Hey Mom Read online

  Hope I wasn’t too hard of a birth!

  Louie

  Sweet Lisa

  Hey Louie,

  Mom was a very strong woman. She came from a well-to-do family and then she married Dad. She just loved him so much. They had nothing but she didn’t care. THAT’S LOVE. She figured out how to get by. Her love and kindness melted your heart. Everyone loved her sweetness. She was always fun. Mom, I miss your love. And the sweet morning call up the stairs, “Lisa! Louie! Time to get up for school!!” She was never mean. I think about how great she was even though Dad made life hell for her. She was so strong. She was the best cook in the world, when we had food to eat. She made the best fried chicken in her cast-iron skillet. And the best angel food cake. Oh, I can’t forget the best over-easy eggs ever. Yummy. Also, the Coke and tuna sandwich special with Mom—we would go to Woolworth’s and have a chocolate Coke and tuna sandwich. It was such special Mom time. And she was always right. She would tell us don’t do something or this will happen. And she was always right. I think she had psychic abilities. Remember when Mom started wearing pantsuits? We had to show her how to walk in them. She was adorable, how she held her legs tight together. If you saw it, it was so funny. She was a doll. Because of her I’m a better person. I saw her struggle so much with Dad’s drinking, I knew I would never be like him. Don’t get me wrong, I loved Dad. I just didn’t like his drinking. I love Christine in Baskets. That IS Mom. She would love the show. She always wore dresses and loved to wear earrings and brooches. You’re a doll, doing Mommy.

  Love,

  Lisa

  Big Shot

  Hey Mom,

  Everyone wants to be a big shot in their family. I don’t care who you are: when the main driving force in your career and your life is to become a “success,” a big shot, you’re really doing it so you can be a big shot in your family, with your brothers and sisters, with your mom and dad, with your friends and your girlfriend or boyfriend who you grew up with or who maybe ignored you. You want to be a big shot in your neighborhood, your community. Of course you do. You devote all that energy to becoming a big shot so that when you get back to town, back to the family home, back to your brothers and sisters, back to the family reunion, people say, as you pass, “He did well. He’s a big shot.”

  The most important thing about being a big shot is not to act like one. Because then you’re not a big shot.

  You’re a little shit.

  Your son,

  Louie

  Andersons galore

  Stranger Things

  Hey Mom,

  Recently I started waking up to the sight of moths and hummingbirds, big fat hummingbirds the size of parakeets, flitting around my bedside lamp even though it wasn’t on, or spiders running up the wall really fast and disappearing. They never run toward me, always up and away, and they look back at me while they’re running as if they’ve been found out. It’s as if they’re spying on me, checking on me. It’s happened numerous times. They’re not dreams. I don’t know what they are. It’s been three months since Tommy passed, and I’ve been wondering more and more about things like that, now that we’ve lost Kent and Rhea and Mary and Roger and Sheila and Billy and now Tommy, seven of the eleven of us. 7-Eleven, the convenience store. This is not convenient. 7-11 at the craps table. Whenever you go by it at the casino, you hear, “Come on, seven, come on, seven . . .” I’d rather have eleven than seven. Oh, Mom, that sounds so sad. I can never play craps again.

  Just four of us are left—Jimmy, Shanna, Lisa, and me. Numbers five, six, nine, and ten, that’s our order. The Final Four. The We-Dodged-a-Bullet-So-Far Four.

  Anyway, I feel as if the moths and spiders and hummingbirds are there to send me love because that’s what I feel from them, love, these big moths and plump hummingbirds. The birds are almost close enough to touch, and yesterday as I watched one of them, I said out loud, “This is not a hallucination, this is real,” and right then the hummingbird darted behind the lamp, then darted back out and looked at me, then darted back, then I put out my hand and it came a little closer, and I reached out and it flew to the window and disappeared. Where did it go? Where do the spiders disappear to when they get high enough up the wall? Or the moths? Have they come to make contact? When the spiders and hummingbirds leave, it’s usually through the wall or into some abyss, not out the window. Were they ever here? Were they hallucinations? Mom, are they a communication from you and Tommy and Kent and Rhea and Mary and Roger and Sheila and Billy? And even Dad? Actually, I wouldn’t mind hearing from him, either. Maybe he’s a spider.

  It’s not the first time something like this has happened. A month after Tommy died, I entered the bathroom of my hotel room, turned on the light, and suddenly there were colors, colors I had never seen before, moving around the bathroom. It felt like something trying to work itself out, and my mind immediately went to thoughts of Tommy, and also Sheila and Rhea and Billy. Those four. None of the others. I have no idea why.

  “Who’s here?” I said out loud.

  I wasn’t scared. It felt as if I could reach out to them but it also felt as if I couldn’t get all the way there. I couldn’t reach them but I could witness what was going on, and in a way participate in what was going on, and be comforted by them, in there, trying to work out what they were trying to work out. Maybe they were as sad about their having left as I was about their leaving.

  It happened the next night, too. Same thing. Only this time I didn’t worry about what had happened.

  I lay down and fell asleep, deeply.

  With love,

  #10 (and #5, #6, and #9)

  Stand-Up People

  Hey Mom,

  I’m in Washington, D.C., where earlier today we taped a tribute to Joan Rivers at the Kennedy Center. Melissa, Joan’s daughter, called a couple months ago, asking me to participate. Given what Joan meant to me, of course I said yes. And thinking about the sudden passing of someone I so admired as a comedian and a person got me thinking of all the comedians who aren’t around anymore, many of whom left suddenly or too early—Robin Williams, Sam Kinison, Phil Hartman, Chris Farley, Bill Hicks, John Belushi, Mitch Hedberg, Gilda Radner, Andy Kaufman, Patrice O’Neal, John Candy, Madeline Kahn, Bernie Mac—the list is too damn long, Mom! Not everyone is lucky enough to hang around like Bob Hope or George Burns, who both died at one hundred.

  I think of the comedians who are gone, and who were so influential to me and my career. Henny Youngman, king of the one-liner and terrible violin playing, really liked me and gave me encouragement early on that I desperately needed. When he hosted the First Annual Comedy Competition in St. Louis, and I was disappointed to take third place, he handed me my trophy (a plastic banana) and whispered to me, “You were the best, you should’ve won.” You can imagine how that feels to a young comedian. Later on, he hired me to write for him.

  When Rodney Dangerfield came to town to play the Carlton Celebrity Room, all the young, aspiring Twin Cities comics were so excited to see him. I had read in an article that he liked Scotch, so I bought a bottle of Glenlivet and balloons, and presented them to him. He never forgot the gesture.

  Then there’s Joan. I first met her in Minneapolis, in the very early 1980s, way before I moved to Los Angeles. She saw my act and loved it. “You’re a natural,” she said. From then on we stayed in touch. She told people about me, opened doors. After I moved west and got on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and tasted some success, and Joan got her own talk show, I was the first comedian she asked to be on it. Lots of potential guests said no because they heard that Johnny was furious with her for starting her show and competing with him, and word spread that if you did Joan’s show, you would be blacklisted from Johnny’s. I said yes to Joan anyway and I’m glad I did. She was doing something monumental, a woman getting her own talk show. She had been good to me. And I liked and admired her. Oh, and I also did it because she picked me first. Growing up I was almost always the last kid picked for any team.

 
Joan was known as the hardest-working comedian in the business. She was a different kind of comedian from me—I told stories with jokes in them, more in the mold of Jonathan Winters, with some easy Jack Benny and Bob Hope pacing thrown in there, too—but I felt I could learn so much from watching how seriously she took what she did. And she had to do it even harder and better than that because of the misogyny in show business and comedy, especially back then. At that time, a woman was never considered equal in stand-up, no matter how funny. More than any other female comic—more than Phyllis Diller or Lucille Ball or Carol Burnett or Lily Tomlin—Joan made possible the success of so many of today’s great female comedians who regularly pack huge theaters or play Vegas or have cable comedy specials. Yet even today, if you read Twitter or other social media, it’s incredible how brutally critics and anonymous commenters, almost always men, go after female comics. They do it in a way they never, ever do with male comics.

  I was genuinely moved that I was asked to sit in and host Joan’s show after her husband Edgar’s tragic suicide.

  I saw Joan in Vegas when she was seventy-six years old, on her knees, crawling around onstage at the Venetian, doing a bit, and I remember thinking, I don’t know that I could do that at her age. I don’t know that I would even want to. Here she was, twenty years older than me, on all fours, and I’m just trying to fit my fat butt into a seat. I always felt that Joan absolutely lived for the audience. I mean, that’s true of all us comedians but it seemed to burn even brighter in her.

  At the tribute, Gilbert Gottfried was there and Dick Cavett and Bob Saget and many others. We all told favorite Joan jokes. I recited Joan’s line that “Elizabeth Taylor was so fat, a ship broke a bottle over her.”

  I think Joan’s legacy in the comedy world is profound—as a trailblazer for women, and just an incredibly funny person.

  I appreciate the greats, the history, what came before. One of my biggest regrets is declining an invitation years ago to be on a Bob Hope special. What the hell was I thinking? He was such a big influence on my joke telling, especially that timing of his. And now it’s too late.

  They’re all gone, Mom. Not that I expected the old guard would be around forever. But we all get nostalgic. And it makes me think of how I fell in love with comedy and comedians to begin with. I remember watching The Tonight Show with Dad. I was such a big fan of Jack Benny’s, and I loved the comedy of Jonathan Winters and Richard Pryor. And the late, great Jackie Vernon, who was sort of a sad sack. Which is what my character has often been. I used to do mostly one-liners, just fat jokes, so it was a fat character, very deliberate and efficient in the delivery, like Hope. You know I developed my skills at Mickey Finn’s in Minneapolis, a tiny locals’ bar on Third and Central. If you blinked, you walked right by it. That’s where I grew up with other young comics like Jeff Gerbino, Alex Cole, Jeff Cesario, Scott Hansen, Joel Hodgson, Lizz Winstead, Bill Bauer. It was an exciting comedy and performance scene in Minneapolis, a city with more theater seats per capita than anywhere but New York. (That’s what they say. I don’t know that anyone has ever proved it.) Very sophisticated audiences, Mom, just like you. Who knew that you and Dad would pick a city to live in after Kansas City that was actually pretty ideal for comedy? Would I have ended up doing comedy if I had grown up in South Dakota? Twin Cities audiences give you a fair shot. Though if they don’t think you’re funny, they won’t laugh.

  Jimmie Walker was also a great supporter, and he got Mitzi Shore, owner of the Comedy Store in L.A., to watch my set in 1982. Then I got my big shot on The Tonight Show in 1984, and Johnny had me back a whole bunch of times over the next year. Eventually I got an agent who represented (among others) Bob Hope, Johnny Mathis, and Marlene Dietrich, and he started getting me gigs. As I got more notice, I opened for lots of huge music acts—Chuck Berry (my first words to him were “Hey, Chuck”; he quickly corrected me with “MISSS-ter Berry”) and Crosby, Stills & Nash and the Commodores and the Pointer Sisters and Smokey Robinson and Natalie Cole and Glen Campbell and Ray Charles. This was mostly in Las Vegas, and I was doing well. When I ran into Joan around this time, I remember her saying, “Isn’t the money good?” I was about to reply, “Oh, the money doesn’t mean anything,” but that would have been a lie.

  There are things that come with being a comedian that I hadn’t thought too much about, or liked very much. (That is, besides the occasional impossible task of having to follow onstage a young Robin Williams or a young Eddie Murphy or a young Sam Kinison.) There’s also the choice of path to take, when you become successful. One path might be more lucrative, one more honest, though for some performers they might be one and the same path, I don’t know. But those performers who are willing to say, basically, “I don’t care if you like me or not—this is what I want to talk about”: those are my comedy heroes. The ones who care more about being respected than liked. I was a poor kid who wanted to be liked, no matter what, and I wanted to have enough money to not worry about it. The money was good. The money did matter.

  In the end, there’s nothing more satisfying than when someone comes up to me and tells me that something I said resonated with them, some joke or routine, from twenty years ago, made them laugh so hard they nearly peed (good) or actually peed (better!), or even made them want to do stand-up. When I hear that, I smile. I’m glad I worked hard on that joke, that bit, that set.

  Of course, comedy is a tough life. And let’s face it, Mom, we’re a pretty screwed-up bunch of people, comics are—sad sacks and volcanoes and damaged goods. A TV producer once said to me, “I didn’t realize until I was working with so many comedians the level of self-loathing. Does any group hate themselves more?”

  “Let me check and get back to you on that,” I joked but I think she’s right. Comedians are complicated people.

  Mom, I don’t hate myself, at least nowhere near the degree I used to. Still, I think it’s a mean stew. You know how when you burn a stew or soup, even if it’s edible, you can always still taste the part that burned, that bitter taste? That’s us. That part never leaves. There’s a helpless, debilitating place, so we need to make people laugh, so we can get all the love we can, and maybe enough laughs and love will cleanse us. Like a good body cleanse. Even a juice cleanse.

  Who knows, though? Some people question the whole life that goes into it and whether it’s worth it. After I got some national attention, the mom of an up-and-coming Minnesota comedian wrote me a letter, begging me to call her very funny, very talented son and convince him to not become a comic.

  What was I supposed to do? Call him and say, “Don’t follow your passion”? Call the mom and say, “Well, it’s not the worst job in the world”?

  I did neither. You have to figure it out for yourself.

  Love,

  Louie

  Nominee

  Hey Mom,

  People have been talking for the last five or six months about how I’m going to win an Emmy for Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy because of my portrayal of Christine Baskets. It’s nice to hear but way ahead of things. Anyway, this morning was when they announced the nominees, but I couldn’t find it, not on TV, not on the Internet. I went to the Television Academy website and didn’t find it there, either. So I started to doubt myself—until I got a ton of calls and texts and emails from my friend Abraham, my manager Ahmos, and my publicists Glenn and Eve Schwartz. I don’t know if it was inside information or they just figured out how to track it down when I didn’t. Maybe I was just too nervous. But there it was, finally, on the Emmy site, that I got one of the seven nominations for Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy.

  Yessssss!

  It feels wonderful, I can’t lie. I read my name over and over, in slow motion. My competition I know well, from the comedy world or from their great work on TV—Andre Braugher from Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Ty Burrell from Modern Family, Tony Hale and Matt Walsh from Veep, Keegan-Michael Key from Key and Peele, and of course Tituss Burgess from Incredible Kimmy Schmidt or Unstoppable Kimmy Schmidt or Irrep
ressible Kimmy Schmidt. You’d like them all, Mom, but you’d love Tituss because he sings and he’s sweet and he has this way about him. Now I just have to wait two months until the night of the Emmys, September 18. Which means everyone will be saying congratulations for the next two months, which is way better than their saying, “You got robbed!” so that part’s great. And if I’m being honest, which why wouldn’t I be with you, Mom, I love that I worked really hard on the part of Christine. I’m making people feel a little differently with the character. I hope they laugh but I know they’re also feeling lots of things because I am, too. If they weren’t, and I wasn’t, then why bother doing the show? With Christine Baskets I put myself in your position as a mother. I put myself in your position as a wife. I put myself in a position of a woman who has been through a lot, seen a lot, who feels everything, who tries to right all the wrongs in her life and in everyone else’s lives, too. Who tries to take care of her children. All the things you did, Mom. And I keep one thing in mind during all the tough moments for the character in the show: Every time I have a turn where I must decide, Should I be mad or happy or sad? I think of you. I keep in mind your incredible humanity. Your depth. I’m telling you, Mom, you’re really something. People think that I’m suddenly a great actor but I’m just playing you. I believe I have a lot of your qualities but I can’t say that I’m the sole creator and author of this character. I would say it’s you and me and we’re in it together, and all my sisters and brothers and so many other people, even Dad. You have added the most, by a long shot—your wonderful outlook on things no matter how down and out you were, the ability to find a silver lining no matter how dark. I’m happy to play you, Mom, because I’m playing someone who is so real and loving and caring.