Might as Well Laugh About It Now (22 page)

It’s often the mishaps in life that are remembered most fondly when you look back. Good times can be experienced and enjoyed by all, but it’s those bumps in the road that really bond people together as family.

In the well-known story line of
The Sound of Music
, Maria leaves behind her convent life—which she had believed was her destiny—and becomes a wife and a mother to seven children. Over the course of the two-year tour, playing the part of Maria close to five hundred times, I began to feel the same way. I left behind my solitary career as a country music performer to become an accepted member in the family of Broadway performers. I later starred in the role of Anna in the Broadway production of
The King and I
. They have asked me “home” to do other shows many times over the past decade. I hope they keep the door open, because . . . someday.

Stuff

Seriously, the directions are in Chinese. Help!

“Sight unseen” was how my friend described her impulsive spring-cleaning technique. She told me that she went into the storage area of her house, carried out three large dusty, taped-shut boxes, and put them into her car. She then dropped them off at the Children’s Hospital thrift store as a donation.

“Wait!” I said in disbelief. “How do you know what you gave away if you never looked inside?”

“I don’t,” she answered. “It was really liberating. It’s the new bra burning! I’m protesting being smothered by too much stuff.”

Her enthusiasm was convincing.

“I hope you didn’t accidentally give away any heirlooms,” I said.

She assured me that she knew exactly where she had stored everything of personal value to herself and her family. She was guessing that the unopened boxes had contained all types of unnecessary things, from old Christmas decorations to coffee mugs, from toys long outgrown to high-fat cookbooks that were no longer useful.

“Probably full of ugly stationery, mismatched picture frames, outdated evening bags, and all of those things that had been packed up and stored in case I needed them someday.”

As my friend summarized, “If ‘someday’ hasn’t come up in the last two years, then somebody else could probably make better use of whatever is in the box.”

Her new goal was to not use storage at all, except for extra sheets and blankets and maybe one box of tree lights and ornaments.

In America, where one in ten households pay for an off-site storage space, and over 1.8 billion square feet is being used to hold our personal belongings, doesn’t it appear obvious that many of us have a “stuff” problem?

I hate to point fingers, but in my house it’s mostly because of the kids. Really. I kept track for an entire week, so I have scientific proof.

I started on a Monday, and this is what entered my house via a person under four feet eight inches tall within eight and a half hours: a scouts manual and neck scarf; a thirty-two-ounce empty pineapple juice can that was supposed to be converted into a small hamburger grill as a project; four Happy Meal
Star Wars
toys with eight switches and buttons and bobbling heads; two empty nugget cartons; a box of sixty-four crayons along with twenty-four washable markers; two birthday goodie bags each containing seventeen loose plastic objects; a hammock pillow; a stack of permission slips from sports organizations; a crumpled ribbon of stickers; and book club order sheets. In addition to that, new sneakers, a fake tree branch for the real lizard, video game cartridges, football shoulder pads, a Razor scooter, and a combination lock were all unloaded from the car into the house. Two plastic lightsabers (borrowed from a playmate), a blow-up air mattress for sleepover pals, and a DVD of
SpongeBob SquarePants: Pest of the West
rounded out the accumulation of stuff we had acquired from eight a.m. to four thirty p.m. I think I missed the partridge in a pear tree.

I’d need a spreadsheet to give you the details of Tuesday through Sunday, but let me just say that 0.0001 percent of it belonged to me.

Truly, I can’t seem to even acquire a much-needed new four-dollar spatula to flip the French toast after the last utensil was consumed by my rabidly efficient garbage disposal. After watching shards of silicone fly through the air, I now use an extension rod to turn the disposal on from across the room! It’s so ferocious that the other day when my teenager’s little black poodle went missing for a bit, we all turned to look suspiciously at the garbage disposal. We’ve nicknamed the disposal “Jaws.”

Recently, I was in New York for a press junket and to appear on a number of morning shows. As the car that picked us up from the airport drove through the streets of Manhattan, I started to notice that an “organizational” or “container” store had sprung up on almost every city block—huge two-story shops that sell stuff to help us hold all of our stuff.

As we neared the hotel where we were staying, I asked my longtime manager, Karl, if he had much stuff put away in storage. He burst into laughter.

“I pay ninety dollars a month to store five sets of water skis we used twice in the mideighties, a saddle from a horse that passed away fifteen years ago, and a treadmill that was cutting-edge technology in 1996,” Karl said, shaking his head. “And, if I’m not mistaken, we have the minibike we gave Brett for his twelfth birthday.”

Brett is now in his thirties, married, with two sons.

“Brett probably doesn’t even remember that bike,” Karl said with a sigh. “I don’t know why we still have it.”

“How many years have you had the storage space?” I asked him.

“Twenty-eight,” he replied, shaking his head. “That’s over twenty-eight thousand dollars I’ve paid to store about three thousand dollars’ worth of stuff.”

We couldn’t help but laugh. “Maybe Jimmy Hoffa’s in there,” I said.

As I looked at Karl’s sweet, sentimental father face, I tried to remember what I had been given as a child, the possessions I thought were so necessary to my existence, which were now long forgotten. I still have a couple of baby dolls that were the very beginnings of my collection, but almost everything else has been shuffled out of my memory bank except, oddly enough, some purchases I made with only one penny.

On summer days in Huntsville, Utah, when I was a little girl, my mother would give me one penny to take to the corner store. Being in a small town, this tiny one-room shop was the “everything” store. There were two or three choices of laundry detergent on the same shelf as the boxed cake mixes. (Ever had a devil’s food cake with a Dreft aftertaste?) Garden hose or panty hose, fishing waders or boxed stuffing mix, they were all available. Paper dolls, thumbtacks, canned fruit, and packs of bobby pins shared a display bin on a countertop. I had my personal favorite section of the store. On the end of one crowded aisle were bins of little toys like tiny plastic telephones, magnetic dolls that kissed, plastic jewelry, and water pistols. I would study each toy as if it were a museum piece, something to be hoped for in the future, but nothing I could have today just because I wanted it.

Above the toy section was a row of penny candy in jars, and I remember the distinct feeling of being lucky enough to have a penny to spend. It took quite a while to choose because I knew there was no second chance. One penny was all I had, and one piece was all I would get, even if I regretted my choice.

To this day, I couldn’t tell you what shoes I wore to the Emmy Awards in 1999, or even what jewelry I wore on QVC last week, but I can remember exactly the look of a grape Pixy Stix, a red jawbreaker, and the line drawings of children playing that were imprinted on a Tootsie Roll wrapper. It wasn’t how much I wanted the candy that keeps this memory ever present in my mind; it was the process of learning how to be selective. The power I felt as a child in choosing came from actually having to choose, and then in appreciating that I had figured out what I really wanted. I doubt that I would even recall this time of my life if I had been given a dollar every day.

As our next generation zigzags down the Short Attention Span Disposable speedways that our society seems to encourage, we’re paying a lot of money to store away too much stuff that barely had any significance from the beginning.

I decided that it was time for a family project. I gave to each child a cardboard box with instructions to pack up the toys they hadn’t played with in the past year. And if it was broken or missing pieces, they were to put it in a separate box. With some moaning and groaning, as if they had been asked to literally separate the wheat from the chaff, as in biblical times, they began to choose which possessions to box up and which ones they cherished.

I told them that I would clean out my own cosmetics drawer and shelves next to my bathroom mirror. I had no idea how many products I had and never used until I started to sort them. I was preoccupied for so long that at one point my eleven-year-old rolled an orange through the door to me and said: “You better have a snack, Mom.” Well, I was starting to feel weak.

By the end of the day, four cardboard boxes of toys had been sealed closed with packing tape and put in the car.

“Where will our toys be?” my nine-year-old asked.

“Probably in a lot of different homes all over this city,” I answered. “Won’t you feel good knowing that some boy or girl will play with them and appreciate them every single day?”

There was a momentary gasp and then slowly some secret smiles. I’m always touched by the joy my kids get from knowing they helped someone else. Their eyes sparkle and they always seem to stand a bit taller.

Brianna carried my box of unused cosmetics to the car. “Who is going to need all this makeup?” she asked dryly.

“I don’t know, sweetheart. Maybe there’s a clown school in town.”

My twelve-year-old picked up the carton of broken toys. “Where does all this junk go?”

I could have sworn I heard a rumbling sound, like an empty stomach. It came from the kitchen.

The kids looked at each other and my nine-year-old yelled, “It’s Jaws!”

In Search of a Last Name