Fame (Baby, Remember My Name)

Some times, I want big credit for the things I didn’t do. For example, today I didn’t hit a woman. Had the judges been there, I would have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for that.

Daughter and I were hanging out in a friend’s book store. It’s tiny, with a wonderful little alcove for the children’s books and a thoughtful selection of adult fare. My friend is also fairly liberal with her air-conditioning. In short, our needs were being met in every possible way. Daughter tucked into a dead end of books and pillows and I was at the counter paging through an expensive art book, idly chatting with my friend, who was behind the counter. A woman walked in, asking long questions of the sales woman, so I took my book and moved over towards Daughter.

After a few minutes, the woman who had walked in after us came over to me.

“Pardon me,” she asked in a simpering tone “but weren’t you on television?”

The questions about being a child actor are never a favorite part of my life, but I closed the book of Vermeer paintings and smiled pleasantly.

“Yes, when I was a child” I said in a tone which I hoped implied “That should be it, right?”

She squeaked excitedly “I knew it! What show was it?” She leaned in towards me and, by extension, Daughter, who was now boxed in.

“Family” I said politely.

“I loved that show!”

“I’m really glad to hear it” I said sincerely. I mean, I don’t actually care on some basic level, but if something I did made someone happy, that’s better than finding out that something I did caused an epidemic of ear infections.

She leaned over and stared into Daughter’s face. Her voice moved up into a range usually only achieved by finches.

“Is this your daughter? Ooh, she’s so cute.”

I tried moving between them.

“Thank you. She’s reading right now.”

Apparently, that was too subtle a hint, because this woman developed a terrier-like tenacity to engage in conversation with my kid.

“Did you know that your Mommy is famous? Did you know that your Mommy used to be on TV? I used to watch her all the time, she was so cute. You’re such a cutie yourself! Did you know about your Mommy being famous? Do you know what famous means?”

The woman caught my eye, which was fairly easy as, under the guise of moving some books back into place, I was trying to create a barrier between my kid and Former-Celebrity Vampire. She giggled to me, “It’s hard to explain fame to little children”.

I thought, “Perhaps that’s because it’s not your job to explain anything to my kid. In fact, if you talk to her again, I’ll punch your nose so hard that when you inhale, you’ll breathe brain”.

But what I said was, “Yes. Well, don’t let us keep you”.

Mercifully, at that moment she happened to see someone else she wanted to annoy and scurried away. I leaned over to Daughter, who had picked up her book again, and spoke softly.

“Long story short, sweetie…I was on television when I was a kid, but older than you are. I pretended to be different people. I had fun, and I don’t do it anymore”

Daughter blinked.

“What did you look like?”

“Mostly, me.”

She went back to reading. I went back to seething.

This certainly isn’t the first time someone has said something thoughtless to me in a public place. I think one of the side-effects of having come in to people’s houses on a television is that people forget that you actually exist and might have feelings about what they say. You can say something hurtful and stupid about an end table without worrying about the end table, why should you have to stop to consider what someone who lived inside your television might think?

You want a couple of examples? Like most of my friends, I had retail jobs when I was a teenager. This provided us with pocket money and employee discounts. I remember the woman who leaned over the counter during the peak of Saturday afternoon rush, grabbed my wrist and said with faux sympathy “Are you working here because you need the money? Did you spend it all on drugs? Or did your parents use it up?” How about the woman who waited until I had finished bagging her stuff and then said to her husband in ringing tones “Can you imagine. From stardom to having to work in a place like this”. I wanted to say, “Hey, lady, you just shopped in a place like this!” But I didn’t. Mean stupid people seem to live for those moments. I am just grateful there weren’t camera cell phones and the Internet during my public career in retail. A nice, blurry camera-phone snapshot of me re-stocking the shelves at The Limited making the rounds of gossip blogs would have compounded my aggravation.

But I believe the unwritten rule which says my brief moment in the sun requires me to be eternally available and pleasant to strangers, no matter how private the moment of their intrusion, does not extend to my child. So, the question becomes: does this make me a hypocrite? I write a blog about my life, and she is a huge part of my life so she is included. Her privacy is thus compromised, but readers who are spread out all over the world, which should keep her protected to some degree. It still dazzles me that people read this in Dubai and Katmandu, but the odds of these folks seeing us while I order a soy latte at the neighborhood café are fairly slim.

I worried this particular bone for quite a while before starting the QC Report, and was prepared to live with Walt Whitman’s take on the matter:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes).

As a motto, it works. But one of the multitudes I contain is a mother who is prepared to propel a stranger’s sinus bone four inches backwards to defend my child’s right to read a book without being bothered. I need to figure out whether I can remain true to the writer in the multitude as well as the protective parent.