I knew I had to write this novel, A THEORY OF EXPANDED LOVE. When I finally performed the play SIX PALM TREES in front of my enormous family, there was a moment that began my journey. Although it happened years ago, this moment fueled the question at the heart of the novel.
Everyone was there
including my mother’s sister, Aunt Cecile, who hadn’t died yet. All my siblings and some of the 42 grandchildren who had been born by that time were all seated on folding chairs in the lanai. It was a warm, hazy California afternoon.
I still have the pictures. I’m wearing a white jacket and my hair (tied up in six ‘palm trees’) is stuffed under a bright pink cap, backwards on my head. A jock strap fits over my left breast like one half of a bra.
The best part was, their laughter. There I was, in front of my enormous family, and every single one of them was paying full attention to me. At last, I had their total focus, and the things I was saying were making them hoot and howl with delight. In comedy lingo, I was killing.
All the longing to be with them, to be part of them again, melted in those moments, in spite of the fact that I had betrayed them all by falling in love with an ex-Catholic Canadian artist, turning my back on God and my country.
They had grown up to be doctors and lawyers and insurance salesmen, proud Yanks who still went to Sunday Mass and baptized their children; but in this moment I was a rogue, living my life as a solo actress/playwright in Canada — — and they were eating out of my hand.
The room was brimming with happiness, but we were fast going into the dip. I knew it was coming, because I had toured the play internationally to standing ovations for the past five years. It suddenly gets up close, personal and very serious. Blasphemous, I would say, in this context. I made my audiences laugh at statues of the Blessed Mother; mocked their fear of Communism; skewered Catholicism with a jock strap and fart jokes.
Then I made them cry.
My Canadian husband Gord Halloran and I had written Six Palm Trees together; he directed. The ruse of the play: we were at a family reunion and Annie Shea was the stand-up entertainment. What we loved: it worked on the audience every time. The laughter opened them up, got them to relax. And then we hammered them with the poignant bits where I said the ‘vagina line’, got angry with the Dad for having too much Catholic sex and cried real tears for our mother who was dead and gone. Sometimes audiences were so stunned by this that they would stare with their mouths open in total silence when the curtain went up, just before they leapt to their feet.
As my family gathered to finally see this play I remember thinking would they get it? It’s not the real story, it’s fiction, with mixed up names and exaggerated scenarios. The similarities – our Mother was dead, it was a family of fourteen, we did live in Pasadena — that was the outline, painted in broad strokes. Gord came from a Catholic family of seven from Belleville and they loved it – assuming we were talking about them! And, in most of Gord’s post-show notes, he’d told me again and again that the arc of the story would sing if I could ‘get really mad at The Dad’ – something I could never quite manage.
Right then, just before performing this seasoned play in front of my actual family, I was seriously tempted to edit. But, if I did, how would it end? What would it even be about? This work has held up because it asks questions about all our mothers, how we use their bodies to come into the world, how our relationship is defined by what they do for us. And this is who I am, I thought, I live in Canada with this man whom I have chosen, and this is our life and our work.
I want you to know that my father really loved my mother and truly missed her every day she was gone out of his life. So I know it was painful for him to hear what I said about ‘The Mom’ in those shocking moments leading up to ‘getting mad at the Dad’. He was in the back row, and before I even got to the vagina line, he shuffled out of the room. I carried on; my family was as still as I have ever experienced an audience to be. Annie spoke through tears after having said what I had dared to say out loud. She tried to make amends, like she does every time I inhabit this fantasy. After the bow, the little kids rushed up to me laughing and re-living the fart jokes. My sister said, “We weren’t that poor”; a sister-in-law asked me about a family secret.
Many years later, home after my father’s funeral, still high with a strange euphoria of love and connection with my family of origin; I opened a FEDEX package from the lawyer in California. And when I read the words that my father had disinherited me, I was not surprised. But then I understood the moment on the lanai when I dared to finish the play I had written. I had chosen to live apart, to speak the voice of my freedom, the voice of my maturity. Giving voice to my work, I told them:
This writer, this performer, this person who loves this man, who lives in Canada, this is who I am.
