Finding It: And Finally Satisfying My Hunger for Life (19 page)

I stood on the beach by myself fast-forwarding through my thoughts and didn’t notice Tom come up alongside me just as I muttered, “You know what? I’m going to do it.”

He bumped his shoulder into mine and asked, “Huh?”

I put my hand over my mouth and gasped, “Oh, shit, why did I say that?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Nothing,” I said.

But obviously that wasn’t true. I knew. I just wasn’t ready to tell anyone, even Tom.

Now, six months later, I wasn’t any more ready to commit publicly. I definitely wasn’t ready to sign on the dotted line. I was still maneuvering around the idea in my mind—what it would mean, what it would take, and how long I would need.

I take a long time between making a decision and heeding the call to action. I have never been one to rush into anything. As I have stated numerous times, it took me seventeen years to figure out how unhappy I was in my marriage and what my options were, and then I needed another three years before I did anything about it. A bikini would be no different. I hadn’t been in one since I was twenty years old. Now, at forty-eight, even though deep down I knew it would happen, I didn’t see any reason to rush.

Like any great procrastinator, I was able to rationalize whatever
time it was going to take. Hey, God could have flooded the world in a few hours if He had wanted. After all, He was God. But he took care of business over forty days and forty nights. That was enough of an example for me. I would take whatever time I needed.

As I have learned, time has a way of allowing things to work out the way they are supposed to, although not necessarily or always the way you want. For example, a few weeks after my meeting with the Jenny Craig folks, I began work on a pilot for TBS, a sitcom known at the network as the
Untitled Dave Caplan Project
. Writer and executive producer Dave Caplan, a veteran of the
Drew Carey
and
George Lopez
shows, was a curly-haired
mensch
whose script was a warm, hilarious love letter to the relationship he’d had with his mother when he was seventeen.

I had wanted to get back into comedy and I stepped into the role as if it was a favorite pair of shoes. The mother-son dynamic at the show’s core was sweet, warm, and close to my heart. During the casting process, I came home one night after a long day of readings with other actors. I fell into a chair and took a deep breath, collecting myself finally after a long day. I hadn’t been as tired or felt as good in ages. Tom asked how my day had been.

“You know what?” I said. “My day was blessed.”

“Really?” he asked, momentarily surprised by my answer, which he might have expected to be a simple “great” or “fine” or “good except for the traffic.”

“That’s great,” he said.

“It is great,” I said. “I feel blessed.”

For the next few weeks, I immersed myself in the sweat and toil of helping to make a TV show. I worked with Dave to flesh out the character and find the laughs. I read with the other actors as casting decisions were finalized, and then I read with the cast, a talented
group that included Nadia Dajani, Kevin Schmidt, and stand-up comic Anjelah Johnson, who blew me away from the moment I saw her audition tape and then again when I read with her.

Everyone on the set except for me seemed to have watched and re-watched her routine bit about a nail salon, that had millions of hits on YouTube. I went home, watched it, and became an instant devotee of that as well as her
MadTV
character Bon Qui-Qui, a fast-food counter girl with major attitude. On top of being gorgeous, Anjelah had perfect timing. I had to try my hardest not to crack up when we worked together. She also hit it off with Tom, who fell in love when he tasted her homemade salsa and chips.

Three years earlier, I had auditioned for another TBS series,
The Bill Engvall Show
, and been told thanks, but no thanks. When I didn’t get the job, I thought my career had finally sputtered to an end, and with it, my income, which I sorely needed since I had chosen not to take any alimony or child support from Ed in the divorce. My ass was really tossed on the ground—and even though it didn’t feel like it at the time, it was the best thing that had happened to me.

In hindsight, had I gotten the job, just as had I asked for money from Ed, I never would have taken the call from Jenny Craig, lost weight, regained my self-confidence, self-esteem, and sense of hope, nor would I have been available for this exciting opportunity on
The Untitled Dave Caplan Show
.

One day on the set, I flashed on all that. I saw where I easily could have still been: trying to lose fifteen or twenty pounds, yo-yoing up and down physically and emotionally, as I had done for years. I would have been employed and had a steady income, but been stuck in a place where I knew my life was not working as I would have liked. I never would have faced what was broken in me.

Now I was overwhelmed by all the good stuff happening to
me, almost to the point that I could barely handle it. Where was the booby trap? Why didn’t I believe I deserved it? Why did I still occasionally go to the dark place where I worried that things were too good and bound to end in catastrophe?

I buoyed myself by talking to God. I thanked Him for the goodness in my life, the big and the little stuff. I also thanked Him for giving me one more day without the meteor hitting. I didn’t yet see that I was equally if not more responsible for these blessings.

Wolfie was asking his own why’s, too. In the days before he began his senior year of high school, he again wanted to know why he needed to go back to school. We had long talks about the importance of an education. I drew on my own experience, a story he had heard many times before, but he listened to it again and again, seeming to accept my position that his diploma, while seemingly unimportant now, would be meaningful to him in the future.

He didn’t argue past the first day, but returned to school and fell back in step with his friends and his classes. I claimed that as a win. Who knew, maybe he would continue on to college and study music.

Between my work, Wolfie’s school, Tom’s business, and his shuttling back and forth to Arizona, life got even more hectic for all of us, and especially me as the household’s chief cook, bottle washer, and worrywart. I sensed how easy it would be to deal with the ebb and flow of anxiety by reverting to old bad habits. It was a reminder that I would always have good and bad days, days when I was stronger, as well as days when fatigue and worry could weaken my resistance to the gut-warming lure of a cheeseburger.

Awareness was the first line of defense against any slips. I knew myself better than I had a year earlier, and I liked myself more, too.
I wanted to stay on track. In addition, I helped my cause by stocking my dressing room with Jenny Craig food, including a basket of snacks so that I would always have something when the rest of the cast and crew hit the snack table during breaks. I worked out diligently and kept to my daily schedule even when I was tired.

As a result, I was able to focus on the right things as we made the pilot. Rehearsal and shooting stretched over eight days, with the last one in front of a live audience, making it the most amazing of all our workdays. The audience bought in to the characters, and they laughed hard throughout the taping. Not since
One Day at a Time
had I felt as comfortable in front of the camera. More importantly I felt that I was exactly where I should be, doing the thing I loved most, which was making people laugh.

I got home and thanked God for giving me such a gift, as well as so many others, including my family, my health, and a sense that almost anything was possible. However, on the chance my luck was about to run out, I asked Him to let me know if I should brace for an onslaught of frogs or locusts. I didn’t want to wake up one day and say to myself, “I told you so,” because I had given away all my size 12s.

God didn’t work that way, Tom explained, laughing at me. I knew he was right. My concern that none of this good stuff that was happening to me would last was really a matter of needing to believe in myself. I just had to get used to the new me.

After finishing the pilot, I suffered the natural let-down of no longer going to work and seeing people whose company I had grown to enjoy. Actors know that can be jarring and painful. But it was out of my control. The pilot had to be edited, go through post-production, and then move to the network for testing and review.
None of us knew how long it would take TBS execs to provide feedback and decide whether they were going to order more episodes.

As it turned out, I didn’t have to wait long before going back in front of the camera. The man in charge of casting Dave Caplan’s pilot also worked on
Boston Legal
, one of my favorite TV shows. During the taping, I had asked him to please, please, please tell
Boston
’s brilliant creator-producer David E. Kelly that I loved the show, had wanted to be on it for years, and would play anything if he would write me onto an episode before it went off the air, which the series was about to do.

Soon after I got a call that David had written a part for me. Again, I couldn’t believe my luck. How fun was it going to be?! I pinched myself. I was flummoxed, and yet again, I talked to God. I wanted to know what parallel universe I was in that I was getting such amazing grace in my life.

Tom advised me to quit worrying when my luck might run out, because the good stuff that was freaking me out was based on hard work and good, healthy decisions. He suggested that I set new goals, continue challenging myself, and realize the bread I was casting on the water might be as sweet as French toast.

His words were particularly meaningful when my managers, Jack and Marc, called and said they needed to conclude contract talks with Jenny Craig. They had only one more point to address. They said I had to decide whether or not I would agree to an ad campaign featuring me getting into a bikini.

As close as I was to both of them, they still had no idea that I had made my decision months earlier. What I realized, though, was that it was finally time for me to come out of hiding— figuratively and literally. I told them that I would try. But I didn’t
want to promise. I gave them my reasons for not making a full commitment and then requested we aim for the next spring. I would need the time and probably wouldn’t begin training in earnest until after the holidays.

I was only trying to be realistic. Besides, given that we were talking about a bikini, some wiggle room seemed appropriate.

As soon as I heard that the themes of Maria Shriver’s California Women’s Conference were empowerment, transformation, and motivation, I accepted the invitation to participate. But once I arrived at the one-day event at the Long Beach convention center, I was intimidated. For starters, there was the size of the crowd. The fourteen thousand seats had sold out in three hours, and then Maria, in her opening address, estimated that more than a million women could also log on via streaming video. I wasn’t used to being in front of that many people.

Then there were the other participants, the real stars, including Maria’s husband, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Jennifer Lopez, Warren Buffett, Sister Joan Chittister, and Bono, who could move tens of thousands of people with a single wave of his finger. I had been invited to interview my friend Rachael Ray, but as we took the
stage, part of me was wondering why the hell was I sharing a stage with that heady group?