Ask Me Again Tomorrow
Read Ask Me Again Tomorrow Online
Authors: Olympia Dukakis
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Women, #Entertainment & Performing Arts
A Life in Progress
with Emily Heckman
for my children and their children
Now I know, I understand…that in our work—acting or writing—what matters is not fame, not glory, not what I used to dream about, it’s how to endure, to bear one’s cross and have faith. I have faith and it all doesn’t hurt so much, and when I think of my calling I’m not afraid of life.
From Anton Chekhov’s
The Seagull,
translated by Nikos Psacharopoulos
I NEVER wanted to write a book about my life
IN THE late 1980s, something truly unexpected happened to my…
THE SPOTLIGHT that shined on my family in 1988 started…
DURING THE couple of years that followed the Oscars, we…
MY MOTHER’S family emigrated from the Mani region of southern…
DURING the early days of my parents’ marriage, they ran…
JUST AFTER I began the ninth grade, my family moved…
WHEN I BEGAN my master’s in fine arts at Boston…
I GOT TO New York in late 1959, when I…
SOMETIMES IT SEEMED like my life was one big effort…
ONE AUTUMN NIGHT in 1977 I received another phone call.
IT HAD BEEN a long five years since Louie’s accident…
THERE WAS A crisis with my mother. She had been…
IN 1999, Louie and I decided to sell our house…
I
NEVER
wanted to write a book about my life. When I was first approached by a literary agent, I told her I wasn’t interested. I didn’t want to dredge up all the personal history that I had already spent much of my life rehashing—in conversations with my husband, my friends, my therapists, myself. I felt I had nothing new to learn or to teach. But as the idea of doing a book insinuated itself in my thoughts, I grew more and more attracted to the possibilities. I couldn’t resist taking one more look back.
When I play a role on stage, I tell the same story night after night, but each time, I see and understand a little bit more of who that character is. In order to write the story of my life, though, the only script I had was “Olympia” and what a chaotic, angry, loving, contradictory character
she
turned out to be. But as the events of my life began to unreel in my mind, I recognized that I had an advantage now I’d not had in the past: I had the vantage point of
distance
. Looking back through the prism of time and experience, I went over and over the events of my life, trying to identify the narrative threads that have made me who I am; trying to understand the forces that have made me Olympia Dukakis, Greek-American, mother, actress, wife, trying to make a coherent story out of all of it. There were times I wanted to quit, but as I began to unravel the past and examine where I came from, several themes revealed themselves. The biggest one turned out to be the one that made this book-writing process so difficult at times; here I was, trying to define who I am for the reader and realizing that one of the main themes of my life was to defy definition.
Much of what I’ve done in my life, many of the decisions I’ve made, has been a reaction to ethnic and gender bias. I’ve spent a large part of my life rejecting the definition of what a Greek-American, and what a woman, was supposed to be. I’d set out to define
myself
, not fall into the role others wanted to define for me. I’d done it from as early as I can remember; first with my parents, then as a schoolgirl, later as an actress and wife and mother.
The life I’ve chosen to lead bears very little resemblance to what has been expected of me in all those roles. I’m a poster child for the bad Greek daughter—there are no Greek Orthodox bishops holding up my picture and nominating me as a role model. As a woman, I never fit into the prescribed parameters of “proper” behavior. As an actress, I’ve made choices that led me directly
away
from the fame and fortune acting is supposed to bring. As a wife, I refused to be stifled by the rules that society says wives are supposed to follow. As a mother, I made mistakes, but I’m happy to say that my three grown children like spending time with me, I believe, because they see me as a human being as well as a mom.
It’s not always easy to stay true to your own definition of yourself. There’s a lot of pressure from the outside world, telling you to be like everyone else, don’t rock the boat, take the easy way out. When you fight that, you naturally put yourself on the outside, and I spent a lot of my life feeling like an outsider. When I was younger, I took this as an indictment, but I grew to understand it was not just the road I’d carved out for myself through sheer stubbornness, it was the only road I wanted to take. In the year 2000, I played one of the most demanding roles of my career in Martin Sherman’s one-woman show,
Rose
. There is a line in that play that has always resonated with me, because, perhaps more than any other, it is a reflection of my own experience: “Maybe there’s a joy in not belonging.”
Women still stop me in the street to yell, “I know who I am,” which is the line Rose Castorini says in my breakout role in
Moonstruck
, when rebuffing a pass from a younger man. I love the strength of character it took for her to say that. I love that she believes that to be true, and that it’s the thing that keeps her true to herself. But I am not Rose Castorini. When I finally agreed to write this book, my editor suggested that should be the title. “But I
don’t
know who I am,” I told her, “that’s just the point.” Because the “who I am” keeps changing, evolving—it’s inevitable. We are constantly gathering—or stumbling upon—new information that, if we allow it to, will change our understanding of the past and point us in new directions for the future. The sand shifts constantly. Our life stories have a logic all their own—they meander this way and that. Their logic is the logic of the spirit as it seeks to know itself, as we seek to work and love.
What I think about my life keeps changing. At twenty, I thought one thing. At thirty, I thought another. And forty, and fifty, and so on. Each decade, sometimes each day, has brought its own revelations. If you want to know who I am today, I’ll tell you. But you better ask me again tomorrow….
I
N THE
late 1980s, something truly unexpected happened to my family and me, something I never thought I’d see in my lifetime, something my father could only dream about. In 1988, my name became a household word. I don’t mean just in Montclair, New Jersey, where I lived at the time. And I don’t mean within the theatrical community (a community in which I’d been an active member for thirty years). I mean the name Dukakis became known all across the United States! Even around the world, thanks to an acting award and a presidential election.
For me, it meant being recognized for the role I’d played in the movie
Moonstruck
. For my cousin Michael, it meant being on the ballot as the Democratic candidate for president of the United States.
It was hard for me to grasp that two first-generation Greek-Americans had made it in this incredible, public way. I became—literally almost overnight—no longer what I’d always considered myself to be: a hyphenated American, living between two cultures and constantly trying to balance the many contradictions forced on us, trying to bridge a divide in ways that kept us on our toes and sharpened our senses. It also meant having to live as a kind of second-class citizen. Now we Dukakis progeny had broken through a barrier of ethnic discrimination that had been, at times, vicious, unforgiving, and isolating. But living in the hyphen, or as an “outsider,” also had its benefits. It gave us all a degree of freedom that we each, in our own way, tried to capitalize on: we weren’t expected to conform (how could you when you didn’t look like everyone else and you spoke a foreign language and you had a name that no one could pronounce?). In the minds of our nonimmigrant classmates and playmates, we were the “other,” and it was our job to figure out how they lived and not vice versa; how to “belong” within a context defined by the majority around us. Instead, Michael, my brother, Apollo, and I, and all the other Dukakis cousins—Stelian, Arthur, and Strat—seized our standing as outsiders and became what our parents had hoped we would: hardworking American citizens.
For me, the process of assimilation has been the lifelong process of allowing this line, this hyphen, to blur and soften. It hasn’t been an easy process, nor has it been simply about assimilating culturally. It’s been about learning to embrace the influences of my family and my heritage without letting them limit, hurt, or hinder me from becoming a better person, a better actor, a better mother, wife, and citizen. It has been about allowing my heart and my mind to open to new influences that will help me embrace life and all of its contradictions, instead of run from them.
It’s only now, at a relatively late time in my life, that I can even begin to articulate what it meant for my parents to come to this country and to raise children who became successful here. It’s a complicated ideal, this notion of being successfully assimilated, and it had such a profound effect on so many aspects of our lives. It determined, for example, how much personal gratification my parents would delay so that they might provide us children with more opportunity, more education, more freedom than they had. And though they tried to shield us from the limitations that were put on them by the outside world, particularly in the form of ethnic bias, they were never really successful. This was something my generation had to figure out for ourselves. We had to figure out how to be good Greek daughters and sons while also becoming Americans. There were so many competing ideals of what was valued, what was honorable, what was right. The world was fraught with contradictions and the best we could hope for was not to be undone by them. Learning how to grasp and use the lessons of this great paradox has been the source of more consternation, more joy, and more growth than anything else in my life. I was taught, by example, to stand tall in the face of fear, not to shy away from obstacles, to believe in myself—even when I felt utterly defeated inside. I was encouraged to strive to be authentic, to become an American without betraying my Greek heritage; to become the authentic Olympia Dukakis, warts and all; to take on the obstacles that came my way, learn as much as I possibly could from them, and then move on. I’ve been overlooked or unfairly treated, but just as often, I’ve been rewarded and honored in very unexpected and public ways, and even acclaimed, as I was so lavishly in 1988 for just that one part I played.
