I was in between jobs and apartments, I spent my last dime to buy a plane ticket, and as soon as I got back to New Jersey, she announced the good news: her heart condition proved to be only a bad case of gas. But by then I was stuck in New Jersey, living at my parents’ home until I could earn enough money to move back to my adventures in Hollywood.

It was during that year that I bonded with Eddy and his singer/guitar playing buddy Phil. The musical duo was like New Jersey’s version of The Beatles minus two. Phil was almost eighteen and had classic blond Tab Hunter good looks, but I was more drawn to the sixteen-year-old Eddy, who was wise for his age. I could see his star quality behind the mop top hair that covered his cuteness as his head bobbed to the beat of his drums. He resembled a younger Paul McCartney. When Mom introduced me to the lads at the pizza parlor, they both noticed I flaunted an “I Love Pot” button pinned to my jeans jacket. When I had left New Jersey in 1965 to move to L.A., I had not yet ever smoked pot, and didn’t know anyone else who did either. Ed and Phil instantly became my new best friends and we spent many an evening after their pizza parlor gig, hanging out in their car, listening to The Doors and other great music of the times while getting high. They even invited me to parties at Phil’s parents’ home, where I got high in the basement with their school friends.

Their company made that year almost bearable while I worked at an excruciatingly boring job as a file clerk at the Fisher Chemical Company on Route 20 in Fairlawn. I spent most of my time hidden away in the back warehouse with hundreds of tall file drawers. I was supposed to file huge stacks of important scientific documents. It’s hard to remember those days when big companies did not have computers. After only weeks of the tedium, I began to carry an extra large purse to work and stuff it full of files, and then dump them in the trash on my lunch hour and then again after work. They never caught me at that, but I did finally get fired for baking banana peels in the chemists’ oven, and I also was accused of selling drugs to my coworkers on my lunch hour. My supervisor assumed the joints I rolled with “mellow yellow” were illegal, and he said if I didn’t leave the premises immediately, he would report me to the police. I knew I could not be arrested for selling or smoking banana peels, but nonetheless I took this as a sign from the Universe to get my ass back to Los Angeles, where I could resume the life of a junior college student majoring in Theater Arts by day and a part time topless dancer by night. I took my meager savings and supplemented the rest of what I needed to rent an apartment in L.A. by stealing expensive silk dresses from Gimbles in the Paramus Mall and then returning the shoplifted items for a cash refund. But that story is for my next book, Petty Crimes and Other High Times of a Counter Culture Diva.

Back in Los Angeles, a few months later, I heard a knock on my door. When I opened the door to my courtyard, there stood Phil and Eddy, covered in the dirt of the 3000-mile road trip cross country. I had no idea they were even coming to visit, let alone planning on moving in with me for a spell. At this juncture of our lives, all of us were floundering. Phil had notions of hitting it big as a troubadour in Hollywood without any connections or know-how, and Eddy was just looking for adventure. Although I was studying acting at Los Angeles City College, I was doing much more acting out and the only stages I could be seen performing on were those on the bar tops of scummy topless clubs. Phil, who had just turned eighteen, had managed to graduate but Eddy, still underage, had dropped out in his senior year to tag along with him.

The boys took turns sleeping on my couch and floor and hung around my one-bedroom pad glued to a big bong. Our main staple was pot and popcorn, and they managed to burn every one of my three pots and pans, popping their dinner each night. For a few months they shared my home and my unconventional life and friends. During their stay, I introduced the lads to a whole community of black gay friends I had grown very close to in my first year in Los Angeles, and I took them on several adventures with this crew that included a lot of drugs, jazz, gospel, rhythm and blues. Phil’s only complaint was that he had to fend off the ruthless come-ons from Leon, a hefty queen with a super Afro who had difficulty taking no for an answer.

During the few months they lived with me, I had my own unwanted suitor, an African-American garbage collector named Ernest, who worked for the sanitation department. He picked me up like some L.A. trash in his garbage truck one day while I was hitch-hiking. I wasn’t at all interested in him, but when he asked for my number I felt bad not giving it to him. I didn’t want to think of myself as elitist or privileged white trash. When he called, I accepted a date because he offered to take me to see Nina Simone in a small jazz club in Baldwin Hill, an upscale black neighborhood. By the end of the night he had gotten so drunk he forced himself on me and I allowed him to date rape me just to get the date over with.

After that night he kept calling to apologize and ask my forgiveness. I had very good cause to refuse any contact, but he begged me to let him make it up to me by showing me what a good man he could be and buying me groceries. With the mention of free food, I allowed him to come by when he promised two bags of groceries and a bag of pot for my roommates. Since I was the only breadwinner, with an occasional one-night topless gig, I decided to use his guilt and took him up on his offer. Also, I knew I had the boys there to protect me if he tried any funny business.

Ernest was excruciatingly boring and after a few minutes, I’d excuse myself, saying that I had to study and then lock myself in the bedroom and leave Phil and Eddy to get high and listen to Ernie talk shit. The boys didn’t mind since they were getting free food and pot. This went on for several visits until one day he showed up unannounced with the groceries and pot when Phil and Eddy were not home, and he tried to rape me again. I ran into my courtyard screaming bloody murder for all the neighbors to hear until he left. But before he did, he had the nerve to ask for his groceries back. Well, that was the end of Ernest, and eventually L.A. proved too much for the lads too, and they went back home to New Jersey.

Almost two decades later, Phil had married a famous singer-songwriter and Ed owned and operated a very successful recording studio in Manhattan. Ed had built his wealth through hard work as a recording engineer and worked with all the major music stars. In comparison to Eddie at that juncture in our lives, I felt like the little piggy who had built her house of straw and the big bad wolf was always just a breath away ready to blow it down. But no matter what opinion I held of myself, Ed remained my good friend and whenever I was in Manhattan he always took me and my daughter out for generous meals and would never let me pay. He married a brilliant singer who was a highly successful voice in commercial jingles, and she also became a good friend and one of my best sweater clients in the ‘80s.

One day over breakfast when it was just the two of us, Ed must have sensed I was feeling low and he told me he thought I was one of the most successful people he ever knew. Although he had amassed a great business by then, and had many high-profile music friends and clients, he admired my freedom and spontaneous lifestyle. He told me he envied what he observed as my magical life. If good friends and relationship mirror what you are really worth, then I have to admit I’m pretty damn successful and especially grateful for friends like Ed.

Chapter 6

Food For the Gods

The illusion of Hollywood glamour is obvious to those of us who live on the fringes of fame and fortune. I remember being hired once to work in the kitchen at the Governor’s Ball where the after-Academy Awards dinner is served. I felt like a slave on a big ship’s galley while building hundreds of salads on an assembly line. Every so often, one of my fellow servers would report a star sighting. It felt pathetic and I wished I had stayed home and watched the show from the comfort of my couch. But a girl does what a girl has got to do to pay the rent sometimes.

Chasen’s, a restaurant that opened its doors in 1936, was a hangout for entertainment luminaries for nearly 60 years. Many of its regular customers had booths named in their honor. The Ronald Reagan booth, now on display at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library museum, was where Ronnie proposed to Nancy. Frank Sinatra, Alfred Hitchcock, James Stewart and Groucho Marx also had their booths. Located near Beverly Hills, it was the site of Academy Awards parties and was also known for its chili. In 1962, Elizabeth Taylor had several orders of Chasen’s chili packed in dry ice and flown to the set of Cleopatra while filming in Rome. But just before Chasen’s closed its doors permanently in 1995, the acclaimed chili was requested one last time by Michael Jackson, who was bringing Elizabeth Taylor as his date to a party being given in his honor.

The chili was just one item that would share the sumptuous buffet table along with all the other fancy foods my employer and her kitchen staff whipped up for this prestigious occasion. Beautiful displays and lush flowers lined the silver trays, which were filled with Dungeness mini crab cakes, rolled salmon with crispy sesame tofu cream, Belgian endive salad bites filled with feta cheese and candied walnuts, burrata mozzarella and heirloom tomatoes, prosciutto di parma, Holland white asparagus salad with miso dressing, and trice-baked potato puffs au gratin with cheese and smoked bacon. And for desserts, there were several chocolate fountains surround by ripe fruits and berries, a chocolate crumble parfait with cardamom glace, espresso air chocolate brulee cookies, and s’mores macaroons, to name just a few. I honestly can’t remember everything that came out of that kitchen that night, but I do recall going home sick from all the sugar I popped into my mouth when no one was looking.

This was just one of the many times I served the stars under the stars at a grand Hollywood affair where there were as many servers as there were guests. We all scurried about refilling trays and drinks, and picking up dirty glasses and plates in our stiff white shirts and black tuxedo pants. I would have been excited to get a look at old Liz, but tensions were high in the kitchen that night, and the pace was frantic. We had been there all afternoon setting up the many food and dessert stations in the hot sun, on the lawn of some Hollywood producer who was throwing this bash to thank Michael for signing a contract with his production company. They didn’t share the details with the help.

By the time the guests of honor arrived, I had been on my toes for over five hours and was already exhausted. Through a crowd of gawking guests and many of the waiters, I craned my neck to get a glimpse of the couple. Liz looked feeble and more exhausted than I felt as she held Michael’s hand and moved slowly through the crowd with the aid of a cane in her other hand. This was probably after one of the many surgeries or health crises she endured throughout her life. She was at an all time top weight, and Michael was a white ghost standing beside her in one of those Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band uniforms. They looked like a royal couple being brought out on display for the masses. I don’t think Liz even got to taste the iconic chili and I felt sadness for the both of them. They didn’t look like they were having a good time.

There were other smaller parties that were not so sad. I got a kick out of meeting Pamela Anderson, and her boyfriend de jour, Kid Rock, when I cooked for her kid’s birthday party. There was also a small Christmas Eve party where Viva and I served the entire Bridges family. Famous father and both famous sons were very gracious. It was another Christmas Eve that both Viva and I wished we didn’t have to work, but the Bridges were so sweet and kind that in the end it was pleasant and they were good tippers.

For many years, I even owned and operated my own small catering business, where I was directly responsible for the menus and service. I booked mostly small dinner parties and a few interesting jobs from time to time. I did finger foods at the DGA in 1986 for Donna Deitch’s premiere of Desert Hearts and some of her private home parties, too. I had no business card, no license, no industrial kitchen or employees, but jobs came to me via word of mouth because I was a good cook. Once I was hired by a P.R. firm where my daughter’s best childhood friend Mira worked and was in charge of special events. Mira had loved my cooking since childhood and hired me to create five different appetizers for 1000 guests for the David Bowie CD release party at Virgin Records on Sunset Boulevard. David was not in attendance.

My menu included ten savory whipped cream cheese, pesto and sundried tomato torte s molded in large Bundt pans and displayed for easy spreading on crackers and bread. I also made ten more mold pans of corn and wild mushroom polenta cut into cake slices and served at room temperature. There were four different flat bread pinwheels cut into hundreds of mini sandwich rolls, some meat and some veggies, as well as bacon-wrapped jumbo shrimp and my fabulous mushrooms stuffed with Gorgonzola and breadcrumbs baked in red wine. For this job, I put Viva and my friends Jennifer and Michael to work, and borrowed space in four of my neighbors’ refrigerators to keep the food overnight as we made it. After two whole fourteen hour days in my kitchen, I had no time to do desserts and just bought them from a bakery.

There were other jobs that were over my head and way under bid that almost killed me too. I recall a sit-down dinner for 60 guests at a mansion in Beverly Hills. The young trophy wife of a millionaire real estate mogul hired me to cater her husband’s 60th surprise birthday party.

The perky young blond Brit had once been the nanny to the millionaire’s kids during his first marriage. As wife number two she was trying hard to prove herself worthy of the promotion. In her British accent she said, “I want to really impress Bernie’s friends and prove that I’m no golddigger. If I can pull this party off on a frugal homemaker’s budget Bernie will be delighted.”

Then she told me she only had a budget of $200 for the chef but all she wanted was a simple meal for 60 guests to include a salad and one other starter, and for the main course, her favorite recipe for Chilean Sea Bass baked in white wine, roasted potatoes, and asparagus, with birthday cake and cookies for dessert. The deal was she paid for all the food, supplies and rentals with my wholesale discount cards, and then she would pay me $20 an hour for all my prep and on-site cooking time and service. She knew she was getting me dirt-cheap so she kept telling me she would take care of me in the end with a good tip. She also provided her two maids to help out with the food prep and clean up.

Well, it was truly a miracle that I got all 60 plates on the table while they were still warm with as little help as I had. All the guests paid high compliments to their hostess for the delicious meal, and her husband came back to the kitchen to thank me for the wonderful job I did. At the end of the long day and night, my employer gave me my check for $200 as agreed upon, and then handed me a crisp twenty-dollar bill, my big cash tip. I was speechless.

As I gathered my things hobbling to my car to pack the last of my supplies, she said, “Bernie and I are so pleased that I’m going to place a write up in the Beverly Hills Social 411 newspaper about our party and mention you as our caterer. A good review in the 411 should bring you lots of new clients.”

“No thanks, and whatever you do, don’t tell your friends what you paid me.”

Probably the most fun of all the star-studded parties I ever worked was the 58th birthday party for none other than Ms. Diana Ross. The theme of the night was The Main Event. Why the party planners chose that theme, I have no idea. Perhaps Ms. Ross just liked the movie that starred Barbra Streisand and Ryan O'Neal. Well, whatever the reason, it made for an interesting backdrop for a party. The planner rented a big house on the beach in the Malibu Colony and set up a boxing ring on the sand for the dance floor. They also hired a few hunky young male models and dressed them in shiny boxer shorts and silk boxing robes left open to reveal their hard bodies and washboard abs. Two of the models stood at the door greeting guests, and the others tended the bar.

The catering company hired me to work the kitchen, and only the young and pretty people got put out on the floor to serve the guests. Viva was happy with this job because this was the night she got to meet her musical idol, Stevie Wonder. Viva would come back and report who was there and I popped out of the kitchen as often as I could, pretending to look over the buffet table for needed refills, just to see the action. Everyone from Motown to Hollywood piled into the beach house throughout the night. I spotted Kevin Costner, Barry Gordy, Billy D. Williams, and Wilt Chamberlain on one of my runs. Ms. Ross herself was quite friendly and gracious, and greeted all of us, including the kitchen staff. Before the dinner was served, she spent much of the night holding court in a shimmering silver cocktail dress, posed on the large white sectional couch in the living room where many guests took turns sitting beside her to chat. For me, the best celebrity sighting of the night was when Hugh Hefner entered with a half dozen identical looking blond Barbie dolls in tow. Heff was in a silk pajama outfit, and all six bimbos in short tight spandex mini dresses squeezed on the couch next to him. The two that didn’t fit on the sofa sat at his feet. As the Heffner package paid their homage to the great Ms. Ross, I thought I was witnessing a skit on Saturday Night Live. Heff was truly a parody of himself.

As the cocktails flowed throughout the night, and after Stevie sang “Happy Birthday” (the African-American arrangement) to Diana and she blew out her 58 candles, it seemed like everyone got really loose, guests and caterers alike. Toward the end of the night, even the kitchen staff took turns going out to dance in the boxing ring whenever we heard a favorite Motown song. I even bumped with Barry Gordy on the dance floor. The energy reminded me of the house parties my black friends in the ‘60s used to throw in their apartments, where everyone line-danced in the living room. It had that kind of vibe despite its A-list guests. Everyone was getting down. By then, Kevin Costner was relentlessly hitting on one of our waitstaff and RuPaul had become smitten with one of our cute gay waiters, and kept following him back into the kitchen. He hung out with us for quite some time, chatting. It was one of those rare nights where the boundaries blurred between stars and the help, and no one seemed to mind except for one of Diana’s daughters, who Viva reported was giving her heavy attitude. We all went home with big tips and hefty doggie bags that night.

Chapter 7

Tell Mama

Necessity, my ever-loving mother of invention, gave birth to Tell Mama, a one-woman personal assistant business. My logo was a cute caricature of me as the Rubenesque Mama with apron strings undone, holding her arms out and welcoming requests for almost any service, from A to Z; Advice to Zipper Repair. While passing out my flyers to potential clients at the Rose Café in Venice, a successful TV writer scrutinized my ad listing all twenty-six services Mama could perform for ten to twenty bucks an hour, and commented, “You know, it might be a lot easier to write the sitcom.”

I replied, “Don’t you dare!”

I ran home, wrote the treatment, and registered it with the Writer’s Guild before he could. It’s still in development at the back of my desk drawer if anyone is interested.

Like the plate juggler on the Ed Sullivan Show in the 60s, I became the juggling mother of invention, wearing more hats than the women in a Baptist congregation on Easter Sunday. As it turned out, I never generated enough clients to put other mamas to work, which had been my business plan, and I ended up doing all the assignments myself. Be grateful for your nine-to-five routine, if that’s what you’ve chosen.

Rat drops keep falling on my head, they keep fallin’.

I’m on assignment inside the garage of a mega mansion nestled in a neat row of other identical mega mansions on a dead end cul-de-sac in Thousand Oaks, a sprawling suburb of Los Angeles. My client’s Mercedes is parked in the driveway outside her home, while inside her garage a serious disease of stuff-infection is spreading faster than fruit flies on a ripe banana. Inside the garage, large enough to park two trailers, the air is stagnant and dust mites choke me as I shuffle though the wreckage of a compulsive shopper/hoarder’s environment.

Since my client was too embarrassed to call the Center for Disease Control, for fear her neighbors would discover the dangers that lurked behind her walls, she called Tell Mama, my personal assistant business that foolishly advertised Diva of De-Cluttering, under the letter (D) of my services. My worst client, whose name will remain anonymous, was a deranged housewife of Thousand Oaks with an obsession for collecting Barbie dolls and other things. In addition to her hoarding problem, she had struggled with an extra hundred plus pounds gained while pregnant with her daughter. When I met the woman who, only five years earlier had had the perfect figure of a Barbie Doll, she was tipping the scale at about 350 pounds. Since her life coach suggested it would help with her weight loss program, Mrs. Barbie was on a new mission to bring clarity into all her affairs before she underwent bypass surgery.

During our primary consultation, Mrs. Barbie immediately revealed too much information about her unhappy marriage. Apparently on her honeymoon her genitalia, just like Barbie’s, became invisible to her husband. From that moment on, slowly the rest of her body began to transform into the shape I saw before me. She even admitted that she was aware that she was filling the hole in her love life with revenge shopping and food. Her story reminded me of Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian Grey, but in reverse. With each new Barbie she acquired, and hid in the garage, she gained another ten pounds of ugly fat. The hidden Barbie dolls remained her young beautiful self, while outside of the garage, she lost her girlish figure. And now even the beautiful plastic Barbies were being ravaged. It wasn’t a pretty picture.

It was too bad I didn’t charge her a therapist’s rate, because I quickly learned that getting a hoarder to let go of excess was harder than cutting off your own arm. I had to do some serious listening and hand-holding, along with the heavy lifting and sweeping rat turds, silverfish, and dust bunnies into the trash. As I dug into Mrs. Barbie’s self-indulgence, I was forced to listen as she excused her sick behavior and blamed her problems on her husband and his suspected porn and sex addiction. Shopping and then burying the evidence was her way of avoiding confrontation. When I asked how she kept him out of the garage, she said, “We have an unspoken agreement, as long as I never enter his office/man cave or snoop on his computer; he stays out of my garage.” (Metaphor intended!) It’s amazing what a Diva of De-Cluttering can learn about the human condition. If only I had counseling credentials.

Like her weight, the hidden merchandise had grown to unmanageable proportions. Hundreds of plastic bags and unopened boxes were stacked haphazardly everywhere. The bags mostly contained new outfits from high-end boutiques with hefty price tags still attached to them that she bought several sizes too small as an incentive to lose weight over the years. There were also many large Costco purchases she was hoping I could categorize so that she could eventually return them. Other unopened boxes contained gifts for every occasion, but when the occasion occurred she could not find the right gift. There were toys and games for her daughter and her daughter’s friends that she held back until the girls reached the appropriate ages to play them, but her daughter and her friends had since surpassed the games’ levels.

There were also other priceless doll collections. Her Barbie collection with their many accessories alone must have been worth hundreds of thousands of dollars if the sealed packaging had not become the food source for the rodents that were then cozying up to the Barbie Dolls at night while they slept.

Having a slight touch of ADHD myself, this kind of disorder and disarray overwhelms me. And the truth is that I am not qualified to handle clients who need a certified therapist. I’m too sick myself and I’m so empathetic that if I go into a hospital to visit a sick person I immediately have to find a bed next to them to lie down in. This particular client needed a serious intervention. She needed Oprah herself to arrive on her doorstep with a dump truck and her favorite organizer, Peter Walsh, to save her. No matter how willing I was to serve, I just wasn’t large enough for this job. Unfortunately, my pressing need to pay my rent was a strong motivator and, back in those times, I said yes to every request that came my way.

Like the time I had the challenge of de-cluttering hundreds of cardboard boxes that contained twenty years of files, along with the client’s inherited clutter left to her by her hoarder mother. Since she could not afford a storage unit, this client kept everything from her mother’s accumulated illness and her own in her one-bedroom apartment in West L.A. She slept on a small couch because there was no room in her bedroom for furniture. She had little money and was in crisis because her landlord had given her a twenty-four hour notice that she was coming into her apartment the next day to inspect the premises. Apparently her neighbors were complaining about bugs coming from her place.

I felt sorry for the old girl, so I gave her a discount and after assessing her situation I realized that any attempt to organize her would be like rearranging the furniture on the Titanic. So I came up with a brilliant solution to at least keep the landlord from evicting her. Knowing that it was impossible to go through decades of clutter in one day, I decided to use her boxes to build her a beautiful bedroom suite. I arranged the boxes into a queen-size bed with a head board, two end tables and a dresser. The bedroom suite gave new meaning to that song that Pete Seeger used to sing, “Little boxes made of ticky tacky.” I used all her mother’s bedding and fabrics to cover everything to make it all look real. As long as you didn’t lie on the bed, no one would be the wiser. Of course it didn’t solve the bug problem, but considering she was paying half my rate I performed a friggin’ miracle. I bought her some time to figure out how to eventually get rid of it all.

Another trait I’ve observed in my hoarder clients was that they were all obese. By far the worst of the worst jobs that ever came to Tell Mama came from another obese woman, who just happened to also live in Thousand Oaks. This poor woman topped Ms. Barbie’s weight and her illness. She tipped the scale at about 650 pounds. She hired me for the skill listed under the letter C for chef. I was beginning to think that the suburb of Thousand Oaks should have been re-named a Thousand Pounds, the burb where hefty wives hide. If I added the weight of Ms. Barbie at 350 and my new client at 650 it hit the mark. It’s too bad reality shows like the Housewives of…. weren’t popular back then, I could have pitched these two for a series.

For the sake of her anonymity, I will call this client “Turkey Lady.” Actually she was not a housewife, but lived alone unless you counted the two Mexican maids who doubled as her 24/7 caregivers, alternating shifts of bathing, dressing, and wiping her ass. I’m not exaggerating. Due to her size it was impossible for her to do it herself. Turkey Lady had no problem with clutter since she was too large to leave the house to shop and could not even sit up long enough to use a computer or read a catalogue. The maids kept her home spotless.

Turkey Lady was willing to pay me $200 a day to be her private chef. She would have had her maids cook for her but she told me they lacked the sophisticated skills for a woman with her sensitive palette. Besides, she believed in the old adage that you don’t shit where you eat. It was immediately obvious that Turkey Lady had an eating disorder that challenged my culinary skills like no other client before or since.

When I interviewed for the job she told me there was only one food that her digestion could tolerate and that food was turkey. She also had allergies to most spices and condiments and had been through a roster of high-end private chefs trying to please her for months. I was the last chef on the block from her list of recommendations. All of them had failed her. I took on the job, convincing her and myself that I was creative enough to deliver. I figured for $200 a day I could turn that grand bird into endless dishes. After making batches of turkey meat loaf, turkey tetrazzini, turkey meat balls, turkey hot dogs and sausages, turkey stew sans most spices, on my first day for her sample menu, I was then expected to set up a formal dining service at the foot of her king size bed with the television blaring for dinner ambiance. Apparently it was too difficult for her to sit up or leave the bed for longer then it took to use the bathroom so most of everything she did happened in the bedroom, which left the rest of the house looking like a model home.

When I served her dinner on a silver platter with her matching silver place setting, she asked me to place it on the antique mahogany coffee table that sat at the foot of her bed. Then with the help of her maid, she would roll over from her back on to her enormous stomach and shimmy herself down to the edge with her head now at the foot of her bed. Turkey Lady was no taller than 5’2” and most of her weight was all in the middle of her front side, making her look like an oblong sea creature with a very small head and little feet. She would then lean over the bowl and eat from it like a dog; that is if a dog could use a silver folk. I myself have struggled with overeating, but I must admit that the sight of her eating was by far the best appetite suppressant I ever experienced in my own attempts to find recovery.

I was spared from having to finish out my trial week when on day two I showed up for duty and she accused me of using pepper in the turkey stew. It would have been considerate of her to call in advance before I made the long drive up to Thousand Oaks from my home in Venice, but that was okay since I got paid for the day anyway. It was such a relief to know I would not have to return to the horror of that house again with its walls and heavy dark draperies reeking of turkey odor or witness the abuse her maids took for one more day. That Thanksgiving I gave many thanks for my life without the main course and went out for Chinese food. It was a long time before I could eat turkey again.

I admit that my desperate need for cash led me to these ungodly employment situations and the only thing that made me feel esteem about my work was the fact that these unfortunates had far worse problems than my own. In some cases I believed that I actually helped some of them get better. There was a time when I worked for two clients who were both close to dying, and both of them had extreme eating issues. One of them was a famous fashion photographer who was in his last days of suffering from HIV infections and the other was a woman who ran a successful commercial production company.

I had served as a part-time production and personal assistant to the producer on and off for over three years. She would hire me whenever her business or personal chores got too much for her to handle. By my last assignment with her, she was dying of throat cancer. Still fighting desperately to hold on to what had been her successful normal life, she brought me back to work after her last surgery.

At this point she could no longer eat through her mouth due to the large tumor that had been removed from her throat. One of my chores was to prepare all her meals and then put them into a blender and feed her through a feeding tube that went directly into her stomach. Where I found the strength to do this I don’t know. I had always liked her and felt loyal, since she had been an easygoing boss and I felt good that she trusted me to do such an intimate thing for her. I was not a trained nurse and on one occasion I overfed her through the tube, causing her to vomit all over me. At that point it became clear that she no longer needed a personal assistant but a full-time nurse. She passed away shortly afterwards. I know that all this experience was leading up to some reward, and the Universe did deliver big time.

Not long after my client passed away, I was approached by my friend Patrick McGuire, who had been a fan of my performance work in San Francisco back in the ‘70s. By the mid ‘90s he owned a small boutique PR firm in Seattle. Patrick asked me to create a comedic spokesperson character that he could pitch to his client Shurgard, a national storage company. Patrick was challenged with the difficult task of getting media coverage for the boring business of storage. “How do you sell empty space and cardboard boxes?” he asked me. By bringing me into the mix, he had hoped I could find a funny solution to his problem.

And humor I did deliver. I used my writing, performing, wardrobe-styling talents, and all the knowledge and work experience I learned in the field and came up with the alter ego: Iona Place, the Diva of De-Cluttering. Iona Place was the next incarnation of Tell Mama and with Patrick’s help I became the new spokeswoman for Shurgard Storage.

I styled myself in workman’s overalls, put my hair up in big bubble curls, and tied a printed hanky around them. I looked like a glamorous Josephine the Plummer, a commercial character played by Jane Withers in Comet Cleanser TV ads of the 60s and early 70s. Then I had my friend Phillip in San Francisco, a master prop maker, construct a large leather utility belt with every imaginable tool hanging from around my hips. Iona’s utility belt was a character in itself. With my trusty belt I was armed for any dirty job around the house: it included a plunger, gardening tools, work gloves, packing tape dispenser, spray cleaning products, and even a note pad where I kept my to-do list in case I relapsed into disorder.

I wrote a script based on the concept of clutter and disorganization being a disease and used a twelve-step program model for Iona’s twelve tips to getting organized. Patrick and I brainstormed and came up with kitsch names for the maladies like “jamitistis in your drawers” and “stuff infection” and I fed the interviewer one liners like, “I’m a graduate from the school of hard knick knacks” and I made jokes about my imaginary husband, Ines Place, and my twenty year old daughter, Anita Place. These punch lines all led to media coverage for Shurgard on several TV Talk shows and news segment in the major markets across the country. I made more money than I had ever earned acting or in any other day job. So in the end, the Diva of Desperation’s hard work paid off. I only regret that the Shurgard campaign didn’t last longer or lead into a commercial campaign like Josephine the Plummer, the Snapple lady, or the “Where’s the Beef?” lady. But, alas, Iona had to come down off her media high horse and be put back on the shelves of hard knick knacks, and eventually find another day job in the real world of a struggling actress.

Chapter 8

I Love Lucy, Who Doesn’t?

I grew up on Lucy. Lucy and Ethel get jobs at the candy factory and get fired when they can’t pack the candy fast enough as it comes down the conveyor belt. I can relate. My first job was at a conveyor belt in a collating factory.

I can relate to all of Lucy’s harebrained schemes as she struggled to be a part of the glamorous world of show business.

Lucy goes off to absorb local color in Italy to prepare for an audition with a famous Italian movie director. At a winery she ends up crushing grapes with her bare feet and gets into a brawl in the vat of grapes with a local Italian grape crusher who looks a lot like me. I’m Italian and I love Italy.

Lucy fakes amnesia to get away from having to explain her antics to Ricky: “Who am I? Where am I?”

I faked amnesia too while trying to get out of going to jail for unpaid parking tickets. Just like Lucy with Ricky, it didn’t work for me either.

But my favorite Lucy gig was when Lucy does a TV commercial for Vitameatavegamin, a nutritional elixir which contains vitamins, meat, vegetables, minerals, and 23% alcohol.

In take one all goes well for Lucy as she delivers her lines: “Do you poop out at parties? Are you unpopular? So why don't you join the thousands of happy, happy, people and get a great big bottle of Vitameatavegamin.”

Then Lucy holds the extra large bottle up to camera and pours herself a giant spoonful. She gulps it down and with a big sour puss expression says, “It’s so tasty too.”

“Cut!” the director screams. “Do it again, but look like you mean it this time.”

Unable not to gag at the taste, Lucy is forced to test the sponsor’s product over and over again, until the alcohol kicks in and she starts to like it so much she licks the spoon but screws up her lines: “Do you pop out at parties? Are you unpoopular?”

Well, if it weren’t for my poopularity in the San Francisco’s gay counterculture, I would have never met my Ethel, but I didn’t recognize her at first.

I barely noticed Roberto, a brown, skinny art student who roomed with Bob Reccio, a wig and prop builder for my musical, Broken Dishes, a comedy I co-wrote and produced. Roberto tagged along with Bob to our out-of-town premiere in 1976 at the Mendocino Art Center in northern California. While I was busy opening the show, Roberto hung out and bonded with my gorgeous little Viva, who was only six at the time. It wasn’t until 1977, when I decided to move my act to Hollywood that my friendship with Roberto Juarez began. He had just graduated from the Art Institute and decided to shift his fine art focus toward a master’s in film. His acceptance to UCLA coincided with my need for a roommate in my new Venice beach home, and thus began our Lucy and Ethel reenactments.

Since I was the only actress Roberto knew in L.A. at that time, he decided to make me and Viva the subjects of his first student film project: a short biopic he titled Dolores Viva. At first I was flattered as he followed both me and Viva around the house like Fellini, at all hours of the day or night, interviewing us as we went about our daily living. Viva was a willing subject and loved the attention she got when Roberto would cook her favorite breakfast, megas, a Puerto Rican dish with corn tortillas fried into scrambled eggs. As she ate, he would hold the camera on her and ask her about her own dreams of stardom.

Soon after the filming began, Roberto’s esthetic became the cause of spats not unlike the ones Lucy and Ethel would have from time to time. At this point our roles reversed, and he became more like Lucy and I the reluctant Ethel. He would wake me at dawn with the camera in my face, capturing a five-minute close-up of my nose. Then he would follow me into the shower and shoot me naked while firing personal questions before I had my first cup of coffee. I told him, “R.J., you need to call this film ‘Too Arty Too Early’,” but my insults never discouraged him. He was relentless about getting his shots. He filmed me putting on my makeup and would direct me to do something totally ridiculous like, “Stick those cotton balls up your nose,” he demanded. I would argue that his ideas were ridiculous and we played out the roles of the difficult actress vs. eccentric film director. Roberto was no Alfred Hitchcock, but I felt as tortured as Tippi Hedren did while filming The Birds. All and all, however, things worked out and Roberto was happy with his first project. Although I had my criticisms, I was still thrilled to have my first L.A. film in the can.

Things grew tenser between us when Roberto came home one day with about twenty cinder blocks that he found in an abandoned construction site. At this point he suggested that I throw out all my comfortable thrift store furniture and the precious couch I lived on and allow him to replace the living room furniture with his collection of cinder blocks. By his second semester at film school, Roberto had yet to discover another out-of-work actress, so he asked me again if he could make his next UCLA project with me. He wanted to shoot a video of the new musical, Primetime, which I had written and was in the middle of producing for a theatrical run in Los Angeles.

Even in the days before YouTube, I thought a video would make a great marketing tool for me to sell my show to bigger houses down the road. So I agreed to let him direct the three camera shoot at the UCLA studio, using my material and performances. At the campus studio we had access to green screen backdrops and other wonderful advanced technology to enhance my live numbers. When the shoot was done and the editing began, the real trouble between us started. Roberto’s ‘too arty, too early’ editing style clashed with my vision of a slick commercial tape to sell my show. This time our riff got vicious and we ended up not talking for a while. But just like Lucy and Ethel, we could not stay mad at each other for long.

During the two years we lived together, Roberto continued his painting in between film projects. He made hundreds of small 12x12 abstract paintings, and after each one was completed he would hold it up with pride and say, “One day these are going to be worth a fortune.”

I rolled my eyes and replied, “Yeah, dream on!” I’d further criticize him because I thought he’d never succeed as an artist. In my opinion he couldn’t even draw well, but what did I know of fine art? Just a few years later when he started to emerge as an art star in NY, I had to eat those words. Roberto taught me a valuable lesson in how important it is to have vision and to believe in yourself, no matter what the world thinks of you.

In my youthful arrogance and ignorance, I admit I was not the best supportive friend, but our friendship grew in spite of our differences. You might say Roberto became my ambassador to the world of fine art. Growing up in Jersey, all I knew of culture was the stuff they put in yogurt. One of my show collaborators, Martin Worman, who knew me back in high school, wrote the lyrics of a song for my first musical performance in San Francisco in 1974 that put me on the map there. The song started with the lyric, “There was never time for lessons, in piano, French or horse. When you’re from a family of eleven, survival, not culture, is the course.” I knew counterculture and pop art, but without Roberto in my life I might never have stepped inside a museum or gallery.

At first it was painful, as Roberto dragged me to every gallery and museum from California to New York, and then later from Rome to Paris, giving me my art history lessons. I have photos of me passing out from art exhaustion on very rare and precious art installations. I was almost thrown out of the Getty Villa for resting on a roped-off antique velvet love seat. But soon I began to see art through his eyes.

During the 80s and 90s, I watched and admired how Roberto maneuvered his success and popularity in the art world that he often shared with me. I was invited to all his hot openings and after-parties with his closest friends and family. After one such event, I got to tag along when Edward Albee invited him to his apartment. After many cocktails, something was said that Albee, in a less friendly inebriated state, interpreted as an insult and before I knew it, Albee kicked us out.

Whenever Viva and I were in New York, we’d stay with Roberto. He would shop and we cooked together, me making my famous enchiladas that he loved and him the beans, rice, and salsas, and then he would invite his high- and low-brow friends down to his East Village loft to party with us. His friends and lovers became our blended family. Even his Park Avenue art dealer, Robert Miller, embraced me and invited me to stay with them during the time when Roberto lived in his South Beach penthouse in Miami, where he also worked and showed.

By 1995 Roberto was at the height of his career and he invited me to participate in a performance with renowned New York performance artists, John Kelly, Jack Pierson and Syd Straw to celebrate the opening of his new show at The Center for The Fine Arts in Miami. This was a great honor for me to be on the bill, reading excerpts from my short story collection, Gay Widow. For me, the event was a perfect marriage between fine art and counterculture art, and the evening was an expression of the journey I shared on the road with Roberto.

They Entered the Road, was inspired by his memories of artists, friends, and family who had touched his life and who had passed on, as were my Gay Widow stories about my deepest loses. We were both survivors of the AIDS holocaust and had witnessed way too many of our mutual friends pass over to the other side.

The Center for the Fine Arts paid a nice honorarium and gave me a free trip east. This invitation came just as I had been alerted to my father’s final hospitalization for lymphoma cancer. I knew my Dad was in the final stages of his life and I had no money at the time to journey to New Jersey, but the ticket the museum offered allowed me to end up at my father’s death bed shortly after my performance at Roberto’s magnificent art opening.

There were endless gifts being Roberto’s friend over the years, but the best time I ever had as a result of his generosity came with an invitation to join him in Rome where he was living and working for a year at The American Academy of Arts and Letters after winning the Rome Prize. Each year 29 fellows, who work in the fields of classical, ancient, and medieval studies, architecture, design, art conservation, musical composition, visual art, and literature, are offered a prize that includes a stipend, travel expenses, and work and living space in either the main building or in one of the smaller ones on the 11-acre campus. In addition to the Rome Prize Fellows, visiting scholars and artists live and work at the Academy for varying periods. I was over my head, swimming in culture.

As his guest, I got my own private room in the upper levels of the main house while Roberto chose a small cottage to share with his lover, Will, near his studio on the grounds. The American Academy is located on Gianicolo (Janiculum) Hill and is one of the best locations in Rome with breathtaking views of innumerable domes and bell towers that pierced the skyline of the multi-hued architectural museum. The Janiculum also housed a late-17th century Baroque fountain built by Pope Paul V, the Fontana dell’Acqua Paola and the Palazzo Montorio, and the residence of the Ambassadors of Spain. Other sights on this hill included the church of San Pietro in Montorio, thought to be where St. Peter was crucified. And if all that wasn’t enough to inspire me, my new digs were a nice walk to the Vatican.

As Roberto’s guest, I was privy to all the amenities the prestigious fellows were given during their stay. I got to attend amazing installations, fashion shows, and parties as well as private tours of treasured sites around Rome. During that same month, Roberto, Will and I ventured to Paris on an overnight train in a sleeping car. Even though Will was a hot blond boy from South Beach, I cast him in the role of Fred on this journey. With Fred and Ethel in the bunk above me, we lay awake most of the night in our sleeper car giggling as the train sped north through Italy. I got up many times to wander about the cars and caught site of the famous Leaning Tower of Pisa and exotic strangers puffing slim cigarettes in the smoking cars. I felt like I was on a train in one of those comedies when at any moment someone would pull the emergency ripcord and bring the train to a sudden stop.

Our Fred was an excellent navigator and on our first day in Paris he led us to the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre as Ethel and I performed more high jinks like stealing hand towels with logos on them from fancy hotel restrooms we stopped at. We ended the day with dinner at the famous Le Dome Restaurant. I gained about five pounds at that meal just watching a skinny French bitch who sat at the next table devour frogs legs and oysters along with a whole loaf of bread and butter and wash it down with two bottles of wine. After each course, I slipped a plate into my purse and some of the silverware too. By the end of the night, Fred and Ethel forbade me from walking out with my big bulging purse, and made me take out most of it. I still have the bread plate with the Le Dome emblem on it as a souvenir.

Once we were back in Rome, the adventures continued. There were plenty of other moments when I strayed from the highbrow culture spots to more of the Lucy-style tourism. Like at the Coliseum, where a gladiator who posed with tourists enticed me into taking a photo with him for a tip. Roberto captured a priceless shot of the ruggedly weathered gladiator dangling a cigarette from his mouth, with his hand resting on my ass. And on that same day, we ran into a grand military procession at the Mussolini Monument, where every branch of Italian service was marching on display in their best finery. Italian military men dress in fancy pants and hats like the Swiss Guard; no drab army greens for these boys. Each service branch had a different elaborate outfit and distinct plumage. I hadn’t seen such elaborate pomp and circumstance since I’d left San Francisco.

As the procession was ending, three jet planes flew low over the monument, leaving a trail of red, white, and green smoke—the colors of the Italian flag. And with that, the affair was over, but not for me. I watched and followed the young servicemen in their plumage as they headed back to their busses. When a couple of young soldiers caught me trying to take their pictures they invited me up on their bus. “Signora, Signora, vene qua,” they yelled out and just like Lucy looking for adventure, I took them up on their offer and got on their bus. All the while Roberto was capturing the moments on film. They were ever so friendly and several of them had me sit on their laps while Roberto got off more shots. Then their superior officer came back to the bus and threw me off.

My Roman holiday could have only been made better if Fellini or Bertolucci discovered me and put me in one of their movies. That never happened, but I got another film offer from Roberto while we were checking out a first-century archeological site on the outskirts of Rome. As we wandered through the ruins, Roberto found a piece of laurel wreath that inspired him to create a vision of me as an ancient goddess. He used the wreath to tie up my hair and then told me to take off all my clothes. Since 1978, when he started to film me in the shower, Roberto never missed an opportunity to shoot artistic nudes of me whenever he could. Since it had become our tradition, I followed his direction and stripped quickly. Thank God it was a slow day for tourists. I then stepped up on one of the broken columns to pose for him. He snapped several shots of me holding up my floppy boobs while standing on the marble pedestal.

Toward the end of Roberto’s year-long fellowship, after I was back home in Venice Beach, he had a show of the work he had done while in Rome. He decided to use one of those goddess shots of me for his show opening invitation. My naked image caused quite a stir and brought an illustrious list of guests to his Rome opening, including a duke who found me, as the naked goddess, quite alluring. It’s too bad I was not still in Rome for the grand event. Who knows, had I still been there, I might have become a duchess. Well, it’s not every actress in Hollywood who can boast about being a muse to a great artist.

Chapter 9

I was a Bimbo’s Slave and More Jobs that Suck

Because of my knitting business, I had many connections to other film and TV show designers, and in 1990, I was hired by Marlene Stewart to be her assistant during the dress rehearsals for Madonna’s Blond Ambition tour. Marlene was co-designer, along with Jean-Paul Gaultier, while simultaneously working as the designer for Oliver Stone’s The Doors movie. Marlene hired me because Madonna was pissed over not getting Marlene’s undivided attention. Marlene thought by putting me on as her assistant and go-between girl, it might ease the tension between them.

My first assignment was to go shopping at the largest Catholic retail outlet in downtown Los Angeles. They sold everything from incense burners to nuns’ habits, and, don’t quote me on this, but I even think I saw packets of freeze-dried Holy Eucharist. I was there to pick up the priests’ robes that Madonna and her dancers would be wearing for Like a Prayer. When I arrived on the Disney mega soundstage, loaded down with bags and boxes, Madonna cornered me in the wardrobe room and barked questions without ever having met me. But this story is not about Madonna.

In Madonna’s Like a Virgin number, designer Jean-Paul Gaultier reintroduced the bullet bra of the 1950’s. Madonna sang her hit in slow motion while writhing on a satin bed, simulating masturbation in the Gaultier corset with its exaggerated pointy quilted cups while two back-up boys joined her, wearing bras with even longer, pointier cups. What Madonna and the world at large didn’t know was that two years before Madonna featured that Gaultier bullet bra, I had already designed and made my own version of this iconic undergarment and wore it for a heavy metal rock parody in my one woman show, The Last Dance of the Couch Potatoes. In my opinion, my design outdid even Gaultier’s version. My bullet bra had 5-inch silver rifle bullets jutting out from its pointy leather cups and my back-up boys wore matching jock straps with bullets accentuating their stuffed packages. You can look up the video on YouTube if you think I’m exaggerating.

Ah, but there’s the rub, I was always the artist ahead of my time and never made enough money not to need a fucking day job.

As my two-week job with Madonna was wrapping up, I applied for a part-time position as a personal assistant for a popular porn star. Ginger Lynn Allen, who ranked seventh place among the greatest XXX actresses of her generation, hired me. Ginger’s first sixty-nine adult films were at the top of the video charts, and she was also the first in a long line of Charlie Sheen’s goddesses. They met on the set of Young Guns, where Ginger made her legitimate acting debut. Charlie seized the opportunity to turn his teen jerk-off fantasy girl into a reality.

I began working for Ginger right after she met Charlie, but she was still living with the photographer who discovered her. I think Ginger hired me because she was impressed that I had just worked for Madonna. On my first day as Ginger’s to-go girl, she handed me a shopping list and sent me off to the Pleasure Chest, a Costco-sized sex fantasy retail outlet in West Hollywood. As a favor to Charlie, Ginger volunteered to arrange the entertainment for his best friend’s bachelor party in Vegas and Ginger was producing and directing the floorshow.

Although I had worked as a topless go-go girl in my early twenties, at this time of my life, my tassel-twirling days were behind me. At forty-four, I was mother to a teenage daughter and it had been a while since I had come in close proximity to sexual accoutrement and the sex act itself, for that matter. So there I stood, blushing like a virgin, before a 6’2” leather-clad queen, and asking if he could direct me to the aisle where I could find the following items: “A five-gallon bottle of baby oil, a package of large plastic tarps, a dozen tubes of flavored lube, a dozen pairs of edible panties, a couple of strands of Ben Wa balls, and a half a dozen assorted dildos with testicles attached in different sizes and colors.” As I read from Ginger’s shopping list, a flush of embarrassment changed my complexion from tan to sunburnt. I blurted out, “This stuff is not for me. It’s for my boss.”

To which the queen in the bare-ass leather chaps replied, “Lady, I don’t give a fuck who they’re for,” and led me down the dildo aisle.

While I worked for Ginger, I continued my studies in my Meisner acting class. I was the oldest and least successful student in the class, and needed this $10 an hour day job. In the two years I studied Meisner technique, I performed scenes with two of Rod Stewart’s ex-wives, one of Gary Shandling’s girlfriends, Pia Zadora, and Catherine Hicks, the mom in the Chucky horror movies, and a few Tom Ford models too. Many of my fellow students went on to become big names, like the baby-faced blond surfer son of James Brolin. I barely recognized Josh almost twenty years later when I saw him at the San Francisco premiere of Milk, the film in which he played Dan White, Harvey Milk’s assassin.

Ginger was delighted that I was an actress, because she too was seriously studying the craft with Milton Katselas, the renowned acting coach of many famous Scientologists. She was also ecstatic that I was crafty and could sew, because she needed help keeping intact her stripper costumes that she wore to support her crossover into legitimate acting, doing pole dancing tours. Ginger was quite the entrepreneur. She ran a mail-order business merchandizing her worn panties to her worldwide fan base. I’d watch her open new packs of sexy lace undies and then rub them one by one between her legs before having me seal and pack them. When on the road, she sold Polaroids for big bucks posing with the horny geeks that came to her shows. After each tour, she returned home with over twenty thousand in cash and then would take me along on a shopping spree to help carry the bags. Ginger loved to shop like she loved to fuck, and after a big shopping binge, just like after good sex, she would run outside the Beverly Center for a desperately needed smoke. When Ginger finally made the break from her photographer/boyfriend, I arranged the move from their Hollywood Hills home to her new fuck palace, a condo in Beverly Hills where she openly continued her affair with Charlie.

For this big move she gave me a budget to hire extra help with all the packing and unpacking and setting up her new place. For my helper I chose my friend Mario, the hottest boy in my acting class. Mario had the looks, intensity, and acting chops of a young Brando. He was young enough to be my son and our bond was instantaneous after working closely with him in a Meisner exercise. Ironically, Mario also had brushes with the infamous Madonna. He was one of the hot dancers in her Express Yourself video. After class one day he told me that Madonna came on to him on the set and that he turned down her advances.

I adored Mario and was impressed with his raw talent and the fact that he could not be bought by a superstar; I personally had whored myself for much less in my day. Mario, in his thick New York accent, said, “It was the principle of the thing. Who does the bitch think she is? Because she’s a star, she thinks I want to fuck her.”

Even though I was twice his age and had a huge crush on him, never in a million years did I entertain the idea that we would ever sleep together. During the move, Mario and I worked side by side, wrapping and unwrapping all of Ginger’s sex accoutrement: all kinds of toys, including her prized whips. On the second day of the job, it was Cinco de Mayo. We took a break and had a Mexican lunch and a couple of beers on Ginger’s dime. When we got back to work we filled up the waterbed and put the new linens on it. Feeling full from the heavy carbo-loaded lunch, Mario and I collapsed on the water bed once it was made. We were resting and talking for a bit when suddenly, out of nowhere, Mario started to kiss me. The sex vibes in Ginger’s boudoir must have turned him on and I just happened to be there. In my opinion he was a god, but I was so surprised to be getting laid by the boy who turned down Madonna that I left my body and hovered above us, watching myself having sex with him like I was in my own porno movie. I didn’t get over it for days.

Later that day, I called my sponsor in the overeaters anonymous program, Alan, a nice older Jewish schmatta salesman. I confided in him. “I broke my celibacy and ironically the last time I had sex fell on Cinco de Mayo five years ago.”

Alan, my wise sponsor, responded with, “Well I guess you have sex every five years whether you need it or not, but I’m more interested in what you ate for lunch today.”

And the perks kept coming. The morning after the move I got to meet Charlie Sheen. Ginger had an early audition and left Charlie sleeping. Shortly afterward, Charlie ambled into the living room in his boxers with rumpled hair and sleep lines in his cheeks. As I poured him some coffee, he asked, “Does Ginger get the newspaper delivered?”

“I don’t know, she just moved in,” I told him.

And then Charlie raised one of his brows and asked me, “Does she read the newspaper?”

I thought it interesting that he wanted me, the help, to know that he was intellectually superior to Ginger—or maybe he was just thinking out loud and I was like the furniture to him. I chose to think that he thought I could be his intellectual peer if I had had the advantages and the money he had. To enforce my own need for approval, I shared with him the fact that I had met his dad and brother Emilio when I worked in the movie Repo Man that starred his brother.

Ginger always felt comfortable sharing details about her sex life, like we were best girl friends. As I organized her large closet adjacent to her luxurious bathroom, she would sit naked on the marble counter top and spread her legs in front of the mirror over the sink to shave her pubic area between Brazilian waxes. She’d tell me all about the rules she set down for Charlie when they had group sex with her girlfriends.

“He can eat their pussies or fuck them but I won’t let him kiss them,” she’d say and then go on to discuss the delicate matter of the offensive taste of her best friend’s vagina. She even asked for my opinion on how to navigate around it. I began to think that sex addicts felt safe confiding in a maternal figure like me who had been there and done that and who would not judge them. Whether true or not, my career in the sex industry began due to this personality trait that other XXX stars noticed too.

Before I ever worked for Ginger Lynn, I met John Stagliano, a well-known pornographer better known as Butt Man in the porn trade, in my jazz dance class. John learned I had been a wardrobe stylist among other skills; he asked to see my resume and began to employ me for a variety of personal assistant jobs. John had also worked as a Chippendale’s dancer and he took his dance training and his movie-making craft seriously. Not long after I started to work for him, Viva was about to turn sixteen and had the misfortune of learning that not every girl gets a male stripper at her sweet sixteen party. When she emphatically told me she did not want a male stripper at her party, I explained, “Honey, I can’t afford to offend Mr. Butt Man, he’s my best client. I’m sorry, but this is the gift he wants to give you. How can I not invite him?” So at Viva’s party John showed up dressed as Dracula and during his pathetic performance he chased Viva and her girlfriends around the room, trying to suck their blood. After that affair, Viva seriously threatened me. “Just don’t ever expect me to call him Daddy.”

John was an Italian American, like me, and was drawn to my mommy qualities. Soon he easily coaxed me into designing sets and costumes for his first big budget movie beyond the Butt Man series.

I jumped right into the world of do all and be all gal in the porno industry, all but for the fucking. I was fast becoming the loving mama on every X-rated set in the Simi Valley, where I met the likes of Ron Jeremy, Nina Hartley, Christy Canyon, and other big names in the ‘90s. I even began to feel a part of this Boogie Nights-like dysfunctional family.

John always cast himself in the starring roles of his movies and wouldn’t think twice about asking me to trim his pubic hair since it made his dick look bigger. And I, not being a bit squeamish, like a bedside nurse, would oblige. Over and above my set and costume work, I’d perform the tasks of cooking, craft service, dialogue coaching, and dildo washing—always being sure to wash my hands between tasks.

Like a fly on the wall, I was privy to all pertinent information: best doctors for breast and butt implantations, best anal bleaching and waxing practitioners, best HIV testing locations, and the best guys to do anal scenes with, and so on and so forth. One day on John’s set he asked if I’d go over lines with a black goddess who was notorious for forgetting them. I gently approached the African-American queen while she waited for hair and makeup. On my first request to read lines with her she said, “Later, there’s plenty of time.” So I went on to another task. A half hour later, I returned to ask again, and once more was put off by the diva. When I told John she was not cooperating, he asked me to try again since her scene was coming up soon. Many porn stars like Tracy Lords and Ginger Lynn aspired to cross over to legit films, so I was surprised by her reaction. When I approached for the third time and suggested we read lines together, she jumped out of the makeup chair and threw one hand on her hip. Snapping her fingers and bobbing her head side to side, she shouted back at me, “Girl, get it straight, I am not an actress, I am a fucktress and proud of it!” I threw up my hands, left the makeup room, and knew that one day I would use that line in a story.

On every shoot with John, he would offer to raise my day rate if I was willing to do a small cameo role. Always for comic relief, I played the silly laundry lady, the mean landlady, and a gun-toting, cigar-smoking Mafia mama in the Godmother, part one and two. In a dramatic scene of his biggest budget, Wild Goose Chase, shot on 16mm film, I played a bereft immigrant mom looking for my lost daughter. My performance was so good that I decided to use it on my legit acting reel, thinking I could pass it off as an episode of Law and Order. On camera I’m crying and pleading with a private detective to search for my missing daughter. My scene partner, the private dick, was Joey Silvera, a well-known porn stud. I figured, what the hell, if some casting director did recognize the X-rated star they would have been into porn and would get a kick out of my cameo.

This performance led to other parts and even a nomination as “best actress in a non-fucking role.” Some of my best acting work can be seen on the videos of John Stagliano classics, as well as funny bits in the more upscale erotica directed by my friend, the lovely Candida Royalle of Femme Productions.

Since Candida and I had been friends who worked in theatrical shows since the ‘70s in San Francisco, she would also hire me to create costumes and do set work on her shoots. I often collaborated with her on some of her film ideas too. My favorite film that I styled for Femme Productions was a comedy about a dress that got passed around between three separate women by the guy who was sleeping with all of them. After shopping for three identical dresses needed in three different sizes, I suggested that Candida call her movie One Size Fits All, and she did. The movie opens in a second-hand shop with me trying to fit the infamous slutty purple dress over my big boobs and Candida making a cameo in her own film, playing another customer, snatches the dress out from my hands and scolds, “It will never fit you!” Truth be told it was my overweight condition that made me turn down offers to have sex on screen from other directors.

One would think that working with all that dick and pussy, I’d be getting some, but the more I saw of it the less interested I became. Yet, still like a virgin today, you can look me up on my IMBD page and find several XXX titles to my credit, but please don’t tell my agent.

Chapter 10

I Get By With a Lot of Help from My Friends

I’ve been blessed to have many generous, successful friends over the years who were major supporters of my dysfunction at the junction. Friends like George McGrath, a three-time Emmy winner, writer/producer/actor who wrote for Pee Wee’s Playhouse and The Tracy Ullman Show, to name a few, became my employer for a spell. I had known George since 1979 when I signed up for my first comedy improv class with the L.A. Connection and he was my teacher. After a decade of success performing with The Groundlings and acting in films and writing for television, George became head writer and producer for a CBS kids’ series Riders in the Sky in the early ‘90s. It was cowboys meet Pee Wee’s Playhouse on the prairie. Despite his genius efforts and hiring fun fellow star improv artists from the Groundlings, like Lynne Stewart (Miss Yvonne from the Pee Wee’s show), and life-size puppets, the show was a hoot but a flop nonetheless. But thanks to George, it was one of the best jobs I ever had in showbusiness. It lasted for a full season of thirteen episodes. Knowing there was hardly ever a time when I didn’t need a job, George hired me to be his assistant. Since he was incredibly self-sufficient, and could type five times the speed of lightning without needing spell-check, my duties were few. All I had to do on most days was buy muffins for the cast and crew, walk his darling dog Chip around the CBS Radford lot, and the rest of the time I got to work on my own scripts and projects in my private office across from George’s and down the hall from the staff writers of the Roseanne Barr show. Every now and then George would pop his head in and say, “Isn’t it wonderful that CBS is subsidizing your art.” This was the best forty-hour-a-week job ever, because George would let me go whenever I had auditions and on more than one occasion he gave me a small part in some of the show’s episodes.

There were other friends in high places as well who saw to it that I maintained my magical lifestyle. Friends like Broadway director Jerry Zaks, who gave me free seats, 3rd row center, for every one of his Tony award-winning hits on Broadway. Jerry had been my buddy since our freshman year at Eastside High School in Paterson, New Jersey, and had a fascination with what he knew of my unconventional life style. We stayed in touch throughout the years and I watched him climb to the top of his mainstream career and become the credit to his parents as our H.S. yearbook predicted he would be, while I had to hide much of my counterculture performance work from my parents’ eyes. But as we know, opposites attract and Jerry and I are still friends to this day.

Clifford Olson, a famous L.A. fashion designer, is at the top of my list of mentor/friends who I owe big time. Clifford made leather and suede outfits and costumes for all the divas in Hollywood, including Aretha Franklin and Tina Turner. I’ll never forget the day at his Melrose Avenue boutique as I sat at the feet of Tina Turner, handing him safety pins as he measured the hemline of a tight leather mini Tina would wear on the album cover of What’s Love Got to Do With It. I sat silently, listening to him joking with her. As he ran his fingers along her shapely million-dollar legs, he said, "Gee, Tina, it's a pity you don't have good legs," then raised the hemline even higher. Before Tina left the fitting that day, she bought the most gorgeous turquoise suede jumpsuit off the rack from Clifford’s collection. As soon as Tina left, Clifford celebrated his good fortune by sharing the wealth and gave me the only other jumpsuit, identical to the one Tina had just paid over $500 for. Hanging with Clifford was better than being at The Oprah Winfrey’s Favorite Things Giveaway Show. If it weren’t for Clifford Olson, I would have never had a career as a knit designer. Once Clifford saw my knit work, he brought me downtown to the L.A. Fashion Mart and introduced me to his sales rep. Overnight, I was selling my sweaters to Saks Fifth Ave and many other high-end stores across the country.

As his star shone more brightly, he took me along as the tail to his high-flying comet. Clifford was also responsible for executing my design for the leather bullet bra, the one I wore in the Lois Standards video, for the Last Dance of the Couch Potatoes, in 1988. He can also be seen on screen in that video as one of the skinny rocker boys in the leather bullet jock straps he made for the music video. We were like two canned hams packed in the same tin.

I watched and learned as he moved up the ladder, from his early days working at North Beach Leather, where I first met him, to moving into his own business at his studio on Sunset, to his first boutique on Melrose, to his factory in downtown L.A., to eventually our shared trip to China. He got me a job for a major manufacturer who took us both to Hong Kong and China to launch leather and knit lines for their successful business. That was my first trip to Asia, and it rocked my world. It was then 1993, and although I had had some minor successes in my design life, this opportunity was the once-in-a-lifetime, but for Clifford it would be another story.

I was always grateful that I had met Clifford after he found sobriety in 1980. It was hard to imagine him, the wholesome, red-headed Richie Cunningham look alike from North Dakota during the years he spent as a heroin addict. Clifford was closer to me than a brother and one of Viva’s favorite fun uncles, too. I recall a trip that the three of us took to Murrieta Hot Springs. While checking in, we discovered the joint was under new management, a right wing conservative Christian group. They had a new policy that did not allow single people of the opposite sex to share a room. I told them we were married. Those Christians looked oddly at us. I signed the book while explaining that the fair skinned, ginger haired Mr. Olson was my second husband, and Viva, our black teenage child, had been adopted. They let us all check into one room, but they still maintained suspicion of the odd Olson family.

The situation grew tenser after Clifford and I over-ate at their vegetarian buffet. Back in our room later, just as we got cozy in two single beds, Clifford and I started to outdo one another with deadly gaseous explosions that were more lethal than the broccoli casserole we had at dinner. We laughed so hard and loud over the farts that the management came to our room and threatened to throw us out if we didn’t quiet down.

After all his years of fame in Hollywood, Clifford moved to Santa Barbara, to slow down when his complications from HIV started to show up. He had been HIV positive since 1980. During his so-called slow down years, he made many trips to Indonesia, India, and China and created a magnificent photo collage art show, compiled a magnificent short story collection, created a wacky alarm clock line and so much more. In comparison to me, his idea of slowing down made me look like I was dead.

Into the ‘90s, I remained inspired by Clifford as I watched him survive TB and then a year later pneumonia, and then the year after that it was CMV virus causing him to start to go blind. And then it was Hepatitis A, B or C, who knew? On and on the list of infections would go that would take hold for a while, and he would valiantly battle and always emerge the victor. He was Santa Barbara's poster boy, volunteer of the year, the only person I knew who would hang his IV drip on his rearview mirror and take his dose while driving from Santa Barbara to L.A. for a business meeting. He was the best-looking, healthiest, long-term HIV survivor I have ever known.

While suffering from all his AIDS complications, he created and ran the men's massage network that he founded after becoming a certified masseur to give free massages to others living with AIDS. And on top of all of the creative businesses, parties, and holidays we spent together, there was our trip to China: the hours of laughter waiting in a cold airport hangar at the Hangzhou Airport, while we told dirty tales to our straight business companions. And then there was the night we celebrated Clifford’s birthday with the Chinese company members in a restaurant in Hangzhou, while we watched the four-year-old daughter of one company employee sing Chinese karaoke to the video monitor hanging over our head. We ate drunken shrimp and many other delicacies our livers wished we hadn't, and as the Chinese sang “Happy Birthday” in broken English to him and as he blew out his candles, I thought, gee, this might be the last birthday I get to spend with Clifford.

Not long after our amazing trip to China, Clifford and I attended a mutual friend's memorial. During the service, Clifford rested his head on my shoulder and whispered, "I wonder if anyone will be left to throw a memorial for me like this?"

I made a solemn vow that I would be the designated bon voyage party hostess even though I hate going to a party when I'm not in the mood, let alone throwing one. As it turned out Clifford had more than enough friends to send him off with a grand memorial and I eulogized him with a story I wrote about him. It was the least I could do. His endless thirst for adventure, directed by his strong will and desire to live every ounce of life that he could possible fit in, is what I can only aspire to be and what I define as a truly successful life.

Not all my helping hands were the hands of friends; there was often the kindness of strangers too who gave gifts unexpectedly to me. Like Ann, a Tell Mama client in 2004, who gave me airline miles so that I could travel business class to Hong Kong to visit my daughter Viva during her first year of working overseas as a singer. And Julie, the Chinese housewife I met on that second trip to Hong Kong, who became my good friend and made it possible for me to return to Hong Kong many times over since 2004 for my sweater business, while providing me with luxury housing in her amazing home, where she treated me like family. In exchange for knitting lessons, she treated me to daily hour-long foot massages, sumptuous meals, and gave me her live-in helper to assist me whenever I needed her to carry and set up my trade show booths. I have to admit, it wasn’t easy for me to accept the gift of having a servant, since I still thought of myself as servant class.

To me, these were miracles that added great joy to living below the poverty line. I often wonder if I had been rich enough to afford these high-priced gifts that came from my fabulous friends I might not have ever learned how truly loved and supported I’ve been throughout this bumpy ride to stardom. In essence, the greatest gifts in my life have been my friendships.

Chapter 11

Extra, Extra, Read All About It!

As I put the finishing touches on my cautionary tale, it’s January 2014, and I just got the last of my W-2’s, 1040’s and 1099’s for tax filing. They come from all my jobs and businesses, including my royalties from Amazon for the memoir that I self-published last year.

My taxman Marvin is a sweet old Jewish retired schoolteacher from my neighborhood, who gives me a good deal because he feels sorry for me. Each year he says, “Ah bubeleh, what am I going to do with you? You have so many different jobs that your tax return is more complicated than filing for the CEO of Facebook, and yet I feel guilty to charge you more because I see you’ve got bupkis.”

I tell him, “Don’t worry, Marvin, next year if I sell the movie rights to my book, I’ll give you a bonus for this mitzvah.”

The good news is that I don’t owe the IRS, but the bad news is I didn’t even earn enough money in 2013 to collect unemployment benefits or get Botox, or a much-needed rest and/or a facelift. Well, just as well, I saw on the news last night that some woman jumped off a thirteen-story building in Beverly Hills the day after she had her face lifted. I wonder if she was an actress.

Like so many bit players in Hollywood I paid my dues serving famous people in restaurants who all gave me good tips: “Don’t quit your day job.”

I can count the principle paid acting jobs I’ve had over three decades on two hands. I made my film début with Emilio Estevez in the cult classic, Repo Man, directed by Alex Cox. By the time they got around to shooting my scene, the low budget film ran out of money but Alex shot my scene anyway. In the final cut it looks like I am saying my lines but in post production Alex cut the sound of my dialogue and used a principal actress who had already been paid for a looping day to dub my lines. That way the production got away with not paying me the SAG principle rate plus future residuals.

By 1980 I found a good commercial agent and right out of the gate booked my first national commercial. I was one of five principle actors in that Kodak spot. Wayne Knight (Newman on Seinfeld) and the others all went on to get jobs on long-running television series; all except me. I finally landed a guest-starring role on Superior Court with five pages of dialogue. I portrayed a poor wife whose skinflint husband was hiding millions from her while she waited tables at a truck stop for twenty-five years. My tightwad husband was played by a character actor whose claim to fame was that he played the baker who asked Marlon Brando for a favor in The Godfather on the day of his daughter’s wedding. I had one other film job in the early days of HBO. I was featured stark naked as a hardened criminal in a prison lineup. I stood in plain view alongside the lead, a demure Pamela Sue Martin of Dynasty, who got to keep her panties on. She was shot only from the waist up while the camera panned down to include all of me.

Then in 1986 I almost became the winner of ‘Be Joan Rivers For a Day,’ a contest for her Fox talk show. I entered a five minute video of me as Lois Standards, a very lose interpretation of Joan as a Late Night Talk Hostess who hits Sunset Boulevard, to interview hookers when her guests don’t show up. I even got Viva who was sixteen then to play a teenage hooker. For my wardrobe I recycled the Divine style Pink Flamingos dress that won me the title of Miss Alternative LA. The same gown with the cut out hour glass front revealing my naked fleshy curves pressed like a prom corsage under see through vinyl. Joan loved me so much she wrote me a letter to invite me to the show and join the finalist when they announced the winner. She said I was her pick but the Fox censors would not allow her to play my video due to the frontal nudity. You can still see it on You Tube if you search ‘Lois Standards Late Night Talk Show.’

At age sixty-eight, fortunately I still live in my rent-controlled apartment on Venice Beach with an ocean view. I’ve been there for over thirty-four years, and although I have no parking or laundry, I consider myself lucky since the stairs and the five-block walk to my parking lot keeps me active. But in the event my landlord croaks before I do, and his inheritress decides to sell, I have put myself on every waiting list for low income senior housing on the Westside of Los Angeles.

In my four decades in show business, I’ve been directed by Clint Eastwood, Gary Marshall, Alex Cox, and Rob Zombie, but after what’s left on the editor’s floor, I am not much more than a featured extra or not seen at all in their movies. And if you don’t blink, you might see me in a vintage episode of the popular sitcom Soap, or in today’s programs like CSI NY, Weeds, Dexter, and True Blood. I was featured as a Spanish innkeeper to play opposite my favorite hot vampire Erik, in the final season of True Blood. It didn’t pay much, but I didn’t mind staying awake all night in Simi Valley for the chance of getting bitten by that gorgeous Alexander Skarsgard. You get a pay bump if they draw blood. Bite me, oh please bite me! The director wouldn’t let him bite me, but no matter, I was still glamorized by those deep blue eyes. These are the perks for an aging actress. Where else could I get attention from a super hot man half my age all night long and not have to pay for it?

When I’m not going to and from the many doctors who monitor my age-related diseases, I still accept extra jobs in commercials that pay three times the SAG day rate and extra bit roles on my favorite shows. When I’m not doing extra work, I spend hours driving daily to and from commercial auditions in the ever increasing, interminably slow gridlock of Los Angeles traffic. As far as commercials go, it’s a numbers game and with my rate of successful auditions it means that I’m fabulous and yet I’m still not the winner. Like in many competitions, only the number one winner takes home the cash prize. I’m just like all the other gamblers/actors playing the odds. Each audition is like buying a lotto ticket and dreaming of the day when you will hit the jackpot.

What I want to know is, “Where’s the beef?” I’m aware of the dangers that lurk in meat, like mad cow disease, or salmonella, or at the very least that cows are full of antibiotics and steroids and fed with GMO feed and then once slaughtered have their meat mixed with a slime byproduct, yet I would still run the risk of alienating my vegan friends, and welcome the opportunity to sell burgers on T.V. I’m ready for my meaty close up.

January marks the beginning of awards season in Hollywood, and in 2014 I spent a total of five hours watching two hours of the red carpet lead into the three-hour Golden Globe award show. My favorite joke of the night was when Tina Fey said, “George Clooney would rather have his oxygen cut off and drift out to space and die before he spent any more time with a woman over 40.” I laughed, I cried then wondered what Sandra Bullock, his co-star and nominee for best actress in Gravity, was thinking as she laughed at Tina’s joke. And I thought, what would George do to get away from a woman who has seen the effects of gravity for 68 years?

Although I have had my countless brushes with fame, I have never been included in the glittering A-list, and yet I love to watch our American royalty, the talented and beautiful people of film and television being honored. And, oh, how I love the fashion; and what about that Joan Rivers, the captain of the Fashion Police? Now there’s an old girl still dishing it out! She’s over 80 and has not let gravity slow her down. Self-deprecating still makes me LOL over her vulgar vagina dragging jokes and her one too many plastic surgeries.

This year Jacqueline Bisset was announced as best supporting actress in a TV show, miniseries, or movie. The poor woman seemed lost as she took her sweet time making it up to the stage. It didn’t help that they sat her all the way in the back of the house. Then she delivered the longest awkward pause as she appeared to be choking back tears, and lapsed into a rambling, cringe-inducing speech that was punctuated by more interminable pauses tinged with bitterness. So much time had lapsed that she hardly got her halting speech started before the band began to “play her off.” Then she wrapped up by rambling something about forgiveness being a beauty treatment before mercifully removing herself from the stage. It’s moments like that when I feel glad that I’m home safe on my couch and not on the red carpet. It’s hard out there for an aging actress, even for the winners.

Still there are other golden girls that inspire me. What about that Betty White at ninety-two or Dame Judi Dench at seventy-nine and June Squibb at eighty-four, both Judi and June nominated for Oscars this year? And of course the magnificent Maggie Smith, for playing the dowager mother on Downton Abbey? These are brave women to face the cameras with every nook and cranny on their faces up close; no Botox, fillers, or cosmetic lifts for these heroines. They give me hope. And that spunky June Squibb— got to love her. When she flashed her pussy to the tombstone of a dead ex-unrequited love, I knew she was a gal after my own heart. And Diane Keaton, another actress whose process and non-work I’ve admired recently wrote in her memoir, It Aint Pretty, "For those of us separated from reality by fame, being old is a great leveling experience." She says she doesn't mind being taken down a peg or two. But what about old broads like me who never had their fame or their money? Taken down a peg or two can put me six feet under.

Even in my youth, I was never cast as the ingénue; never considered a real beauty by American white bread standards. Now, older and fatter, it works in my favor. I am still fertile. That is, mentally fertile. You won’t see me featured anytime soon on the 11 o’clock news as the oldest woman to ever give birth.

And then there is always Italy. This year Great Beauty, the Italian film that won the Globe and the Oscar proved that beauty in Italy comes in so many shapes, sizes, tastes, and colors. Every lead character in it was past middle to old age, and physically and emotionally flawed, so I think I would fit right into the Italian talent pool. My naked beauty killed in Roma in 1998, so perhaps I can spend my twilight years in Italy.

“When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose.”

Chapter 12

Witches, Bitches, and Naked Zombies

Surviving in the arts has never been easy, and in this current economy, “forget about it!” I have always believed that living on the edge came with the territory. It’s a fact that only 5% of the Screen Actors Guild membership actually makes a living from acting, and most of them are men. So it’s no surprise that I not only teeter on the edge, I have even slid down the cliff, like so many houses in the rainy season of Los Angeles. I have calluses on my ass to prove it.

As the Knitter to the Stars, I used to supplement my acting income by earning most of my yearly income selling hand-knit sweaters during the last quarter of the year. The operative words here are “I used to.” Those three little words, “I used to” bring to mind a call I made to the utilities company to complain about an increase in my gas bill last month. As I bitched about my dwindling earnings compounded by the rise in natural gas, I could just picture the gum-chomping gal on the other end of the phone filing her long fingernails. When I told her that my bill “used to be …” she cut me off abruptly and said, “Yes, girl, and I used to be a size 7.” I got the point. No use in complaining. Cost of living going up, up, up, and income going down, down, down!

So last Sunday after a rained-out craft show, I returned to my couch and watched ten hours of Breaking Bad in between long naps, or nods, as the druggies call it. I guess you can say I was depressed. These Art and Craft Boutiques that “I used to” find profitable not only have put me in the red, but drain every ounce of my dwindling life force as I careen past the age of a much needed retirement from schlepping.

Like many of those dumb asses you see interviewed on the 6 o’clock news after their houses slide off the cliff in an L.A. downpour, I stand over the rubble and ruins with my hopes and dreams under mud and talk about how I will rebuild on the same spot. Optimism is not always the best healing balm, but on Monday morning I picked myself up and brushed myself off, because I had a commercial audition; a ray of hope.

For the past year or so, I have had my fair share of commercial auditions for an aging character actress who now goes up for all the Hispanic or ethnically ambiguous grandmother rolls. I get about a 90% callback rate, and out of 69% of my callbacks, I have been put “on avail”, meaning “on hold”, for the job. I say 69% because “on avail” is just another word for taking a licking and getting fucked is usually the outcome. In spite of the fact that my auditions make the clients break their stone faces with laughter and the directors hug me at the end of the takes, and the casting directors keep calling me back and my agents keep working hard for me, I have not booked one good paying commercial in over three years. On some weeks I put in more than 40 hours traveling to and from, not to mention the rising costs of fuel, but hey, what do they say? The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Yes, I know I am certifiably INSANE, but isn’t 68 years old too late for a career change? But I digress again into complaining. Forgive me.

So on Monday while inside the casting studio, an eager meter maid gave me a big fat parking ticket. I had failed to read the street sign properly. Chalk that up to the side effect of too much Breaking Bad, sugar, and napping. You would have thought the ticket would have sobered me up, but NO, the Universe decided I needed one more bitch slap. In heavy Hollywood traffic, I made a quick maneuver into the left hand turn lane and lightly nicked a brand new Lexus. As the old adage goes, when it rains it pours, especially in L.A.

The driver behind the wheel of the shiny new Lexus rolled down his window and began screaming at me to pull over. For a split second I entertained the idea of pulling away but considering my past karmic debt, I did the right thing and pulled into the Ralph’s supermarket parking lot on the corner of La Brea and Third Street so that I could give the driver the necessary documents to appease his anger.

He and his wife, a middle-aged, ethnically ambiguous couple jumped out and took turns screaming at me and calling me several names for stupid. As I inspected the injured car, it was clear that I hadn’t even made a dent, but only a light scuffmark caused by my rubber bumper. When I pointed this out to the couple, the wife yelled at me, “Shut up, how dare you say this damage is minor?” As she cast dirty looks at my beat-up Honda, she added, “Our car is brand new and now we are going to have to replace the entire bumper. And on top of that, you have greatly inconvenienced us.” She continued her rant, “I’m already late for my chemo treatment.”

The way she went at me, you would have thought I was the cause of her cancer. What can you say when someone pulls out the cancer card. I kept apologizing and after the husband inspected my documents and realized I was not an illegal without auto insurance, they both calmed down somewhat. If you believe that bad news comes in threes, I had reached my quota for the week. As I drove away, wiping the dog shit from the Universe off my aura, I contemplated that it could have been worse, much worse. I could have been the one on my way for chemo treatments.

Gratefully back home on planet couch, I picked up my phone messages from the reclining position and heard the voice of a casting director informing me that I had been selected to be a special featured extra on a movie. There it was the first ray of sunshine breaking through the dark, cloudy day. The casting director went on to explain that this was not any ordinary extra role, but a job that paid $400 for eight hours, four times the SAG day rate because there was some nudity involved. I had been a nude artist model in the 80s and the decade before that, I had been a nude go-go dancer, so it was a no-brainer. I would accept the job. After all, it was a SAG production and the director was Rob Zombie, a famous cult director in the horror genre of film-making.

Being an extra is not much fun for an actor. For the most part, you are nothing more than set dressing, but after my losses that week all I was thinking about was the money. I was looking forward to the two days ahead being a naked lady in the next cult classic titled The Lords of Salem.

My call time was for 3:45 p.m. the next day, which meant the shoot would go to midnight, three hours past my bedtime. I even hoped it would go into overtime, since that meant time and a half, and double-time if we went over 12 hours. When I showed up at 3:30 p.m., the friendly extra wrangler greeted me with a sunny good morning and offered me breakfast at the food wagon. These are the perks of being an extra, all the food you can eat, and you don’t have to learn any lines. I was soon guided to the holding tank, a large room in the basement of an old classic downtown movie theatre built in the 1920s, where I met the other thirty women who were cast as special nude extras. I marked my territory with my bags of wardrobe on two plastic folding chairs. It’s funny to be requested to bring at least three wardrobe options for a nude scene, but, hey, I wasn’t going to complain. Then I sat myself on another chair in between all my stuff. At our table there was a performance artist, a yoga teacher, and a Shakespearean actress, all who appeared to be in their 40s or early 50s, and for the most part the conversation was interesting for the first hour or so.

After sitting around for two more hours, the second AD, a friendly kid, came in to our holding area to give us some information about our parts in the film. He went on to explain that The Lords of Salem was the story of a young woman named Heidi that works as a DJ at a radio station in Salem, Massachusetts. One day a wooden box arrives at the radio station containing vinyl records. Heidi plays the records on her radio show in order to promote the supposed rock band that wrote the music.

Unbeknownst to Heidi or anyone in Salem, a coven of ancient witches was seeking vengeance against the people of Salem because of the Witch Trials that occurred there in 1692. Their plan was very simple; create vinyl records with provocative music to lull the townspeople in to a sense of extreme curiosity. Little do the townspeople know the true horror that is about strike Salem with extreme ferocity. When the time of the gig arrives, the rock spectacle turns into a blood bath beyond all human comprehension. And that’s where we extras came into the story.

In our first scene we are lured to the theater like zombies, and begin to strip. Eventually we will end up naked and dead in a pyramid pile on the stage.

I thought it odd that the townspeople being lured for this revenge were all females in this story, and wanting to be a good actress looking for my motivation, I asked the second AD about this omission in the script. He told me it was best not to try to make any logical sense out of the story and I took note.

After many more hours of sitting on the plastic chairs in the holding tank we were escorted into the big, cold cavernous theatre upstairs and given places to sit. It was long before I started to notice that some of the extras were using the method technique to capture their characters and it soon became apparent who was a witch and who was a bitch. There were bad acoustics in the large theatre, and an echo made it difficult to hear the assistant director’s instruction. When I missed a few words I turned to the woman in the seat next to me and asked her to clarify what had just been said. From out of nowhere this actress, and I use the term loosely, reprimanded me. “You should have been listening,” she snapped.

“I was listening,” I defensively proclaimed.

To which she replied, “If you were listening you would have heard him then.”

I could not believe this trailer trash biker harlot with stringy fried blond hair was talking to me like that. Where was the sisterly love? Not on this set with this bitch. I restrained myself from saying what I really wanted to, and said, “Never mind, I wouldn’t want you to tax yourself,” and turned away. I made a point to hate and avoid her for the rest of the night.

We were six hours into the shoot and everyone still had their clothes on when they broke us for lunch at 9:45pm. The meal consisted of three protein options, five starches, several overcooked vegetable dishes, and a salad bar and dessert bar to follow. We filled our plates and sat outside in the dark at long tables on plastic chairs to enjoy our lunch. I was fully bloated at lunch’s end when they finally called us back into the theatre for the first scene where we would begin to shed our dignity.

It wasn’t until I saw the gang of us naked ladies that I knew why this film would fit into the horror genre. Rob Zombie is an equal opportunity employer and I was not the only overweight actress past her prime on the set. We were of every age, size and color. There were tall ones, short ones, fat ones, skinny ones, old ones, young ones, brown ones, black ones, yellow ones, and multi-colored tattooed ones. In the scenes to follow, when we were completely stripped down to our birthday suits, I noticed that the rude bitch I had had words with earlier had more tattoos on her scrawny ass than a drunken sailor.

So the night passed with us disrobing and then going back to one. That means getting dressed again and starting the scene over from the top again and again for all the many different camera angles. This went on until four a.m., but I didn’t care because all I was listening to was the sound of a cash register ringing in my ears, cha ching, until we were wrapped after a twelve-hour day. They told us we would all return the next day for the final scene. Could I endure being a cold nude zombie for one more day for hefty earnings? Yes, cha ching, cha ching.

Day two I checked in and went straight to holding. Wardrobe came down and told us to get naked and put on our robes since we would be doing the final scene soon. Then we sat around for at least another two hours in our bathrobes, waiting. Finally we were herded into the theatre and sat there for another hour until the lighting and logistics were ready. I watched as the crew built a pyramid of boxes on the stage leading up to a platform where a stand-in extra, stood for camera and lighting to make all their adjustments. Rob Zombie’s wife was playing the head witch, who would be the top of the naked pyramid cake once we stared to roll.

After all the elements were in place, it was time to position the human props in place on the pyramid chain. They asked for volunteers to drape their bodies over the boxes. These actresses required flexibility. Not having taken yoga since the 70s, when “I used to be” limber, and after many more years ago when “I used to be” an artist’s model, I knew how difficult it was to hold a pose, especially an awkward one, so I opted out of the prime positions. Not needing to be discovered, I held back and waited to fill in the last places on the stage floor. This arrangement of bodies went on for some time, while we still had our robes on. Once the final adjustments and touches were added they brought the star in for her position on top to the human heap, cleared the room of unnecessary crew members, and had us discard our covers ups. The stage floor was cold beneath me but at least I could lay out flat. The only problem was that to my left the skinny tattooed bitch had her scrawny ass and back to me.

After the first take, the director decided he didn’t want her in that position because her tattoos were distracting in his shot so they plucked her out and hid her in the back of the pile. That made me happy. While the director was moving bodies about like checkers on a board game, I was busy making friends with my neighbor to my right, whose face was almost under my right tit. As we were chatting, I didn’t notice who was replacing the tattooed bitch, and when I turned to my left I saw the biggest, fattest white ass, like the moon over Miami, staring me in the face. I was so surprised by this full moon in my face that I blurted out without censor, “Oh my God, there’s a big fat ass in my face.” I couldn’t believe I had said that out loud, and felt immediately embarrassed for the poor woman whose ass I had judged, but I didn’t mean to be cruel; it just slipped out. She pretended not to hear me, but my neighbor to my right had to struggle to keep from laughing.

Just before cameras were ready to roll again, Rob Zombie was making last adjustments like a designer on crack. He decided to tighten up the space between my face and the big fat white ass with a little wrinkled up old lady who had breasts hanging down to her knees. Her crinkly buttocks were now even closer to my face than the moon over Miami’s had been. I don’t know which ass was worse. After several more takes and calls to action, all of us holding our breath like you do for your mammogram, we were getting close to the final take. With one more roll of the camera and all of us extras holding our breath, the director called “cut” for the last time.

At that very moment, the little old lady to my left with the crinkly, shriveled-up ass farted in my face. It was almost inaudible, but just loud enough for me and my neighbor below my right tit to hear. We both burst into laughter. Then, while I was shaking and jiggling all over from trying to suppress my loud laughter, I too farted just loud enough for my bosom buddy to hear, and then we both lost all control. The heaping body of females above us was wondering what had happened that was so funny and a few called out, “What are you laughing about?” But we didn’t answer and just kept laughing. It’s a good thing that last take had been the martini shot, as they call it in the biz, the final shot of the night, because if I had to hold my laughter or my gas back any longer, I may have shit myself.

When I shared this saga with my daughter Viva, she said, “Oh Mother, will you ever retire?”

I said, “Honey, just remember, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

To which Viva replied, “Gee, Mom, I’m so glad you’re old now. You’re just full of wisdom.”

As I sign off, I’m still waiting for the check.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Name droppery is always the final desperate attempt to get ahead in show business. I’m sure you’ve heard the old adage, “It’s not what you know. It’s who you know.” I have worked for, sold to, waited on, been tipped by, catered for, slept with, swam in the same pool with, acted with, studied acting with, played a part or extra in their films, brushed up against, or locked eyes from across a crowded room with so many of the big fish in Hollywood.

Alex Cox

Alexander Skarsgard

Alicia Silverstone

Amy Pietz

Andrea Martin

Andy Garcia

Angeline

Arnold Schwarzenegger

Barbra Streisand

Barry Gordy

Billy Crystal

Bo Bridges

Brandon Fraser

Brandy

Catherine Hicks

Charlie Sheen

Chris Meloni

Chris Mulkey

Christopher Isherwood

Chuck Barris

Clint Eastwood

David Arquette

David Bowie

Dean Martin

Diana Ross

Diane Ladd

Divine

Don Bacardi

Dorothy Lamour

Dustin Hoffman

Dustin Lance Black

Ethan Hawke

Edward Albee

Eileen Brennan

Elizabeth Taylor

Elaine Stritch

Ellen Burstyn

Emilio Estevez

Fran Drescher

Garrett Morris

Gary Busey

Gary Marshall

Gary Shandling

Gary Sinise

George Wendt

Gregory Hines

Gus Van Sant

Harry Dean Stanton

Hugh Hefner

Jack Nicholson

James Franco

James LeGros

Jane Fonda

Jason Alexander

Jeff Bridges

Jenna Elfman

Jennifer Tillie

Jerry Zaks

Joan Rivers

Joe Bologna

Joe Pantoliano

John Cusack

John Travolta

John Waters

Josh Brolin

Jaye P. Morgan

Julia Roberts

Kevin Costner

Kid Rock

Laraine Newman

Laura Branigan

Leah Thompson

Lily Tomlin

Linda Hamilton

Lloyd Bridges

Madonna

Marge Champion

Marilyn McCoo

Martin Sheen

Mathew Modine

Mel Gibson

Megan Mullally

Melina Kanakaredes

Michael Jackson

Oliver Stone

Pamela Anderson

Pamela Sue Martin

Peter Lawford

Patty Duke Astin

Pia Zadora

Renee Taylor

Rip Taylor

Robert Downey Jr.

Roseanne Barr

Robert DeNiro

Robert Duvall

Robin Wright

Rod Stewart

Ron Howard

RuPaul

Russ Meyers

The Ramones

Sammy Davis Jr.

Sean Penn

Smokey Robinson

Stevie Wonder

Suicidal Tendencies

Tina Turner

Tom Hanks

Tori Spelling

Wayans Brothers

Wayne Knight

Whoopi Goldberg

Wilt Chamberlain

SPECIAL THANKS TO

The not yet famous who helped make this book possible:

I owe much gratitude to my daughter Viva for enduring my reckless mothering and tolerating my use of her voice throughout these stories and for not suing me.

I’m so grateful for my trusted editors, Winslow Eliot and Samantha Stier, a dynamic mother and daughter duo who are wonderful writers and were the perfect editors for me. I felt their support and encouragement throughout the shaping of this book.

I thank Bader Howard for her photos and Sam Tabreizi our retoucher that made me look bubbilicious on the book cover. And what would I do without my in-house one-woman art department, Jennifer Lim for delivering another spectacular book cover. And I must thank Antonio Dias who indulged me and my bubble visions by spending hours in photo shop blowing bubbles.

I thank my friend David Greene for giving great notes after reading several drafts and Mark Thompson for cheering me on when I first came up with the idea and title for this book. I must also thank my sister, Ginny Grosso and friend Robert Croonquist, for their well honed English teacher proofing skills.

I’m so thankful for my good friend Dale Nieli’s enthusiasm and Carol Schlanger who stopped working on her own memoir, Far Out, to read my chapters and give notes whenever she could. I give thanks to Larry Litzky for the nourishment and free dinners and for the constant love and encouragement I get from Danny Nicoletta, Michael Kearns, Lee Mently, Diana Davidow, and all my wildly creative friends who always offer good cheer.

Shout Out to cheap tricks, peeping toms, sugar daddies and mamas who put their money where their mouth is and gave more than lose change.

Bill Schlimme

Brian Frank

Cathy Brown

Daniel Canier

Daniel Nicoletta

David Zimelis

Diana Davidow

Donna McNeely

Drew Eshelman

Elaine Partnow

Francesca Rosa

James Campbell

Jeffrey Schwarz

Jon Canier

Lothar Delgado

Lotti Pharriss Knowles

Randall Caporale

Mario Di Donato

Michelle Cameron

Steve DiVerde

Viva Vinson

Winslow Eliot

About the author:

Dolores De Luce began her performance life after becoming a single mom to her baby girl, Viva in 1970. Dolores was mentored by the legendary Divine and the infamous gender-bending Cockettes in San Francisco. She was nominated for ‘Best Performer’ by Bay Area Credits Association for Broken Dishes, a musical she co-wrote with Amber Waves in the mid-seventies. By the end of that decade she moved back to Los Angeles to continue her stage and writing work and added film and television credits to her resume.

Dolores’ autobiographical screenplay, Grace Happens, based on her first memoir; My Life a Four Letter Word: Confessions of a Counter Culture Diva was semi finalist at the Austin Screenwriting Competition. The Shirt, from Gay Widows, a collection of AIDS survivor stories, was published in Witness, an A.P.L.A. magazine.

Currently Dolores lives in Venice Beach and continues to write and act while promoting her adult daughter Viva's International singing career. She can be seen about town reading her stories with QueerWise, an LGBTI senior writer’s collective, and story-telling at The Moth, Tasty Words, Everybody Loves a Good Story, and other spoken word venues around Los Angeles.

Contact www.counterculturediva.com

Cover Design:

Jennifer Lim currently resides, works, surfs and plays in Venice Beach, California. Contact jenniferjadelim.com

Cover Photos by:

Bader Howard www.baderphoto.com

Additional graphics:

Antonio Dias and Sam Tabreizi

Table of Contents

Also By Dolores DeLuce

Chapter 1 Bargain Basement Beauty Queen

Chapter 2 Bad Mommy

Chapter 3 Knitter to the Stars

Chapter 4 Maid For This

Chapter 5 High Times in the Low Life

Chapter 6 Food For the Gods

Chapter 7 Tell Mama

Chapter 8 I Love Lucy, Who Doesn’t?

Chapter 9 I was a Bimbo’s Slave and More Jobs that Suck

Chapter 10 I Get By With a Lot of Help from My Friends

Chapter 11 Extra, Extra, Read All About It!

Chapter 12 Witches, Bitches, and Naked Zombies

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

SPECIAL THANKS TO

About the author: