Who took this picture? Why do I have a copy of it?
I have just spent two months wrestling with two wigs to make one of them presentable by Halloween.
This wasn’t my idea but I have been asked to put together the Cher costume. I’ve only worn it twice before and honestly I didn’t feel very Cherlike in it either time. In fact, I’d much rather be a cardboard TV box with knobs and a picture of It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown drawn on the front (a costume my brother Randy made for me when I was 7) or a little devil (a costume my grandmother made for me when I was 8) or a dinosaur or a pirate or some other ridiculous thing. But the Cher costume was requested as part of a funny group idea and so here I am pulling out the dress my sister-in-law Maureen gave me, a midnight blue polyester gown from her 1970s-era Homecoming dance with my oldest brother. It’s the closest dress I’ve ever had to a 70s Cher gown.
And so I’ve been brushing and steaming these god-damn wigs for weeks, soaking them in fabric softener and all the things they recommend online but to no avail. They’ve been tangling into monstrosities in the costume box for many years now and they’re done.
Meanwhile, I could have just purchased a new one for 20 bucks. Sigh.
As I take out Maureen’s homecoming dress out of my closet, I am also reminded how I used to always look to her to see what milestones I would someday encounter as a girl: dates with boys, dealing with their parents, a prom, a wedding, babies. She’s been a real sister to me. (I’ve written two poems about watching her for life clues.)
Despite the forgiveness of polyester, I could now be too hippy for that old dress. Praise Cheesus for all the zaftig Cher drag queens who have gone before me. But I’ve had to purchase a “Believe” suit as a Plan B.
Anyway, the whole experience reminds me of the first time I threw together this very Cher costume for a date who took me to a Halloween party of young Kraft Food employees (where I was working as a Kelly Girl at the time) in White Plains, New York. My date went as a cow. The cow costume was very cute but it didn’t mesh well with my Cher, a character unlikely to fraternize with cows and I shredded long black hairs over him all night. I also now recall his complete lack of enthusiasm in helping me figure out how to get into Manhattan for an internship at Penguin Books. This was a few weeks after the Halloween party.
When I got to New York to start a graduate program at Sarah Lawrence College, I was full of fears. I was afraid of the telephone, for example, even though I was often sent out as a receptionist during many years working as a temp. What bad luck that was.
My first boyfriend in college, god bless him, had to get on the phone to try to resolve all my questions about birth control to the nearby Planned Parenthood office because I was afraid to talk to strangers on a phone. To their credit, they wouldn’t tell him anything (assuming he was up to no good snooping). But he rolled his eyes and tried.
And phones may have been my biggest fear but they weren’t the only one. There was my fear of cliff ledges, sinkholes, hillbillies, the parents of my young friends, and swimming pools with anything decorative painted on the bottom of them.
When I got my internship at Penguin in Manhattan, I had no idea how I would find the wherewithal to get myself on a train to the subway system and down a few blocks to the Penguin offices in lower Manhattan. That was too much new stuff to deal with, too many overwhelming opportunities for things to go wrong, too much energy to zap my delicate constitution!
I was renting a basement apartment in a Yonkers house owned by a middle-aged Italian chef and his wife who spent half the year in Italy (chef-ing) and half the year retired in Yonkers near their grown-up kids. The movie Moonstruck didn’t even make sense to me until I sat in their house with the plastic runners and plastic couch covers. Besides them, I hadn’t met many other friends yet at Sarah Lawrence. The only new friend I had so far was the aforementioned blasé cow. Finally, after much cajoling, he did agree to accompany me from the Bronxville train station to Grand Central on the Metro North and then to walk me through the grand atrium (which always felt to me like walking through an exciting vortex) to the correct subway tunnel so I could at least see the token booth. (Yes, this was even before subway cards.) But that’s as far as he would go.
The internship turned out to be both parts frustrating and delightful. There was an endless flow of subsidiary rights paperwork that came in via faxes faster than we could deal with it, a basement contract file room that was a shambles of misfiling and the whole publishing industry that was a bit depressing tbh. But there was also getting as many free galley copies of books as my backpack would hold, being able to read the manuscript of Stephen King’s wife Tabitha’s first novel, which wasn’t very good, and best of all holding in my hands the original contract for John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath.
But how did I even make it that far? In the end, I had to make use of the baby-step method.
I had to get up in the morning and drive myself to the Bronxville Station. If I felt freaked out, I could turn around and go home. If not, I could get out of the car and buy a train ticket. If I felt freaked out then, I could turn around and go home. If not, I could get on the train and sit down, ride into Manhattan and get off the train at Grand Central. If I felt freaked out there, I could turn around and go home. If not, I could walk through Grand Central to the subway, (past the oyster bar I never did get a chance to visit), maybe buy an everything-bagel with cream cheese at the kiosks by the front door. If I felt freaked out there, I could turn around and go home with my bagel. If not, I could buy subway tokens from often-grumpy booth folk, get on the subway going across Manhattan and then make the subway connection going south. If I felt freaked out at any time on the subway, I could turn around and go home. If not, I could walk up the subway stairs and out of the street and orient myself to the four corners of the earth. If I felt freaked out about that, I could turn around and go home. If not, I could walk into the Penguin offices.
And this was just for the interview!
But I did it.
I didn’t turn back.
I didn’t wig out even one time.
In 2023 I found myself reciting this whole ordeal to some old Sarah Lawrence friends who had, since the 1990s, become too intimidated to go into Manhattan from Long Island themselves. (!!) Baby steps.
And it turns out, I had an unforeseen support system. I was always surrounded, my whole time in New York, by helpful New Yorkers, not just people on the street but particularly the Italians I lived beneath, (the chef snored and my basement bedroom was right below theirs), and those Italians I worked with at Yonkers Contracting Company. My brothers often kidded me about working for Italians at a New York construction company. Randy (of the 1976 TV set costume) used to ask me if my co-workers used terms like “concrete shoes.” They didn’t. Instead, I gained a lifetime love of penne alla vodka from their big Italian retirement parties. They all treated me like a lost little bird (which I was) and were amazed I even wanted to go into Manhattan to begin with.
The beautiful women working there with their big 80s perms (it was the mid 90s) told me they hadn’t been down to Manhattan for over a decade, since their high school trips to the Statue of Liberty. (For a time in my life I was able to tell the difference between a Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn accent.) Those people watched out for me and gave me life hacks for managing the pitfalls of their city, from how to outwit a slumlord to where the couch sales were at the Cross County Mall. I still have that couch. That couch has been all over the country.
Soon I would meet Julie (and other SLC students) and we would go into Manhattan quite often by train and by car using some of Julie’s fearless life hacks.
In that bustling city, I was going anywhere fast, but I was moving forward and even that, in ever so small amounts, can build its own energy and opportunity.
Before I left St. Louis (and a summer in Boston), my own family had many, many, many doubts about my ability to move to New York as a graduate student. My oldest brother predicted that New Yorkers would eat me alive. Those were his exact words. And I remember navigating my first bank account meeting in downtown Bronxville one day fully believing I would be eaten alive that day. After all, meeting with strange bankers all by myself was something I would have been terrified to do even in the suburbs of midwestern St. Louis.
Sometimes I still can’t believe I did it. It was big. It was a big deal that I did it. And if I never did anything else in my life, I did that.
The insurmountable overwhelming.
Julie and me lifehacking our way out of a corn maze in the 1990s.
