Wishin' and Hopin' (14 page)

But then Father Jerry said, “And, of course, there’s our actors to thank as well. Ladies and gentlemen,
this afternoon you’ve seen the world premiere of “Jesus Is the Reason for the Season” by Saint Aloysius Gonzaga’s very own fifth-grade playwright, Rosalie Twerski, and you’ve also witnessed on this historic afternoon Saint Aloysius G’s first-ever
tableaux vivants
, which I sure hope will now become an annual tradition at this great school. And who knows, maybe by next year we may even have those couple of little kinks worked out for you.” That made people laugh. “So why don’t we get the curtain open again and have our players and their director
extraordinaire
, Mrs. Marguerite Frechette, step forward and take a bow. (“Oh my god,” Simone noted later. “The audience gave you guys a standing ovation.” When I asked what that was, Ma was the one who answered. “It means everyone liked you so much, they got up off their culos to cheer for you.”)

When the others stepped to the front of the stage to take their bow, I was too embarrassed to get up, so I stayed put in my corn crib. But when Lonny looked back and saw me, he had him and Ronnie Kubiak
carry the manger up to the front, too. And when they did that, everyone cheered kinda loud, and so I waved at them and that made them cheer even louder. And while I was looking out at the audience, I found Ma, Simone, and Frances. They were in the fourth row, right in the middle. Nonna wasn’t with them, though, so I guess her corns were bothering her. I kept looking for Pop, but he wasn’t there, so I figured Chino musta still been sick. And then? I
did
see Pop. He was way over on the side, three quarters of the way back, between this old lady who must have been somebody’s grandma and this other, younger lady with big giant hair and a kerchief. And when I waved, Pop waved back, and so did the kerchief lady next to him and I was like, I wasn’t waving to
you
, Mrs. Big Hair.

Then Father asked Mrs. Button and Madame to join us on stage, and when they did, Sister Fabian and Mother Filomina each came out with these bouquets of roses. Red ones. Sister Fabian gave Mrs. Button her bouquet and Madame got hers from Mother Filomina. And Mother Fil not only gave her
her flowers, but then she hugged her for a kind of a long time, and it wasn’t one of those fake hugs that people give, but a real one. And when they stopped hugging, Madame blew a kiss to the audience and gave them one of those curtsies like people give to Queen Elizabeth, and one guy even whistled.

And then Father Jerry said, “Well, folks, I guess that wraps things up except for one final detail. So let’s all stand and sing, ‘God Bless America.’” And everyone did, even me. And in the middle of it, Jackie’s lamb started squirming so much that he let him go. Then Eugene let his go, too, and the lambs started running around the stage bleating, and the first and second graders, and even some of us older kids, started chasing them, and one of the lambs jumped off the stage and people in the audience started chasing him, too.

Back up in our classroom, Pauline Papelbon must have been feeling better because I seen her eat some of the refreshments, including two of Ma’s pizelles. Zhenya’s father kept telling me to have some of his
raisin and milk curd strudel, and I didn’t really want to but I didn’t want to hurt his feelings either, so I tried some. It wasn’t that bad, but it wasn’t that good either, and when Mr. Kabakov was talking to Marion and his family, I chucked it in the garbage can. I asked Ma where Pop was, and Ma said that it was too bad, but he must not have been able to get away from the lunch counter. “Yes, he did,” I said. “I saw him.”

“You did? Then I guess he had to go back to the depot and finish up.”

While all the other kids and their families were eating and talking and laughing about stuff, I kept looking over at Mr. and Mrs. Twerski and Rosalie.

They were sitting by themselves in the back, looking kinda gloomy. Rosalie had changed back into her regular clothes and had gotten the rest of her beard off, but there was this kind of big red mark on her chin where her goatee had been. When I walked toward her, her eyes squinted like she was getting ready for me to say something snotty. But what I said to her was, “I really liked your play.”

“No you didn’t,” she said. “You told me you thought the ending was dumb.” Mrs. Twerski put her hand on Rosalie’s arm and shook her head.

“Yeah,” I said. “But then I thought about it some more and changed my mind. Now I think it was a good ending.”

She blinked. Nodded. “What do you say, sweetie?” Mr. Twerski said.

“Thanks,” Rosalie said. I said you’re welcome and started to walk away. “Hey, Felix?” she said. When I turned back toward her, she said, “You were a pretty good Jesus, too.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Better than that doll, anyway.”

“Thanks,” I said.

Out in the school parking lot was where Simone and Frances had their disagreement about whether Franz Duzio had only picked his nose or if he had both picked it and eaten it, and Ma said, well, she hadn’t seen Franz do either of those things, but maybe that was because she liked to focus on the positive and
not always on the negative like
some
people she knew. (She looked at Frances when she said that last part.)

When we got home, there was a note from Pop that said to meet him down at China Village in Easterly so’s our family could celebrate what a great job everyone did in the Christmas show,
“especially whoever that kid was who played Baby Jesus. He was terrific!”
To this day, I remember in vivid detail what happened next….

W
e get in the car—Ma, my sisters, and me—and drive to Easterly. Along the way, I count the number of houses that are decorated with Christmas lights. That song by the Chipmunks, and “White Christmas” and “Jingle Bell Rock” play on the car radio. Plus that French song by the Singing Nun, “
Domenica nica nica
….”

Pop’s already there, sitting in a half-circle booth with red plastic upholstery. He’s drinking a bottle of beer—Rheingold—and has already ordered Ma this fancy red drink that comes with pineapples and
cherries on a stick. “What do you kids want to drink?” he asks us. Me and Frances both want Shirley Temples, and Simone just wants a Coke.

“Ready to order now?” the waitress asks after she brings us our drinks. Pop tells her we need a little more time. I’m still pretty full from all the refreshments in our classroom, but in a few minutes, when the waitress returns (she’s wearing a shiny red kimono), I will order a number 16 with gravy, an egg roll, and pork fried rice and eat it all, no doggy bag.

Frances asks Pop for a quarter and, when he fishes one out of his pocket, she gets up and goes over to the jukebox. There’s a fish tank right next to it, so I get up, too. There’s carp in there, huge ones with bulgy eyes, plus a ceramic mermaid that doesn’t have any shirt on. “Woo woo,” I go, pointing at the mermaid, and Frances calls me a moron. You get three songs for a quarter. Frances feeds Pop’s coin into the machine and punches a bunch of buttons. Dusty Springfield starts singing.
Wishin’ and hopin’ and thinkin’ and prayin’ plannin’ and dreaming each night of his charms…

After I slide back into the booth, I stick my finger in this orangy stuff in a little dish and taste it. It’s good. Sweet. “Duck sauce,” Simone says, and I go “Qwack, qwack, qwack.” Ma says she’ll qwack me if I put my fingers in there again. Then she turns to Pop. “So Felix said you got to the school after all.”

And Pop says, “Yeah, right about when that jerky kid threw the bottle cap at the stage and got the bum’s rush out of there. When he walked past me, I felt like getting up and giving him a good, swift kick in the
culo
for good measure.” Ma asks him, did he have to go back and close up the lunch counter? Was that why we didn’t see him up in my classroom for the refreshments?

“Nope,” he says. “That wasn’t it.” He’s smiling kinda mysterious, like that time when, for Mother’s Day, he bought Ma a dishwasher and hid it under some old blankets in our garage.

“Where were you then, Poppy?” Frances asks.

“Do you want me to tell you or should I
show
you?” Pop says. And we all go
hub?
Then he reaches
down on the floor, picks up this big envelope, takes out three glossy black and white photos, and hands one to each of us kids.

Simone’s says, “For Simone, With my fondest wishes, Cousin Annette.”

Frances’s says, “For Frances, With my fondest wishes, Cousin Annette.”

And mine says, “For Felix, Who was the best performer in the whole Christmas show!! Love, Cousin Annette.”

Pop asks me if, when I waved at him from the stage, did I see that both him and Annette were waving back? And I go, “That big-hair lady was her?”

“Sure was, kiddo. Her father called me. She’s in the middle of a press tour for her new movie. She’d just left Manhattan and was heading up to Boston, but I didn’t want to say anything because she wasn’t sure she’d have time to stop on her way and I didn’t want you kids to be disappointed. What a sweet gal she is—as sweet as sugar. And man oh man, you should’ve seen the limo she was riding in. First class
all the way…. Simone, honey, maybe you better close your mouth now, or you’re going to start catching flies in there.”

“She was actually
there?
” Simone says. “In the same auditorium we were? You’re not just kidding us?”

Pop asks, what does she think? That
he
autographed those pictures?

“But for real, Pop? She was really, really there?”

I tell Simone yes, she was. Because other than Pop, I was the only one in our whole family who saw her.

“Until now,” Pop says. He’s looking toward the front of the restaurant, and when I look, too, there’s this big black limousine pulling up to the curb. The waitress returns. “Ready to order now?” she asks. “Everyone here?”

“Almost,” Pop says.

The front door opens, and there she is. Pop stands, calls her name, and waves. She waves back, smiling, and starts toward us.

Sister M. Dymphna
(
née
Jean McGannon) returned to her Saint Aloysius Gonzaga fifth graders in January of 1965, at which time she halted the teaching of conversational French but also discontinued her policy of ranking pupils academically on the blackboard and by seating chart. In 1980, she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder (then called manic-depressive disorder) and responded well to treatment. In 1984, her order forsook traditional nuns’ habits for street-clothes and launched a number of social justice ini
tiatives. Today, seventy-nine years old, Sister Jean volunteers at Ecole Agape, a school for impoverished Haitian girls.

Father Gerald “Jerry” Hanrahan
left the priesthood to marry in 1967. A retired social worker, Hanrahan lives with his family in Seattle, Washington.

In 1968,
Monsignor Angus Muldoon
succumbed to emphysema and alcohol-related diabetes. In his honor, St. Aloysius Gonzaga Parochial School’s advisory board established the Monsignor Muldoon Memorial Medallion, an award given each year to a graduating eighth grade boy who exhibits, in the manner of the school’s namesake, “high moral conduct.” In 1968, the inaugural prize was shared by
Roland
and
Ronald Kubiak
.

Mother M. Filomina
(
née
Phyllis Benvenuto) left her post as principal of St. Aloysius G in 1979 to become the residential supervisor of the Holy Family
Home, a shelter for the homeless in Worcester, Massachusetts. She held that position until her death in 1986.

Following the retirement of her husband, a haberdasher,
Madame Marguerite Frechette
returned to her native Québec. Active in community theater there ever since, she has directed and/or performed in no fewer than seventy-seven productions. The Frechettes, now in their mid-eighties, visit Paris yearly.

Pauline Papelbon
and her sister were withdrawn from St. Aloysius Gonzaga in March of 1965 and sent to live with out-of-state relatives. Under Sister Dymphna’s direction, Pauline’s former classmates wrote and signed a group letter to her, but she never wrote back. Recently, however, she resurfaced on the
Dr. Phil Show
in a program titled “Love Your Life, Not Your Carbs.”

As a district manager for the Dunkin’ Donuts corporation,
Franz Duzio
oversees the operation of
more than 200 stores in central and western Massachusetts. The former lead singer of the Skinnydippers, a surf band, he is also a published poet whose work has appeared in the literary magazines
Upwind, The Boll Weevil Review
, and
Art & Noise
. With his son, Franz Duzio, Jr., he edits
Screw You: An On-Line ’Zine of the Arts
. Duzio and his wife (the former
Geraldine Balchunas
) have five children and one grandchild, Franz Duzio III.

Marion Pemberton
borrowed his signature line—“Wait’ll the NAACP hears about this!”—from entertainer Sammy Davis, Jr. At the 1964 Academy Awards telecast (at which Sidney Poitier became the first black American to win the “best actor” Oscar), Davis, a presenter, was handed the wrong envelope. His ad-lib received the best laugh of the evening. In March of 1965 Marion Pemberton’s oldest sister, Brenda, a college student, was injured and imprisoned during the Selma-to-Montgomery march, and Pemberton identifies this as a defining event in his
life. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania School of Law, he is a Southern Poverty Law Center attorney. He and his wife, a pediatrician, live in Marietta, Georgia, where they organized campaign fundraisers for Barack Obama in 2008. Having dropped the “n” in his given name, he is now known as Mario Pemberton, Attorney at Law.

Following the fall of the Soviet government in 1991, a front page
New London Day
article recounted the 1963 defection to the U.S. via Norway of Boris Kabakov, a writer and KGB infiltrator, his wife Lina Kabakova, an industrial engineer, and their niece,
Evgeniya “Zhenya” Kabakova
, who was passed off as the couple’s daughter for security reasons. The daughter of itinerant circus performers, Zhenya Kabakova had been orphaned at the age of ten when her father, Ivan Kabakov, Boris Kabakov’s brother, was killed by a spooked elephant during a thunderstorm. (Ivan Kabakov’s wife had predeceased him.) Following her graduation from St. Aloysius
Gonzaga and the Academy of the Sacred Blood, a Catholic girls’ school, where her peers voted her Class Dancer, Class Clown, and “Most Boy Crazy,” she entered the Zachary Smith Academy of Beauty and became a licensed hairdresser. Married and divorced twice, she has over 800 “friends” on the Facebook social network and is today employed as a blackjack dealer at Circus, Circus in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Thrice married and divorced,
Lonny Flood
is a graduate of Windham (CT) Technical High School. Employed by a number of area plumbing businesses, he received his foreman’s license in 1996 and oversaw the plumbing operation of Wequonnoc Moon Casino and Resort, retiring from that position in 2008. He owns time-shares in Sandwich, Massachusetts, and Branson, Missouri, and, through Facebook, has reconnected with his former classmate, Zhenya Kabakova. Recently treated for high blood pressure and erectile dysfunction, Flood takes a daily diuretic and
Viagra as needed. He is in the process of relocating to Las Vegas, Nevada.

Rosalie Twerski
was valedictorian of her classes at both St. Aloysius Gonzaga and the Academy of the Sacred Blood. A
magna cum laude
graduate of Notre Dame University’s School of Business, she subsequently toured for two seasons with Up With People! Married to James Hibbard, an actuary, hers is a familiar face seen on billboard and grocery cart advertising across east-of-the-river Connecticut, from which she declares, “Take it from me, Rose Twerski-Hibbard, Re/Max Realtors’ Top Seller Month After Month After Month: IF I CAN’T SELL YOUR HOUSE IN 60 DAYS, I’LL BUY IT MYSELF!”

Alvin “Chino” Molinaro
purchased the New London Bus Station’s lunch counter from its previous owners in 1985. The business went into foreclosure the following year, after which time Molinaro relocated to
Orlando, Florida, where, when last heard from, he was employed by KleenPoolz, a swimming pool maintenance company.

Following his retirement from the food service business,
Salvatore “Sal” Funicello
was active in Festa Italiana, an annual community event, and was the New London County Senior Citizens’ bocce champion for six consecutive years. Surrounded by his three children, he succumbed to congestive heart failure in 2001. His final words were, “Take care, kiddos. I’m running out of gas. God bless.”

In retirement,
Marie (Napolitano) Funicello
was active in the St. Aloysius Gonzaga Rosary Society and the church’s Grief Committee, for which she knitted “comfort shawls” for deceased parishioners’ loved ones and cooked for post-funeral buffets. A victim of stroke-related dementia in her last years, she resided at Easterly, Rhode Island’s Saint Catherine of Genoa Nursing Home. In October of 2005, she informed
her son Felix that her husband Sal had dropped by that morning to help her pack. Rather than pointing out that Sal had been dead for over four years, Felix asked her if she was going on a trip, to which she replied, with a Cheshire grin, “As if you didn’t know.” She died in her sleep that evening.

Perhaps it was her playpen encounter with her later-to-be-famous third cousin at a family picnic that made
Simone Funicello
long for an Annette-like life. (At the age of eleven, she had begged her parents for permission to have her name legally changed to
Jeannette
Funicello.) As a stepping stone to her own imagined Hollywood career, Simone enrolled in modeling school in 1966. Her modeling jobs were few: a Grange fashion show, a weekend stint as a Chicken of the Sea mermaid positioned in a papier-mâché scallop shell at a Hartford, Connecticut, food show. In 1967, she entered the Miss New London County beauty pageant but failed to place in the pageant’s top five. She entered dental hygienist school soon
after. For the past twenty-four years, she has been employed by the office of Maya Paulous, D.D.S. She resides in Niantic, Connecticut, with her husband of twenty-nine years, Jeffrey Sands, and the couple’s son, Luke. As do no fewer than four other family members on his mother’s side, Luke Sands, twenty-seven, lives with the challenges of multiple sclerosis.

In the living room of her Noank, Connecticut, home,
Frances Funicello
displays a framed 1966 photograph of herself, a bubble-haired radio contest winner, standing shoulder to shoulder with her blond, bubble-haired idol, British pop star Dusty Springfield. Frances earned a Bachelor’s degree in early childhood education from the University of Connecticut and a Master’s degree in reading from New York University. She is employed as a reading specialist in the Stonington, Connecticut, school system. Like Dusty Springfield, Frances came out as a lesbian in the mid-1980s. “Just a phase,” her mother assured her father, but Frances’s parents came to love their
daughter’s partner, Victoria Jankowski, a U.S. Navy nurse who in 1996 ran afoul of the U.S. military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. Frances and Victoria were married in February of 2009, shortly after gay marriage was legalized in Connecticut. The couple enjoys hiking with their two dogs, Ella and Libby.

During his freshman year at Alexander Hamilton Senior High School,
Felix Funicello
grew five inches and finally became taller than over 50 percent of the girls in his class. The subsequent elongation of his face and the soft, dark down that had begun sprouting above his top lip made him look less Dondi-like. At Hamilton High, he took honors courses, ran cross country and track, and was elected class treasurer. An English major at the University of Massachusetts, he unexpectedly fell in love with film—
Midnight Cowboy, Fellini Satyricon, Five Easy Pieces, The Last Picture Show
. In his senior year, he opted for graduate school, wanting both to study movies more widely and deeply, but also to escape his parents’ never-quite-
spoken fantasy that he would return to New London and run the lunch counter with, and then for, them. He met his future wife, Katherine Schulman, at the Waverly Theatre, a cramped fifty-seat alternative movie house in Easterly, Rhode Island, that featured stale popcorn, sticky floors, and an excellent Tuesday night foreign film series that Schulman organized. It was at the Waverly that Felix became enamored not only of Kat but also of the French film directors Truffaut, Godard, and Malle, whose work he analyzed in his doctoral thesis, which was later published by a small arts press. In 1983, the year the couple married, Kat gave birth to their daughter, Aliza, and Felix was hired as an assistant professor of film studies at Emerson College. Kat and Felix divorced in 1991. To date, Dr. Funicello has published six books on film and is currently at work on a seventh: an examination of the second half of actress Bette Davis’s career, from the 1950s
All About Eve through Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte
, and the films of her final years. After
his parents’ deaths, Felix wanted nothing of theirs except the family photographs, of which he was made unofficial curator. Of those hundreds and hundreds of black and white, Polaroid, Kodachrome, Instamatic, 35 mm, and digital photos, Felix has three favorites, each taken in 1964: a picture of his mother posed between TV personality Art Linkletter and future U.S. President Ronald Reagan; a photo of his family at their New London bus station food concession, Felix and his sisters seated on stools in the foreground, his parents standing behind the lunch counter; and a snapshot taken by a waitress at a Chinese restaurant. In this picture, Simone and Frances flank their cousin Annette on the left, Felix and his parents on the right. Everyone smiles and waves.

B
orn in Utica, New York,
Annette Funicello
was cast by Walt Disney as one of TV’s original Mouseketeers in 1955 and quickly became the most popular cast member of the
Mickey Mouse Club
. She
also starred in a number of Disney motion pictures and recorded four Billboard chart hits. With her costar Frankie Avalon, she later became a beach picture icon. In 1965, she married agent Jack Gilardi and the couple had three children together, Gina, Jack, and Jason. Later divorced from Gilardi, she married Glen Holt in 1986. In 1992, she was designated a Disney Legend. That same year, she disclosed to the public that she had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. The following year, she established the California Community Foundation’s Annette Funicello Fund for Neurological Disorders. Blind, wheelchair-bound, and in the advanced stages of her debilitating disease, to many of her baby boomer fans she remains America’s Italian-American sweetheart.