Anderson - Hey Mom: Stories for My Mother, but You Can Read Them Too

Ora Zella Anderson

Im your mother. Do you know what that means? Does it mean anything to you?

Christine Baskets

The first words out of my moms mouth at a restaurant: Could we get some extra butter, please?

Matre d: Well, let us seat your party first, maam.

My mom will go to any garage sale. Shell stop no matter what.

Pull over, Louie, that looks like a good sale.

So were leaving the funeral procession?

Well, hes not going anywhere.

If my mom could come back from the beyond, Im pretty sure she would stop at a garage sale before she came to see me.

My mom was the sweetest person in the world but she was a thief. You always knew what she was going to steal. At a restaurant, shed point out the item she was going to take. Shed say, Louie, arent these cute salt-and-pepper shakers?

Ill see them when I get home.

Then my brother got caught shoplifting. My mom said, Whered he get an idea like that?

I dont know, Mom, should we look at the salt-and-pepper wall? Youre one shaker from a felony.

She drove in the imaginary lane.

What are we doing over here, Mom?

Well, no ones in it.

Youre the worst driver in the world.

Ive never had an accident.

Yeah, but how many have you caused?

We had eleven kids in our family. I was tenth of eleven. I just slid out. I was home from the hospital before she was. I was waiting at the door. Im starving!

Hey Mom!

I already talk about you a lot but lately Ive been speaking to you directly, too, so I figured it was time I wrote. I often wonder how youre doing. Is there an afterlife? Heaven? Thats the million-dollar question. Or billion-dollar question. Or in this day and age, I guess the trillion-dollar question. A millions not even a million anymore. A million was really a million back in your day, Mom.

I could say Im writing now to tell you about this great role I got in a great TV show, which just got picked up, in which I play a momthats right, Mom, a mom , not a dadof four grown sons, and the character is so much like you! Her name is Christine Baskets and playing her comes so naturally because I keep channeling you. What would Mom say? What would Mom do? What would Ora Zella Anderson do?

So of course I want to let the inspiration for the character know about it, even if she died a quarter-century ago.

But thats not the only reason I feel the need to write. I have so many questions and so many things Ive been meaning to say to you. Stuff thats on my mind a lot, and I wanted to get it down someplace. There were questions I neglected to ask Dad when he was still around but thats easier to explain. There were so many things he wouldnt talk about. He was angry, an angry alcoholic. Sometimes I just didnt want to be around him, and neither did any of your other ten children.

But why didnt I ask you the things I want to ask you now, back when I had the chance? You had no trouble talking, Mom. Blah, blah, blah, Dad said many times about your going on. Im so much more like you than him, in that way. You never yelled or punished or expressed disappointment, only love. Sometimes I wish youd been harder, more disapproving. Maybe you were and I didnt notice. Anyway, it kills me that I didnt ask you a bunch of things I think about more and more these days.

I often think about childhood and our family and the things that make us who we are. Ive always thought about that stuff. You know this, Mom, but so much of my comedy act over the years has been based on our family, and you, and what growing up was like. That was a lot of my best material, still is. As a young comic, I mostly made fat jokes at my own expense, or maybe I should say I did lots of fat jokes about this fat character I played onstage (though I played a fat person offstage, too). That was the common denominator. But its come to be less of my act. Maybe its because I dont see myself anymore as a fat person but a person who happens to be fat.

Anyway, you were still around when I was doing material about family and it always got laughs, but then I got a little darker and maybe more real with it, and got some of the biggest laughs of the set. A different kind of laugh. It opened up something in me and I started digging. Roman DiCaire, an older comedian I admired and who saw me perform, told me, Louie, if you do that material about your family and have a completely clean act, youll be famous. I lacked direction then and I was looking for someone to tell me something. He turned out to be 100 percent right. Decades later, Mom, I make jokes about the family, and they land, and land hard, because theyre so true for everyone, though I still think our family was way more screwed up than most. A stress testyou know what that is? Its where you have your whole family over to the house. Stuff like that often gets the most unguarded laugh of the night.