Starstruck Marta and the Torch Song

Their names were Marta and Joe. They were born in Poland before 1920 and met in the U.S. while still very young. According to Marta, they’d been married forever.

Image copyright, Teece Aronin

I met them in 1980, I believe. It was when they showed up at the Hollywood Hills office of Forrest J Ackerman, whose many idiosyncrasies included shunning the period after his middle initial. He was a literary agent and editor of "Famous Monsters of Filmland," a magazine children had been clamoring for since 1958. I worked for him during my summer vacations from college. 

Marta was slim, almost frail, and elegant with her soft voice, her white, free-flowing hair and her loose and gauzy garments. Joe fit her perfectly. Slim, neatly dressed, and with a pencil mustache, he could have been a movie director in the silent age of Hollywood - and she a leading lady. 

Unaware of Forry's sci-fi and horror niche, they had come hoping to find a literary agent for a book of poems by Marta. They were about her heart, her husband, her sons, her gratitude, and the buckets of wonder she could wring from a single ray of sunlight.

That sunlight was important because Marta was supposed to be deep down in the dark by now. She had been ill for most of her adult life with a heart condition doctors said would kill her before she could grow old. They also said she should never have children, but she defied the doctors and the odds, acing pregnancy with the birth of a healthy son. One of her poems was about the bright and perfect joy of hearing that baby cry for the first time.

Soon after, Marta aced another pregnancy and gave birth to another healthy son. Joe stood by her through it all, doting and protective. Joe, who had survived a pogrom and seen someone killed right in front of him, found himself partnered for life with a woman whose experience with death was just as threatening and, astonishing as it sounds, far more personal because the threat came from her own heart.

The couple was in their late sixties the day I met them, and they proceeded to “adopt” me, this apple-cheeked college kid from the Midwest. One Friday, they ventured from their home, a sleek, one-level mid-century modern in the California desert, to L.A. to pick me up for the weekend. Settled in for the evening, Marta, who adored Joe's voice, begged him to sing for us. Eventually he gave in with an acapella performance of an old torch song about the agonies of love, "I’ve Got to Pass Your House to Get to My House."

A little recent Googling revealed some history on that strange song I’d never heard before and hadn’t heard since. Released in 1934 on the Columbia label, it was recorded by a young Bing Crosby. The genre was "pop," which is a little hard to believe when you hear the song. 

That weekend was filled with white wine, delicious food and talk of everything from sex (which I had yet to experience), to desert weather, to writing, and there was lots of talk of writing. It was one of the first times anyone had treated me as a fully formed adult equal.

They both had so much to say, and every other word wore a fresh coat of grace. As to that old song, it may have been recorded by Bing Crosby, but you haven't heard it until you've heard it sung by Joe to a thrilled and starstruck Marta. 

Comedians Aren't Funny When You're Pregnant

Sometimes even professional comedians aren't all that funny - like when you're living with one, or married to one, or find yourself impregnated by one. No, not funny at all.

My ex-husband, Michael at a run 

to end breast cancer - finally 

doing something helpful for women.

Photo courtesy of Michael Aronin. 

For instance, most husbands of women turning forty and overdue with their first child, know enough to keep their mouths shut - about pretty much everything. But when the husband is a stand-up comedian, he doesn't know enough to do this and says things men planning to live long enough to see their babies would never say.

Picture this: I'm standing there, so pregnant my nose has gained weight. The baby is inside me, hanging window treatments, rearranging the furniture, and ordering from Wayfair, showing no signs of coming out. My then-husband, Michael looks at me suspiciously and asks, "How do I know you're the real mother?"

Then imagine this: I'm somewhere into my 104th week of pregnancy. I have given up shaving my legs. Our shower stall is tiny and when I bend over and lather my legs, the soap immediately washes off and I'm cutting myself. Even if I shut the water off first, bending over to shave is miserable.

And forget shaving in the tub; just sitting down in the tub is like centering a house onto one square of a sidewalk. 

So I give up shaving for a while.

After a few weeks, as I roll into bed, Michael reaches over, pats my leg and mutters, "Dad?"

Anyway, I blubber and sulk my way through my fortieth birthday and two weeks later the baby is still a no-show. By the time I am finishing the nursery, I am enormous, and if I am sitting on the floor painting a baseboard and need a rag from the other side of the room, I roll there to fetch it.

One night, I am putting up a wallpaper boarder at chair rail height. When it starts peeling off faster than I can slap it back up, I scream for Michael to help. He does his best, but we end up watching helplessly as all my hard work comes crashing down like a home improvement project in a Laurel and Hardy short. 

I throw myself on the floor in a hormone-enhanced tantrum and begin to bawl. At first Michael takes the sympathetic approach and tries unsuccessfully to comfort me. Then he decides I will settle down if he leaves me alone for a few minutes. My hysterics, however, continue.

After a full thirty minutes of this, Michael grabs the bull by the horns and, using the same judgment he too often employs, takes the tough love route.

"Teece!" he bellows from the bottom of the stairs. "Pull yourself together and get down here - NOW!"

I yell back what he can do with his order.

And his stand-up buddies weren't all that different. When one of them got in trouble with his pregnant wife, he solemnly absorbed her words, looked at her with mopey eyes and a divorceably straight face, and said, "That's okay, honey; it's just the baby talking."

As another of them was coaching his wife through labor, the baby's head emerged, but his wife was exhausted and stopped pushing. The doctor told him to say something motivating, so he told his wife, "Sweetie, if you don't keep pushing, you're gonna have a helluva time buying pants."

Yes, comedians are a very glib bunch - which is just one of the reasons so many are divorced.   

                         

         

Emile, Are You There? It's Me, Nellie!

When my marriage ended and the dust finally settled, my kids told me I should try online dating. Inwardly I groaned, but I have to admit, I was curious. It had been nearly 20 years since I'd last dated; my mind, face, body, my very psyche for that matter were different now - in some ways better and in some ways not. What kind of men would I attract? Would I attract any? Who might be out there who would make sense as the other half of a couple with me?

When I met my ex-husband, my weight was a healthy 140 pounds or so and I was in my late thirties. But during my second pregnancy at age 43, I developed gestational diabetes, a condition which resolved itself after the birth of the baby, but which had left my metabolism so wildly out of control, that my weight ballooned to over 250 pounds. Despite consulting an endocrinologist, and doing everything she told me to do, including exercise, the most weight I ever lost at any given time was six pounds - honest: six pounds. And every time I lost those six pounds, they would fly back and wrap themselves around me faster than you can say, "big mama."

I'm sure the life stressors we all cope with were part of the problem, too, and that I sought too much solace at the bottom of a bag of chips, but overall, I tried very hard to eat in a way which should have landed me at a healthy weight but just couldn't seem to succeed.

Eventually, I opted for bariatric surgery and my weight dropped to something somewhere in the chunky range. Then divorce stressors replaced family stressors and I lost about thirty pounds without even meaning to. So when my kids started nudging me towards online dating, I was thinner than I could ever remember being as an adult; about a size eight. But that weight fluctuation had led to a confused self-image, so I often stared in hard-blinking amazement at pictures of the handsome men approaching me on the dating sites I'd chosen. Why were they attracted to me, I wondered. I won't mention the sites by name, but they rhyme with Scratch.com and No Way, Stupid.

But it's funny (and not in the hah-hah way) that I could learn so much about the mysteries of physical attraction at such a late stage of life; sometimes more than I wanted to. Some men who reached out to me online seemed to think the heavens had opened up to deposit me in front of them. Then again, one man I dated struggled with his lack of physical attraction to me while feeling very connected to me "emotionally and intellectually."

Hearing this hurt, so when he finally managed to articulate this concern, I grappled for my dignity, sat up straight in my pen and demurely folded my hooves atop my udder. And it was a herculean effort to limit my weeping to only one set of my six eyes.

Then, one night he and I had dinner with his sister who was chatting me up as we waited for a table. "So you met my brother on Scratch.com?"

"That's right," I smiled.

"I never had any luck on Scratch," she mused.

"Neither did I," I said. 

And then we all laughed and laughed and laughed. I was joking - mostly, but zinging him a little felt good. I have to say, though, that knowing him was very much worth the jab to my ego and he proved himself a wonderful friend. And one of my most honest, damn him.

But really . . . Who can explain it? Who can tell you why? Fools give you reasons; wise men never try. Oh, wait, that was Emile De Becque serenading Nellie Forbush in South Pacific. Some Enchanted Evening was the song. And that was physical attraction the way it should be.

Now, if I could just find my Emile De Becque, I might even be willing to change my name to Nellie Forbush. Then again, maybe just Nellie.