The first time I saw "Mommie Dearest", I was hooked. It was inevitable. I immediately changed my mother's contact information in my phone from "the Dark One" to "Mommie Dearest", which it remains to this day.
Being an angsty teen, I naturally tried to draw parallels between my life and Christina Crawford, but failed for a number of reasons:
1. I didn't live in the most beautiful house in Brentwood, I lived in one the crappiest houses in Midland Park.
2. My Mommie wasn't a movie star, she was a waitress (which is still an acting gig as far as I'm concerned).
3. I did not have an endless parade of "uncles" and subsequently didn't have to fix drinks for them.
4. I wasn't forced to clean anything, except for the occasional dish and even then I would always leave one or two in the sink as a form of passive aggression.
5. We were encouraged to use wire hangers because they were free. The only hangers forbidden were the hangers that my Nanny had crocheted fancy sleeves around. They were reserved for Mommie Dearest alone and it was considered a capital offense to misappropriate one of them.
Christina and I did have a few things in common:
1. Both of our mothers made the scariest faces they could muster.
2. Both of our mothers liked to drink.
3. We both knew where to find the boys and the booze.
My favorite scene, and probably the most iconic one, is the wire hanger scene. Joan comes into the children's room looking a fright and discovers a wire hanger in Christina's closet. This naturally sends her into a savage rage, kicking off my favorite monologue of all time. For your enjoyment, this is what that scene would have looked like at my house:
[Mary enters the boys' room, Newport Light 100 in one hand, remnants of a bologna sandwich in the other. She finishes the sandwich and climbs over one of David's piles to the closet. She lovingly looks through their clothes. Heineken t-shirt. Budweiser t-shirt. She stops and glares, briskly sliding the clothes off to one side to reveal a Guinness St. Patrick's Day shirt on a crocheted hanger. She snatches it from the closet rod.]
"More...wire...HANGERS! What's fancy Nanny hangers doing in this closet when I told you no fancy nanny hangers EVER?! I work and work until I'm half dead and I hear people saying 'she's getting old'. And what do I get? A SON! Who cares as much about the Coors Light t-shirts I give him...as he cares about me! What's fancy Nanny Hangers doing in this closer? Answer me! I bring you beautiful beer t-shirts from the bar and you treat them like they were some dishrag. You threw a three dollar t-shirt on a fanny Nanny hanger! We'll see how many you got hidden in here, we'll see! All of this is coming out! Out! Out! Out! Out! We're gonna see how many fancy nanny hangers you've got in your closet!"
Now that I'm older, my mother and I are less like Joan and Christina Crawford and more like Big and Little Edie Beale. I imagine one day we'll be living in a dilapidated mansion infested with raccoons and cats. I'm already bald, so all I need now is a head scarf and revolutionary outfit of the day. Picture me standing next to a eight-foot pile of tin cans talking about the craftsmanship of the banister while my mother lays in bed in a sunhat, warbling to warped records as a cat urinates behind her portrait and the corn boils on the hotplate. A girl can dream.
Happy birthday, Mommie Dearest.
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