Is My Bow Too Big? How I Went From Saturday Night Live to the Tea Party (30 page)

I went back to Venice Beach ten years later, hoping to reconnect with God. I picked up a rock as a “souvenir” and walked toward the waves. I wished I could make God show up again, but I knew it didn’t work that way. He wasn’t a magic genie. Since our last meeting here, I’d obeyed God by loving my family. They were thriving. Marriage was good. I had started a stand-up career. We were financially stable. I didn’t have a hangover. I’d enjoyed a brief stint filming in Vancouver, the
Lil’ Romeo Show
, where I got to play a magical nanny for five months. After twenty episodes, I was ironically “let go” the week the
Hollywood Reporter
review said I was the best part of the show. It had been a challenge. Master P (Percy Robert Miller) was frequently late, if he showed up at all. We’d stand in makeup for hours waiting for him. While taping my last episode, Master P actually hit me in the back of the neck twice. When I told the higher-ups they said there was nothing they could do since Master P owned the show. I thought about all this as I sat by the crashing waves. I waited and listened, but lightning doesn’t strike twice. I waited some more. Then, I heard God say, “I have kingdom business for you,” then He was gone.

We try to find meaning in our lives. We search for even the smallest little clue in a song, a romance, a journey, a book, a career, or a cause that will reveal to us the unique purpose we were made for. I might have found mine. I had written this poem my senior year of high school, and it was printed in our yearbook:

A Purpose

I started thinking to myself

as graduation grew near,

What should I be or do in life?

What is my purpose here?

I wanted to leave my footprints on the sands of time.

I wanted to have success and be well known.

I wanted to be rich and great and wanted much to come

From seeds through life that I, myself had sown.

I thought, even if I became a famous person,

And on fortune I did look,

All I’d gain would be, perchance,

a page in a history book.

And what would happen to all my wealth

and riches I had in store,

When someday I was faced with death

knocking at my door?

…I had thought my purpose

could be found in things on earth.

But now I know only God can give

a life that has real worth.

I know my purpose now, and friend,

I hope you find yours too,

Cause only then can you have real joy.

Let God give happiness to you.

It’s a bit trite and juvenile, but it shows where my heart was when I was sixteen.

Maureen died at the age of thirty-six from breast cancer. She left four children. Maureen was one of the little gymnasts who had been trapped in the Buick with me on those long road trips with my Dad’s pontificating in the driver’s seat. My last memory of Maureen was age fourteen, in the gym. My Dad asked me to quote
John 3:16
to her. He had a bad memory. He used to call gymnasts “Curly” or “Blondie” because he couldn’t remember all their names. I quoted the verse. I felt kind of embarrassed standing there in my purple leotard with chalk stains on my hands and sweat under my arms quoting the Bible, but it also felt powerful watching God’s Word in action outside the church. It was like how Dad took tricks out of the gym and placed them in unpredictable places, like when he did a flip off of a mailbox, a handstand on his car, or a flip off the pier.

I copied him when I placed my balance beam routine on Johnny Carson’s show while simultaneously singing my punk rock song,
I Am an Angry Woman
. Now I do handstands on top of everything and anything I can find, wherever I go, and I photograph them: at Niagara Falls, on the hood of Paul’s police car, near a cactus in Arizona, the big tire in Detroit, a red fire engine in Vancouver, in front of a gothic cathedral in Cologne, on a fire hydrant in Birmingham, and in the middle of the street in Reno. The most dangerous handstand I’ve ever held was in a clear, twenty-foot-high, champagne-glass-shaped bathtub in a red-velvet honeymoon suite in the Poconos… naked. My husband took that photo, only after much persuasion. It’s a collection—my handstand collection.

So one night, I was doing stand-up at
The Comedy Zone
in Charlotte, North Carolina, and up walked Maureen, twenty-two years older than when I last saw her. She was gorgeous as usual. Then she pulled her hat and wig off. She was bald! She looked me right in the eye and said, “Vicki, I have cancer!” We both stood there in shock. Death is something you see in a movie or talk about in church. It never happens to you. While the other comics performed onstage to loud raucous laughter, Maureen and I slipped into a small room and talked. She told me that my Dad was the only person in her childhood that told her about Jesus. She told me that she had recently become a believer in Christ. I told her that I drank and smoked. I was trying to say that I deserved cancer. She told me that the cancer had spread to her brain, and that the steroids she took to shrink the tumors made her puffy sometimes. As we spoke intensely to each other, I noticed that two ex-gymnasts, whose lives had briefly crossed paths long ago, were discussing Jesus, cancer, and death in a broom closet, while drunken people sitting in a big cloud of smoke were laughing at dirty jokes on the other side of the door. Their laughter that I usually craved now sounded crass and hollow. A knock on the door broke up our strange reunion and I had to go back onstage for the second show and do my stupid act. She distractedly put her wig and hat back on. We hugged and parted. I wasn’t very funny that night.

As the year passed, Maureen’s brother kept in touch with me. He and Maureen allowed me the privilege of sharing her death— her passage into heaven. Because her husband hated God, she wasn’t allowed to read her Bible, even in the final stages of her illness, so I sent her letters filled with every Bible verse I could find that dealt with her situation. Her brother read her the letters. He said her face lit up when he read passages like, “…our perishable earthly bodies must be transformed into heavenly bodies that will never die.” When this happens… the Scriptures will come true: “Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is your sting? O grave, where is your victory?”

The day Maureen died, I planted a gardenia bush in my backyard in her honor. I had to do something symbolic. I’d never died with someone before. The Bible is more real when someone you love dies. It’s not just words anymore. The gardenia bush started to die. I didn’t water it enough. Well, so much for mushy, symbolic gestures. But when I turned around some days later, blossoms covered the bush.

The Bible is simple enough for a child to understand, and theologically stimulating enough to keep intellectuals like C.S. Lewis and my University-of-Chicago-graduate-PE-teacher-Dad constantly studying it. Dad is eighty-three, and his organs are wearing out. He never drank or smoked. He’s proud of that. He has a patch on his face where skin cancer was removed. He has tubes coming out of his kidneys. Maybe it was all those Tabs. He’s like the Velveteen Bunny, all sewn together in patches. His hip surgery left one leg longer than the other, so he shuffles to church with one elevated shoe every Sunday to teach Sunday-school. It is made up of six old men. One, Harold, is not a believer. He asks a lot of questions. Dad leafs through his worn Bible and answers them. Dad is leaving a legacy.

Handle Us with Care

There were days in the gym

Trying to be slim

You know a woman is always too fat

There were years in the mirror

Trying to get nearer to the boy

Who was gone just like that

If only you knew

What me and my uke have been through

I think that you would handle us with care

On the cheerleading bus looking down the long, dark road

After watching the football team play

The Best of Bread and Karen Carpenter wove through

My ukulele strings and sang all of my teenage angst away

If a picture paints a thousand words

Desperado, why don’t you come to your senses

Baby I’m a want you, Baby I’m a need you

I’m on the top of the world

On the way to LA with my gay friend in the car,

Route 66, we were young and naïve.

“You’ll be a star,” he would say, “Just let your ukulele play.

Let the world see the heart on your sleeve.”

All alone, don’t phone home

There is nothing for you there.

Write a song, you’ll belong to a dream.

Tell your cat where you’re at. If you listen to his purr

He says, “nothing’s as bad as it seems.”

If only you knew what me and my uke have been through

I think that you would handle us with care

Suddenly I’m on a stage

With the world at my feet

Vulnerable as a body can be

You’re amazed at the sound

when the curtain comes down

Of applause—how addictive it can be

Then you give up your life

to be a mother and a wife

And when no one can see you, you sigh

Dust your ukulele off and then you can release

All that jazz in a soft lullaby

Now you sit in a chair with your first grand baby there

Crawling up to your grandmother knee

And you smile and you say,

“What do you want me to play?

How ’bout that good ol’ standard, Jesus Loves Me?”