I've Tried Being Nice by Ann Leary

Author:Ann Leary
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: S&S/ Marysue Rucci Books
Published: 2024-06-04T00:00:00+00:00

RED-CARPET DIARIES

I don’t think red carpets were a thing when I was young. I mean, we saw the glamorous actors and actresses at the Academy Awards and other ceremonies on TV, I just don’t remember watching them arrive at these events. I’m only mentioning this now, as I hope it will explain how completely unprepared and ridiculous Denis and I (mostly I) were when we took our wobbly first steps along the famously red-swathed walkways of the stars.

The first time I saw an actual red carpet was at a New York film premiere in the early nineties. Denis’s fame was quite new, and I wasn’t really paying attention to it, so I was startled by the blinding flashes of dozens of cameras and the press people calling out Denis’s name. The next time was in Los Angeles, where we spent a winter while Denis was making one of his first movies.

That winter in LA was a very exciting time for us. It was the end of 1992; to put things in perspective, let me explain how 1991 had ended for us. I was seven months pregnant with Devin, our second child. Denis had decided to do his show called “No Cure for Cancer” at the Actors’ Playhouse, an Off-Broadway theater downtown. He’d done the show at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival the previous year and it had been a huge success. When we moved back to New York, he decided he should do the show there.

Denis is an optimist. I’m not. I tend to see every glass as half-empty, every cloud with a pitch-black lining, so when he told me he would be doing less traveling to other cities doing stand-up and wouldn’t that be great to have him around more while he rehearsed for the show, my response was to burst into tears and say, “NO!” I was pregnant, so I was emotional, but paying for food and shelter was more important now than ever. How would we pay the rent without his income from stand-up gigs? “What if critics come?” I asked him. “What if newspapers review it?” He told me that was the whole point of doing the show, and I realized I’d married a madman. Yes, the audiences had loved the show at the Edinburgh Festival, but this was New York.

My mother came to help for a week or so before our daughter was due. During that week, I was informed by our health insurance company that our policy was about to lapse because we were behind on our payments, and we had been served a legal “notice to vacate” our apartment because we were behind on rent. This was the era of answering machines, and I always waited until my mother was in the bathroom or asleep before I played the messages from the collection agency that had taken over our student loans and the other agency that was trying to collect on a credit card we had overrun. Oh, and the IRS. We owed them, too.

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