Awakening Gabrielle
by Sharon Delaney
The Chakram Newsletter: Issue 13
Guilty pleasures. Getting ready to go to bed Sunday night, only to realize you've still got your pajamas on from Saturday morning. Eating Nestle's Quik out of the can. Admitting you watch Martha Stewart.
I usually settle in by the phone a half hour before Lucy is supposed to call for our interview. I take a couple minutes to check over the questions I’ve prepared and do a sound check with the tape recorder by calling the “at the tone the time will be” number. Then I grab a book or see what’s on TV. I tune in to the Learning Channel or the Discovery Channel. Or maybe CNN World News. I keep my ears peeled for a topic that might make a good conversation starter. Because, as I’ve learned, even if you’re watching a program on the life of seahorses, odds are Lucy will have something pertinent to say about it.
When the phone rings this afternoon and Lucy asks what I'm doing, I’m forced to admit I’ve been watching Martha Stewart. I usually tape it the day before and watch it during breakfast, but this morning I got up too late to eat before work. I do try always to tell the truth, but an admission like this made me hold my breath. Would I be the recipient of a Xena sneer? A sympathetic, consoling Lucy promising to see me through this time of obvious brain drain?
What I heard was a laugh - a knowing laugh. A conspiratorial laugh?
“It’s like watching brain surgery,” I explained to Lucy. “She's mesmerizing.”
“There's something about all those nice clean products, you know?” Lucy said, chuckling. “Makes you want to at least have that in your past, although not necessarily be like that.”
She hasn't admitted yet to actually watching the show, so I danced in a little closer.
“I remember when she was making a cloth bulletin board,” I said, “and she had these ribbons - ”
“Criss-crossing over the board,” Lucy finished.
“You know what I'm talking about?” I said, feeling an admission right around the corner.
Lucy laughed. “My sister-in-law made one for me a year ago.”
I still can't nail her down. I decide the pump needs a bit more priming.
“She's so meticulous,” I said.
“I know what you mean,” Lucy laughs. “The mesmerizing applications, the duty of making beautiful parcels and candles - dipping and rolling them. And gold leaf on our gingerbread houses.”
I've got her!! “You have seen her show,” I exclaim triumphantly.
“Are you kidding? !’ve got her books,” Lucy said without any shame at all. “Last Christmas. I went and cut the evergreens and put them all upstairs so it would have that smell. I just wanted for one Christmas to feel like Martha Stewart.” Lucy starts laughing. “Like it was snowing outside.”
I'm feeling a bit more secure in this particular guilty pleasure of mine. “Didja ever notice how the glue comes out so evenly when she squeezes the bottle?” I ask her.
“Oh,” she moans. “I know.”
“It never does that for me,” I said with a pout. “I get a straight line, a ball of glue, a straight line, a ball of glue.”
Lucy’s commiserating laughter at this point is giving me confidence. “I know! I know!” she said. “And you get pricked fingers from thumbing cloves into oranges.”
“One day she showed how to pack a suitcase for a trip,” I continued.
“With tissue paper?” Lucy said excitedly.
“And everything in vacuum-sealed bags,” I added with amazement. “So things wouldn’t get crushed.”
Another roar of laughter greeted this remark. “Well, that's very important.” Lucy said in her best Martha voice. “I want her to come and pack for me.”
“It would make a great segment for her show,” I chimed in. ‘“Packing for the Warrior Princess.’”
“I love how she's got her own chickens that lay perfect blue eggs,” Lucy said laughing.
“One day she gave a tour of her house,” I said, “and on her office door was a Do Not Enter sign. When she opened the door, it was a shambles!”
“Nooooo,” Lucy said in an awed voice.
“Piles everywhere,” I added, “sliding off table tops, stacked on chairs and the floor. It was amazing!”
Lucy seemed stunned. “I love it! She humanized her own persona.” Lucy thought for a moment. “Do you suppose it was planned?”
“Oh my God, do you think so?” I wondered, my illusions crashing around me.
“Some art director meticulously placed every cascading stack,” Lucy laughed.
“I can’t handle it,” I said as we both dissolved in laughter.
Speaking of organized people reminded me that Lucy had just finished filming an upcoming Xena episode, called “Dangerous Prey,” with Renee directing again. “The first episode she did was a comedy and this is a drama?” I asked Lucy.
“Yeah, and she was terrific,” Lucy said enthusiastically. “She was right on the money with her acting direction, as you would expect. She was very decisive.”
“I remember interviewing Renee right after ‘Deja Vu All Over Again,’” I told Lucy, “and she remarked that because she was so green, she didn’t know when to hold her ground and go with her own instincts.”
“She nailed it this time,” Lucy said with a warm pride in her voice. “I think It was the second day that she took charge and realized, ‘I'm not one of the gang now. Everyone is supposed to slave to my rhythm,’ if you understand what I mean,” Lucy laughed.
“Sometimes I would make a suggestion, something I felt strongly about,” Lucy explained. “Renee would think about it and either say, ‘Yes, let's go that way,’ or ‘No. I just don’t want that,’ and I would say, ‘Fair enough.’ I want a director to let me have my say, but my responsibility is to them - they have the last word. I never fight the director and Renee was very strong. Given the time allowed and the compromises that are part of the job, I think she made the episode she wanted.”
“I like that when someone allows me my say,” I agreed with Lucy. “And then, if they disagree and they're the one in charge, I do it their way. But at least I've had a chance to speak my piece. And I think it's important to have someone in charge in a situation where there are so many people and such a variety of disciplines involved as in the making of a television show.”
“We need that and I encouraged it in her,” Lucy stated firmly. “We don't want somebody who's constantly saying, ‘Shall we do this… shall we do that… what do you think?’ We need someone who's going to say, ‘Right, move those sets over there. This is my vision, this is what I want to fulfill.’
“That's what a director does - they direct the course of everyone's day. And we can work much more efficiently slaving to that one person's view. If they have done their homework, it leaves us to do our jobs without being encumbered by indecision. And that's everyone - the grips, the lighting, the actors, everyone. We're very much a family on this set, but the head of the family is the director, not the star. That's the way it should be.”
“They say that's one of the things to remember about raising a child, too,” I commented. “To give them rules and parameters so they have a structure within which to experiment and grow.”
“Right,” Lucy agreed. “I'm reading a book called ‘The Naked Ape,’ by Desmond Morris. It was written in the sixties and I don't know how outdated it is, but it talks about how we had to develop as a communicative and cooperative species. Primates are not cooperative. They'll just go on their merry way and pick fruit as they need it. When we came out of the trees, we had to compete with carnivores who are the masters of their environment. We weren't as fast as they were and didn't have their sharp claws and teeth. So we had to develop cooperative skills to help one another catch food and survive.”
“And cooperation leads to rules that help the whole group,” I added.
“Right. And that's what the director does - provides the structure and limits and rules,” Lucy declared.
As we were talking about directors, I remembered what Lucy had said about enjoying working with Michael Hurst. And I hadn't had a chance to ask her about “Antony & Cleopatra” which Michael directed.
“That episode was strongly relationship driven,” Lucy explained. “It's all about the love affair between Xena and Antony - the moral peril rather than the mortal peril.”
“Xena made the decision that Antony wouldn't be a good leader and she worked to replace him with someone she thought would be better,” I told Lucy.
“Better the devil you know,” Lucy agreed. “But she fell in love with the person she was forced to dispose of. In other circumstances, I think she would have loved to have loved him.”
“And Gabrielle had to kill Brutus. Xena and Gabrielle standing over the bodies of Antony and Brutus - looking at each other across the ship, was a powerful moment,” I told Lucy. “Such a range of painful emotions seemed to fill both women.”
“Good,” Lucy said, seeming gratified that what she and Renee had tried to portray came across so well to the audience. “That was a really strong moment between Xena and Gabrielle.”
As we were speaking of love, my thoughts strayed to some recent housecleaning I had done. Can't see the connection? I'll explain. I was emptying the top shelf of a closet and came across a doll with writing on the bottom of her shoe. It said, “Jean-Guy Doucet.” I told Lucy the story behind this memento from my teenage years.
“He was the son of a Canadian campground owner,” I explained. “I was thirteen and he was about nineteen. We hung out together the two weeks my family stayed at their campground and, on the last night, we sat on a park bench under a light by the pool and talked about how much fun we'd had. All of a sudden, a little voice inside my head said, ‘He's going to kiss me!’ And he did.”
Lucy sighed, “Oh, how exciting.”
“Can you remember your first kiss?” I asked her.
“I don't remember,” Lucy said, pausing to think.
“Did you date a lot in high school?” I queried.
“We don't really do that here,” Lucy said. “You go out in great big groups and suss out who you might like. You're quite wary to go out with anybody at all because the next day, you're either going out with them seriously or you never see them again!” Lucy laughed.
“Did you live at home when you went to college?” I wondered.
“Yes, though I only went for a year,” she said. “I was just biding my time till I could save the money to go overseas.”
“You wanted to do something else bsides continuing with school?”
“I did,” she explained. “I just didn't have the money. I was only seventeen and it took me a year to drum up the cash. I worked in a nightclub and did a TV ad which gave me a couple thousand dollars.”
“And once you had the money…”
Lucy laughed. “I took off with a one-way ticket and nothing in my pockets. It was ridiculous really.”
I had heard about this “OE” - Overseas Experience. They even use the expression in television ads in New Zealand. Lucy gave me a bit of insight into this particular cultural phenomenon.
“Coming from somewhere this small, you have to travel,” she stated.
“Did your parents do it too?” I asked.
“No, not their generation. This is more recent,” she said. “My parents were a little nervous for me, but everybody does it. Mind you, my four brothers before me had gone. And they had all come back safely or found lives overseas. The average time is two years.”
“Two years!” I exclaimed. “I thought it was a few weeks.”
“Traditionally, during the last 35 years, most went to London. Now they're starting to go to other places as well - South America and the United States,” she added.
Remembering some articles I’d read about Lucy's travels and how she had been to France, I asked if that was the first place she went to.
“No, Switzerland, actually,” she said trying to retrace the journey in her mind. “I traveled there with some friends and stayed with them till I needed to strike out on my own.”
“And you had no money?” I said in amazement.
“It was ridiculous. I could kill myself for being such a fool now, but…” She laughed.
Ah, the trust of youth. All will be taken care of. “What happened after you left your friends?” I asked.
“I took a bus to Munich and stayed somewhere dismal and inexpensive. You steal the bread and rolls off the breakfast table in the morning and put them in your bag.” Lucy laughed at the memory.
“That's what I used to do in college,” I said as my own memories came flooding back. “I remember friends making ketchup soup.”
“Ketchup sandwiches for me,” Lucy supplied.
“I used to make mustard ones myself,” I chuckled. “Did you speak any of the languages of the countries you were in?”
“I had studied French and German since third form, from thirteen to seventeen,” Lucy said, “but I don't know that those were vastly improved by my travels.”
I remembered going to a tap dance class in France and the other students wanting to practice their English on me. I wondered if that was the way it was for Lucy.
“Yes, or they just don't want to speak to you,” she said rather sadly. “It was winter and in cold countries people shuttle from house to house and they don't hang outside in the sun and chat like they might down under - because there is no sun! Ah, I should have stayed in Switzerland, really.” she said quietly to herself. “If you're locked out of the society and you don't know anyone, winter's a bad time to be in Europe.”
“Why did you go in the wintertime?” I asked wonderingly.
“You know what it was?” she said. “I had said I was going and then I felt I had to commit to it. You know, you say it out loud… And then you're too embarrassed to change your mind,” Lucy laughed ruefully.
“I went to London when I was about twenty,” I told Lucy. “I would sit on a bus stop bench and talk to the other people waiting there. Then the bus would come along and everyone would get on and I'd wait for the next batch of people to show up.”
“Oh,” Lucy commiserated. “How lonely.”
“Well, now that you mention it. I guess it does look that way,” I said, looking at it through her eyes. “I just thought it was a good way to meet people.”
Lucy chuckled.
“Right after college, I left home and went to Ohio,” I added.
That remark elicited a burst of laughter from Lucy. “Living dangerously! ‘I'm going to Ohio.’ ‘Say it ain't so, Sharon!’” Lots more laughter.
“Guess Ohio wasn't exactly a place I could really get in trouble,” I admitted with a chuckle. “What other countries did you visit?”
“I went to Greece and traveled around a bit there. Actually, where did I go?” Lucy seemed to be rummaging around trying to jog her memory. “I went to Yugoslavia. I remember now! I went to Yugoslavia, as it was called then, and traveled the youth hostel circuit.
“You would see the same kids all over Europe. We were all doing the same thing. I caught up with a couple guys who were busking and we sang in the youth hostels to make some money.”
As more and more memories came to mind. Lucy started laughing. “There was a bunch of young people doing this terrible play about the plague and it was in English. It made absolutely no sense at all! I hung with them for a while,” she added. “Just tragic teenage stuff.”
“Were you ever afraid?” I queried.
“Yes,” she said. “And tremendously lonely.”
“If it was so awful. why didn't you go home?” I asked.
“You can't go home,” she declared. “I could have rung my parents, I suppose. I don’t know why none of those things occurred to me. It's some sort of ridiculous pride, I guess. You say you're going so you've gotta go and you've got to stay for your allotted two years. And what's the sense of going home. Home is the known. You know what's going to happen when you go home. My misspent youth,” Lucy said with a gentle laugh.
“Did all your friends from school do their OEs too?” I asked.
“A lot of them did it later than me,” she explained. “They went to University for three or four years and then went off. A lot of them went to Ireland and had good times. But I was never envious of that. I had had Daisy by then and I was never unhappy to be a mum.”
Lucy had said she acted in plays in school, but I wondered if she was thinking about it as a profession early on in her life.
“I knew, but I didn't know how I was going to do it,” she said. “Long before I left school I knew. I remember in third form when I was thirteen, they handed out career sheets. Everybody said they wanted to be a marine biologist or a pathologist because it sounds flash. But nobody knew what they did,” Lucy chuckled.
As anyone who's read the dozen interviews I've done with Lucy knows, I’ve yet to run across a topic that doesn’t spark a conversation with her. She reads voraciously and has an enormous curiosity. I wondered what it was about school that turned her off.
“Theory,” she stated firmly. “I'm not interested in theory unless it pertains to real life or practical situations. I need to apply things. I've known from a fairly young age, very early teens, that I'm a feeler. And my job is to make other people feel. At least, that's how I perceive it. Becoming involved now in the child abuse issue is about turning feeling into action, positive action.”
I looked at the clock and saw lunchtime approaching in New Zealand. Rob had come in during my talk with Lucy and taken their son from her for a bottle and then off to bed for a nap. In fact, when Lucy called, she said she had been sitting with Julius watching the rain out the window. I wondered if there was anything Lucy could tell me about the upcoming season.
“Claire (Stansfield) is down here now about to film an episode,” Lucy told me.
I mentioned that the Xena art department had raided our warehouse for heaps of Xena merchandise with which to decorate the sets for the episode Claire is appearing in. It seems it takes place in the present and there are three Xena fans whose houses needed to be furnished with memorabilia.
“I was there when they opened the boxes and brought in one of the Xena busts,” Lucy chuckled. “Rob and I watched One Million Years B.C. with Raquel Welch last night. Rob’s got this idea of using the New Zealand tuatara, which is the oldest prehistoric lizard in New Zealand, in an episode. It's our native dinosaur. He wants to stick horns on it!” Lucy begins to laugh. “I had to say, ‘Reality check, here, love, I don't think you can take one of New Zealand's national treasures and glue horns on it.’” She dissolves in laughter.
I joined in the laughter. “Oh, there's nothing like show biz.”
“Not that he would use some sort of harmful glue, super glue, or anything. But it was just such a funny idea.” I could see Lucy shaking her head in amusement.
“I suppose that would be like gluing horns on Dick Clark in this country - speaking of prehistoric treasures,” I said cheekily. And speaking of cheeks...
“Have you filmed the kiss yet?” I asked Lucy.
“What kiss?” she asked.
“The kiss between Xena and Gabrielle. Whaddya mean what kiss?!”
Quiet - as Lucy rummages through her past. “I don't remember. What episode was that?”
“You don’t remember kissing Kevin Smith in ‘Eternal Bonds,’ you don't remember kissing Renee,” I said, laughing.
Bells finally go off. “Oh, the Valkyrie thing. Oh, yeah, yeah,” she says. “The Ring of Fire. The Kiss of Life.” Lucy explodes with laughter. “What kiss! Every time you say. ‘What about that kiss?’ I say, ‘What kiss.’”
I join in her laughter. “It's amazing what you forget. So this is a kiss of life?”
“Yes,” Lucy explained. “I questioned how this was going to work. How do you do this right and serve the storyline. The way we’ve always worked in the show is that people can see whatever they want to see. I wanted to leave that open for people to feel good about it no matter which perspective they're coming from. So, it's the Kiss of Life and it's the thing that wakens Gabrielle.”
“It's similar to what happened with Lao Ma in ‘The Debt,’” I said.
“Exactly.” Lucy paused and I could hear her mischievous mind at work and a smile curling the corners of her mouth. “Except I knew that in the morning I'd either be going out with her or I'd never see her again.”