Diary of a Mad Diva (11 page)

Dear Diary:

Today’s my eightieth birthday. I made a list of the interesting things about being eighty:

1. I can bully seventy-nine-year-olds by telling them to shut the fuck up and respect their elders.
   
2. I can still call Betty White an old whore.
   
3. I’ve started a new business using my old tampons as party favors.
   
4. The dogs are blaming the smell of pee on me.
   
5. When young people ask me if I have started “hooking up,” unfortunately they mean to life support.
   
6. When I reach orgasm I yell out Dr. Kevorkian’s name.
   
7. I can put on my bra with a shoehorn.
   
8. I can land a big endorsement deal with industrial-strength Depends.
   
9. When I watch the History Channel, my name comes up six or seven times a night.
   
10. John McCain is sexting me pictures of his junk.
    

JUNE 9

Dear Diary:

Poor John Travolta. There’s another story in the tabloids about how gay he is. I have no idea if he’s gay or not. On one hand he has a wife and kids and does macho things like fly planes. On the other hand, he’s a fabulous dresser, a great dancer and likes to be called “Miss Phillips” when he goes shopping in Talbot’s Big Gals section. Maybe he and Kevin Spacey can just get married and have a very hetero honeymoon on whatever planet it is John’s Scientology guru thinks we all come from.

JUNE 10

Dear Diary:

I could never be in a cult. For starters, they never accessorize properly. David Koresh had no fashion sense; Jim Jones wore leisure suits; and I don’t care how charismatic Osama bin Laden was, an AK-47 and an insulin drip do not take the place of drop earrings or a well-placed brooch.

The word “charismatic” really annoys me. Journalists and pundits are quick to call every cult leader “charismatic” because they convinced thousands of demented losers to drink Kool-Aid or walk into gunfire. “Charismatic” is not a synonym for “fucking nuts.” Charlie M. didn’t really have “charisma”; he had LSD and boundary issues. He was also nice in his own way. Few people know this, but Chuck was a Buddhist—and a Buddhist with a sense of humor. Whenever I met him he had a real twinkle in his third eye. If he would’ve invited me for a long weekend at Spahn Ranch, all expenses paid, there’s a fair chance I might have gone night crawling with Linda and Leslie and Susan and Tex.

JUNE 11

Dear Diary:

It’s 2 a.m. and I
just
figured out why Scientology is so successful. I was having my usual dream, the one where I’m on a speedboat off of St. Barts, with my new lover, Bill Gates, when the boat hits a school of sharks and flips over. Bill is immediately devoured into bits of chum by the frenzied makos, while I land safely on the back of a passing dolphin and am brought back to my private resort without so much as a hair or bangle out of place. And even more important, the tape recorder with the waterproof tape I safeguarded in my bra with Bill’s last words—“I leave every dime I have to Joan Rivers”—clearly audible, is in perfect condition.

Anyway, I think Scientology caught on because L. Ron Hubbard created it. Like me, many people are drawn to individuals with initials in their names. My favorite actor is F. Murray Abraham. (It used to be Lee J. Cobb, but he’s pushing daisies.) I remember the first time I met F, I said, “F, you . . . are fabulous.” And he agreed.

My favorite president? Harry S. Truman. The
S
stood for sexy; Harry was one hot haberdasher. It would have been Richard M. Nixon but the
M
stood for Milhous. Milhous, by the way, is Quaker for “Momma’s Boy.” Nixon took his mother everywhere. I’ll never forget the inauguration. There was the leader of the free world dancing with her urn.

My favorite singer? k.d. lang. Not only does she make great music, but she’s really handy with a hammer and nails, and can get me free tickets to the
Ellen
show. Best of all, if k.d. likes you she will come over and clean your shag carpets with her tongue. And, FYI, if you haven’t seen her lately, she’s starting to look an awful lot like Wayne Newton.

My favorite poets? T. S. Eliot and e.e. cummings. Although I must admit, e.e.’s resistance to capital letters speaks to a serious lack of healthy self-esteem. Or a broken typewriter. (This is often how genius is born. If Monet could have afforded a palette, he would not have been forced to mix his paint colors
on
the canvas; if Al Jolson didn’t stutter, all of America would not have sung “T-T-Tootsie good-bye”; and if Teddy Roosevelt’s wife was not such a shopper and didn’t constantly beg him for money, he would not have yelled, “Charge! All right, all right, charge.”)

In fact, if Mel Gibson were P. U. Gibson, not only would I go back to seeing his movies, I might even revisit his anti-Semitic remarks.

JUNE 12

Dear Diary:

Flying to Omaha, Nebraska, for a concert tonight. I’m feeling really fat so before I disembarked the plane I pulled the seat belt into its narrowest length. This way, no matter how thin the next bitch is who sits there, when she sits down and tries to buckle up she’ll have to loosen it and she’ll feel fat, just like I did.

Playing the Midwest is fun but tricky. The audiences are really, really nice but really, really Waspy. They’re so Christian, even the women have foreskin.

JUNE 13

Dear Diary:

Show went great last night in spite of the fact that it was like playing a Bund meeting. Heading off to Topeka for the second concert on the “Watch the Jew Entertain the Gentiles” tour. Unlike Jews, gentiles keep their emotions totally within. When a Jewish mother dies, the daughter screams and beats her chest and pulls out her hair for a week. When a WASP mother dies, the daughter does a small sniffle and then says, “Pity. Who got her shoes?”

JUNE 14

Dear Diary:

In Kansas and I adore the people here. They have great pioneer hardiness. One gets to see the big sky and get a true sense of the American work ethic. Media pundits think Kansas is completely ass-backwards because the people in Kansas don’t believe in things like science and math and reading and electricity and weather, but those same pundits forget that Dorothy was from Kansas. Yes,
that
Dorothy: Toto-loving, witch-killing, ruby-slipper-wearing, gay icon Dorothy. Right-wing Kansas is the birthplace of all things gay, so how un-hip could the place possibly be? If there was no Judy there would be no Liza, and if there was no Liza there would be no Betty Ford Clinic, and if there was no Betty Ford Clinic there would be no TMZ to report gossip, and if there was no gossip I’d be working as a waitress in a diner in Yonkers, New York. I
love
Kansas.

JUNE 15

Dear Diary:

I flew back to New York for a minor procedure; I’m having my lips done. Not
those
lips; the ones on my face. I need a little filler. But truly only a little. I don’t want to turn into one of those Beverly Hills housewives who have so much filler in their lips that they look like ducks and the only place they fit in is Disneyland. I’ve never understood why those women do that. They don’t look sexy. Their lips are so swollen they look like they’ve spent a weekend with Josh Brolin.

JUNE 16

Dear Diary:

Procedure went well. Healing quickly. I should be able to purge soft foods by 8 p.m. tonight.

JUNE 17

Dear Diary:

I think I had too much wine last night and apparently did something I should regret because I got a phone call from Meg Ryan’s publicist and lawyer this morning, threatening me with a lawsuit. It seems I was so happy with my big new lips, and being under the influence of Novocain and Merlot, I called Meg and left the following message on her answering machine: “Hey, Meg, quack quack, how are your duck lips, quack quack? I think my agent can get you an audition for an Aflac commercial. Quack-fucking-quack.” I’ll send her an apology gift—and some pâté.

JUNE 18

Dear Diary:

About those
other
lips. I would never get a vaginal rejuvenation. At my age, the only person interested in getting inside my vagina is my probate lawyer because it’s where I hide my really good jewelry.

I can’t figure out how a woman knows if her vaginal walls need to be redone. My gynecologist hates to examine me because my vagina is dropping so fast that he is in danger of getting a concussion unless he wears a hard hat. I know my vagina is stretched, as a year ago I had seventy-seven Chilean miners trapped in there. Next time I go to my gynecologist, Dr. Lickapussy, I’ll ask him if I need a vaginal tightening. If his answer echoes three times, I’ll assume it’s a yes.

JUNE 19

Dear Diary:

Good news! James Gandolfini is dead. Wait, that looks wrong. It’s not good news that he’s dead—he was a lovely man. But good in that a few weeks before he passed I mentioned to Melissa that I had seen him on a talk show and he didn’t look well. So, should the comedy thing fall apart, I think I’ve got a future running a psychic hotline.

The media called James Gandolfini an American icon because he was a “murderer with a heart.” Nonsense. He was an actor playing a murderer with a heart. You know who was a murderer with a heart? John Gotti, that’s who. And
his
heart used to beat at ninety beats per second because he had just ripped it out of the chest of a perfectly healthy young man who had the effrontery to look at him the wrong way in an IHOP.

Everyone was all shocked and stunned that Gandolfini died. Why? He was morbidly obese and smoked and drank like crazy. I’m surprised he lived as long as he did. Same thing with Michael Jackson. When MJ died people were acting all shocked that he kacked out. Again, why? For years he lived on a diet of Propofol and small boys. How he made it to fifty is anyone’s guess. How he made it to a fifth-grade homeroom at the age of forty-seven is not anyone’s guess but an ongoing felony investigation.

JUNE 20

Dear Diary:

I went to my friend Beyoncé’s penthouse last night and her two-year-old baby, Blue Ivy or Blue Room or Blue Balls—I’m not sure, I know it’s Blue something—was watching
Romper Room.
I decided I hate Miss Sally. For as far back as I can remember, at the end of every show Miss Sally holds up a “magic looking glass” and says hello to various boys and girls out there in TV land. It was always, “And I see Billy and Johnny and Patty and Kim” (of course, these days it’s “Joquamda and Latisha and Mohammad and Fareed”), but never once, in all these years, have I ever heard her say, “And I see Joan, from Larchmont,” or, “I see Joan, who is debuting on Sullivan,” or, “I see Joan, who is having filler injections in Dr. Diamond’s office.”

JUNE 21

Dear Diary:

Today is the official first day of summer—which means it’s also the first official day of my having to stop people on the street to say things like, “Please put on a shirt, your boobs are dragging on the sidewalk. It may not bother your wife, but you’re making
me
nauseous, Mr. Feldman.” Man boobs annoy me, big time. Why can’t they leave us something? It’s enough that men are becoming sensitive and waxing, but now they have breasts? It’s not right! Poor Angelina Jolie; she never thought she would say, “I’d give my eyeteeth to look like Kevin James.”

Speaking of Angelina, she’s started a trend in preventative medicine. Yesterday while visiting my podiatrist, he said, “Joan, you might get a plantar wart; hey, let’s take that foot off now. You can use the extra shoe as a vase.” I said, “Dr. Schwartz, isn’t that a bit extreme?” He stood up and said, “Not at all. Look at my body! Do I look great or what? I’m a man in my fifties and I’m wearing girls’ jeans—and you know why? Because I was scared I might get a bump on my hooha so I just lopped it off! I’ve never been happier. Finally, I’m a junior petite. It’s a small price to pay for not standing in front of a urinal.”

JUNE 22

Dear Diary:

Just got back from the drugstore. I don’t usually run those kinds of errands myself, but my housekeeper took time off to sell her six-year-old daughter’s kidney—at least I think that’s what her note said; I don’t read Esperanto. So I had to go to CVS myself. Whenever I go there I fill my cart with tampons, maxi pads and lube. Let them wonder.

JUNE 23

Dear Diary:

Went to a party last night with my agent Steve Levine’s secretary’s second cousin, Alan. He’s an unmarried, fifty-two-year-old nebbish with a lisp who made a small fortune in women’s foundations. “Joan, would you like to thee thome new Thpanx?” “No sanks, Alan.”

The party was a big snore. There wasn’t one person there who could either advance my career, or even better, destroy the careers of anyone who could even marginally be considered my peer. (By the way, I hate the word “peer,” as in, “O.J. Simpson was found guilty by a jury of his peers.” Unless the jury was made up of twelve rich, African American, Heisman Trophy winners who appeared in the film
Towering Inferno
, O.J. wasn’t tried by a jury of his peers; he was tried by the twelve stupidest people in the United States.)

I guess this means I really don’t have any “peers,” either. A handful of drag queens who do me in lounges in Vegas doesn’t count. Do the math: How many
other
octogenarian female Jewish comedians with acid reflux and two cable shows do you know?

JUNE 24

Dear Diary:

Today the Supreme Court approved gay marriage! Well, they didn’t actually “approve it”; it’s just that five of the Supremes love going to well-catered events and don’t really give a shit what the occasion is. (You haven’t lived until you’ve witnessed Ruth Bader Ginsburg shoving baby lamb chops into her purse.) Now that I’m an ordained minister, this means more work for me, which means I won’t have to go to the women’s shelter when I lose all my money in a game of strip poker with Larry King.