Lady Parts (25 page)

I’m losing my hearing,

I’ve lost sight in one eye.

I’m sorry I can’t hear you,

Did you really say goodbye?

ANNOUNCER: Yes, Connie Franklin, the most depressing singer of her generation, will really bring you down with twenty of her most depressing hits.

We then hear Connie continuing, “Stop slapping my face now.”

Harold also co-wrote “Sex Talk with Dr. Cheryl Kinsey” with me. Dr. Kinsey was an incredibly uptight woman who had a nervous tic whenever anything sexual was mentioned.

DR. KINSEY: Welcome ladies to today’s seminar, Sex, Sex, and More Sex … Today I want to talk to you about one of the most common sexual dysfunctions in women today. The inability to fake orgasms. Recent studies show that nearly 60 percent of all
women are capable of at least one fake orgasm, and nearly 20 percent of these women report multiple fake orgasms. That leaves 40 percent, four out of ten women, who are unable to convincingly fake an orgasm. If you are one of these women, may I suggest the following exercise. Please repeat after me, these helpful passionate phrases: (
With no affect, yet involuntary physical twitching.
) “Don’t stop, lover, please … don’t stop.” “Oh, you’re good, you’re so good.” And “Stuff me like a mushroom, big boy.”

Fortunately, in a recent study, it was shown that nine out of ten males will believe anything, especially if it confirms their virility, so don’t be afraid to pretend you’re aroused by your partner.

I was so thrilled that Harold cast me in his film
Club Paradise,
and the shower scene he wrote for me remains one of the funniest scenes I’ve ever had the great pleasure to do.

Johnny LaRue, John Candy, Johnny Toronto, Johnny Chicago. Anywhere John Candy went, he was worshipped and adored. The police, the queen of England, the janitor. It didn’t matter who you were or the status you had, John treated everyone
the same. He was exactly as you would like to think he was. He was actually
that
guy. I’d see him with fans who had come up to him on the street and started acting out their favourite scenes with him, and he’d go along with anything.

John was the first person I knew who had an entourage. There were always people in his dressing room, from all walks of life. It’s been twenty years since John died, but I’m still stopped by people, especially working-class guys, who ask me about
SCTV
and say how sad it is that John is no longer with us. Even those hulking guys let their guard down as tears fill their eyes, their grief over the death of John Candy, a man they never knew, overwhelming them.

Everything John did was big. Bob told me about the time he was writing a sketch with John. It was ten pages long. Bob said, “John, we’ve got to cut it down.” “You’re right, Bob,” said John, “I’ll take it home and work on it this weekend.”

“He came back Monday,” Bob told me, “and said he rewrote it—and it was now twenty pages long.”

Bob once went out to write with John on his farm, but they got no work done because John had so many things going on. He was having a radar dish installed, and gardeners building a river. He showed Bob a barn that housed every car he’d ever owned. He wasn’t able to give anything away.

What John did share was his deep vulnerability and authenticity. There wasn’t a cynical bone in his body. I would have loved to see where his career would have taken him. He was not only capable of making you laugh, he could also
make you cry, which you’d know if you saw
Trains, Planes and Automobiles.
He was a singular actor and a heartbreaking clown, and the world still mourns his loss.

My favourite scene with John Candy: In August 1981, the accomplished actress Lynn Redgrave sued Universal Television, claiming she had been fired from
House Calls,
a sitcom in which she played a nurse. She had been told she could not breastfeed her baby during breaks in shooting. I had just given birth to my first son, Jack, in July of that year. We took the incident and turned it into a promo sketch called “Wet Nurse.” It begins in a hospital waiting room with me dressed as a nurse and my back to the camera. Joe Flaherty, as the doctor, is talking to me with overly dramatic urgency:

“Nurse, there’s a total power failure in the cafeteria. Every patient in this hospital is starving. You are the only one that can help us. We are counting on you.”

I turn to face camera, and viewers can see for the first time my ginormous boobs, a foot in diameter. “Yes, doctor,” I say as I run toward camera, my boobs filling the screen.

We then hear the announcer, voiced by Rick Moranis:

“Coming to
SCTV
this fall,
Wet Nurse,
starring Lynn Redgrave, a woman dedicated to the sustenance and nurturing of all mankind.”

The scene cuts to me with a little baby, who in real life was my two-month-old son, Jack. He is perilously balanced on my shoulder. My gigantic boobs keep him suspended as I walk around the room. I put him on my lap
and begin to unbutton my shirt to breastfeed him. There’s a time lapse and the baby is now John Candy. He is on my lap, in the same position, dressed identically to my real baby, and I’m burping him. The camera pans down to my boobs, which are now flat and deflated as I rock all three hundred pounds of Baby John. He coos and smiles gleefully as he is bounced up and down.

I am not sure you could show that sketch today on prime time anywhere because women with big breasts would feel discriminated against. Breastfeeding advocates would think
we were admonishing them, not to mention the child abuse charges brought against me for recklessly balancing my son on my shoulder.

John, my son Jack, and me

We had so much social and creative freedom on
SCTV.
The world wasn’t picky about being politically correct, and we never thought a lot about it because we were isolated from the press, and the media, and we were having so much damn fun. Lynn Redgrave, like so many actors I had impersonated, became a friend, and she was delighted to have been portrayed so comically. When I was acting in the film
Stepping Out
with Liza Minnelli, I was terrified that she had seen my impersonation of her, whom we called Lorna Minnelli. Over the three months we worked together, she never mentioned seeing it—until our last day, when she took me aside and said, “I’ve seen you do me. You’re
terrific.
”

Brenda Vaccaro, Linda Lavin, Bernadette Peters, Anne Murray, Andrea McArdle, Barbra Streisand. Not one of these women, all of whom I have impersonated and was later introduced to, ever confided in me that they were upset or insulted by my impersonations of them.

I’m sorry I never met Mother Teresa because I know she would have had the utmost forgiveness of my portrayal of her in Lola Heatherton’s show. We realized while doing
SCTV
that people love being impersonated—it is the highest form of flattery. At least no one told us differently. We made it a
point never to be mean-spirited. Our comedy was not cynical. Overall, we had a reverence for what we were making fun of. One of my favourite sketches was “Farm Film Celebrity Blow-Up,” starring John Candy and Joe Flaherty. It was a perfect vehicle in which to impersonate famous actors—or let’s be honest, people we could look like.

The Juul Haalmeyer, Bev Schectman, and Judi Cooper-Sealy Hall of Fame

Bernadette Peters

Joni Mitchell

Cher