Thanksgiving. I hear the word and all the cliché Norman Rockwell images immediately come to mind. But they don’t match my memories at all. As the Big Holiday approaches, I have been wracking my brain, searching for cherished remembrances.
Oh, certainly, there were family gatherings on South Knoll Road, with turkey, stuffing and pie. But, set against a background of plenty that was the norm in our household, the extra food on the table was not very notable. My distinct memories of Thanksgiving as a child are 1) my brother and sister fought over the bronzed skin of the turkey, 2) I was very fond of my mother’s rice stuffing, and 3) I didn’t like pie in general, and pumpkin pie in particular, so there was little to look forward to at the end of the meal.
Celebrating Thanksgiving with our relatives meant a long drive, either to my grandmother’s house (over the river and through the woods to Fresno) or to our cousins in Southern California. Thanksgiving at Uncle Jack's big ranch-style house in Valencia was closer to that Rockwellian ideal. There were four boys in the family, enough to actually play touch football on the front lawn while waiting for the turkey to finish drying out. I also recall that, one year, I was also followed around by my littler cousin, Betsy, who apparently had a crush on me. Later she would write a letter to my mother on the subject, whimsically describing how she was sitting on her bed and asking her Magic 8 Ball whether I liked her, too.
The real issue was that I didn’t realize how grateful I should be. It’s different when you are trying to survive harsh winters in the New World. Or you have lived through the Great Depression like my parents. There was little in my life that was lacking.
That’s why one of my favorite Thanksgivings was in 1984, when I first moved to Los Angeles to pursue my Hollywood Dream. I was rehearsing a play that weekend, so couldn’t drive up to the Bay Area to be with my family and that is how I ended up a holiday orphan. Luckily, I was invited to celebrate the day at Scott Weiss's in Santa Monica.
As I arrived, bearing a fair version of my mother’s rice stuffing, I ran into Cris Santmeyer, an old college theatre friend and probably tops on my list of the Ones Who Got Away. We definitely had hit it off back at school, but never seemed to get our timing right to be mutually available at the same time. It was good to see her and we took the elevator up to Chris’s apartment.
There, we joined several of my other Marin County friends: Bruce Vieira, Scott Weiss, Deena Burke, Chris MacGregor and Robert Reneau. There were others that I either can’t recall or didn’t know. For most of us, I am sure it was our first Thanksgiving without our families.
The first discovery was that Scott had bought the turkey the day before and had simply put it in the refrigerator, heedless of the time it would need to thaw. It was still mostly frozen, but we fished out the bag of giblets, shoved it in the oven and hoped for the best. Fortunately, there were plenty of other things to eat and we dove into the chips and dips, hors d’oeuvres, stuffing, vegetables and desserts that everyone had brought. Oh, and the wine and beer. That, too.
Then we played games. Pictionary. Charades. And a unique variation of Botticelli that doesn’t seem to match anything I can find on Wikipedia. In our version, you take a quote from Shakespeare (at least 26 letters long), write it in a vertical column down the left hand side of a piece of paper. Then either to the left or right of the quote, you write the letters of the alphabet, A-Z or Z-A, thus creating 26 pairs of letters. Next you try to think of a celebrity whose name matches those initials. For example, the pairing P-P might elicit Patti Page, Pat Paulsen or Peter Pumpkineater. The goal is to come up with a name for each pair, and hopefully one that is unique. Duplicates among players cancel each other out. Unknowns are also tossed, unless cleverly defended. The player with the most unique names wins bragging rights until the next game begins.
To be a small part of such a group of lively, intelligent, well-read, creative and thoroughly silly people for an evening has always been one of my favorite things to do. I don’t remember if we ever got to the turkey and it didn’t matter, anyway. There wasn’t anywhere I would have rather been.
Now, as I have gotten older and have started to lose friends and loved ones, the meaning of Thanksgiving becomes clearer and more poignant with each passing year. I finally know what I should have been grateful for all along. My holiday prayer would be to spend just one more day with each of those people who have brought so much joy to my life.
Instead, I will celebrate with the ones who are near and hold them extra tight, so the memory will leave a lasting impression on my heart.
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