Up Here, I’m Free
Apr 14 | Written By American Baroness
This is a collection of connected excerpts (edited/reworked; songs and stage directions removed) from “Birth of the American Baroness”, written by me and subsequently performed at Joe’s Pub at The Public Theater (2015), Oberon at A.R.T. (2016) and Dixon Place (2017).
The show was described this way—definitely hyperbolic, but a nice distillation nonetheless:
Stella Starsky shines in her moving and side-splitting solo play that explores both the mundane and the mystical implications of modern womandom free from motherhood, whether by choice or cast of the die. From her humble beginnings as a tweenage donut-maker in small-town Massachusetts, through a me-generational gauntlet of disco balls, body dysmorphia, designer dreams, and debatable dates with destiny, Starsky illumines our universal quest for value and validation, alighting on divinely human and hilarious realizations along the pro-creative path toward planetary parenthood.
PRAISE FOR STELLA STARSKY
“Serves up quick wit combined with a sexy straightforwardness”—Harper’s Bazaar
“Vivacious and engaging…you can almost see the stars twinkling about her”—The Scotsman
“One of those slightly severe-looking high-cheekboned women who make glasses sexy”—San Francisco Chronicle
I grew up in the 1970s in a small, unremarkable suburb outside of Boston. I loved music, I read a lot of books. I read so much and so quickly that I had a special waiver at our public library allowing me to take out as many books as I could carry home. From compulsively listening to The Beatles’ Abbey Road, I had developed what I thought was some sort of psychic connection with George Harrison. From there, it was a hop, skip and a jump to James Taylor, Carly Simon, Todd Rundgren, Dan Fogelberg…Joni Mitchell…and really any sensitive singer-songwriter with long hair and a slim physique. I soaked up their poetry. Lived and breathed it. Made it my own. What I heard informed how I saw myself, what I wanted to be and do, how I would negotiate growing up and becoming, well, all-this, who I’d want my old man to be, and how long it would take for me to realize he was no good. I was sensitive and impressionable. I imagined sitting by the fire—with John Lennon—in my Norwegian Wood cottage. I thought my guy would call and say “Hell-o. It’s me, I’ve thought about us…for a long…long time.” I planned to shower the people I loved with love. And I assumed that one day I’d sigh, “Well, okay, it’s time we moved in together.”
Those were thinly veiled misogynistic times. Women were welcome to fight for equality, but they absolutely could not have it.
Go ahead, Mizzz, burn your bra. Now I can see your nipples through that Indian gauze tunic. Liberate yourself from those tight shoes, babe, I like you barefoot. In the kitchen. Making that…actually, that crunchy granola you make is absolutely delicious. You’re such a health nut. How about you whip up some fondue tonight. I mean, who the hell knew drippy cheese could be so…sexy. With some of that sweet wine you buy. Liebfraumilch. Babe, am I pronouncing that correctly? Bet you had no idea lieb-frau-milch translates to beloved lady’s milk. Now you know. And you’re welcome. Maybe this time you could chill it a little longer, though. I like it colder. But it’s alright. You do almost everything so right. God, you really do know what I like, my love. My love…does it good. Whoa-whoa-whoa-whoa. Maybe, just maybe…I’m amazed. At the way you love me. All the time. And maybe I’m afraid…maybe I am…like, really afraid of the way I love you. The thing is, if we can be serious for a sec. I, um, I don’t know if I can do…this thing…we’re doing…it’s really beautiful…right now…and I, I guess I don’t want to smother it with necessity and, um, decisions. We’re better than that. I want you to do what’s best, for you. I’m just some guy—look at me, shit!—and you’re this great girl, full of power and emotion. I can’t be the one who gets in the way of that, that…fire. That passion. You do what you gotta do. For you. And that’s the best thing you can do…
…for me.
I’ve always had a complicated relationship with relationships. And I don’t remember ever, as a kid, fantasizing about marriage, being pregnant, my wedding day, the dress, the cake, the seating arrangement.
Somehow, still, I got married at 25. To another Catholic, which was a huge relief to my father.
I remember, planning the wedding, Dad, anxious I think about calling attention to himself, asking,
“Do I have to walk you down the aisle?” To which I immediately replied,
“No, of course not.”
But I’d wanted to say something else, something I’d said a long, long time ago, when I was 12…
I wish Paul McCartney was my father.
I wish Paul McCartney was my father.
No, no. That’s not it. I still had the Boston accent at that age, so it was more…
I wish Paul McCahtney was my fathah.
No, that’s still not quite right. I was really disgruntled.
Grrrr, I wish Paul McCahtney was my fathah!”
I’m not really sure how I said it.
I’m not really sure I said it. At all.
Could I really have said that? To my father? Just because he tried but couldn’t get tickets for the Paul McCartney and Wings concert at the Boston Garden?
I mean, that’s a major bit of rebellion, from a kid. Especially one who always does what she’s told, which includes not showing emotions or offering opinions.
The thing is, I remember saying it. I said something. Maybe…
“S’OK, Dad, thanks for trying.”
After which I would’ve turned away and sobbed into my Barbie townhouse, where I’d find metrosexual Ken dry humping the itty-bitty Dawn doll. They were such a weird mismatch. Interspecies. Supersize Ken and diminutive Dawn. Perfectly plastic pretend people. In the Barbie world I created, these two were having an affair; getting-it-on was their way of making the best of an imperfect situation. You see, though Ken belonged to Barbie, which meant he was cheating with Dawn, he had no reason to feel guilty. The guy was neglected. Barbie was never home. Sure, she lived there, with Ken, but she had almost no presence in the place. Once she left in the morning, she stayed out all day and late into the night, too. Occasionally, midday, she’d pop home to snack on some melba toast and cottage cheese, a couple pineapple chunks—essentials on her Weight Watchers maintenance diet. Often, Barbie would also take the time to change from one sexually suggestive outfit to another. She was a busy lady, working mostly, at what I’m not sure cause there are a limited number of tasks a woman can perform dressed like that. I also had the Barbie airplane, The “Friendship”. So, I guess she was a stewardess.
I mean, airline hostess.
Sorry, flight attendant.
When they used to be more like Playboy bunnies than policewomen.
Where to begin. How about back to when I first started playing with Barbies, in 1972, after I received one as a gift while I was convalescing with a broken tibia. That’s the shinbone.
1972. I was fat. In fact, that’s exactly how I broke my leg. The sheer weight of my own plump, dense body, on my right leg, snapped it. My father, who heard me scream from across the frozen pond eventually skated over, expertly stopping right in front of me. I lay there, a little girl in a big heap on the ice. He had a quick look at me, and just as quickly declared,
“Yohr OK! Bettah get up, put some weight on it.”
And then…
“Go ‘head, skate!”
Remember, this is suburban Massachusetts. Hockey is a religion. The ice is sacred. And skating is attending mass, or, in my case, doing penance, punishment for my sins.
I never skated again. Not because I couldn’t. Because I wouldn’t. And I probably should’ve. To prove, to myself really, that I wasn’t some kind of victim…of the ice.
So…
I broke my own leg. And the next several months were some of the most beautiful and impactful of my early life.
I had to lie in bed, with my fully cast right leg elevated. Doctor’s orders. No school. Now, I loved school, and I wasn’t thrilled at first that I’d be missing multiplication tables. But being home all day, that snowy winter-white winter, with my mother, and my baby sister, having been moved into my own bedroom…that, I liked. And somehow—maybe prayers were answered—I had my own little black and white TV with a big antennae. This meant I didn’t have to sit with the others and watch my father watch the Bruins’ games, or Gilligan’s Island, or—dear God, no—the local news.
One Friday night, during that convalescence, my parents had friends over in the evening. As a treat, I was allowed to stay up late enough to say “hi” to the grown-ups and even hang out awhile. Getting downstairs, though, had been a challenge. Wearing my new pale pink quilted bathrobe—with its puffy, asbestos-like inner layer and slippery, polyester outer—I sat at the top of the staircase and ever so slowly—thud, thud, thud—slid all the way down, crutches in tow. My bum burned, real bad, but it was worth the pain for the pleasure of gawking at a bunch of tipsy adults, all of whom I knew only as their sanitized, daytime doppelgangers, while stealthily, silently eating all the cashews from a big bowl of mixed nuts, alternating mouthfuls with many a salty Frito, dipped into my favorite cream cheese-chopped clam dip.
My mother—whose only weight problem ever was that she thought she had one—smiled when she saw me ravaging the snacks while nobody was looking.
Our little secret.
And with that comforting exchange—I still see her, my mother, then thirty-something and beautiful, earthy and unconscious of her appeal—I realize that, suddenly, I’m being given leeway, a certain license to make my own rules. More than not being admonished for overeating, I get the sense she’s somehow encouraging me to continue. This is way out of the ordinary. I mean, I know already, from what I’ve so often overheard discussed, that snacks like cashews and clam dip are not Weight Watcher approved foods.
Something is different.
It’s the broken tibia, the shattered shinbone, that has earned me special privileges. This handicap, dramatically displayed with a Tiny Tim-like wooden crutch and full leg cast, makes me special. As if broken is better. I have been invited, welcomed. I am independent. I like it, all of it. Especially the clam dip. And so, my immature, malleable mind connects having problems—being hurt—with being privileged. I get the message that having problems is a pretty sure way to become special. Extra-special. Extraordinary even.
I’m no longer just some sad little fat girl from nowhere who can’t skate. I’m wounded. I’ve been to the hospital. I survived an accident.
I made it downstairs on my derrière, without disturbing my leg cast or my parents!
This is the beginning of consciousness. The start of who I’ll choose to be, and the end of who I was. From now on, I’m drawn to trouble, pulled towards problems. Trouble loves me. In my own special way—subtly, secretly, silently—I’m troubled.
From that day, I’m attracted to pain and pained people. Over the decades, life becomes increasingly painful. I feel persecuted—singularly subjected to losses, rejections, and failures—and I’m surrounded by the sort of people who love to lay blame, from bosses to besties.
I’m a scapegoat. I’m a survivor. I’m an escapist.
I’m extraordinary.
Before traveling sales, my father had been a stockbroker. Which I thought sounded important and exciting. And I overheard that he made a few people a lot of money.
One of the men my father helped make rich, Jack Gowan, lived way up on the North Shore of Massachusetts, must have been Manchester or Magnolia or Marblehead, one of those waspy enclaves that I still love and actually wouldn’t mind growing old in. Dad took me with him to visit the Gowans one Saturday. I was handed off to Jack’s daughter, she’s 6 or 7, around my age. Her bedroom is the size of our entire upstairs, and she has…a canopy bed…and a beautifully appointed doll house. I have a doll house, too, but it’s not furnished. I only ever use the little attic, to hide things, mostly candy and money, both of which my father borrows. He always pays me back, the money. Whether or not he wins at the track, the money is returned right after it’s lost. But the candy he keeps. He says, I shouldn’t be eating it anyway. Bad for my teeth. He says,
“One of these days, I’ll have to go the Willy Wonka Rehab Center.”
We laugh.
At that age, I have no idea what “rehab” means, but I feel certain that what he said was funny. Almost everything Dad says is funny.
So, I laugh.
But I was frustrated by this experience at the Gowans, and I started to see things from my mother’s perspective: This stinks. Some random family up in fancy Manchester or Magnolia or Marblehead is spending their Saturday strolling around a cavernous, sun-filled mansion, without a care in the world, funded by my father’s excellent broker’s instincts. While we’re down here, closer to Boston, in the crappier suburbs, the six of us, sharing one bathroom, taking turns searching the inexplicably jumbled kitchen cupboard for that one goddamn can of tuna.
It has to be here somewhere!
I develop an interest in all my father’s interests, so he’ll take me along. To church at Saint Agnes on Sunday mornings, where we sit quietly, together, side by side, kneeling, standing, kneeling, standing, kneeling, standing, kneeling, standing, praying—“Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed.” I learn, by watching him, how to bless myself, on the way in and the way out of church.
“Peace be with you.
And also with you.”
We go to the racetrack. Often right after church. There’s bargain hunting at Building 19 in the afternoon, and, occasionally, an earliest morning at the ice rink, for free skate. Sometimes, the family of (what we once shamelessly referred to as) midgets is there, teeny people, skating in a circle, arms locked. They scare the bejeezus out of me, but I go, I go every time, right up until I snap my tibia. I go because Dad loves to skate. He smiles when he’s skating. Younger, he was an all-star hockey player. He wishes his kids loved skating, too. We do not.
There are summers in New Hampshire, going to Sarah’s Spa for breakfast, then swimming in the lake while my mother looks on from the dock. She never swims. She’s Italian. So, she’s deathly afraid of water, of thunderstorms, especially lightning, which we see a lot of on the lake, of natural disasters we don’t even have in New England, like tornados, tidal waves, and something called a rogue wave. She’s worried that people might think we’re poor, that she’s fat, or unfriendly, or too friendly, and I notice that she looks down and bites her thumb around any man who isn’t my father.
My first job is at the Donut Maker, morning shift, 5 am to 12 noon, Saturdays and Sundays. I’ve just turned 14. My work schedule seriously curtails my social life. I can’t very well hang out with my friends on a Friday or Saturday night if I’m getting up at 4 o’clock in the morning next day.
I walk to the Donut Maker for my shift, leaving our house at 4:30 am. I climb High Street, past the Doherty’s—they’re Hockey people, too—the Christian Science Bookstore, the new library—the old one was way better—and down past Dudley Street, where Aerosmith used to live.
I don’t eat the donuts. I’m just picking. Tasting them. 8 quarters is 2 donuts. 6 halves is 3. I drink coffee with cream and 2 sugars. There’s more money to be made filling the donuts, but I’m useless at it. I’m saving for a trip to Paris with the high school French Club. It’s annoying. I can’t fill the donuts, I just don’t have the right touch, that innate I-know-how to be simultaneously forceful and gentle. My jelly donuts, I’m told, having lost their puff, lay there flat, bleeding out clumpy red innards. Unappetizing. So, I’m put back out front, but this time serving customers at the semi-circle cafeteria counter. My uniform smells like grease. I want the tips. So, I’m nice. Too nice. Chronically nice. The regulars love me. Too much. And I know that once I save enough for the 7-day trip to Paris where we’ll stay in a two-star hotel in the Latin Quarter, I’ll quit.
Anyway, working at Donut Maker has ruined my diet.
How can I be on a diet if I’m working at Donut Maker? I can’t believe I’ve gotten this fat. I have to lose weight before the Paris trip. I’m sure there are no fat people in France. I want to blend. I want people to think I’m French. I’ve been to Montreal. That’s French!
That time, a year earlier, my father drove me to Logan Airport. I was 13 and taking my first plane trip, alone, to Canada, French Canada! He tells me to have fun, there’s nothing to be afraid of.
Once the plane takes off, you won’t even think about home, he says, never mind getting homesick. He tells me, you can be anyone up there. Up there, you’re free.
I’m young enough still to associate white clouds with heaven, and I imagine I’ll be nearer to God at that altitude. Peace, peace, everlasting peace.
I can be anyone up here. Up here, I’m free.
So, on the flight to Montreal, I imagine I’m royalty—of undisclosed nationality— and apparently, I travel alone with some frequency. The woman sitting next to me kindly asks my name and I say “Maria Jones”, conjuring the pseudonym I’d adopted years earlier to entertain Uncle Joe, my mother’s older brother. Another character, another self. I’m young, I’m still deciding.
In Montreal, I visit family. Well, family. My mother’s stepmother’s people. More Italians. From Italy. They all have big houses and brand new white Cadillacs. All the uncles own penny candy stores. I struggle to understand how penny candy stores can make people rich. They buy everything with cash, bills they flick with manicured fingers, licked.
There are so many Aunts. And they all wear housecoats as they roam the vast marble hallways of their brand new custom-built, strangely empty homes. I smell spaghetti sauce and laundry detergent and, what is that? Oh, anise seed. Like licorice? Home-made biscotti? I’d love some! Thank you, Aunt Rita.
I’ve been told that Rita is the really nice one, and I feel lucky that I’m invited to her house first. Other aunts and cousins crowd her kitchen. It should be fun—I’m in Canada!—but it’s not, because Rita’s daughter, whose photo sits looking at us from the credenza, is locked in a room off the kitchen. And this creature who I never see, is heard loudly, angrily grunting and gurgling. Every so often, she screams. Nobody flinches. The biscotti are delicious. And I’d love to dip them in the milky coffee Rita serves me. But I can’t enjoy the biscotti because the loud, invisible daughter is glaring at me, from the photo on the credenza. I see, in the still image, she’s heavy set with tiny shoulders, a small head and short, no-color hair. She’s wearing a pale pastel pink, yellow and blue…housecoat? I can’t tell, is she 15 or 50?
Later, I overhear the other aunts:
Rita is such a good person, eh? Why did God curse her with a retarded child? Her only child. Her life was ruined, eh? Why didn’t she and Rocco put the girl in a home?
Why? Because as you well know, Rita…is a goddamn saint!
I love the saints.
Later, more than two decades later, after both my parents have retired, and my mother has begun to spend most of her time painting, we took a day trip into Boston, the three of us, destination The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. My favorite. Now, not working, my father loves his leisure time. At the museum, strolling through the vast rooms, he lingers. Really takes his time. He’s well behind my mother and me, carefully reading the titles and dates and artists’ names for every, single painting. He seems, finally, at ease.
At one point, my mother having sped ahead of me, I get lost in “Christ Carrying the Cross”, attributed to Giovanni Bellini, or one of his followers, oil on wood, from about 1505. I’m mesmerized. The painting is a dramatic close-up of Christ, his face tear-streaked, as he lugs the knotty wood cross on his right shoulder and over his left looks at…me.
At the time, in my 30s, I was experiencing something of a religious renaissance. I had fallen in love with the Catholic mystics. Always, I listened and watched for signs, of divinity, of transcendence. Of Grace. I prayed, and I felt its power. I cultivated faith, and I attributed my faith to making those particular years mostly trouble-free.
Eventually, that day, in the museum, my father caught up to me. We stood in front of “Christ Carrying The Cross”. Quietly. Together. Side by side.
Jesus looked at us, melancholy, empathetic, ultimately…forgiving.
And we stood there…for what must have seemed an Eternity.