Lady Parts (2 page)

I even performed, with Marty Short, in the Canadian Opera Company’s
The Glove
, in which we travelled extensively throughout Ontario, singing our hearts out as Leo and Leona Lion. By then my career was taking off and I was well entrenched in Canadian show biz. My biggest break came in 1975, when I auditioned for and was cast in Toronto’s Second City stage show. In 1976, John Candy, Catherine O’Hara, Joe Flaherty, Harold Ramis, Eugene Levy, Dave Thomas, and I, all Second City performers, collaborated to create a television show called
SCTV.
My first twelve years in Toronto saw me marrying Bob Dolman, a Canadian writer, giving birth to our two sons at St. Michael’s Hospital, and living in a beautiful home in High Park. Even Sharon,
Lois, and Bram wanted me for their
Elephant Show.
I would have stayed in Toronto forever if the success of
SCTV
hadn’t brought our family to Los Angeles in 1986. For the next twenty-three years, I set up residence in Los Angeles and New York, but I longed to be back in Canada. (In September 2009, I took the plunge and bought a little house once again in Toronto. And so I’ve come full circle.)

With the exception of the explosion of cars and people, traffic jams, condominiums, and the epidemic of raccoons, the city of Toronto is as welcoming as it was when I first arrived. But now I see beavers on my lawn, and geese and ducks and otters and swans. I lead an enchanted life, on a pond in High Park. It’s a perfect life, really. I’m even cohabitating nicely with a family of raccoons, in Toronto’s west end, where it all began.

F
or the longest time I wished I were Jewish. First of all, I look the part. You know, big nose, dark eyes, pushy. Second of all, the Jews I hung out with—Mark Finks, my first boyfriend; Dr. Ralph Heifetz, my pediatrician; and Janet Shur, my super-confident best friend—had a good time being Jewish. They owned who they were. They had so much self-esteem. Unlike me. My parents, Sybil and John Martin, had gone to great lengths to assimilate and bury our ethnic, Armenian identity. I’m a distant cousin to Cher, Mike Connors, Charles Aznavour, and Clarabell the Clown, they told me. Why couldn’t they have stopped at Cher? And
you know who else? Arlene Francis from
What’s My Line?
“Is it larger than a breadbox?
Haw haw haw
.”

As late as 1991, when I decided to write my first one-woman show, I didn’t know where to find Armenia on a map. I thought it was a distant land that shipped frozen baklava to the corner deli. In fact, food was the only thing I associated with being Armenian. How was I going to write a one-woman show if I didn’t know my roots? Who was this “one” woman who was about to reveal everything about herself? Up until that point in my career, I had been playing characters, hiding in glasses, hats, wigs. Could I be on stage as myself without all my props and feel that I was enough? There was only one way to find out. I booked a flight to Armenia.

“Jesus Christ, Andrea! Why do you want to go there?” my father asked as he grew more impatient and agitated by our conversation.

“Because I want to find out what it means to be Armenian, Daddy.”

“You won’t find it out over there. The people are poor. The country is dirty. They have nothing.” He was angry. “Besides, your family came from Turkey and they’re all dead.”

Obviously, I knew
nothing
about my past. I went to the library and checked out everything ever written by, for, and about Armenians.

My dad was right. Historic Armenia was once a huge
and prospering land that stretched between the Black and Caspian Seas to eastern Turkey. But all that remained of Armenia today, after years of invasions by the Romans, Persians, Arabs, Mongolians, and Turks, was this small Communist-ruled republic. Armenia: population 3 million. A tiny republic occupying eleven thousand square miles of the southwestern tip of the Soviet Union, surrounded by Georgia, Azerbaijan, Iran, and Turkey.

But wait. Armenia was the first nation in the world to adopt Christianity. That was impressive. I kept reading with growing awe and fascination. Armenia, where Noah landed his ark. Armenia, where the alphabet was invented. A proud race of survivors that had lived three thousand years. Survivor. I liked that word. It made me feel courageous. A brave crusader, right up there with Tigran the Great. Maybe I had been selected by some divine power to put Armenia back on the map. If Cher (Sarkisian!) wasn’t going to jump on the bandwagon, then maybe I should. Fonda had Vietnam, Sting had the rainforest, but Armenia was still up for grabs. I closed my eyes. I saw my face on a stamp.

I prepared for my trip. I contacted Armenians, who then gave me names of more Armenians to contact. Where had they been hiding all this time? Every Armenian I met wanted to help. I had more names that ended in “ian” in my address book than were listed in Fresno’s city directory. My bag was packed with “souvenirs” I was told to bring: Bic lighters, bubble gum, decks of cards, costume jewellery,
scarves, coffee, toilet paper, Handi Wipes, children’s clothes, toys, and eight-by-ten glossy pictures of myself. The last item was important, they said. “You are a famous Armenian. People will be proud.”

By the time I boarded the plane, I looked like Margaret Mead about to document the Samoans. I was carrying a video recorder, a mini cassette player, and a thirty-five-millimetre camera. I was excited. I was hopeful. I knew that when my feet touched Armenian soil, I’d be home.

Here and now I would like to rewrite Thomas Wolfe: “You can’t go home a first time.”

When my feet did touch land, nineteen hours later, all horrifyingly spent on the Devil’s own airline, Aeroflot, I was just thankful to be alive. Flies buzzed inside the plane, pieces of ceiling dangled overhead, seat belts didn’t fasten, and a flight attendant slept throughout the trip. Just before we took off, two pilots staggered up and down the aisle. I was sure they were looking for the cockpit. But not one of the three hundred Armenian passengers I was travelling with complained. In fact, they seemed happy. Men stood in the aisles, chain-smoking, laughing. Women sat in heavy coats guarding their bags. People sang. They were returning home to their loved ones. And I was an American girl, recording the event. I had never been around so many Armenians before. We had similar features, the same colour skin. But we seemed worlds apart.

It took four hours to get through customs. Armed Russian soldiers stood behind glass partitions. On the trip
from the airport to the hotel I saw lambs being slaughtered at the side of the road, barefoot children sleeping in makeshift houses, and decaying buildings left unfinished in 100-degree heat. And everywhere I looked there were rocks. I knew that Armenia was called “the land of stones,” and that only 10 percent of the country was covered by forests, but it seemed so barren and bleak. And backward. Peasant women in shapeless, worn clothes sat on the ground selling yogourt and melons. Men pushed underfed cattle down the middle of the road. Traffic was at a standstill.

And nothing seemed funny to me. A one-woman show? Every comedic bone in my body was broken. I didn’t know what I’d expected, but this certainly wasn’t it. All my life I had felt like an outsider. Too ethnic for Maine. Too ethnic for Hollywood. And now I was too waspy for Armenia. The Annette Bening of the Caucasus.

When we arrived in Yerevan, the capital, I clung desperately to my fading ideals. The city, one of the oldest in the world, seemed to be big and thriving, and I’d always thought of myself as a big-city girl. I hoped I might feel more at home. I got to the hotel and called some of the names on the lists I’d been given.

Greta, the fifty-year-old sister of a friend of a friend I had met in Los Angeles, was the first to arrive. She came with gifts of peaches and bread, and her dictionary, thank God. My only way of communicating was through mime. But
aside from walking in place and pulling imaginary rope, I wasn’t much good at making myself understood through visuals alone. Greta, a physicist, was unmarried and lived with her brother, his wife, their one-year-old child, and her mother in a small walk-up flat in the city. She seemed so happy to see me. She hugged me and said, “My English is poor, but I like very much to try.” She apologized for not having a car. But there was a shortage of fuel, and automobiles were scarce, she said. She then took me by the hand and escorted me through the city, all the while speaking slowly, and searching for words in her little book.

“You should see Armenia before the earthquake. Before the massacres in Baku and Karabakh. Here are many refugees. We are overcrowded. We live with blockades and corruption. Since perestroika, we don’t know what to believe. And now you see problems everywhere. But Armenia is beautiful country. You will find new energy here.”

She showed me stone monuments of Armenian battles and bronze statues of Armenian heroes, and proudly pointed out massive pink buildings made from tufa, the national stone.

“It is a wonderful rock,” she said, “our country’s main source of wealth.” I could see that the city had once been beautiful. But now, in striking contrast to these magnificently crafted “symbols” jutting up into the sky, were the shocking realities of everyday Armenian life. No food in the markets, just the occasional slab of fat in an unrefrigerated case. Empty cafés. No medicine. A few dreary, cheaply made clothes and shoes for sale. The opera, theatre, and museums were closed.

“It is too hot in August,” Greta said, “to watch anything inside.” People stood idly by on the streets, shaking their heads, many with blank stares. I recognized the faces. They looked no different from the faces of my ancestors who had fled their homeland a hundred years ago. Little had changed. There were few tangible reminders of a flourishing civilization that once had given birth to the most distinguished artists, musicians, and intellectuals in the world.
How could anyone live here?
I thought. Life seemed so impossible.

For the next ten days I submerged myself in the country. Armenians gave me food when they didn’t have any, drove me in cars which they had to borrow. Everyone welcomed me. They showed me how proud they were to be Armenian and how important it was for me to feel that way too. I was shown ancient pagan temples, monasteries from the twelfth century, and churches all hand-carved out of stone.

There were four thousand churches still standing in Armenia today, I was told. I was overwhelmed by each Armenian’s knowledge of the country’s history, and grateful and exhausted by their hospitality. “I vant to be alone,” I soon found out, was not part of the Armenian vocabulary.

We spent evenings talking and philosophizing about the Turks, Communism, seventy years of an evil regime, and the future of the country. They wanted an independent Armenia, and were fighting for it. The newly elected president was on their side. It might take years. But they were prepared. They had no other choice.

I grew to love these people and their undying spirit. And I began to find my humour again, and to understand theirs.

“Do you know what makes an Armenian laugh?” Samvel Shahinian asked me during a dinner he had prepared for me one night. He was an artist and theoretician; his beautiful and gracious wife, Gulnara, was the head of Yerevan’s Department of Foreign Affairs.

“What?” I asked, hoping that the door to our mutual comedy psyches might finally be unlocked.

He held his hand up and moved his little finger back and forth. I laughed.

“See,” he said, “anything.”

I asked him how Armenians could find humour in the terrible conditions in which they were forced to live, and he replied, “Because, you see, things cannot get much worse.”
I began to see courage in each and every Armenian, the kind of courage I had never known: that despite the terrible hardships and living conditions, they still woke up with their dreams. I asked why they didn’t leave and come to America, where they could have a better life. And they answered simply, with a quiet dignity and resolve, “If we go, there will be no Armenia.”

By the time my trip ended, I was anxious to get home. I missed my kids. All lines to the United States had been cut off for a week. I wanted to take a shower. I wanted to sleep in a rodent-free room. I also wanted a cup of real coffee. Armenians received theirs from Russia, caffeine-free. The government, I was told, controlled all “drugs.”

Greta and her brother drove me to the airport. We were silent all the way. As we stood outside customs, Armenians pushed and yelled and crammed their way past us. Greta apologized for their behaviour. “They are animals,” she explained, “because no one has come to show them how to do better.” Self-reliance had to be taught to Armenians again. Everyone knew this. I wanted to believe that nothing could destroy our race. If we had survived three thousand years, I hoped we could survive three thousand more.

I returned to Los Angeles on August 16, 1991, one day before the Soviet coup. I felt privileged to have been in Armenia while the next chapter in its history was being written. After seventy years of Soviet rule, Armenians were finally free.

Four years later, I was sitting on a plane that was flying from Los Angeles to New York, where I was about to open my one-woman show. A woman sat beside me. I didn’t hear her or speak to her or see what she was reading, but I smelled a familiar smell. I turned to her and said, “Excuse me, are you Armenian?”

She could barely speak English but understood the word “Armenian” and nodded yes. What I really wanted to say was,
You smell like my grandmother. Can I hug you?
Then it dawned on me: I had studied everything about my ancestors, but I knew nothing about my own family. I couldn’t recall one word of my own grandmother’s. She had lived with us for twenty-six years in the room next to mine and I could not recall one conversation we had had together.