Free My Mother Was Nuts by Penny Marshall Page B

kids arrived in the afternoon. I played the same songs my mother had used and taught the same routines. It was easy. I sat next to the record player, smoked, and said, “Left, right, left, right.”

CHAPTER 12
Take Everything

    Penny and Mickey at the 1965 New York World’s Fair
Marshall personal collection
    B Y THE MIDDLE of spring, I had lost the remaining thirty pounds of my pregnancy weight. I felt much better. Later, when Tracy turned one, the three of us went back to New York and spent a week on the beach in Avon-by-the-Sea. We also went to the World’s Fair to see my mother’s students entertain on one of the stages. When my mother insisted on hiding an entire roasted chicken in the front pouch of my cotton pullover so we could save money and not have to buy dinner there, I thought I might be getting my life back, the crazy life that I knew.
    My mother was eager to spend alone time with her one-year-old granddaughter, but with a condition. She didn’t want Tracy to talk as much as she did, which was all the time—and in complete sentences. She was very verbal and had a large vocabulary, thanks to all the time she spent with Mickey’s grandmother. One of her favorite phrases was “Oops, Nana has gas.”
    It was cute. But my mother didn’t want so much cuteness. She was pretending that Tracy was six months younger so she wouldn’t have to tell people in the building that I had been pregnant before getting married.
    That Christmas, having had his fill of New York—and my family—Mickey stayed in Albuquerque. He was a Jehovah’s Witness, so he didn’t celebrate Christmas. However, after coming home, I found a receipt for flowers. I confronted Mickey. He confessed to having sent them to an old girlfriend. I had problems with that. He couldn’t buy his child a birthday or Christmas present because it was pagan, but he could send an old girlfriend flowers?
    After a number of angry arguments, I stopped being angry. I realized the rest of my life, however that turned out, wasn’t going to be with Mickey. I wasn’t mad at him. What was to be mad at? We were two different people trying to do the right thing under circumstances that neither of us was prepared for yet. Mickey knew it, too. I think he came to that same realization when he sent flowers to his ex.
    As for what to do next, we had no idea. We had a kid, and we were too young to know how to make a clean break quickly. We didn’t even know how to talk about it. We needed events to push us into action, as they eventually did.
    One day a man from the Albuquerque Civic Light Opera came into the Litka School of Music, asking for me. Explaining that he had read about me, he said he wanted me to choreograph their production of
South Pacific
. I said no. It sounded like more than I could handle. Then he asked if I wanted to be in it.
    “Do I have to audition?” I asked.
    “No,” he said.
    “Then okay,” I said.
    With Mickey’s encouragement, I signed on. I was in the chorus of
South Pacific
, as well as
Carnival
, and
High Spirits
. For me, the best part of these productions was discovering other people in town who liked to stay up at night and smoke. Mickey wasn’t a night person; now I had company, people who were fun and had interests similar to mine.
    Like Phil Crummett, a handsome, energetic actor with a big singingvoice, who was involved in theater in town. Older and ambitious, he was putting together a production of
Oklahoma!
, and he hired me to be his assistant. As he auditioned people, he asked for my opinion. Then one day he asked if I wanted to audition for Ado Annie.
    “Yeah, sure,” I said. “Okay.”
    I didn’t have any confidence yet. And during rehearsals, I discovered that I couldn’t sing worth shit, but I could sell. Once the play opened, reviewers agreed. One local paper called the production “superlative” and said, “the two comic leads, Bill Cook and Penny Henry, almost steal the show.” Another paper also applauded the