Eileen Gunn: Questionable Practices

So after the show, I went to the Maury people. I told them Christy was taking advantage of them. They weren’t interested in that story. And why should they be? They had a good story already in Christy. But I said, you’re on a roll here. If they kept it going, maybe they could bring Mickey in too.

They liked that idea. “Do you know where she is?” the guy asked.

“He’s a he!” I said. “Mickey is a he. I ought to know. He got me pregnant. I don’t know why Christy is pretending he’s a girl. This is my story, and he swiped it!”

I would have thought they’d be surprised by this, but it turned out they’re used to this kind of a story. If it’s a love triangle, they can keep bringing people back until the cows come home. If it’s got a bi angle, they love that too.

So I met with them again, with a story doctor. Very professional, very slick. They do this hundreds of times a season. Kind of creepy, actually.

I had little Baker with me, ’cause I was nursing him, and they glommed onto him. “So this is Bigfoot’s baby?” they asked. For Pete’s sake, he’s just a baby, I said. Leave him out of this.

So the deal was, they were not going to tell Christy that I was going to be on the show, or Mickey, if they could find him. They kept calling Mickey “she.”

Christy

What did I look like, I wondered. Wardrobe had tried to spiff me up a bit, with a haircut and some clothes that weren’t too bad. They even shaved me, sort of, with a razor that left me with a nice even stubble.

I wasn’t expecting Andrea. They had made her up to look very wholesome and earth-mother-y, with a peasant skirt and embroidered blouse, like some sort of old-country woman headed for the market. Her hair was wound into a braid, and the braid was curled into a large round bun at the back. I felt like I’d been set up. Where was the hot babe with the welding gun who had won my heart at Burning Man? This was a mom!

They brought us out like the contestants in some old game show, sitting on chairs in front of the audience.

Then Maury came out and he introduced us, and he started asking us questions about where we live and how we met. Pretty soon we started talking, and I didn’t think it would amount to all that, or that we could talk about it in public.

Then they started showing the videos of the kid. I mean, babies are babies, and we’re hardwired to find them cute. But gee whiz, the audience went a little wild at the baby video. I admit, Baker is a cute kid. I looked a lot like that when I was a toddler. I can show you the photos.

And then they said they had photos of the other baby, but they ran videos of some bear cub instead. The audience was confused, but game. It was a tease, I thought. They don’t have any photos, because they’ve never been able to find Mickey, because I’ve never been able to find Mickey. Cute little cub, though.

And then they brought out Andrea’s mother.

Andrea

So my mother was on the show, which I wouldn’t have agreed to if anybody had asked me. And she and Maury, I swear, they tag-teamed me, and pretty soon I was telling the unexpurgated version.

I said, which I had never said out loud to anyone, even Christy, that I didn’t think the baby is Christy’s. My mom said, basically, that she certainly hoped not, and that Christy was an aimless good-for-nothing.

Christy acted like he was outraged, and he threw himself off the chair and onto the floor and kicked his heels a lot and yelled. Since he knows perfectly well how my mother feels about him, I felt this was a little stagy, but I think it’s something that men have to do on the Maury show.

I said that I was just a bit annoyed that my own mother would rather see me with a fatherless kid from some hookup with a grizzly half way up a volcano than for me to have a baby with Christy.

But my mom just looked at me and said, “That’s the way it is.”

Maury was still in control, though, whatever my mother thought, and he started talking to my mom about her entirely misspent youth. And she told this perfect stranger — she doesn’t even watch his show — stuff she had never told me in my entire life. My mother told Maury that she used to hike on Mt. Baker, and that she, in fact, had had her own fling with the sasquatches, way back before I was born.

She made it sound like a picnic of some kind. No long weeks in a cave. It was summer, and the weather was warm and sunny. It was like some fantasy romance. The love sasquatches. I don’t know why I got so angry about that.

But I was pretty incensed by it all. My mom had always been so tight with the details about my dad that I assumed he was some kind of criminal. And now I find out he’s a sasquatch, and on network television. If I were a typical Maury guest, I’d be jumping up and down and crying.

But I know that doesn’t work with my mom. So I just ask her: was Mickey my father?

She said, “Honey, I don’t know. It was a long time ago. Life was different then, before I took the accounting course. I didn’t always keep track of stuff.”

There was a lot of yelling from the audience, some of them laughing and some of them scolding her.

And then they brought out Mickey.

Christy

I don’t know how they do this stuff. I certainly didn’t have anything to do with it. They didn’t ask me for any advice or help. But somehow they found Mickey, or maybe Mickey just decided to allow herself to be found.

Either way, she walked out onto the stage at the Maury show and paused. She looked great. Elegant, all spiffed up in some kind of classy New York clothes. She looked like Candice Bergen, maybe, or that woman who lives in Connecticut and does the magazine — Martha Stewart. Older, you know, and maybe a little authoritative, but still pretty great-looking. I guess I hadn’t thought about it, but maybe Mickey does that craft stuff too, like Martha — that’s how she gets all those hats and bowls and coffee cups and stuff.

They told me later that, to the studio audience, Mickey looked like a sasquatch. Some people screamed, other people laughed. But I wasn’t paying a lot of attention to the audience reaction at the time.

Of course, I wanted to run to Mickey, but Maury gestured to me and Andrea to stay in our seats. He went over to her, rather cautiously, I thought, and guided her to a seat next to Andrea’s mother, who looked at Mickey speculatively.

Andrea looked at Mickey too. Tears welled up in her eyes, and she said to me and the studio audience, “He’s lost weight.”

I swear I thought at the time, she’s not even seeing the same person I’m seeing. I said, “Looks to me like she gained about ten pounds, but I figure, she had a baby, she’s going to gain a little weight.”

Andrea looked at me intently for the first time, like she was actually listening to me. “What are you talking about?”

I said, “Well, you gained weight.”

Andrea gave me the evil eye. I said, “I’m talking about Mickey, that’s who. She had the baby, and she’s still carrying a few extra pounds. But it’s nothing to me. She looks great. You look great. Jeez.”

Then Andrea said to me, right on camera in front of the TV audience, “Mickey is a man, you idiot.”

I was surprised, but I was not going to put up with being treated that way. Idiot. Huh. I said, “I understand how you could have thought that, but the fact is that she’s a girl. I found out for myself in the traditional manner.”

Of course by now, there were more people in the audience screaming and laughing. I’ve done some street theater, and this happens — people act out, and certainly on the Maury show the audience is encouraged to act out. I’ve found that the best way to deal with it is to ignore it.