Motherhood Made a Man Out of Me by Karen Karbo

Aunt.
    It was a time in Hollywood when the edgy, Italian-suited, business-school-educated studio clone was on the way out, and no one knew what was on the way in. All anyone could be sure of was that the creative elite had stopped washing their hair. A-list directors began showing up for meetings looking like earnest philosophy majors. They wore sweaters with holes in the elbows and smelled.
    I didn’t know any of this. I didn’t know anything. I didn’t know enough to call myself a producer. I returned all my phone calls at the first opportunity, ate lunch at home—peanut butter and jelly on whole-wheat toast with half an apple. I was on time for my meetings, wore job-interview clothes, and never offered anything I couldn’t deliver. I didn’t negotiate. I said: “I’ve got the story of Jennifer Allen’s death, from the point of view of her boyfriend. Take it or leave it.”
    If they left it I went somewhere else, in my 1979 Datsun with no car phone. When I took the project elsewhere, I presumed I was really taking it elsewhere, unaware this was a negotiating tactic. When the studio I had left called back and offered more money, more control, I said: “No. I’m sorry. I’m already talking to someone else. Thank you anyway.”
    No one had ever heard of such a thing. No one knew whatto make of me. I was so middle-class, so resolutely un-shrewd, un-feisty, un-iconoclastic, un-all-those-other-adjectives used to describe brash up-and-comers that I was perceived as being shrewd, feisty, and iconoclastic.
    For a few weeks, everyone wanted to have a meeting with me just so they could tell their friends and associates how I never once said Romeo’s Dagger was a cross between this box office smash and that critically acclaimed success; how I drank Dr. Pepper and ate club sandwiches and seemed not to be watching my weight. My brand-new agent Melissa Lee Rottock performed the necessary arm-twisting and obscenity-slinging, and together we were able to get a deal set before people got bored with my style of doing business, which was no style at all.
    â€œIn Dicky’s defense, I have to say that it was a pretty heady time. For all of us. But then, you know, we made the movie and moved on. But he’s never gotten over not being famous anymore. I think he even goes to a support group of other people who were also famous for something or other. There’s that Olympic athlete who got shot in the groin during a domestic squabble, and a chicken rancher who landed a 747 when the pilot had a stroke. On the set, we joked—it was cruel, I have to admit—that Dicky was already planning his next career move. Trying to figure out a way to deliver a set of quintuplets in the middle of a hurricane or unwittingly discover the gene for obesity.”
    â€œAlso, of course, in the middle of a hurricane,” said Mary Rose. “Preferably the worst one in a hundred years.”
    â€œNow you’ve got it.”
    Mary Rose got up and turned on the tube; the game was a minute into the first quarter. We sat together in the dark on Mary Rose’s sleeper sofa, a Goodwill reject of nubby brown polyester fabric whose seat yawned open, jaw like, when no one was sitting on it. Stella dozed in my lap. The furnace kicked on. Outside there was the occasional roar of sudden rain.
    We watched while Ajax Green, the star of our team, missed both of his free throws.
    â€œOne guy starts missing, then they all start missing,” I said.
    â€œThey don’t want one guy to feel like a loser all alone, so they all join in,” said Mary Rose.
    â€œHere’s my prescription for the off-season: group therapy in the morning, free-throw practice in the afternoon.”
    â€œThe other reason they don’t make their free throws is because it’s a free throw. They don’t feel like they deserve anything that’s free. They only feel happy overcoming a ten-point deficit