The Role of A Lifetime

When she accepted her Tony for portraying the young Big Edie and, after Intermission, middle-aged Little Edie in the runaway Broadway smash Grey Gardens, Christine Ebersole thanked Hollywood for the “role of a lifetime.” But wait, you say, Tony? Broadway? Hollywood? How does Hollywood figure into this?

Using a math all too familiar to women “of a certain age,” Ebersole calculated that her fall from female lead as she aged in Hollywood was in direct, if inverse, proportion to her rise on the stage where acting chops are valued over boob jobs and other heavy lifting. Had she stayed in Hollywood, Ebersole reasoned, she would never have played any Edie. Instead, she played both to such thunderous critical acclaim that fags the world over can recite every line and vamp every gesture Ebersole used to bring both women back to life long enough for us to be enchanted with them and look back to Camelot through a dark lens. Ebersole’s career, in the Hollywood toilet, rose to stratospheric stardom in New York.

In my own version of this very same math, my interpretation of E=mc2 goes like this: Escape El Cerrito = metro-condo, return 2 fun. After 15 years of waiting for accrued equity to launch me to something other than a daily gauntlet of homophobic idiocy, I sold my house in whitechristianland and returned to the city where I am most comfortable among the misfits, outlaws, and genuinely creative. Now that I’m here in the other city by the bay, my life has begun to parallel another grand dame of the boards, Olympia Dukakis or, rather, her most widely seen role, Anna Madrigal.

At 59, I am not the oldest woman in my building of renegades. There is a woman in her mid-sixties. She is corporate counsel for a certain motorcycle gang that calls Oakland home, to the degree that bunch can be said to have counsel of any kind. (She keeps her Hog parked in the garage stall directly below my second floor bedroom and the rumble every morning as she kicks that pig to life is my ersatz alarm clock). Rather, I am the aging hippie lady who opens her door to one and all, comforting the recently dumped, cooking for the abandoned stray, and rolling a joint to make it all better, dear. Okay, this is not 28 Barbary Lane. It is, in fact, better.

To be fair to El Cerrito, my transformation to Ms. Madrigal can definitely be traced to the home of The Gauchos. I even had my own Mary Ann Singleton, the young straight chick who wandered into Gomorrah and was lost in a sea of man and other troubles. The difference being that my straight chick (let’s call her Katrina as she destroyed almost everything she touched) invented Gomorrah. Otherwise, the man troubles necessitated the same herbal smoky contemplations of what went wrong and what to do about it. But a joint in the late-night kitchen of a sleepy suburb is not a life style whereas a loft in an old iron works factory in the Port of Oakland is . . . or could be if managed properly. Enter Ms. Madrigal II.