Award-winning actress Linda Lavin in A Short History of Decay
There’s a remarkable scene in A Short History of Decay, the début film by writer/director Michael Maren, that will be familiar to anyone whose life has ever been touched by illness—which is to say all of us. Sandy Fisher, played with exquisite nuance by award-winning actress Linda Lavin, is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s and aware that she’s losing her lucidity. Sandy has just had a brave, candid conversation about the reality of her illness with her son, Nathan, a writer played by Bryan Greenberg. She reveals how scared her husband (Harris Yulin)—is by the prospect of losing her—he’s in poor health himself, having suffering a stroke. The ostensible subject of the conversation is Sandy’s need to move into an assisted-living center, but the subtext is mortality, and Lavin’s performance is a master class in acting. It is during their embrace, when her son cannot see her eyes, that she reveals the fear and terror she’s kept at bay.
I’ve kept my eye on this beautiful film throughout its development. My mother had Alzheimer’s. Unlike Lavin’s character, however, my mother was not aware of what was happening to her—her version of the disease announced itself suddenly, with episodes of paranoid delusions. Having lived through her nightmare, I can’t say I would have preferred a gradual declension of the sort embodied by Sandy Fisher—the “short history of decay” that would have allowed for time to accept and adjust and plan. Knowing my mother as I did, I think that living with an awareness of what was happening to her mind would have horrified her.
My focus on this scene, and my interest in the Alzheimer’s arc of the film, should in no way mislead you into thinking that A Short History of Decay is depressing. Far, far from it. The film’s triumph is the hope that plays like a horizon note throughout its patient, careful storytelling. That, and its moments of pure grace and humor. Maren, whose mother has Alzheimer’s, drew from his own life in writing the film, which he has called “a darkish comedy.” Critics such as Marshall Fine of the Huffington Post are praising Maren for managing “the nifty tonal trick of telling a tragic tale and somehow making you feel hopeful about its characters.”
I had the chance to interview Linda Lavin by phone during the run-up to the film’s release; it opens in New York City at the Village East Cinemas on May 16. I asked what she looks for in a script or screenplay, and what, in particular, drew her to Maren’s film.
“I look for a script that makes me laugh and cry while I’m reading it,” she says. “Michael’s screenplay felt comic, tragic, real, funny, and sad.”
How did Lavin prepare for the role of a woman afflicted with Alzheimer’s?
“I didn’t prepare,” she says. “I just showed up. I used my imagination, and what was in the script—what Michael had written. This is a personal story for him, so we would ask him questions. He was a very gentle guide as a director.”
But enough telling. Let me show you the trailer for the film:
Alice Doesn’t Work Here Anymore Lavin’s portrayal of Sandy Fisher might surprise audiences who know her only as the iconic and beloved waitress Alice Hyatt from the hit CBS series Alice, a role which earned her two back-to-back Golden Globe awards. So, for those who haven’t kept up with her career, here’s a quick primer: Two years after Alice ended its nine-year run in 1985, Lavin won a Tony Award for her performance as Neil Simon’s mother in BroadwayBound, a role for which she also won Drama Desk, Outer Critics’ Circle, and Helen Hayes awards.
All in all, Lavin has earned six Tony nominations—for The Last of the Red Hot Lovers, The Diary of Anne Frank (where, as Mrs. Van Daan, she was first paired as Harris Yulin’s wife), The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife, Collected Stories, and The Lyons.
At 77, Lavin is as busy as ever. In addition to the release of A Short History of Decay, she stars in a new play at the Vineyard Theatre in Manhattan. Nicky Silver, who wrote The Lyons, created the part of Audrey Langham in Too Much Sun for Lavin.
“I’m excited to be playing this character—a successful American actress having one spiritual awakening after another,” she says.
When I asked her what life experience had the most significant effect on her art and on her career, her answer was that of a woman intimately familiar with spiritual awakenings:
“Life is about evolving. I can’t say I would point to one experience. I believe everybody and everything that’s ever happened to me has gotten me this far. I have more to learn, more to do. Each experience leads me to a place of knowledge and surrender and truth, and the ability to accept things as they are and the courage to change the things I can.”
Even if you haven’t seen Philomena, the acclaimed 2013 film directed by Stephen Frears, and starring Dame Judi Dench and Steve Coogan, the media attention surrounding it has possibly made you aware of the fraught issue of closed adoption—especially those adoptions arranged and sanctioned by the Catholic Church in Ireland. The heart-wrenching tale of an unwed girl’s loss of her child in 1950’s Ireland, when the nuns at the abbey that took her in adopted him out to an American couple, received many critical accolades and awards—four Academy Award nominations among them, including a Best Picture nod and a seventh Best Actress nomination for Dench. Based on the book The Lost Child of Philomena Lee, by Martin Sixsmith, the British journalist who helped Philomena in her search for her son—50 years after his birth—the film is now available on DVD and Blu-ray, VOD, and Pay-Per-View. If you missed it during its theatrical release, I urge you to see it now—especially if you are an adoptive parent, as I am.
My son is now nearly 33 years old. Because his story overlaps with mine (as each of our narratives intersect with those of others), I asked M if he would be comfortable with my telling my part of our shared story. He assured me he would. (He hasn’t yet seen the film, although he’ll be coming over soon to watch it with me.)
Before I get too far ahead of myself, take a look at the trailer, and note the unexpected moments of humor in this beautifully crafted film:
I’m glad that I was alone when I watched Philomena. Although I was aware of the story and how it develops (I’ll not provide spoilers here, so continue reading without concern)* I viewed it privately not to shield my son from my reactions to the film, but rather to give myself space to have those reactions, and to reflect on what this courageous woman’s story meant to me.
That’s Philomena’s Story. Here’s Mine. If you’ve read the serialized medical memoir on my blog, you already know the circumstances that led my first husband and me to adopt a child. We don’t get much from Philomena’s story about the way adoption changed and fulfilled the lives of her son’s adoptive parents. (The adoption of three-year-old Anthony Lee, later known as Michael Hess, was almost an afterthought; he was paired at the last-minute with a younger girl whom the St. Louis couple had traveled to adopt.)
So let me tell you, from my experience and perspective, what it felt like the first time M was placed in my arms:
I was overwhelmed by love. I was ridiculously happy to have him in my arms.
M was four-and-a-half months old and crying when we first met him in the agency office. (We discovered, once we got him home, that he had a terrible case of diaper rash.) The first thing I noticed was his full head of beautiful, dark blond hair. When your ability to bear a child is taken from you as emphatically as was mine, you are unquestioningly grateful when you are fortunate to adopt. As thrilled as we were to have an infant, I would not realize until later how much it would have meant—to M and to me—to be able to hold him in the moments after his birth. Did he have an uncanny infant-awareness that a difference existed in the warmth and scent of the body holding him now, compared to that of the foster parent who cared for him in the months since his birth? This was not a thought I articulated then. Then, all I could think to say to him, instinctively and repeatedly, was this: It’s Mommy. You’re home now. It’s mommy. I love you and you’re home now.
Among the charming items we decorated M’s yellow nursery with was a framed poem that I would sometimes read aloud to him:
Not flesh of my flesh,
Nor bone of my bone,
but still miraculously my own.
Never forget for a single minute;
You didn’t grow under my heart
but in it.
It would be a while before my delicious feelings of motherhood could allow room for the fact that there had been someone before me. But as my son grew older, it became clear that if ever in his life he felt he wanted to know his origins, I would move mountains to help him in his search. I did not know—I still do not know—anything about the woman who gave birth to my son other than the fact that she had hay fever and (if memory serves), was of Italian and Irish ancestry. We might have been told that she attended college, but I’m not even sure of that. I know I took notes when we got the call, but those are stored in a box in my first husband’s home. I’m relying on pure, faulty memory here. But I can tell you this with certainty: Whatever powerful reason compelled her to make her decision, I thanked her every day. And each year, on M’s birthday, I say a silent prayer for her.
The heartbreaking difference in Philomena’s situation is that she was not given a choice; Anthony was abruptly taken from her after she had three years—such as they were—with him. (The young girls worked long hours in the laundry at the abbey, permitted only one hour each day with their children). I would like to think that the adoptive parents of Michael Hess, who was born Anthony Lee, said a similar prayer for Philomena.
Open Versus Closed Adoption Because my first husband and I were Catholic, and because we had heard that the wait time was not as long as with the non-religious affiliated agency in town, the Catholic Charities organization in our local diocese arranged our adoption, which was legalized through our county’s probate court. As far as I know, closed adoption was the only process through which a couple in Ohio could adopt a child in 1981. That’s since changed, of course; today, open adoption is becoming the norm, with birth and adoptive parents often meeting one another and exchanging helpful information.
Lori Holden is a blogger and writer from Colorado whom I met at a blogging conference a couple of years ago. She is also an adoptive parent. With her daughter’s birth mother, Holden co-authored a book called The Open-Hearted Way to Open Adoption. I interviewed her via e-mail, and she confirmed that much has changed since our closed adoption in 1981. Holden shared with me statistics from the Donaldson Adoption Institute:
“Prior to 1990,” she wrote, “fewer than 5% of domestic infant adoptions were open. In 2012, 90% or more of adoption agencies are recommending open adoption.”
According to Holden, “there is no set definition” to what open adoption means; she writes that it is not necessarily the case that birth parents meet the adoptive parents, for example. Open adoption might simply mean an exchange of information; for others, it could entail some agreement about contact or integration between the families. To others it could mean access to original birth records, or some combination of all these factors.
“For years, adoption agencies have been telling adopting parents why to do open adoption,” says Holden. There was, however, often no support or guidance in exactly how to go about doing so. The book she wrote with her daughter’s birth mother is, she says, “the girlfriend’s guide I wished had been available at the start of my journey into adoptive parenting. For all the shame and pain caused by secretive adoptions for women like Philomena and her son, Anthony, openness could have been the antidote. Readers say our book helps heal the split that is created at the moment of placement between a child’s biology—the story he’s born with down to his DNA, and his biography—the life that’s written thereafter.”
The Times They are A-Changin’ In Ohio, where I live and where my son’s adoption took place, Governor John Kasich signed into law a bill that will eventually allow adoptees, upon attaining legal age, access to their birth records. According to reporting by Robert Higgs of the Northeast Ohio Media Group, “the law applies to an estimated 400,000 Ohioans adopted between Jan. 1, 1964, and Sept. 18, 1996.” This would include my son; he was born in June 1981.
According to Holden, many states are beginning “to unseal what was once sealed.” In fact, the day she responded to my e-mail, her own state of Colorado put two bills through the legislature. She shared with me a link to a map, created by the White Oak Foundation, illustrating U.S. adoption statutes.
I’m grateful for this new law in Ohio. If and when my son decides to take the next step and conduct a search, his path will be cleared of many obstructions.
What I realized, watching Philomena, was how excruciatingly painful that separation from Anthony was for her. Even as an adoptive parent, I wanted to reach through the screen and prevent that hopeful St. Louis couple from realizing their dream—I wanted to intervene on Philomena’s behalf, so strongly did I identify with her. In experiencing the joy of raising my son and watching him grow into an accomplished young man, I understand the power of a mother’s love.
I look forward to watching Philomena with him.
Postscript Philomena Lee has become an advocate for adoption rights in Ireland, founding The Philomena Project in conjunction with that country’s Adoption Rights Alliance. The organization calls upon the Irish government to implement adoption information and tracing legislation. Philomena Lee is taking her fight all the way to the Irish Supreme Court.
The shame and pain that Holden referred to earlier was such that in Ireland, at the abbey where Philomena was sent, the nuns insisted that the girls’ identity be kept hidden—a fact not included in the film. Anne Midgette, writing in the Washington Post, reported that “the girls in the convent were forced to use other names—Philomena went by “Marcella”—and never knew each others’ true identities.”
When I read this, I had to stop and read it again, and then a third time, to make sure I was seeing what I thought I was seeing. Philomena went by ‘Marcella.’
My name is Mari-Marcelle.
* The following articles do contain spoilers, but I provide them for those who would like to explore the story further:
Lori Holden blogs at LavenderLuz.com and contributes to the Huffington Post. Her book with Crystal Hass, The Open-Hearted Way to Open Adoption, is available at Amazon.com.
Forgive me for what I am about to write, because, in the wake and afterglow of the Erma Bombeck Writers’ Workshop, I risk sacrilege: Erma Bombeck was not what she portrayed herself to be. I submit, for proof, this statement, in the humorist’s own words:
From Suzette Martinez Standring’s PowerPoint presentation at the Erma Bombeck Writers’ Conference: “Staying Power Advice from Top Opinion Columnists.”
I wondered what I had that was unique and ironically enough, I discovered something. I was ordinary, painfully middle of the road, bare boned Ohio Midwest beige, Our Town ordinary…
While it is true that Erma Bombeck wrote about the ordinary, mundane details and events of her life, only an extraordinary writer and person could have taken that ordinary turf and seeded it into fertile mountains of gold. By keeping her ear to the common ground—daily life and love in the realm of domesticity—Bombeck harvested an astonishing legacy as a humorist, writer, columnist, journalist, and television personality. Her hometown of Dayton, Ohio, celebrates her legacy every two years on the campus of the University of Dayton, at the writer’s conference and festival that bears her name. I was lucky; I was one of the 350 attendees from across the U.S. and Canada smart enough to register before the event sold out. In 12 hours.
It takes an extraordinary woman to remain married to the same man for decades, raise three children (all of whom were present at the festival), walk the walk of feminism (she was an early supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment), write and publish, and keep her voice pure and true. No. Erma Bombeck, taken from us much too soon at the age of 69, was as far from ordinary as Dubai is from Dayton.
According to the Bombeck workshop website, http://www.humorwriters.org, Bombeck’s syndicated column, “At Wit’s End,” appeared in more than 900 newspapers. She wrote twelve books, nine of which were on the The New York Times’ bestseller list. She appeared regularly ABC-TV’s Good Morning America for 11 years. She was still writing her column for Universal Press Syndicate and developing a new book for Harper Collins Publishers when she died from complications of a kidney transplant on April 22, 1996.
I believe Erma Bombeck deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as another Ohio-born humorist—James Thurber.
When I was entering adulthood in the 1970s, I read and treasured two of her most famous books: If Life is a Bowl of Cherries, What am I Doing in the Pits? and The Grass is Always Greener over the Septic Tank. Her writing, while hilarious, also made me feel as though I were reading the work of a good friend. That was her special gift, I think. Everyone felt that they knew Erma, and at the conference, everyone did. Her spirit was everywhere, most especially during Phil Donahue’s first-night keynote address. Donahue and Erma lived on the same street in the Dayton suburb of Kettering when both were just starting their careers. Bombeck, then a journalist for the Kettering-Oakwood Times, interviewed Donahue, then an announcer at radio station WHIO in Dayton. A lifelong friendship developed, and the moving eulogy that Donahue delivered at Bombeck’s funeral, which he shared with the audience, encapsulates the honesty, humor, and utter lack of pretense that was Erma Bombeck.
I had an opportunity after dinner to tell Donahue that I loved what he said about Erma, and to present him with two original photographs from the days when his father-in-law, entertainer Danny Thomas, was raising funds for what would eventually become St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. My father was a local fundraiser from Elyria, Ohio, and a huge benefit was held at a Cleveland hotel ballroom in April 1961.
There’s so much more that I want to share with you about the conference—what I learned, who I saw, how I managed to navigate the campus with my knee-scooter and the help of the incredibly supportive staff at the University of Dayton—that I’ll likely have to write another post or two. For now, to keep up with all the conference news, I invite you to go on Twitter and follow hashtag #EBWW2014. You can also follow me there—here’s my handle: @midlife2wife. I’m still tweeting about the conference, so you won’t miss a thing!
I’d write more now, but I have some chores to do around the house. You do know what Erma said about housework, don’t you?
Housework, if done right, can kill you.
So please check up on me via Twitter and here at the blog to make sure that I survived my to-do list.
Ohio artist Leslie Miller was working on this collage—part of a planned series of mixed-media bird paintings—when she was diagnosed with uterine cancer in December of 2003. It is one of the last painted works she was able to complete before losing function on the right side of her body.
In one of cancer’s mystifying quirks, rogue cells bypassed Leslie’s lungs to cross the blood-brain barrier—a highly unusual occurrence—nestling themselves near the center of her brain. Her original cancer, cured after months of chemotherapy and radiation, proved relentless after all: she now had brain cancer. She endured Gamma Knife Radiosurgery (a closed-skull procedure), 10 weeks of radiation, and, finally, traditional open-skull surgery. Her brain—arguably the body’s most sensitive organ—could take no more. Radiation necrosis stilled the hand that had coaxed charcoal, oils, and brushes into astonishing works of art for nearly five decades.
Chemotherapy and radiation saved her life but made it worse.
Ask her what kept her going throughout her health crisis, and her placid demeanor grows slightly emphatic: “I’d just get disgusted with myself for being a crybaby, and tell myself: ‘Stop it! Stop whining and get busy!'”
And so she pushed back against the changes in her life. Eager to return to the bird series, she compensated for her increasing paralysis by resorting to more controllable surfaces on which to work. If she could no longer stand and manage a canvas, she could sit at her dining room table and draw on envelopes.
By 2006, however, the loss of the fine motor skills so essential to drawing was complete. In a masterful reinvention, Leslie exchanged brushes and pencils for a Panasonic Lumix digital camera, finding art in the ordinary elements of daily life: bowls of green apples and cherries (“Because life is a bowl of cherries,” she says with wry humor); a bunch of beets on an enamel table; photographs of every friend who stopped by to visit. No one, myself included, escaped without getting their “portrait” done.
A portrait of the artist with her friends. The curator of her exhibition can be seen at the far right of the top row; I’m at the far left. Photo credit: Marci Janas Rich
Now, at 63—10 years after her first diagnosis—Leslie is overseeing preparations for a retrospective solo exhibition of her life’s work at the Beth K. Stocker Art Gallery on the campus of Lorain County Community College in Northeast Ohio. It is a dream come true, she says; she has fantasized about such an exhibition for years.
Born and raised in the college town of Oberlin, Ohio, where she lives today, this solo exhibition, appropriately titled Paper Painting Before Radiation, is the first to be presented in her native Lorain County.
Guest curator Jean Kondo Weigl has selected 81 examples of Leslie’s works on paper in mixed media—representing drawing, painting, printmaking, and collage—for the retrospective, which will be on view from August 26 through September 28, 2013. The works represent only a fraction of the art Leslie created between 1981 and 2006.
Even though Leslie’s art has won awards and earned her grants, residencies, and solo and group exhibitions—including one at the Cleveland Museum of Art’s prestigious May Show in 1993—much of it has never been seen before.
“Leslie has received significant recognition throughout her career,” says Kondo Weigl, “but her focus has always been the practice of her art, rather than its promotion. As a result, she’s received considerably less public attention and critical acclaim than her work deserves.”
I asked her what her art means to her. (Even though she is no longer able to paint, even though taking photographs has become more difficult, I cannot use the past tense.)
“It’s just a passion,” she tells me. “Something I get lost in. A kind of escape from myself.” She repeats a quote attributed to Mark Rothko that she recalls reading. “He said, and this is a paraphrase, ‘It’s nice when people come to see me in my studio, but it’s nice when they leave. It’s even nicer when I leave.'”
Leslie will just have to put up with the throngs of art lovers who will be clamoring to see her work. I suspect she knows how much pleasure this will give her.
About the Artist Leslie Miller earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in religion from Bates College, and a Master of Arts diploma from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. She has been awarded professional development grants from the Ohio Arts Council and the Contemporary Artists Center in North Adams, Massachusetts; she was in residence at the latter for three consecutive years in the 1990s and was part of group exhibition there. She has also held a residency at I-Park in East Haddam, Connecticut. She won the Best in Show prize at the Beck Center in Lakewood, Ohio, where her work was part of a group exhibition called Proscenium ’92.
Other group exhibitions include shows at the Erie Art Museum in Erie, Pennsylvania; the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art; the College of Wooster Art Museum; the Mather Gallery at Case Western Reserve University; the Firelands Association for the Visual Arts in Oberlin, Ohio; the Pearl Conard Gallery at the Ohio State University; and the May Show at the Cleveland Museum of Art, which was juried and curated by Evan Turner, director emeritus of the museum.
Solo exhibitions featuring her work have been held at Jamaica Plain Gallery in Boston, the Greater Miami Jewish Federation in Miami, Florida; and in Israel at the American Cultural Centers in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
She began writing poetry in 2006, and Foothills Publishing released a chapbook of her work, Boom Time: 1946-1964, in 2007. She has since completed a nearly book-length manuscript.
The Midlife Second Wife ™ 