I've Tried Being Nice by Ann Leary

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.



Download



Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.