Jenny McCarthy - Stirring the Pot: My Recipe for Getting What You Want Out of Life

Copyright 2014 by Jenny McCarthy Productions, LLC

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

BALLANTINE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

ISBN 978-0-553-39086-5
eBook ISBN 978-0-553-39087-2

www.ballantinebooks.com

Jacket design: Alex Merto
Jacket photograph: Matthias Clamer

v3.1

Contents

Baby Steps

Thisll be hard to believe given that I am now best known for being unafraid to grab a microphone and work a crowd, but when I was younger I had a totally crippling fear of public speaking. Im not only talking about a fear of having to give a speech to the whole school or stage fright the night of the school play. That shits obvious .

I was also paralyzed by something as simple as a request to read a paragraph out loud to a small class. If a teacher asked me to come to the board and show the class how to do a math problem? Hyperventilation time. Give an oral report on my science project? Id become totally sick to my stomach and have to run to the bathroom.

To avoid getting to the puking stage, I got creative with my excuses. I conveniently lost my glasses a lot (even though I didnt wear any back then). I was pretty convincing with a sudden bad cough or the development of a splitting headache. One time I went so far as to quickly crack a red pen so that I could let the ink dribble down my leg. I dont know if the teacher thought my leg was bleeding or that Id had an embarrassing female accident (as youll see on , I later became very prone to embarrassing female accidents!), but that was an instant pass to the nurses office. I couldnt really use it more than once, though. Too bad.

By the time I got to college, I didnt think it was too much to hope that oral reports and front-of-class participation would be things of my past. I wanted to be a special-education major (little did I know that my son Evans needs would give me a front-row seat in that world a decade later) and didnt see how my fear of public speaking would cause a problem. I saw myself teaching and playing with kids using blocks and games and crayons, not cue cards.

But wouldnt you know it Public Speaking 101 was a requirement for my chosen major. What the fuck? There was no way around it. I knew I had to bite the bullet or I would have to give up on the thing that really interested me. I was determined. For the moment, anyway.

As I walked to class the first day, I began to shake just thinking about the idea of it. I can still see the big auditorium classroom nowstadium seating sloping down to a classic college lectern and about fifty shaggy students settling in to fall asleep. After introducing himself and giving an overview of the curriculum (all of which sounded terrifying and totally effing pointless to me), the professor announced that he wanted all the students to stand and briefly introduce themselves. Before even the first student had stood to tell us her name and where she was from, I had grabbed my backpack and bolted from the room.

I ran straight to the freshman guidance office and busted through the door in hysterics. I was crying so hard the advisor thought I had been attacked, and she jumped up from her chair to console me. I tried to relay the problemmy fear, the goddamned public speaking requirementbut wasnt really making much sense. When I finally managed to spit it all out, she was sympathetic to a point but also explained with a little pat on my back that most incoming freshmen were nervous about speaking in public. My response? I really spit it outI put my head between my knees and vomited on the floor. Not my proudest moment. I think the counselor got the picture that my case was a little more extreme than average.

We cleaned up the puke. She calmed me down. And then we got down to business. She said she would help me find a major that didnt have a public speaking requirement. Nursing looked promising, since it was a career that would still allow me to nurture people and help people heal, and I could potentially specialize in pediatrics; I might be able to work with kids after all. Id watched a lot of General Hospital and didnt think it looked so hard. Yes, I know now that was a ridiculously insane thought, and I have convinced myself all these years later that I didnt say it out loud. If I did, the counselor was cool enough to let it slide. What I do remember is that nursing didnt require me to stand up and risk shitting my pants in public. That did it for me.

I was relieved that Id found something else that I could imagine myself doing and that wouldnt make me confront this ridiculous fear, but I also remember feeling sad and disappointed in myself because I knew that I was going to let a stupid fear keep me from a goal and a dream (special ed). A little voice in my head shamed and berated me. Not an evil-spirit mean little voice, but a wise-conscience kind of voice that told me, You cant hide from your fear. It will find you wherever you go .

For the most part, though, I managed to shake off the soul ache and flick the little guy off my shoulder. I kept focused on trying to pay for and not flunk out of college. For a while there I had the idea to finance my courses by selling weed. I was my own best customer, though, and spent most of my time stoned to the bone. Financially that wasnt working out, and educationally it wasnt so stellar, either. You try focusing on the intricacies of chemistry or biology after a wake-and-bake bender.

Not yet a nurse, and no closer to staring down my public speaking phobia, I was forced to drop out of college after my second yearno more money, no more prospectsand head back home to live with my parents. Another not-my-proudest-moment moment.

What followed were many weeks of staring at the ceiling in my old bedroom. And some sobbing. And some serious angsting about what I would do with the rest of my life. I listened to a lot of music. I ate a lot of crap food. I smoked some more weed. I sobbed some more.

And then something happened that in a movie would be depicted as the skies parting, sun shining straight down into my room, and angels singing. The camera would swing to my record collection, and out of the pile I would pull the Grease album with John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John looking up at me with their crazy hairdos and cheesy smiles. Inspiration had struck!

I was seven years old when I first saw Grease , and like so many girls at the time, I declared to my mom that I was going to go to Hollywood one day and be a star like Olivia. Of course, at seven my phobia about public speaking and performance hadnt yet taken holdmaybe my teenage hormones helped that blossom? At seven nothing stood in my way. (Just so you know, by the time I dropped out of college, I had stopped dancing around my room singing Grease songs into my hairbrush/microphone, but I still knew all the lyrics and I still do.)

By the time I was wallowing at home and trying to figure out a new career path for myself, I was older and a little wiser and knew that making it in Hollywood would be no easy road. Id need some connections, some auditions, some luck. Oh, and some talent. And I knew Id need to conquer my fear of public speaking. I simply had to push through and find a way to cope with my nerves.