Happy Accidents (10 page)

Our friend Mick Napier had just rented a huge, filthy storefront on the
3700
block of North Clark Street. He was calling the space The Annoyance. He offered it to the Soloway sisters on Tuesday nights to do what they would. The opener for the night was a mock-live game show called
The Real Live Game Show
, created by another friend, Eric Waddell. Audience members would come up on stage as contestants and compete for real prizes. The headliner was a live performance of one
Brady Bunch
episode each week in a stage show called
The Real Live Brady Bunch
. Jill created the script by watching tapes of the original TV show, rewinding constantly, and typing every word. Our stage rendition was verbatim. Faith would play all the music live on the keyboards, including the instantly recognizable incidental music. We closed the evening with our own “Alice the maid”–inspired rendition of Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit”
(a long drug reference that conveniently included the words “Go ask Alice”) as we Bradys tripped out in a psychedelic, drug-crazed nightmare. Instead of seats, the audience would sit on old ratty couches so it felt like you were watching television in your living room. Smoking and drinking were not only allowed, but encouraged.

Faith asked me if I wanted to play Alice, the maid, or Carol, the mom. I chose to play Carol, who was played by Florence Henderson in the series, because I felt I would be a natural what with my hair color and all. I told them that my friend Mari could play Alice, because not only was her hair color correct, she actually looked like Alice. So much so that she ended up becoming a bit of a sensation. After a couple of different Mikes, Andy Richter would settle in to play Carol’s beloved husband. I had just turned thirty, and all the adults playing the kids were in their late twenties and on the chubby side. Our costumes were threadbare seventies clothes and smelly wigs from thrift shops. I fashioned a Florence Henderson shag with a few wispy pieces of blond wig hair attached to a piece of thick yellow yarn. A couple of painted plywood cubes served as our set, and we used only a few props.

We drank beer and ate pizza during our first rehearsal and laughed our asses off as we spoke those familiar Brady lines. We figured that only our friends and maybe a few other Brady fanatics would show up to see our show. And though ecstatic to be revisiting a favorite childhood show long gone, we were pretty half-assed with our preparation. On the opening Tuesday night, we had a last-minute run-through with light cues and music, got a bunch of pizzas and beer, and were sitting on the roof of the theater. All of a sudden we were shocked to see people gathering down below. There was a line snaking from the front door, down the street, and around the block—all to see
The Real Live Brady Bunch
.

A lovely lady. Me as Carol Brady.

The place was packed. It was a hot early summer evening and there was no air-conditioning. The converted storefront reeked of beer, smoke, and BO. As we stood in our places waiting for the show to start, I could hear my own heart pounding. When the lights came up on that first scene and we were revealed in all our Brady glory, the place went wild. I looked wide-eyed over to Mari and she gave me her best Alice smirk. I gave her a beatific Carol smile in return as the Brady kids chortled in idiotically.

A bunch of Real Live Bradys.

At seven bucks a ticket, the show was sold out every night and we had to turn people away. Soon we started doing two shows each Tuesday, at seven and nine, and still both performances sold out every single week. The show became a sensation and started getting national press in magazines like
Rolling Stone
,
Newsweek
, and
People
. Everyone was happy, except Sherwood Schwartz, the creator of
The Brady Bunch
. When he heard about it, he had a cease and desist order sent to The Annoyance claiming copyright infringement—which was valid. It looked like he wanted to shut us down.

Me as Carol, Pat Towne as Greg, and Florence Henderson.

Faith and Jill Soloway.

One Tuesday night he showed up, unannounced, in Chicago, at the dumpy Annoyance. And bully for him, he was going to see for himself what all the fuss was about before he shut us down. It was the night of the Johnny Bravo episode, where Greg Brady signs a record deal and lets fame go to his head. Sherwood Schwartz stood in the back as people were screaming out the dialogue before the show had even started. Word got out that he was in the house, and the audience starting chanting “Sher-wood, Sher-wood!” and bowing in his direction and saying “I am not worthy.”

We brought him up to the stage and introduced him, and the place went nuts. He told a reporter for the
Chicago Tribune
, “It was the most incredible experience I’ve ever had. I felt like a rock star—at my age!”

Seeing the show changed Schwartz’s mind. He decided we were doing it with love and respect. He declared that he would charge us only a dollar a week as a token royalty. The show would go on.

Soon after that, much of the original Brady family would come to see our show, including Florence Henderson (Carol), Barry Williams (Greg), Christopher Knight (Peter), Susan Olsen (Cindy), and Eve Plumb (Jan). Robert Reed (Mike) came to see us when we did it at the Village Gate in New York City. A very good sport, he was also a contestant on
The Real Live Game Show
.

Davy Jones of the Monkees, who appeared in a
1971
episode of
The Brady Bunch
, not only came to see the show but played himself thirty years later in our live stage version of the episode he’d been in. He sang “Girl,” let Marcia pursue him again, and took pictures with all of us. True to form, my mother, upon pasting a photo of him and me into my scrapbook, labeled it “With Billy Joel.”

Actually, it’s Davy Jones.

I
remember being onstage at the Annoyance doing
The Real Live Brady Bunch
, looking at my fellow performers all decked out in their Brady wear and wigs, their faces earnest and committed, and thinking
Can it get much better than this?
I was loving life in the big city, loving performing with these people. We all laughed so much, and I felt like that laughter was healing the part of me that had always felt broken and out of place.

Plus, every performance was a group catharsis, with all of us, actors and audience alike, sharing in the dirty secret that this TV family was the family we wished we’d grown up in. Where else but in the Brady household could you pitch a fit, storm off to your room, slam the door behind you, and then hear a gentle knock, followed by, “Honey? Do you want to talk?” It was the relationship we wished we could have had with our parents, and we just couldn’t get enough of that show.

After years of a nodding acquaintance with my brother, Bob, we were finally bonding and really enjoying each other. We were living in the same building on Surf Street on the near north side. Every week, he and I would go out to dinner at a little basement shack of a restaurant called the Half Shell. We did this not only to catch up with each other but also to revisit the hilarity of that week’s episode of a new TV show called
The Simpsons
. We’d wolf down their specialty, “steer and prawns,” and drink beer after beer after beer. After the food and
The Simpsons
recap, we’d stumble around the corner and across the street to a tavern called the Gaslight and drink some more.

In the midst of the lighthearted hilarity and camaraderie of
The Real Live Brady Bunch
and my growing relationship with my brother, I became absorbed in the much more serious pursuit of figuring something out about myself in this world. It was spurred by the absolutely transcendent experience of reading a book called
The Seat of the Soul
by Gary Zukav. All my life, I’d felt I was at the mercy of people and circumstances; I’d had the sense that life was happening
to
me. This book presented the jaw-dropping idea that I had the power to consciously choose how I see the world and the people around me, and that my life could be different if I made more powerful choices. That thought blew my mind, and opened my heart.

I bought a copy of the book for Chris. He had the same powerful experience, so we each bought several more copies to give to our friends. We became evangelists for this book.

Realizing the power of my own choices led to a moment of reckoning that I wasn’t at all eager to have. I had tried to deny it, to ignore it, to tell it to go fuck itself, but it wouldn’t go away, and it was shouting at me now: I drank far too many Miller Lites. I had a problem. But whenever I entertained the idea of stopping drinking, I would panic. As the reckoning creeped its way into my conscious mind, it felt like my best friend was dying.

I’d been an everyday drinker since the end of high school. I never got crazy or out of control—I worked, I paid all my bills and taxes, and always showed up for everything not only on time but early—but I was starting to get sloppy. Some mornings, I’d wake up and shuffle to the bathroom to find vomit from the night before. I had absolutely no recollection of how it got there, and that freaked me out.

My
Brady
boozing had put me over the edge. Every performance promised a big and crazy night that I couldn’t wait to get to, but every time it would kick my ass. In spite of how the night always ended, it always began for me with gleeful anticipation. With a bounce in my step, I’d hightail it to the theater at
5
P.M.
-ish and initiate that first beer run so we could get it going at the run-through before the show. I’d drink during both shows and would be inebriated by the final bow. Afterward, we’d move on to the Lakeview, a tavern across the street from the theater. I was usually still there when it closed at
7
A.M.

The hangovers were debilitating. I remember “coming to” many a morning feeling like I’d been beaten up or poisoned. I remember, too, my delight in telling my friend and roommate Mari of my discovery of a surefire way to avoid hangovers: Nyquil! “It puts you right to sleep and you wake up in a soft cotton place.” But soon enough, even the Nyquil lost its power and I once again started to wake up with a pounding head.

One day, in the midst of this endless alcohol-and-hangover cycle, I decided I needed to “cut back.” Instead of every day, I would let myself drink just two nights a week—on my night out with brother Bob and also on Tuesday nights before, during, and after the show. But the overachiever in me kicked in and I drank enough on those two days to make up for the other five.

I finally came to terms with the idea of quitting drinking on a winter night in
1991
, when I was on the phone with Chris. He was living in New York then. After years of doing drugs and being a huge boozer, he had been sober for a few years and was working out and eating well. He was healthy. He had always been a more prodigious drinker than I, and we proved the old AA adage of “he spilled more than I drank.” His level of tolerance for emotional and physical discomfort was also much higher than mine, but even he had reached his limit.

As we were talking about nothing in particular, I poured myself some red wine into a big green glass goblet I used to drink from. I looked at it, then went to the sink and poured the whole thing down the drain. “That was my last drink,” I said to Chris. Though I had been aware of how destructive my drinking was for me, I hadn’t conceived of giving it up. The resolve felt like it came out of nowhere, and all of a sudden I couldn’t be a person who drank anymore. I was “struck” sober.

“Cheers to queers,” he said, and then we just kept talking and didn’t mention it again. And that was the last drink I ever had. I never really drank wine, so it’s kind of sad that I didn’t go out on a Miller Lite, just for old time’s sake.

The very next night, Steppenwolf was having a party to celebrate the opening of its new state-of-the-art theater space on Halsted and North Avenues, and when I got there, the free booze was flowing. I looked around and thought,
Well . . . maybe I’ll start this sober thing tomorrow.

But then another thought popped in my head:
If not now, when?
Because I knew tomorrow there would be another party, and I’d want to say, “You know what, maybe I’ll start tomorrow.” There would always be another party. I had to just stop. I also remembered something in
The Seat of the Soul
about how every time you say no to your addiction, you fund power for yourself. I decided to fund my account starting that night. Turning away from the drink in that moment was made rather effortless by that thought.

The night I poured that wine down the sink something changed, and I have never really wanted to drink since. I don’t know what happened. It’s as if something in me just shifted, or maybe lifted, and I no longer had that particular compulsion.

Robbed of the promise of a boozy reward at night, I began creating a delicious fantasy life. All that compulsive energy had to go somewhere, and I was a long-standing fan of a good delusion. Love relationships in the real world were not happening for me. People always said, “You’re just so focused on your career!” but actually I was just so focused on my fears, my insecurity, and my lack of worthiness and entitlement that I had no room for intimacy. Intimacy was revealing, emotionally sticky, and made me feel goofy—and it certainly wasn’t something I was ready to do sober. I remember getting very close to kissing someone at around this time and literally feeling like I was going to throw up.

So, like any rational person would do, I fell in love with a dead person.

I had discovered Greta Garbo on April
16
,
1990
, the day after she died. The obituary in the
Chicago Tribun
e printed a picture of her in
Camille
, and I was enraptured. It was love at first sight. I raced off to the video store and rented every Greta Garbo movie they had, and I spent the next several months watching them over and over. But it really got bad after I stopped drinking. She was elusive and mysterious and so misunderstood. In my somewhat obsessive, though chaste, musings, I was her love, the one person who “got” her. So real were my fantasies that they seeped into my actual day-to-day existence. If someone asked how I was and I happened to be in mid-reverie, I would sigh and say, “I’m wonderful! Just wonderful!” I was in a dopamine-fueled bliss—based on a fantasy—about a dead person.

As close to Greta Garbo as I’ll ever get. Me with Greta’s star on Hollywood Boulevard.

In addition to the gift of the black-and-white romantic film starring me and Greta Garbo running in my head, being a non-drinker transformed my day-to-day experience. For the first time in my adult life, I was brushing my teeth and washing my face before going to bed. I awoke every day at the crack of dawn and was thrilled not to have a hangover. I drank pots of coffee all day long. I found myself eating about a gallon of chocolate ice cream daily to replace the copious amounts of sugar my body was used to from my daily beer intake.

I did, however, continue my habit of taking Nyquil before bed. I wanted oblivion. Though no longer drinking Miller Lite, I was still in need of something to soothe me. The fact that Nyquil had alcohol in it was not something I acknowledged at all. I still considered myself on the wagon.

Around this time, Jill Soloway masterminded a
deal with theater producer Ron Delsner to bring our production of
The Real Live Brady Bunch
to the Village Gate in New York City. This was not an obvious place to stage a TV parody. Over the course of its thirty-eight-year history, the Village Gate had been home to the likes of Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane, and Nina Simone. The nightclub must have been on its last legs when it agreed to book our crazy show, because it closed just a few years later.

Jill’s deal for us was a nonunion one that would pay us $
900
a week, far more than the union, Equity, was paying. I was the only one in the cast who was a member of Equity, so I used a false name—Greta Wesson—to do the show. “Greta” was a tribute to my beloved, and “Wesson” was for the cooking oil Florence Henderson was hawking on TV. Someone turned me in (I think it was an ex-agent), and Equity wanted me to come before some board of members and plead my case for why I shouldn’t be thrown out. “And let me tell ya,” some union rep warned me, “we will not have much sympathy for you.” Given those odds, I resigned from Equity.

Nine hundred dollars a week was a lot of money to us—more than any of us had ever made. Living in New York City wasn’t cheap, so everyone got places together . . . except for me. Truth to tell, no one asked me to bunk up with them. Yes, I was newly sober-ish (still taking Nyquil) and they were not. But I think the real reason they didn’t invite me to share an apartment was that I still viewed myself, and thus made myself, separate and outside. I could have piped up and asked, but I felt unable to deal with the possible rejection and humiliation of asking and being turned down. If I had really been using all that new information I was gleaning from
The Seat of the Soul
, I would have seen that my feelings of being alienated and alone were of my own making. But I just couldn’t make the leap to reshaping those beliefs.

No one in this group of Brady people was excluding me, and if you were to ask any one of them how they viewed me at this time, they would probably be shocked to learn that I had felt so alienated. They probably thought I just wanted to keep to myself.

So here I was, back in New York. I could only hope this time would go better than the last. My first order of business was to make sure I had a rock-solid, secure place to live. I wanted my own bed, in a place where I wouldn’t get kicked out by screaming men in the middle of the night, and where my cohabitants wouldn’t make more than me by giving blow jobs. The West Village, where I had lived and suffered over myself, felt heavy and menacing, so I stayed away.

I went down to the Parkside Evangeline house, a “ladies only” residence on Gramercy Park, run by the Salvation Army, where they rented rooms by the week. You had to be interviewed, so I sat down with an old woman who kept referring to “the General” as she told me the rules.