Happy Accidents (18 page)

It was to my home that all my friends came early on the morning of September
11
,
2001
, to watch the coverage of the horrible attacks. Everyone stayed all day, and we ordered dinner in because no one wanted to leave. We felt so vulnerable. It was like after the earthquake in
1993
: it seemed as if the world could end. We were all in shock and leaning on each other. For the next handful of years, I was religiously devoted to MSNBC. I had felt so unsafe after the attack, but the events that followed, with Bush and Cheney’s wars, just made it worse. I didn’t trust George Bush and was shocked that someone whom I perceived to be not all that smart could be elected president. I was afraid of what he would do next and feared that he was lying to us all. I needed to be informed to feel safe. I loved putting my feet up in my living room, sitting in front of MSNBC, and soaking in information like heat from a fire.

I now had a home; I had a family, albeit a furry one. I had very strong long-term friendships. I was deeply interested in the political events of my world. I really was an adult. I felt like I was able to handle my own trials and tribulations, without waiting for someone to swoop in and take care of things for me. I was still shopping for furniture, but I was starting to feel settled on the inside.

I also stopped going to Alcoholics Anonymous. I had been going to AA meetings steadily for more than eight years, and I was starting to drift away. I didn’t have any urge to drink, and hadn’t in what seemed like forever. I was getting my succor from my friends. I left my identification as an alcoholic behind and went about being just myself.

The following January, I passed an important test when I woke up on my tenth AA anniversary in Park City, Utah, with a horrible flu. I was at the Sundance Film Festival with Jeannie and some other friends, enjoying some moviegoing and the winter weather. I didn’t have a film in the festival; it was just a beautiful place to hang out and see new independent films. Between screenings, Jeannie skied and I hung out in coffee shops. I loved the vibe of that festival, and because this was in
2002
, I had a good chance of getting in to see any movie I wanted.

When I came down with the flu, I just wanted to check out and sleep. Nyquil popped into my consciousness.
Dare I? On my AA anniversary?

I did, and I fell fast asleep. When I took that shot of Nyquil, I took a huge step toward trusting myself. I knew that I could take it for its intended purpose and trust that when I woke up, I wouldn’t make a mad dash for a six of Miller Lite. I woke up feeling rested, less flu-ish, and with no desire to get loaded.

I also readily dispensed with the fear of that unspoken AA notion that if you stop going to meetings, you will surely drink again. I felt I could have my sobriety and take my medicine, too. I have great gratitude toward AA, but my association with it had simply reached its conclusion. Part of me was still unsettled, but I coped through more adaptive methods, like latte consumption and clutter prevention.

Speaking of coffee, I was enjoying my “first to
day, badly needed” one morning in the bathtub, when Chris Guest called to tell me we were doing another movie.

“You play the guitar, right?” he said, as if he assumed I did.

“Well, I can play two chords.”

“Great. Learn another one.” I think it was Bob Dylan who said all you need is three chords and the truth.

The movie was to be called
A Mighty Wind.
It would follow three folk-singing groups of the late sixties and early seventies as we prepared for a tribute concert to honor the recently deceased manager we had shared. The story had us all meeting in New York City’s Town Hall to celebrate the music that had shot us “straight to the middle of the charts.” We would be “back together for the very first time.” The cast was almost identical to that of
Best in Show
, and I was delighted beyond words to be making a musical movie with them.

Chris wanted us not only to sing but to actually play our instruments, and not just random twanging like I’d done at the sixth-grade talent show, but well enough to do a concert tour after the movie came out. So we rehearsed the music for weeks ahead of shooting. Parker Posey learned how to play the mandolin. I actually added several new chords to my repertoire and worked to improve my almost complete lack of rhythm. John Michael Higgins (who we all just called Michael) played a tiny classical guitar that was always falling out of tune. He was also not very good at playing it. At the end of rehearsing a song, he’d play its last chord loudly and with a flourish so we could all hear how wretched it sounded.

Me, Parker Posey, and John Michael Higgins.

In the film, Michael and I were matched up as husband and wife, Laurie and Terry Bohner (pronounced, yes,
boner
). We were members of the folk-singing group the New Main Street Singers, loosely based on the New Christy Minstrels. Michael was our bandleader not only in the movie but also in real life. His guitar playing may not have been very good, but he was a wonderful director and arranger. Back when we were shooting the dog show scenes in
Best in Show,
Michael had taught us songs with arrestingly beautiful vocal harmonies. We’d gathered to sing at any opportunity during those shoot days, and the music we made together was so beautiful it literally brought tears to our eyes. I knew he’d be superb after the gorgeous sound he’d gotten out of us in between takes of
Best in Show
, and he was.
He arranged all of the New Main Street Singers’ tunes and even wrote one himself. Michael is a musical savant. He knows every song any vocal group has ever performed and could teach you every part in the arrangement. He has a record collection that fills up an entire room of his house.

In the New Main Street Singers, Michael gave me the high soprano part, which was a real stretch for me, but like everyone else in this group, I worked my butt off and rose to the occasion. For someone like me, who had grown up singing and whose soul was massaged by it, the whole experience was joy, joy, joy. Just like with Jennifer Coolidge before him, my time with Michael felt enchanted, and I fell in love with him just a little bit.

Before shooting
Best in Show
, Jennifer and I had talked a lot about our characters, thinking about all kinds of possibilities for their relationship. Probably because we were so busy focusing on the music, Michael and I barely even had a brief powwow before we started shooting
A Mighty Wind
, so I didn’t know what he was going to do and he didn’t know what I was going to do. We both heard each other’s story for the first time with the cameras rolling.

Being unable to control one’s laughter while shooting is not only unprofessional, it ruins the take. Over the years, I’ve learned some pretty fail-proof techniques for keeping myself from laughing, including biting the inside of my cheek and saying the Hail Mary to myself. I had to do some heavy praying and cheek-biting when Michael began to speak about the “mostly musical in nature” abuse he’d suffered as a child.

For my part, I had decided that Laurie Bohner was a woman with no shame about her porno past. I purposely gave her a womanly sexual confidence because I had no idea what that felt like. I put chicken cutlets in my bra, emphasized my round ass, and sprayed on a tan. Although I couldn’t
wait
to shed this getup at the end of the day, it actually got me more in touch with my womanly self. Though I didn’t keep using the chicken cutlets, I did continue showing more cleavage after we were done shooting.

My inner MILF.

In between the shooting of
A Mighty Wind
and its premiere, my dad was diagnosed with lung cancer. It was small cell carcinoma, the kind that’s usually too far along by the time it’s discovered to do anything about.

My dad was the type of guy who went to the doctor for a cold. He wasn’t a hypochondriac, but he was mindful of his health. Like most of his generation, he had smoked when he was a young man and was given a ration of cigarettes while in the service. But he had quit more than thirty years prior, so the diagnosis was a kick in the pants.

He went through a couple of rounds of chemotherapy, but we had all been told that it probably wouldn’t do much to stop the cancer. It just made him very weak. My dad had always been the head of the household, the good husband and provider, and I had seen him vulnerable only a few times in my life. But now my mom was fully in charge. He even let her drive. Julie stepped up to help during this time as well, going to their house at all hours to deal with one crisis after another. And I flew back home every couple of weeks to be with them.

While I was there one week, my mom came down with a severe kidney infection and was on fire with fever. She had to be in a separate room because we couldn’t risk my dad catching anything, and I remember the doctor telling me I had to get my mother’s temperature down by putting wet washcloths under her armpits. She was almost delirious and was resisting me, and oh god it was awful.

My dad as a U.S. soldier in World War II, guarding the Iranian oil fields.

Meanwhile, my dad was worried and scared, and turned this into a fixation on some insurance papers that he couldn’t find. He kept asking about them, so I told him I would find them, and that all he had to do was focus on feeling better. He said he was relieved, so I searched the house for the insurance papers while trying to take care of him and my mom. I ran up and down the stairs to tend to both of my parents.

At this point it really hit me that I was no longer a kid. The people who had taken care of me now needed me to take care of them.

When her fever finally broke, Mom walked to the stairs to yell down to my dad, who was set up on the first floor, that she loved him.

My dad had gone to twelve years of Catholic school and Mass every Sunday of his life, yet I don’t think he ever really thought about his own death. He did what he was supposed to do and kept faithfully moving through life. Now that he was facing his mortality, although he had been such a good man, he seemed frightened of what was to come. I wished he could be at peace.

We took him to hospice in early June and tried to focus on keeping him comfortable. He had been at home for a while, but he was experiencing delirium and needed round-the-clock care. I know my mom had an awful time accepting that she couldn’t take care of him anymore.

My old friend Chris’s parents, Mike and Joan, had been hospice volunteers for years and had learned a few things about helping people pass away. They told me that people have a hard time letting go if there are matters in life that remain unresolved, or if their loved ones are present in the room. After my dad had been in hospice for about a week, my mom finally found those insurance papers he had been so worried about. She whispered this in his ear and went down to the gift shop to buy something that had caught her eye earlier. Always the shopper, my mother. When she came back, the nurse told her that my dad was “actively dying.” I think he picked his time, and let himself die.