My Mother Was Nuts by Marshall Penny

Author:Marshall, Penny [Marshall, Penny]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: AmazonEncore
Published: 2012-09-18T07:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 29

Taking Direction

Penny playing the tambourine onstage with Paul Simon and Mayor Ed Koch at New York’s Palladium Theater in 1980

Marshall personal collection

WITH THE HIGHS came lows. It was fall 1980, and I had flown into New York to see Paul Simon perform at the Palladium. I arrived in the grip of a deep depression. Sometimes the feeling is beyond control. This was like a strong current that took me out to sea. Deep down, I knew that the stuff I had run away from by going to Europe was catching up to me. Luckily, my friends were sympathetic. Paul suffered from bouts of darkness, and Carrie had a whole wardrobe of mood swings hanging in her closet. Before the show, Paul said, “Why don’t you come onstage and sing at the end when I play ‘Amazing Grace’?”

“No thanks,” I said. “I’m not a singer.”

“Penny, we’ll have a large gospel choir backing you up—as well as Mayor Koch,” he said. “No one will hear you.”

“They won’t know who I am,” I said, sounding depressed.

“What are you, nuts?” he said. “Come on out and see what it feels like,” he said.

After turning in an amazing two-hour-plus show, Paul got to “Amazing Grace” and motioned to me on the side. Reluctantly, I walked out and stood next to him, and I will forever be glad I did. As we sang, the cheering from the audience was like a gust of wind that blew away some of my depression.

I wasn’t cured, but it made dealing with the stuff that had depressed me a little easier when I got back to L.A. I was still a little sad about Rob. Every so often feelings of remorse would sneak up on me. My mother was also fading, and that was not so nice. And then there was the show.

While I had been off motorcycling with Artie, my brother had huddled with the show’s producers and studio executives and decided to give Laverne & Shirley a reboot. For its sixth season, they reset the show in 1964—just after the Kennedy assassination and just in time for the Beatles—and moved everyone to Los Angeles. They also added Ed Marinaro as stuntman Sonny St. Jacques and Leslie Easterbrook as our wannabe actress neighbor.

I thought the whole thing was a mistake. L.A. didn’t make sense to me. Even poor people there have a house with a lawn and a couple of trees. They dress like they’re on vacation. They don’t look poor.

Laverne and Shirley were poor. That was part of their appeal. They were regular folks. I thought they should go to New York, where they would face new struggles and we could use different actors. But my opinion counted not so much. In the season’s opening episode, titled “Not Quite New York,” Laverne and Shirley lost their bottle-capping jobs to machines and moved to Burbank, California, as did everyone else.

Despite my criticism, we still did some excellent work, including the episode “I Do, I Do.” In it, two

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.