Teddy
“Ma, how would you react if one of your kids was gay?”
“I’ll tell you the truth, Dorothy. If one of my kids was gay, I wouldn’t love him one bit less. I would wish him all the happiness
in the world!”
“That’s because you’re the greatest mother in the world, and I love you.”
“Fine. Now keep your fat mouth shut so I can get some sleep.”
The curtain closes. The crowd erupts.
“Let’s hear it for The Golden Gays!” Patty O’Furniture says.
We take our final bows. I rush backstage into the dressing room while everyone remains to sign playbills and headshots, lock
the door and will myself not to weep.
“Get a grip, Teddy,” I say to myself in the mirror. “You do not cry!”
I dab the corners of my eyes with Kleenex.
I reposition my wig and stare at both Teddy and Dorothy, mother and son, character and real person.
“No one can see us be weak,” I whisper to my reflection. “We are the strong, sarcastic, painfully honest glue that keeps everyone
together.”
I slap my cheek hard to sober myself though I have yet to have a cocktail.
“And yet you cannot be honest with your best friends,” I sigh.
The thing most fans never realized about The Golden Girls is that they were friends, yes, of course, but first they were outcasts.
Four elderly women without husbands who no longer offered anything “of value” to society.
Who would protect an aging floozy, a dimwit, a stroke victim with no censor and her caustic daughter who wore her humor as
a protective layer like her tunics?
Only each other.
They were fiercely funny, yes, but their humor masked their pain.
Especially Dorothy’s.
I look in the mirror again.
Make others laugh so you won’t get hurt.
Laugh, so you can’t feel the stinging pain as sharply.
I think of my mother and all the years that have passed since her death. Would I—would all of my tribe—have turned out to
be entirely different people had our mothers reacted the way Sophia did?
The doorknob rattles.
Or would we never have met?
I must make a decision—and quickly—about what to do and what to say.
“This is not a sitcom, Teddy,” I whisper to my reflection. “This is life.”
“Hello?” Barry calls in his Southern Blanche voice, now knocking on the door. “Teddy? I can hear you in there! Yoo-hoo!”
I stand and open the door.
“Sorry, I had to tinkle,” I say. “Old bladder.”
Barry looks at me and sweeps a hand dramatically across my body.
“Old man.”
I give him my and Dorothy’s signature withering glance.
Barry looks me over. “Well, I’m glad you didn’t get any pee-pee on that tunic. We need you outside. Everyone wants to talk to Dorothy. You’re like truth serum to fans.”
A pain strikes me out of nowhere in the groin, and I wonder if it’s an ironic phantom pain of guilt or a symptom of my cancer.
I turn to check my appearance one last time, and Barry catches me.
He eyes me even more closely.
“Oh, honey,” Barry says. “Have you been crying?”
“No!” I protest. “Why would you ask that? I never cry.”
“I can always tell when someone has been crying. It’s instinct. Like when a man tells me he’s thirty, but I see the truth
in his hands.”
“I wasn’t crying.” I pat Barry’s cheek. “It just might be time for another eye job.”
Barry places a hand on my shoulder. He tilts his head, and I see him become Blanche again.
“Crying is for plain women. Pretty women go shopping,” he says, reciting a line from another Golden Girls episode.
“Well, this pretty woman wants to go drinking.”
“Streetbar after, as always,” Barry says.
I walk out, and Teddy turns into Dorothy again, releasing zingers and casting withering looks as photos are taken.
We finish and return to the dressing room. Ever the stage mother, Ron helps the other Golden Gays change. I remain in costume—sometimes
Dorothy is my armor—and watch the routine. Ron removes their silicone breastplates, which adhere to the skin when we sweat,
and then gently rubs lotion onto their backs to help soothe the red welts they have created. He takes off the wigs and gently
places each atop its personal mannequin head for transport home.
I watch Ron buzz around, caring for each of us.
“You know what my great-uncle Sven, from St. Olaf always used to tell me, don’t you, Dorothy?”
“No, Rose,” I say, as if we’re still on stage. “Illuminate me.”
“Helgenbargen flergenflurfennerfen!”
I smile.
“You seem like you need a laugh tonight.”
“You do seem off tonight, Teddy,” Sid remarks.
“What is wrong with the three of you? I’m right as rain.”
“But it never rains in the desert,” Sid says with a knowing wink.
Be honest, Teddy. For once in your life.
“Tonight’s episode always brings up memories of my mom and my family,” I say.
Points for partial honesty.
Ron pins a wig to the mannequin form and walks over to me.
“Did you ever call your sister back?” he asks.
The man never misses a thing. He must have seen my cell ringing at Church of Mary. He knows how I refer to Trudy. He must
know she’s been on my mind. He knows . . . everything.
I shake my head.
Ron smiles sadly and touches my arm. Sid meets my eyes.
“Look, you didn’t ask for my advice, but I’m going to give it to you anyway because I’m the oldest around here,” he says,
using a makeup wipe to scrub the dark lines off his forehead that make him look even older on stage.
“By far,” I add.
“Don’t look back,” Sid continues. “All you’ll see is your tuchus, and you can’t change that either.”
The room explodes into laughter.
“Feel better?” Ron asks.
I nod. “What should I wear to Streetbar?” I ask.
Barry looks at me, considering.
“No knits. Bad tits.”
“Nothing sleeveless!” the rest of the girls yell in unison.
They head out the side door of the theater.
“Coming?” they call back to me.
“Meet you there!”
When the door slams, I walk back into the theater, still dressed as Dorothy.
I stand on stage all alone.
“You come into this world alone, and you leave this world alone. Always remember that.”
This was one of my father’s favorite lines.
“But you sent me into the world alone as a kid, Dad,” I say.
There is a world of difference between being lonely and alone, and there is a yawning void between the family we are born
into and the one we choose.
I square my shoulders, lift my head and say one of my favorite Dorothy lines ever, the one that sums her up best, reveals
she isn’t actually a pessimist but a realistic optimist.
“The bottom line is, in life, sometimes good things happen, sometimes bad things happen. But honey, if you don’t take a chance,
nothing happens.”
I take a bow to no one.
Like millions of people, I watched The Golden Girls every Saturday night at 8:00 p.m. sharp with my mom. The only difference was that—for many years—my mom and I watched it
separately but together across the country from one another.
My mother would sneak upstairs after Daddy had fallen asleep on the couch downstairs watching sports and downing a six-pack
of Stroh’s and call me from her red rotary phone. I could always picture the handset held to her ear, the cord snaking as
far as it would uncoil from the hallway to her bedroom, a pretend umbilical cord stretching from Michigan to California.
John would always tease me about the dinners I’d make when I’d watch the show long-distance with my mom: appetizers that ranged from Funyuns with French onion dip to Jeno’s Pizza Rolls, a dinner of Cheeseburger Macaroni Hamburger Helper, Manwiches or TV dinners, a dessert of Hostess Fruit Pies (I loved all things lemon now that I lived in Palm Springs), and a couple of watermelon Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers to wash it all down.
You can take the boy out of the country, I always told John, but you can’t take the country out of the boy.
“What about the cholesterol?” he would joke.
For the first couple of years, my mama and I would chat at commercial breaks about the show, but never about our lives.
Then, one Saturday, after the show had ended, she said casually, “Your Daddy died last night. Stroke.”
“Good riddance,” was all I could manage to say at first, before finally asking, “Are you okay?”
“Best night of sleep I’ve ever had,” she said.
I went home alone for Christmas that year to see her. John had to work, and we didn’t have much money. I was finally allowed
back now that Trudy had moved out and Daddy was gone. First night home, I went searching for some comfort (Southern Comfort,
that is), and I was shocked to discover the liquor cabinet—and Windex bottles—were empty. See, Mama used to pretend to clean
the windows and bathrooms every single day. But I knew those Windex bottles were filled with vodka, and Mama was just trying
to erase her life.
“How’d you finally give up drinking, Mama?” I asked.
“Just listen,” she said, cocking her head.
The old windows creaked in the wind. Birds chirped outside in the snow.
“I don’t need to silence your father’s demons anymore,” she continued. “His pain is no longer mine.”
“What do you do with all your spare time now that you used to spend washing the windows?”
“Why, you little sumbitch,” she said. “You always knew!”
She laughed so hard she spit up blood.
That’s when we knew the end of her show was near. I came home to stay with her the next fall ’til her finale.
First Saturday I was home, my Mama looked over at me and said, “We can finally watch the show together.”
My God, my mama was strong. Gave up drinking. Fought cancer. Refused to leave her home. I got all that fire, too, deep inside. I just wish she’d used an ounce of that strength to protect me when I needed it most.
One Saturday when we sat down to watch The Golden Girls, Mama finally asked what my life had been like after I’d been kicked out of the house after being discovered taking a literal
roll in the hay in the barn with a local farm boy who’d been hired to bale. I didn’t pull any punches. I told her I hitchhiked
my way across the country to a place I’d heard of called Palm Springs. I told her what I had to do to survive. I told her