Happy My Birthday Month to You

Hi Y’all,

Welcome to all the newcomers and welcome back to the rest of you. I turned 59 last Tuesday and threw myself a party at the Hyde Park Theatre. Several incredibly talented friends joined me onstage to share stories and it was amazing to be among a group of humans again. I still have a joy hangover.

I spent four weeks leading up to the show trying to figure out what I wanted to share. Everything I wrote was so fucking sad because I often use my writing to work out the hard stuff. I don’t want to be sad anymore. In fact, I’m not sad. I still have plenty of bad shit to reflect on, but the older I get, the happier I am to be alive. So I challenged myself to write a list of fifty-nine happy memories.

What poured out of me was not entirely happy, but a lot of it was. I went with random observations and memories. In case you missed the show, I’m sharing here what I shared on that stage. I found the exercise to be so wonderful and, to put on my writing teacher hat for a moment, I encourage you all to take the time to sit down and just write out a list of memories as they come to you. So very freeing.

Here you go:

1. The best gift I ever received from a boyfriend was a hysterectomy.

2. The funniest thing that ever happened to me—I won a trip for two to England by sitting in a Mini Cooper in front of a green screen and bouncing up and down pretending I was the queen of England.

3. I love learning probably more than anything else. I have taken classes in: French pastry making, ceramics, yoga teacher training, silversmithing, watercolor, oil landscapes, illustration, and silkscreening. And that was just during the first five days of lockdown. 

4. As a child I learned guitar, clarinet, saxophone and how to play the theme from jaws on the piano

5. I found the absolute love of my life when I was in my fifties and he was in his late eighties and we lived together for the last fourteen months of his life, just after his 88th birthday. Everybody say HI BOB!

6. Fourteen years ago my kindergarten crush revealed to me the feelings had been mutual. I never felt so validated in my life. 

7. I have been to England, France, Israel, Japan, Argentina, Mexico, Canada, Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wyoming. I have visited New York, Los Angeles, Memphis, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Chicago, Phoenix, Tucson, Sedona, Fayetteville, Knoxville, Tokyo, Yokohama, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Buenos Aires, London, Nottingham, York, San Miguel Allende, Cabo San Jose, Todos Santos, La Paz, Real de Catorce, Quebec, Montreal, St. Andrews and, well you get the idea. I BEEN EVERYWHERE MAN. And I think, of all the things I have managed to pull off in my life, managing to travel around the world has been my most amazing achievement. I still have no idea how I did it. 

8. I had a friend I’d not seen in 30 years hand me a check for $500,000 one day, telling me he trusted me to pay him back. So I bought an abandoned meth lab/junkyard, became the face of our business, and in a wild set of circumstances I’ll leave to your imagination, managed to hand him back double his money in six years. 

9. I had another, even greater financial fortune fall into my lap once and, knowing that thanks to having been poor the majority of my life, I would probably tear through it, I allowed myself to have a very good time. I indulged myself. I indulged others. I paid the IRS promptly and fairly. I bought a decommissioned historic whorehouse built in 1891 from Billy Idol’s guitarist (not that one, the one whose name you can’t remember) and I bought the furniture, too, including the antique mirrored vanity the guitarist had place directly in front of the black toilet in his black bathroom. And I sat on that toilet and watched myself poop and imagined that maybe Billy Idol had done the same whilst singing “I’m pooping with myself, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh….”

10. I was once sent on assignment by National Geographic Traveler Magazine to attend snowboarding camp with a bunch of people half my age. I think the theme—kept from me—was World’s Clumsiest Human Embarrasses the Crap Out of Herself on the Bunny Slope for a week while a guy wearing ten different extremely expensive cameras follows her around documenting it all. I experienced a serious muscle pull on that trip while experimenting a little too vigorously with the shower head in my dorm room. 

11. I got published in the New York Times. More than once.

12. For my fortieth birthday, I nominated myself for a Pulitzer Prize. Fucking Thomas “the Yawn” Friedman beat me. 

13. I was delivered the news of my malignant ovarian tumor in a post abortion checkup when the doctor, who at that particular moment was probing me with an “internal ultrasound device”—aka a dildo the size of a donkey dick—announced with no fanfare but much bluster: “Your jeans are going to fit a whole lot better when they get that out!”

14. I spent a day in Los Angeles hanging out with Howie Mandel.

15. I danced on my father’s grave which wasn’t as fun as I’d hoped, but nothing I regret, except it kind of ruined the song Tequila for me, since that is what I hummed as I danced. And now I probably just wrecked it for y’all, too. 

16. I became a rancher.

17. In turn, I learned more about death than I ever might have guessed I would have. I have had kittens snatched by hawks and pigs taken out by dogs. After thirty-two years of blocking it, I processed the near-death trauma of my son’s birth while sitting for days waiting for a heifer to try to push out a calf too big for passage. And I processed it more when I had to help deliver that stillborn babe with the help of a young man my son’s age, and some heavy equipment you don’t want to hear about.

18. I killed a mini-donkey with my bare hands because she had labored with a breech foal for too long, all hope was lost for either of them to survive, and I could neither bear to shoot her or watch her suffer another second. So I scaled the panel into her pen and I stopped her breathing. I never dreamed I might have the strength to kill any animal, let alone a donkey, but I her need for mercy easily outweighed my hesitation and as the English say, NEEDS MUST. 

19. I experienced epiphanic clarity upon watching the Buffy St. Marie documentary on PBS and hearing her say she just never learned how to sense predators. 

20. I experienced further epiphanic clarity upon learning that I, apparently along with every one else on the planet, have ADHD. This explained SO MUCH. Like, MY ENTIRE LIFE. It turns out I am not randomly a slob that is terrible with money management and prone to impulsively marrying narcissists. Oh no. It’s just that I HAVE ADHD. Wait, what was I saying? 

21. I once performed the Heimlich maneuver on a beagle. That, it turns out, did not need the Heimlich maneuver. 

22. One year and one day ago, I did a farewell tour of Shitville in a rainbow covered hearse, moved back to the ranch and promptly broke my tailbone whilst rollerskating in the Molly Ivins pavilion. 

23. A couple of months ago, I took the first step and admitted that if I have any hope of living to my sixtieth birthday, I have to give up skating. Let me know if you want to buy my skates. 

24. I came to understand my mother intensely during lockdown when, hands down, the sentence I said with the most frequency, like fifty times per day, was: “Mommy Needs Space.” I said this to the dogs. Mommy Needs Space Mommy Needs Space Mommy Needs Space. 

With her litter of nine, my mother never had space. Ever. And while this will never make what went down in my little kid world okay, I only had five dogs and none of them talked back and I nearly lost my shit. So when I am king, the first thing I am going to do is make my royal scientists perfect the time machine. And I am going to go scoop up my mother and take her back to when she was fifteen, when she was in school and loved French and Shakespeare and before she met the man who would wreck all of our lives. And I am going to Sliding Doors her into some other life which includes autonomy and freedom and CHOICE and, as such, will not include me. But I am okay with that. I mean, what if all our mothers could have been told: pick whatever life you want instead of having it all mapped out from them the moment they were born female? 

25. I once got into a mammoth verbal altercation at a Thich Nhat Hanh meditation retreat. 

26. My Uncle Jack confessed to me, on his death bed, that he always thought I was a hermaphrodite. 

I confided in my sister Kitty, this notion of Uncle Jack’s. She broke my confidence and, sotto voce on the phone just outside of Uncle Jack’s hospital room, said the following, “Don’t be mad at me, but I asked Mom if you had a penis.” I pressed her. “What did she say?” “She said ‘No, Kitty, Jackie did not have a penis. That was Rosie.”

Rosie did not actually have a penis—that I know of, Just a protracted umbilical stump, Given that I am still, at damn near 60 and no uterus left to speak of, waiting for my mother to tell me about getting my first period, well, I can sort of see how in our family, you say umbilical cord, I say penis. 

27. Speaking of first periods, the most hilarious writing gig I ever got was to revamp the little pamphlet Tampax peddles to prepubescent girls to get them hooked on those white stringed ponies. There were parameters to this gig. Like under no circumstances was I to mention blood. And I needed to come up with a vague title that would equally confuse and appeal to tween girls. My friend Mike had a great suggestion. He said, “Call it, ‘So You Want to Wear a White Bikini.’”

28. I have gained/lost/gained at least fifty pounds on numerous occasions. I don’t recommend it. 

29. I think I finally beat my eating disorder. It only took 59 years. I try not to dwell on all those hunger strikes over the years. Now I eat a motherfucking burrito the size of Chicago for breakfast. Every. Single. Day. 

30. I have summited the peak of the perfect combination of roommates. I had no idea this was an attainable thing. This combo includes a 30 year old, 6’7” white rapper and my best friend, his 7 year old daughter; A friend whom I met at Shipe Park in 1991 where we discovered our boys were born on the same day and from that point on literally raised them as brothers. A Continental Club bouncer who appears in the kitchen about twice per month, typically with a great attitude, no shirt, and tiny terry cloth shorts. And Chad, whom I met around 40 year ago in a women’s studies class, and who has been along for the Spike Ride longer than most people. So he gets the endurance award.

31. I believe in miracles…since you came along. Seriously though, y’all. While it is true I have lived through some pretty serious shit, I have also been on the receiving end of so many opportunities that always manage to spring up in the eleventh hour to save my ass when things are about to crash down all around me. Last fall, I had a couple of financial fiascos hit my fan simultaneously, from opposite directions and at full force. I can sum it up in four words: Banking Error. Septic Disaster.

It had been a long time since I felt a cash crunch like that and as I watched my squirreled away property tax savings literally go down a drain field, I suffered a series of panic attacks. And that is when the yarn started calling to me. THE YARN! The yarn! It had been sitting in front of my face, all that inventory I had left when I closed my Shitville yarn shop to run back home to the ranch. I loaded up my ebay store and offered the most incredible yarn at such low prices that at one point ebay shut me down, accusing me of fencing stolen yarn! Yeah, just like in a Starsky and Hutch episode. 

In two months I sold $5000 of wool, which did not fully solve my problem but mitigated it to the point I was able to resume breathing and clearly see other fixes. Toward that end, I’m having a massive living estate sale at the ranch this coming Saturday. 

32. I fucking invented SELF-CARE MONDAY. 

33. After 45 years of believing the lie my 4th grade art teacher told me when I was 10–namely that I was “doing art wrong”—I discovered I actually can paint, and I love it, maybe even more than writing. I credit this discovery to my friend John Byrne and his untimely death. John was an amazing painter. Though he was older than me our entire lives, as of today I am officially older than he will ever be. I began painting in his honor. Painting has freed me. And it allows me to be near to Byrne every day. ALL HAIL JOHN BYRNE.

34. I have finally and fully and completely learned that it is OKAY TO CHANGE MY MIND. Which is why I have decided I don’t really need to share fifty-nine observations. So just one more, a moment I will never forget. 

I was in a church classroom in London, quietly exiting an AA meeting that had just ended. A woman saw me and visibly startled. She stopped me. She explained that I was an absolute ringer for her dead sister whom she missed so much. She could not stop staring at me. Then she asked if she could hug me. I stepped toward her. She held me and held me and wept and wept. I also cried. In that moment I knew I was not me, I was her sister. I had done nothing of action. It was just a curious right time right place moment I had stumbled into, a reminder that the greatest gift truly is presence. I cannot thank you all enough for your presence this evening. May we all validate each other. Fucking Namaste.