Ma Speaks Up by Marianne Leone

Author:Marianne Leone [Leone, Marianne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8070-6005-6
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2017-03-08T16:00:00+00:00

Years later, after the mother-daughter war had devolved into the odd skirmish at holidays or snippy retort during phone calls, my mother was able to indulge in a final wave of schadenfreude, thanks to my career choice: I became an actress. I never appeared on the daytimes (I was “too ethnic”). My only connection to the soaps was when, early in his career, my all-American actor husband robbed someone on One Life to Live, and thus funded our bare-bones honeymoon on Cape Cod.

In college, Ma came to see me play the role of Marica del Reino, an elderly widow, in Divinas Palabras, by Ramon del Valle-Inclan. An overwrought symbolic drama that involved nudity and onstage masturbation, Divinas Palabras was risky going at our state college, even in the late sixties, but our theater professor seemed to be unaware he was dealing with queasy nineteen-year-olds who had never acted before. Picture preschoolers staging Camus and you get the idea. My dramatic moment came when Marica’s only nephew, a hydrocephalic, was “EATEN! EATEN BY PIGS!” the immortal lines I shrieked before collapsing into a quivering heap. I could feel my mother’s beamed approval from the audience when I discovered the giant chewed, bloody plastic head of my stage nephew and emitted full-throated banshee wails. I knew that she felt like I had at last claimed my heritage. Finally, I belonged to my family.

But Marica del Reino was only the beginning; my DNA was radiating the martyr mother archetype to casting directors, and more distraught mothers were in my acting future.

My mother was transported when I was cast on The Sopranos. Not only did she get to crisscross the neighborhood asking the whyos at Dunkin’s, the newspaper store guy, the bookies at the soccer club, and the elderly girls at her hair salon, “You watch-a The Sopran’s?” she got to see her smart-mouth daughter transform into the role she had wished on me since my teens: I was now the mother of a thankless child. But there was one big problem: my child was a wayward son, not a bad daughter. In the series, my son, Christopher, was violent, addicted to drugs, and dating a girl I hated. My character, Joanne, was a rancorous alcoholic who felt outclassed by the wealthier members of her extended family, always getting the worst table at social events and having her cheap presents snickered over at a wedding shower for her despised future daughter-in-law. In the first scene I had with my son, he playfully noogied me, and sniffed my breath for alcohol. I had my hair in rollers and was wearing a pink chenille housecoat, plus dark eye-circle makeup and broken blood vessels drawn all over my nose (the drink). Any old boyfriend viewing the show could count himself lucky for getting out before my premature aging and alcoholic demise. But my mother thought my son, Christopher, was a good boy. Didn’t he visit his mother? Didn’t he leave me a twenty-dollar bill taped to the

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