The Old Cat, Julius and Bill
by Sharon Delaney
The Chakram Newsletter: Issue 10
Have I ever mentioned that I spent a few years as a volunteer at a school for the Deaf here in Los Angeles? When I began having Deaf friends, I put a TTY message on my answering machine. This means when a hearing person calls and I’m not home, first they get my voice message and then they hear a series of electronic beeps repeating the same message only. If you have a TTY, it prints out as words on your screen.
I’ve never actually heard this message myself, but hearing friends have told me the beeps are very loud. Therefore, I always warn people ahead of time about this. There was one person I forgot to tell.
I came home from work and the first message on my answering machine was someone moaning and laughing and saying, “Now all your friends are deaf, Sharon.” I forgot to tell Lucy.
Later that night, the phone rang again, and this time I am home to receive Lucy’s call to do our interview.
“I forgot to warn you about my TTY message,” I apologized, sheepishly. It’s really loud, isn’t it?”
“I had my earpiece in for my cell phone,” Lucy said, laughing, “and my hands were full, so I couldn’t pull the phone away from my ear.
“Jeez, I never thought of that scenario!” I said. Thinking to myself, “Poor baby.” Baby? Hey, baby! “You had the baby!”
“I did,” she said, in the sweetest proud new mom voice. “He’s gorgeous, just gorgeous.”
Why is it that hearing a woman talk about her newborn just seems to bring a smile to your face. I felt all hopefully inside for a new life, just starting out, full of promise.
“You told me it was a bit tougher than when you had Daisy?” I reminded her.
“I think it’s just that I’m older and I was awake for a very long time,” she explained. “I had been awake for 27 hours before he was born and then I was so excited, I stayed awake another 12 hours.”
“I can’t imagine giving birth and then rolling over and falling asleep,” I said, amazed at the thought.
“No,” she laughed. “At least not for me. I guess I just wasn’t 20 this time and it was a big deal. It was very humbling.”
“I hope you’re not going to think I’m nuts,” I said, “but as the due date got closer, I found myself walking around the office and suddenly I was struck by the image that there is a human being inside a pregnant woman. Not just a ‘life,’ as it’s frequently referred to but an actual human being with arms and legs and shoulders. I don’t know why I never pictured it that way before.
“I mentioned it to one of the women in my office who has children and she looked at me like I was nuts!” I laughed. “‘What did you think was in there?’ she said. ‘An egg?’”
I don’t know what was making Lucy laugh harder - my ingenuousness or the fact that she understood exactly what I was referring to.
“It’s only after you have the baby you realize that before you’d given birth it was an abstract idea,” she said. “Somehow, you think of the baby in two dimensions, you know? And all of a sudden it’s three!
“It was incredibly profound and amazing as well. And the further away you get from it, the more amazing it seems. But it took me until the last six days to do anything other than ‘baby,’” she explained. “It just took me ages! Julius was sleeping next to me in the bedroom and he’s a very noisy boy. Chats all night long in his sleep.”
“They talk in their sleep?” I asked, a puzzled frown wrinkling my brow.
“Oh my God, does he talk,” she chuckled. “He’s a complete grouse. I was waking up every twenty minutes on top of his feeding times. After a week, Rob and I were both bleary-eyed. And after three weeks, it was time to put him in his own room,” she laughed. “And now he’s down to four-hour feeding sessions. He’s a big boy and growing like a son of a gun. I’m very proud of that. In three weeks, he was 12 pounds 6. So he’s putting on a pound a week which is twice the rate in the womb.
“So absolutely lovely. Such a good-natured kid,” she added, warmly.
“You gave birth in water?”
“Yeah. All our American friends think we’re just mad hippies,” she chortled. “It’s not that much done in the States, but it’s not uncommon here.”
In my former profession as a proof-reader, I’d read a number of books on this alternative way of giving birth and I remembered being surprised it wasn’t more common. It seemed to have a lot to offer especially in the lessened trauma for the baby of going from the womb into a similar environment of water.
“One of the things you have to try and do is hold off getting in the water until the labor is well established,” Lucy informed me. “Otherwise it can slow things up. You get too comfortable sitting in the water and it can stop labor.”
“Too comfortable?” I asked, astounded.
“Yeah, the body just says to itself, ‘Ahhh, this is nice, I don’t feel like giving birth anymore,’ Comfort and labor do not go hand in hand,” she laughed, knowingly.
Lucy recently gave an interview for the New Zealand Herald on the value of breastfeeding. I wondered how that article came about.
“You know why?” she said. “Because the rate of women breastfeeding is declining in New Zealand and the same week I had Julius, there was a bit to-do about it in the papers and they asked me to comment on it. So I did.”
“Did the papers say why it’s declining?”
“No, they didn’t.” She continued, “I think it’s because women have lost confidence in their ability to do those things. It’s quite difficult to get the hang of it. It’s not as natural as it looks. I mean, it’s absolutely natural, but women have lost the technique. Historically, women would guide one another and there would be a culture of the passing down of information of women’s matters. And that’s gone away. It’s been taken out of our hands. Childbirth is no longer in the realm of our everyday experience. You’ve never seen somebody being born, right?’
“No, I haven’t,” I told her.
“My mother, who had seven children, had no overview of anybody having given birth until she was there with me and Julius. A lot of women’s matters have been taken out of the hands of women. And it’s a great shame because I think women are suffering. They’ve lost confidence and their ability to give birth without medication or to breastfeed or any number of things. Secrecy,” she stated. “Everything’s shrouded in secrecy and it shouldn’t be.”
“In pioneer times,” I added, “women only had each other to depend on. And they were constantly meeting with each other. During a pregnancy, you might have your mother, grandmother, neighboring women all there to tell you what it was going to be like and guiding your every step. But the nuclear family as well as the nuclear neighborhood doesn’t exist anymore. It’s all splintered. Children move far from home and people don’t bother to meet their neighbors.”
“That support system really has been decimated,” Lucy agreed. “There’s just so little information sharing. Now you go away to a place to do these things and I don’t think we’re richer for it. Though the hospital is a fantastically useful place. I’m not knocking hospitals because you need them in many situations, but we’re not interlinked anymore in Western society. We’re all cut off. And that’s why dating is second only to porn on the internet in terms of traffic.”
“There’s no town anymore,” I said, “where everyone knows each other.”
“And we’re all such privacy junkies,” Lucy said, thoughtfully. “‘Don’t bug me,’ ‘We’re too busy, too busy.’ ‘What does this person want from me?’”
“It makes it hard to reach out to people even at work,” I agreed. “Your mom was there for the birthday?”
“Yep!” she said proudly. “And my daughter. And I thought that’s a great thing for her at this time of her life. If nothing else, it shows her this is the price of making whoopee,” she laughed. “It makes it concrete. ‘Ah, this is what it’s all about.’”
“That it does, that it does,” I said hopefully. “How was Rob?”
“He was fantastic,” she said, obviously smiling.
“Did you bite him?” I asked, referring to something we had talked about in our last interview.
“Not hard,” Lucy laughed.
“You mean you took a nip!” I said, astounded.
“Figuratively speaking,” she teased. “He was just great. And he’ll be even better next time. I think it’s very difficult for men now. Once upon a time, they were expected to do nothing. They weren’t even allowed to be there. Nowadays, they’re expected to do everything. Do something, do anything, do everything. Men are, by nature, Mr. Fix-its and they’re absolutely paralyzed when they can’t help their partner who’s in some sort of private Hell,” she laughed.
“So now,” she continued, “they’re given a list of things to do. Rob was crashing around at two in the morning trying to make things just right. He’s such a proud father - very hands on changing diapers and burping the baby. He’s a wiz at that,” Lucy laughed delightedly. “And he’ll get up in the middle of the night to feed Julius to give me a break. He’s just a fabulous partner.”
“What can the husband do at a time like this? What is it you needed and wanted?” I wondered.
“The best thing he can do is just not be offended if she asks for one thing one second and then says get the hell away from me the next,” Lucy laughed. “Just ride with it, it’s all part of the deal. It’s an interesting roller coaster. But my experience was that I just needed him to be there, to be simple and do nothing really. Just be with me.”
I remembered she’d said that when Daisy was born in the hospital, her husband was the only focal point of love in the room.
“He was the one thing I knew,” Lucy stated firmly. “Everything else was completely foreign to me and he was my one support. The one thing I understood.”
“Where did you get the names Julius and Bay?”
“We just like the name Julius,” she explained. “Apart from that, my mother’s name is Julie and Rob’s grandfather and uncle were both named Julius. So it was a family name on both sides. But really, we just like it. And we gave Daisy a chance to choose a third name for the baby so that it would be her baby too.
“She chose Bay because it means born on a Saturday in Gaelic or some other foreign language. She had a book of baby names and she dubbed him Bay.”
“Have you gone back to work yet,” I queried.
“I’ve been back one day and I’ve got this week off,” Lucy said.
I’d been hearing that Renee was spending some time being a mermaid in an episode they were filming.
“Yes,” Lucy laughed. “And apparently it’s fantastic, really funny. Everybody’s pleased with the way it’s shaping up.”
“I’m dying to ask Renee if she abstains from drinking all day because of her legs being in a fins costumer,” I laughed.
Lucy moaned. “Oh, I know! I’ve also heard the set is very funky and wacked out and fun. I’d like to see it, but I just can’t get out of the house!”
“And next week,” I teased her, “you get to have a baby all over again.”
“I do?” she said, surprised. “I haven’t read the script yet.” I hear noises of Lucy obviously thumbing through a pile of papers. “Oh yeah, ‘God Fearing Child. I’ve got to do it again!” She laughed.
“Speaking of angels,” I said, deftly segueing from newborns to Xena and Gabrielle’s recent time in Heaven and Hell, “how was shooting ‘Fallen Angel’, with those wings?”
“Much better for me than for everybody else,” Lucy said, trying unsuccessfully to hide a measure of glee, “because I wasn’t in a real harness as I was pregnant at the time. I was rubbing my hands with glee cuz I didn’t have to wear that harness.
“The stunt people were incredible. My stunt double wore that makeup every day for over three weeks and it’s just a killer. She was also in the heavy wings and the high-heeled shoes, the cloven hooves,” she added.
“I wondered how they did the demon feet,” I said.
“They’re high shoes with the heels painted out,” she explained. “I gave her and her partner a vacation trip for doing all that work for me. I owed her a great debt.
“And Renee, poor Renee!” Lucy moaned. “I only had to wear the upper harness to hold on my wings, but she wore the lower one that is used for flying and hanging by the wires. They’re just the most miserable things. Renee really tolerated a lot.
“This has really been my easiest year,” she said. “Many times I was saying to myself how glad I was not to be wearing some of the makeup and prosthetics the other actors and stunt people were in for so many days. I felt sorry for them and guilty at the same time for the happiness I was feeling that I didn’t have to suffer with them,” Lucy laughed.
“Did your double do more work with Renee when your back was to the camera? I know you and Renee are usually always there for each other’s closeups whenever possible,” I said.
“Wearing that demon makeup, they could do a full frontal shot of Zoe, my wonderful stuntwoman, without too much trouble. And my double, Polly, was also wearing the makeup, but nobody more than Zoe,” Lucy said, gratefully.
“Do you remember the scene after Demon Xena and Angel Gabrielle fight in the sky and Gabrielle tumbles to the ground? You plummet down and kneel by her and stroke her cheek. I was wondering if there was any of the real Xena left inside the demon because as you stroked Gabrielle’s cheek…”
“...there was a facial tick,” Lucy finished for me. “I do remember that face because it was a little bit of Daisy or Meg in there. Something childlike or mischievous. Except, it wasn’t Xena being wistful. I think, at that point, there was next to zero of Xena left. It was the demon thinking, ‘Ayy, what is this cute little creature?’” Lucy laughed. “We actually dubbed some lines for the part where Demon Xena is carrying Gabrielle to the cliff edge and saying things like, ‘Heavy birdy.’ Wicked things about the little broken butterfly, the little broken bird on the ground,” Lucy chuckled, wickedly. “But they weren’t used.”
“What was Xena going to do with Gabrielle in Hell? Why was she taking this little thing back with her?” I asked, puzzled.
Lucy answered in a wicked demon voice, chortling gleefully. “‘Cuz she wanted her!’ She was gonna throw her over the abyss down to Hell.”
“So she could have something to play with?” I asked, laughing.
“Yeah! Toy with her, the old cat. I think she belonged to the devil then. Yeah, she’d have her forever!” Lucy laughed.
“It’s ironic,” I added, “even when there wasn’t any Xena left in the demon…”
“...they were gonna be together forever,” Lucy finished, laughing. “One way or the other.
“They decided not to use those bits we added during looping,” Lucy said. “But the way you think things are going to pan out in an episode rarely has anything to do with the way it turns out in the end. I’m always surprised with the finished product. Every episode takes on a life of its own.”
Although an episode starts with the script, I’d often heard the actors, directors, etc, talk about how things change when filming actually takes place.
“Yeah,” Lucy explained. “Everything’s an amalgam of what happens on the day with your own performance or someone coming up with a funny idea. It could be the clapper loader or a grip who comes up with a cool idea and it’s all infused into the scene.”
“The crew participates as well,” I asked.
“We’re just a big family,” she said. “Cameron, who used to be our camera operator, was a great one for funny ideas. We’ll do something in rehearsal and everyone will laugh and in it goes. And then we just see what makes the final cut.”
Not knowing the protocol of a television or movie set, I didn’t know that the crew could chime in with ideas as well.
“It’s very different from the States. We’re not overly unionized which means that if I want my chair over there, I’ll pick it up and move it and nobody’s going to get their nose out of joint about it. Whereas in the States, boy, you’d better not be picking up your own chair because somebody else will lose their job over it! People don’t work interdepartmentally,” Lucy said a bit sadly.
The most riveting moment for me in “Fallen Angel” was Xena’s healing of Callisto’s soul. Taking on Callisto’s guilt and sin and knowing that she’s condemning herself to Hell for eternity. We were set up to believe that Xena might have to do that to save Gabrielle, the expected sacrifice. When Xena struck Callisto down by chopping off one of her wings and Callisto turned on her, pouring out her rage on all Xena had done to destroy Callisto’s life and soul and vowing to hate her forever, a coldness began to settle over me as I knew what had to happen.
Xena says, “No” and touches her as a light envelopes the two of them. Xena pays her debts.
“That was a high point of the episode for many,” I told Lucy.
“Oh good!” she said delightedly. “Although I kicked myself for not playing it slightly differently. It was a big moment and it deserved a little more attention. I think Xena should have said more - ‘No, that’s not how it’s going to be.’ I thought it was a little brief. There should have been a bit more time spent on it, that’s all. Even if it was in the look. And that was my screw up, nobody else’s. It just wasn’t there for the editor to put in.”
“You know, as a viewer, I can only judge my opinion of the scene by what it made me feel as I watched it. There’s no behind-the-scenes info or hindsight involved and it worked for me and many others,” I told her.
“It worked for you guys, eh? Well, that’s all that matters. That’s good,” she said brightly. “If it works for you then it works for me.”
“Have you heard that the prison scene from ‘Ides of March’ is one of the top five favorite moments of the series?” I asked Lucy.
“Was that when Xena’s dying and her back’s been broken?” she asked.
“That’s the one,” I told her.
“Oh good!” she said, sounding very pleased.
“When Xena says to Gabrielle, ‘I’m sorry I didn’t treat you right,’ I lost it.”
“Did you really?” she asked me.
“I couldn’t even describe the scene to someone the next day without getting choked up. It wasn’t just that it was taking place between Xena and Gabrielle, but do you realize how much people want to say that and never do?” I explained.
“It’s very poignant, isn’t it? When it’s too late. What an interesting comment. I’m glad you brought this up,” Lucy said, thoughtfully.
“It was a very powerful scene for many people,” I added. “So many fans wrote to me about that moment.”
“That’s great! I’m so pleased!” she said brightly. “Will you pass that on to them? I’m so pleased they liked that moment because I remember it indelibly. Some shows and scenes, you know how I’m alway saying to you that I don’t remember? But I remember that one very clearly.”
Time was running out and I knew Lucy would have to be getting back to her son. But there had been an article in the papers not so long ago about her having had dinner with President Clinton and my curiosity was bubbling over to find out what that had been like.
“So,” I said casually, “you had dinner with our President? How was that and how far away from him were you sitting?”
“Oh, about six inches,” Lucy said mischievously. “He was right next to me and his daughter was across from us at a very narrow table,” she laughed. “It was amazing. There were 12 of us at dinner. I expected it to be an enormous affair and he’d just blow through and then leave after the appetizer. But he didn’t! He came and sat right down next to me, and we talked about our favorite authors. We’re both great fans of James Lee Burke. He writes stories about crime and small counties around New Orleans and Texas,” she explained.
“We talked about a lot of things for the whole night. He’s extremely personable. And the whole Clinton entourage is the classiest game in town. I’ve never seen a production like it - how they move so seamlessly. Everyone,” she said with amazement, “right down to the drivers. It’s effortless effort. They’re so charming, so friendly and yet so damn well organized you can’t see them pulling the strings. And what you see is just the tip of the iceberg. You just know that there’s guys with Uzis hanging around in the crowd wearing trenchcoats,” she laughed. “And yet you never see them.
“He’s so affable. You’ll never see anyone who’s better at melting people’s icy little hearts. New Zealand’s very jaded politically. Very disinclined to trust any politician. Clinton came and charmed the socks off everybody. He could be standing for Prime Minister next month and win, hands down,” Lucy laughed. “The master of PR.”
“What is it about him that so attracts people?” I wanted to know more.
She thought for a moment. “He’s extremely intelligent. Very committed to his job and well versed on every topic. He obviously works hard to be apprised of every political situation. And if he doesn’t know about something like, like lamb tariffs,” she added, “he won’t fudge it. He won’t pretend that he does. He’ll say, ‘I have to study on that.’ You cannot help liking the man.”
“He’s got a warm face,” I said to her. “It always seems very relaxed and he seems to concentrate on whoever he’s talking to.”
“He does! And he pays attention,” she agreed. “He has this trick of looking people straight in the eye and I saw in all the newspapers so many people mentioned that,” she laughed. “When he talks to you, he looks at you and he might have his hand on the back of your chair. And it doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman. I can imagine there’s a lot of silly women who would go very weak-kneed and think (mimicking a lovesick voice), ‘Oh, he’s smiling just for me,’” she laughed. “I can see that would be a hazard in his life and I would imagine it could be very tedious for his daughter.
“You know she must be thinking, ‘Oh my God, here we go again.’ She walks in and sees me sitting next to him and she doesn’t realize I’m eight months pregnant,” Lucy laughed at the recollection. “If I was her, I’d be thinking, ‘Another stupid woman sitting next to my father.’ Because I experienced that as a kid. My father was the mayor of Mount Albert and I hated all these dopey women thinking my father was just so (fawning voice) ‘powerful and wonderful.’” More chuckles from Lucy as she remembered what it felt like when she was younger and looking back at the memory with an adult’s knowledge.
“He’s fun. He laughs. He’s a man who really eats life, that’s what it is. If something’s funny to him, he will laugh. He doesn’t care if nobody around the table is getting the joke or not. He’s sucking the marrow out of life as Robin Williams said in Dead Poet’s Society,” Lucy concluded.
“And he’s got the job he wanted,” I said to her. “He loves being president. And, at this stage, he’s really coasting home.”
“Yep!” she said positively. “He loves his job and treats people well. But what I was so charmed to see is that he and his daughter clearly enjoy one another’s company immensely. Like any normal father and daughter - actually, better than most. His own words were that she’s lived five lives in the course of a year.
“He doesn’t shrink from talking about the bloody controversy last year, but I did, you know?” Lucy laughed.
“Did anyone bring it up?” I asked, astounded.
“Not me!” she said, laughing. “But I feel that I could have because he will allude to it and I would just go ‘erp’ and change the subject. ‘So how’s them Rangers?’”
“Chicken!” I teased her.
And Lucy laughed.