Hey Mom Read online

If I didn’t have you as a model, I wouldn’t have had success playing the matriarch of a dysfunctional but ultimately loving TV family. I’ve been thinking about that, and about how art imitates life. And how my real family has influenced not only who I am but my professional success, too. I mean, I do lots of material about the family. My TV cartoon, Life with Louie, was our life, barely disguised. I worked on another TV show, a sitcom, The Johnsons Are Home, also based on our family. Then there’s Family Feud, the incredibly popular game show that has “family” in the very title and turned out to be this weird, joyous thread throughout my life.

  Do you remember our watching Family Feud when I was still living at home, with you and Dad, Tommy was still there, too, and Tommy and I sat on the couch, or I sat on the arm of the couch, and maybe Tommy wasn’t there but upstairs in the bedroom, looking through my record albums? Anyway, Dad was in his chair, and you were in the kitchen, and like every American family we tried to guess the number one answer, and you would come out of the kitchen occasionally and throw your two cents in. Dad would complain about Richard Dawson slobbering over the women when he kissed them. I think Dad might have been jealous.

  About twenty-five years later, the producers of Family Feud were looking for a new host and they wanted me to do a pilot, but I wouldn’t. I knew that if you shoot a pilot, afterward they can easily say, Uh . . . no, and if they really want you, they’ll put up the money to attract you. Hire you for the job or not.

  So we didn’t shoot a pilot. (I’m not a terrorist, Mom.) But the producers asked if I would go to London to host some episodes of Family Fortunes, the British version of Family Feud, and I went, and the contestants were American servicemen and servicewomen stationed over there, and the producers thought I was terrible. I probably was.

  Oh, well.

  But when I was back doing shows in Vegas, the producers asked if I would host an episode, taping it with audience members onstage, as a sales tool to show to station managers across the country. It so happened that we were having an Anderson family reunion in Vegas right around that time, and we could be the guests, on both sides! So we did. I played host with both sides of the family—brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews—and it was so much fun. And because I was so relaxed—my family! battling it out on Family Feud!—the tape of that episode landed me the job as the new host, though that wasn’t even the point!

  Some people who care about me wondered why I would take the job. They said it would hurt my career. I said, “Well, let’s see, my comedy is all about my family, I did a cartoon about my family, why wouldn’t I do Family Feud?” I’m glad I listened to myself. I wasn’t afraid that I couldn’t do this or that. I don’t think it hurt my career. I think it helped it. I learned a great deal doing it. And those were three of the most fun years of my life, from 1999 through 2001. I wish you could have seen it, Mom. You would have been calling answers out at the TV, with your second-youngest child on just the other side of the screen to tell you and everyone else what the survey said. I love game shows. They’re part of America. I like to think we invented them but I have no idea if we did.

  We shot five shows a day, and filmed on thirty-six days, so in a little more than a month’s worth of shooting we completed 180 shows, a year’s worth (each show runs twice). First we did it at CBS, in the same studio where they filmed The Price Is Right, then moved to NBC, where they filmed The Tonight Show. How great is that? The ratings for the show reversed their downward trend. They doubled, in fact.

  Then, somewhere along the way, I got really full of myself.

  I wish I would have worked harder at that point in my career, and been nicer. The show’s success made me think it would just go and go and go. But that’s not how life happens, I learned. I acted like a big shot. People kept telling me how great I was, and guess what? I believed them! I sometimes acted rude and mean, like a prima donna. I could be difficult. I hurt people and I regret that. I hurt myself, too. I tripped on myself, Mom. I didn’t even see it. And so life and success didn’t just go and go and go. It was go and go and . . . gone. After the third season, they replaced me. I was devastated. I didn’t know what to do. Because I wasn’t good with my money, I had to relocate from L.A. to Las Vegas. Eventually I landed a great gig there with Spy Entertainment, at the Excalibur, and Las Vegas saved me. I worked a regular show in Vegas for more than a decade.

  I learned a lot from that painful period in my life. Do we learn much from the painless periods?

  Wondering,

  Louie

  That’s Somebody’s Baby

  Hey Mom,

  This past Thursday night I was coming out of a charity event in Hollywood. As I reached the corner where a car was waiting for me, I noticed a big plastic cup perched in front of a yellow blanket, the kind of blanket we grew up with, fuzzy with silk trim, the type we had on our beds and built forts with and spread out on lawns on the night of July Fourth to watch fireworks. Anyway, it took me a moment to realize what I was looking at. At first it was just a blanket on the sidewalk. But wait, no, it was twisted in such a way that it looked almost like a partial chalk outline of a murder scene, with a pair of footed white tube socks peeking out from one end. Damn. There was a person under there, motionless. I halted in my tracks and stared at the image, sorrow washing over me. I wanted to see if the person under there was okay but immediately I thought, What a silly question. He was nowhere close to okay. I dropped some money into the cup and moved on, thinking, That’s somebody’s son. That’s somebody’s brother. That’s somebody’s dad. That’s somebody’s old friend. Once upon a time, that was somebody’s baby. I was shaken but kept moving, and because I’m a so-called celebrity and I have means and I got lucky, soon I was seated in the dark, private comfort of an SUV, speeding safely into the night. I stared absently at my bag of leftovers, tasty free-range chicken and lots of it, and thought, Damn, why didn’t I leave the food for my fellow man under the blanket? Then I thought, Well, maybe he’s a vegan. I snickered to myself and thought, That’s a good bit, a homeless person who’s vegetarian or vegan, but really I was just trying to cover up my sorrow. I snickered a little more.

  Now I’m thinking of Snickers.

  It’s not the first “bit” I’ve thought up or done about homeless people. Once, I did a joke about a guy passing me on the street and I’m eating and he says, “I haven’t eaten in five days,” and I say, “Well, you’re not getting this.” Then I say to the audience, “I didn’t say it but I thought it.” I did another joke about how I once went three hours without eating but that was because of a bad waiter.

  Jokes are one way to keep the sorrow at bay. Because, let’s be honest, there’s no chance the sorrow won’t return. Oh, it’ll be back, don’t worry. Like the line by Bogie at the end of Casablanca: “Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life.”

  Sometimes the sorrow doesn’t even wait until tomorrow to return.

  I really should try to do something to help the homeless, Mom, because it would help an individual, it would help my sorrow, and also it’s what you would do.

  Of course, it’s no rare thing to see a homeless person in America. We see them all the time. Or, at least, they’re there all the time. I’m not sure that most of us see them after a while. And getting to that point of being homeless can really, truly happen to anyone. We’re all of us sad and confused at so many points in our lives. So many of us have addictions and weaknesses, usually more than one. (How do people not have a major addiction or weakness in this world? How is that possible?) It doesn’t take much to lose your way. It’s surprisingly easy. The stories are always harrowing and unbelievable—then all of a sudden believable.

  Yeah, I suppose I could see that happening.

  Yeah, I could definitely see that happening.

  Yeah, I could see that happening to someone I love.

  Yeah, I could see that happening to me.

  It happened to me.

  A week ago I passed a strip mall and
saw a man outside a 7-Eleven and I thought maybe he was going through a garbage bin but I wasn’t sure. It was twilight and hard to see. Isn’t twilight the most heartbreaking time to see a homeless person, and think about the night that’s beginning for them? Isn’t twilight the most heartbreaking time to see anything? So at first I couldn’t see if he was recycling or looking for food, and maybe he was mumbling to himself—

  And then he crossed himself. And I realized his mumbling was him saying the Lord’s Prayer. He was about to eat, and he was gathering the pieces that would make up a godly meal all around him, on the top of the trash bin. Some people don’t have easy lives. They just don’t.

  I angled into a parking spot near him, got out of my car, and walked over and gave him some cash. There’s another bit about the homeless that I used to do, about how when we give money to the homeless, we base it partly on how we think they’ll spend it. (Wow, I do a lot of humor about homelessness. I guess it makes sense if you grow up in the projects and your father is often jobless and the lights and TV often get shut off because the electricity bill didn’t get paid.) But who am I, who is anyone, to get judgmental when giving a homeless person money, because he or she might, you know, buy drugs or liquor with it? “Yeah” (went my old joke), “I didn’t think he was going to use the money to open a 401(k).” Or (went another joke), “maybe he’ll buy crack with it because that way, for a few minutes, at least he won’t think he’s homeless.”

  A lot of us are conditional with our giving. We shouldn’t be. Either give or don’t give. Right, Mom? Who are we to judge? “Listen, I’m going to give you this twenty-dollar bill, but here’s how I want you to allocate it . . .”

  Screw you! I remember how we’d get our welfare support in the form of vouchers, not cash. So if we had to buy clothes, we’d pay with the vouchers. It’s really belittling. Probably not intentionally so, but belittling nonetheless. As if, had they given my parents cash, hey, you never know what we might have done with it. That fifty-three dollars a month could really lead to something dangerous. We might have started a business on the side.

  Not quite in twilight,

  Louie

  If There Are Cheeseheads in Bucharest, Blame Me

  Hey Mom,

  Hello Louie,

  How are you? I’m writing to ask you if you could help me with writing my bachelor’s paper, because I chose a topic, “thematic variation in Life with Louie, by Louie Anderson.” I would like to ask you if you could tell me some useful details about the cartoon that nobody knows and some interesting aspects about you, because there’s not much information on the Internet.

  Your biggest fan,

  Klaudia from Poland

  Mom, many Americans know who I am (more older ones than younger ones), and lots of Midwesterners and especially Minnesotans know, but want to guess where I’m really popular?

  Eastern Europe. That’s because my animated TV series, Life with Louie, which first ran in America in the ’90s, somehow became one of the most popular shows in Poland, Romania, and Turkey. So there’s a mini-generation of people from there who grew up watching it and liking it and identifying with our family’s life. The Andersons! Can you believe it? I based the show on my childhood experience, though I made changes. I moved the setting from Minnesota to Wisconsin, which meant the family were all big Green Bay Packers fans, not Minnesota Vikings fans. And while the dad was a war vet, like Dad, and his nickname was Andy, like Dad’s, and he was gruff, he was nowhere near as angry and mean as Dad. I definitely tamed things down. That’s TV for you.

  Lots of details in the show are very similar. The title character, Louie Anderson, is chubby and funny and sweet, like me, most of the time. Louie has a kid brother, Tommy. And I gave them four older brothers and four older sisters, so that’s close to accurate.

  And the mom is Ora Anderson—kind, loving, and sweet-natured. Her character was voiced by Edie McClurg, a talented actress and comedian with the perfect Midwestern accent, who played the school secretary in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Recently, while I was performing at a club, Edie was in the audience, and I pointed her out, and the audience went crazy. Mom, she’s a cross between you and Mary, with beautiful red hair and a sweet smiling face and a voice that makes you want to eat pie. She could have fit right into our family.

  Anyway, Life with Louie ran for three seasons and won a couple of Emmy Awards for Outstanding Performer in an Animated Series, and got nominated for a bunch more Emmys, but what I’m most proud of is it won the Humanitas Prize for Children’s Animation each and every year it ran. The prize is given to “stories that affirm the dignity of the human person, probe the meaning of life, and enlighten the use of human freedom.”

  Okay, is that really what I’m most proud of? Or is it the Life with Louie–branded SpaghettiOs, in the shapes of various characters from the show?

  Talk about making it! Mom, I would carefully eat each of the other characters, and push yours to the side, waiting to eat those all together.

  (Do I have to add that little ® after SpaghettiOs in a letter to you, Mom?)

  Now I have hundreds of thousands of Facebook fans from Central and Eastern Europe. (I know, what’s Facebook? Remember the bulletin board at the laundromat, where people posted stuff like “Dryer #6 doesn’t work!” and “Someone should clean the bathroom!” and “Judy’s pregnant!” and “Watch All in the Family this Monday!” and “Who has an apartment for rent?” and “Anyone want a cat?” Facebook is like that, except with more judgment.)

  My Life with Louie fans often post pictures of themselves in Packers jerseys or hats or waving Packers banners. And I always think, Wow, there’s no way they’d be wearing a cheesehead in Romania except for me. My life, my childhood, the goofy, crazy Andersons of 1122 Hazelwood, Apartment A—we caused that.

  I hope some of the other stuff I was trying to say with Life with Louie also got through.

  Hi Louie,

  I grew up watching the Life with Louie series. Just loved the way your mother raised you and treated you the right way in the toughest situations. Let me mention some of the stories I remember even now (after almost twenty years since the series aired in Romania) about her as I’ve seen them in the series:

  • The story about her becoming a baseball coach for your team

  • Mother’s Day when she got sick and you took care of her

  • When she won the award for cooking at the fair

  • When she was against you working over the summer at the golf club and got more money than all the family had in a month

  • When you got the first stand-up in your dining room after meeting the great Kazoo

  • When you went camping with the classmates and she sent you extra underwear and cookies

  • When she got herself a job of selling perfume and makeup for money when your father got fired

  • When her mother died and you searched for a specific place that Grandma went because you forgot to thank her for all the winter blouses (the most emotional episode ever)

  • When she prepared the Thanksgiving dinner for all the family and relatives. Your father had a fight with her brother. I hope that story had a happy ending.

  I don’t know if all these stories are true but I just love your mother for her mind, her soul, and her beauty in every way.

  Best regards,

  Mirela-Maria Iepure (Romania)

  Anyway, sorry, fictionalized Wisconsinite Andersons, but: Go, Vikings!

  Animatedly,

  Louie

  Who, Me?

  Hey Mom,

  To be or not to be: that is not the question.

  No, the question is, Could you please get off your butt and pick up the remote control I dropped and slip it back into my hand, thank you?

  Okay, that’s not the question, either.

  No, the question is: Who?

  Who is going to save me?

  Isn’t that the question we ask ourselves, silently, all the time? Whether we’re religious or not? Who?


  Everything else is minor by comparison. What’s for dinner, where’s the nearest gas station, when’s my favorite TV show on.

  Nah. It’s, Who will save me in life and who will comfort me and isn’t it true that there isn’t one person or actually there is, because it’s really just me that has to decide that I’m enough, and that I can take care of myself and I can comfort myself. And that’s why this morning, when I was at the coffeehouse and got my coffee (light, of course, you and I both put so much milk in our coffee, it’s almost albino), I did not get the cookies, which came in six evil choices: peanut butter, chocolate chunk, peanut chunky, snickerdoodle, pumpkin chocolate chunky cheese, and plain old sugar. Are they trying to kill me? I was the one being confronted. It was up to me to save myself, no one else. I got out of there by the skin of my teeth. Who is what it’s all about.

  You gonna eat that, Louie?

  Who, me?

  Other people come in and out of our life but the real truth is that we have to find peace in ourselves when we look in the mirror, we have to come to the idea that that’s enough, that we’re enough, that we can survive, that we can be fearless and we can go forward and we can find our way, even when sometimes there doesn’t seem to be a way to find.

  In the end, the How doesn’t matter that much, does it? If it works, it works. The Where doesn’t matter, either, though it’s fun to wonder about. (Will it happen as I lie in bed in my home? While traveling in another country? While sitting in a chair? While I’m at the state fair?) The What we know. So it’s really Who, and When. And the Who is us, a new version of us.

  So then it’s really one question, but a different one from the start.

  When will we be saved? Now? Later? Never?

  Today’s as good a time as any.

  Saving myself,

  Louie

  I Am Christine

  © FX

  Hey Mom,