You snap right back and other tall tales about being pregnant
by Sharon Delaney
The Chakram Newsletter: Issue 17
During this interview, Lucy gave me a beginner's course in dump truck video games. You might wonder how such a topic came up. It happens when an interview session falls in-between the scheduled hours of the babysitter and Lucy's young son, Julius, is wide awake, hungry and in need of diversion. Mom whips out a joystick bridge to place over the keyboard and off goes the young man into the fascinating world of cranes and cargo ships. As Lucy gave me detailed instructions on how to play this game, I had a sinking feeling her two-year-old son could probably wipe the floor with me. After all, the square red carton needs to go into the square red hold in the ship, then the round yellow carton into the - I think you get the picture. I could hear Julius happily racking up points while I was trying to bring up my kindergarten education and wondering if I could still match colors and shapes. Oh well, back to the adult conversation. At least for a while.
We had originally planned to talk the day before, but Julius had a play date.
“How did it go?” I asked.
“Fine,” Lucy chuckled. “They had almost nothing to do with each other. Parallel play.”
“Had they met before?” I queried, puzzled by this behavior I've never viewed firsthand.
“No. It takes little kids a while to get used to one another,” Lucy explained.
“Was the other child a boy or girl?” I continued the questioning.
“A boy. Julius sort of aggressively hugged him and kids don't like that, you know. Someone getting into their personal space,” she said with a smile in her voice.
With Julius chattering away to himself in the background and occasionally calling out questions to his mom, we rambled into the interview.
I usually have a printout of recent news articles that I run past Lucy for a game of Truth or Tabloid Rumor. The first was a report of a broken rib received while practicing the fine art of shussing down the ski slopes in New Zealand.
“I was out with Daisy and one of her friends,” Lucy began with a crestfallen tone in her voice, “and my ski came up and hit me. Nothing broken, just a hard thwap. I'm fine now.”
Okay, that story had a happy ending. Although I wondered how soon Lucy would schedule another jaunt to the slopes.
“I remember the first time I went skiing,” I said solicitously. “I was ten years old and tried to walk up the slope with my skis on.” I heard muffled laughter on the other end of the phone.
“You were young,” Lucy said consolingly. “You didn't know.”
“You’re laughing,” I retorted, feeling hurt. More muffled noises coming through the wire. “Okay, my parents laughed too,” I told her. “Then they showed me the ski rope. As I was happily moving up the slope on this wonderful form of transportation, I let go the grip of my hands on the rope. With my skis in the ruts, all I could do was slide backward knocking everyone off behind me.”
Lucy couldn't hold it in any longer. Her mirth exploded through the phone. The vision of my friends toppling behind me like tenpins and giggling as I went past them was one of those warm childhood memories. I chuckled along with Lucy.
There was also a report that she would be appearing in The Vagina Monologues at the Auckland Theatre in New Zealand.
“I am doing that,” she confirmed. “Starting Valentine's Day and running for six weeks.”
“Have you ever seen the play?” I asked.
“I haven't,” Lucy said. “I'm not sure I want to see it. I know how I'm affected by hearing other people's versions of songs. I wouldn't want to get someone else's interpretation of the character in my head.”
“I hear you've gotten a new haircut?” I queried.
“Yeah, and I'm learning to blow dry it myself,” Lucy said proudly.
The story that came out about Lucy's time doing a guest spot on The X-Files was that she wound up in Annabeth Gish's trailer by mistake and used her bathroom with the electrically- heated toilet seat cover. True or False, I asked.
“I made that up,” Lucy said, chortling with glee. “But I did get taken into her trailer by mistake. I think I was very newly pregnant during the making of that show and didn't know it. I did a lot of crazy emotional stuff at that time and was reacting weirdly to certain things. It was overwhelming to me an actor could have so much in America. We worked so hard on Xena and every cent went on the screen. I'm proud of that.”
“You've mentioned wanting to do a sitcom a number of times,” I said.
“The lifestyle would be great for my kids,” she explained. “But if you're lucky enough to be in a show that's a success, you just go nuts by the fourth or fifth year. I'm sure sitcoms are no exception. You have to bust through a psychological brick wall and discover freedom, gratitude and grace and realize how incredibly blessed we are.”
I wondered if, over the past six years, Lucy had ever thought about how Xena might end.
“People asked me if I knew how they were going to do it and I said no,” she stated. “I never wondered. I was always living in the moment. Renee's much more far-sighted in that way.”
“That's also not how you work,” I told her, thinking back on all the discussions we'd had about how she practices her craft. “Renee would think about it more because she approaches the work differently.”
“When I'm asked questions like that, I feel I should have a different answer. But the truth is I don’t. Why do I never ask Rob to tell what a story is going to be considering I live with him?” she puzzled to herself. “Well, I know he hasn’t made up his mind. And he doesn’t know how it’s going to pan out. Planning a script is always very fluid. I could think one thing was going to happen, but something completely different ends up being more appropriate.”
“There's a quote from Renee in one of the early Xena magazines where she said she thought they would grow old together and sit around talking about their adventures,” I told Lucy. “When I asked her if Rob said he wished he'd ended the show differently, would she want him to say that? She answered, ‘I hope he wouldn't say that.’ Because even though it turned out entirely different from what she'd thought back then, she thought it was a powerful ending. That doesn't mean she would have made the same choice, but she believes in the freedom of the artist.”
“Exactly,” Lucy stated with conviction. “That's right. And the courage of an artist to fulfill their vision. It ain't about hurting someone else's feelings. You can’t work to please an audience when it's made up of so many groups. Then you'd just be churning out the most common denominator.”
“Rob told me he knew Xena would end this way from the time they did the Xena trilogy on Hercules,” I said.
“He tossed and turned for a long time about his choice of ending,” Lucy explained. “He could have changed his mind at any time. But, in the end, it was the strongest choice and we all supported him in that.”
Lucy began to chuckle and I asked what she was thinking about.
“I remember another decision he made,” she said, laughing. “The time I found out Callisto would be the one who impregnated Xena. That cracked me up. It made me laugh because it's so brilliant and so weird and such a turnaround. Nobody else would think of that except Rob. I just have this intense rush of delight in something’s audacity and boldness.”
“My first thought was that it seemed so logical,” I remembered. “Then I thought it's insane. How can it be logical? But that's how it felt. As if Xena and Callisto had come full circle.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Lucy exclaimed. “It was real karmic payback. I love that. And with Xena. too, nobody expected it to be as simple as, 'you live by the sword, you die by the sword.' Gosh, she's not a superhero after all. She was human. And they could always bring her back, but I'll be too old by then and they'll recast.”
“Does Xena feel dead to you?” I wondered.
“No,” she said without hesitation. “She doesn't feel dead. She will never die.”
“Hey, do you know the movie Robin and Marion with Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn?” I asked. “It was about the death of Robin when they're both old.”
“Now that would be worth exploring in many years' time. But you wouldn't want to see a 60-year-old Lucy in a black leather frock. That would be hideous,” she laughed. She thought a minute and chuckled again. “And by then, even Renee might not have such a great midriff!”
I love it when Lucy and Renee talk about each other. There is such an obvious feeling of affection. I reminded Lucy of something that had happened during the filming of “Friend In Need.”
“Do you remember when you and Renee were in the pool in the town of Higuchi?” I began. “As you were waiting for the cameras to roll, Renee said to you, 'Pregnant women don't float!’ You shot back, 'There's a lot of things I lied to you about.’”
Lucy begins laughing at the memory of their teasing.
“And then you said to her, 'And you snap right back.’”
She laughs even harder.
“The director called, ‘Action,’ and Renee went under the water. But you're still talking and her hand came up out of the water and pulled you under,” I finished.
It took a moment for Lucy to catch her breath, she was laughing so hard. “Oh, that is so funny. I don't remember that.” But she seemed inordinately pleased with the picture of her gentle teasing of her friend.
“And now you're pregnant for the third time,” I said. “A long time ago, we talked about how you enjoyed having brothers and sisters. There's about the same age difference between Daisy and Julius as there is between you and your oldest brother. isn't there?”
“Yeah,” she answered. “But Daisy feels very much that she has a little brother and one day he's going to be a big man and be able to help move her furniture and look after her.”
Moving furniture?! Now that's an attribute of brothers I never thought of.
There was a question I had posed to Rob and Renee and I decided to see what Lucy's response would be.
“If you had not wanted Xena to die,” I started, “do you think you could have had any affect on Rob’s decision?”
Lucy was quiet for a moment. “That's an interesting question,” she said thoughtfully. “I don't know. I never questioned his or Chris Carter's or any producer's vision of their show. It never occurred to me to push the envelope in any direction. I guess I feel my contribution is at the end of the line.”
I thought for a bit about this. “I suppose you can't really put yourself into that question because you didn't disagree with the choice.”
“No,” she said, “as it happens, I didn't. Could I influence him? Yes, because Rob respects both my opinion and Renee’s. But, in the end, he will make an executive decision about his show. You respect your spouse's opinion, but you have to be responsible for your own decisions, your own career. And, as a partner, I support my husband in being all he can be.”
She laughed. “There have been times when Rob wanted me to help him make up his mind, but I'm just not that sort of person. I'm much more interested in him identifying what is right for him. This has only happened on one or two occasions in the whole time we've known each other. I'm not going to poke my nose into his career because he's the one who has to be happy with it. And I expect the same from him. I expect him to support me, trusting my instincts regarding my career.”
“I like input,” I said in agreement, “but the final decision must be mine.”
“Yeah. ‘What do you think about this? Give me a fresh perspective so I can consider that.’ And then I'll go away and make an educated decision,” Lucy added.
“When I asked Rob that question,” I explained, “he said he would have gone away and thought about it some more, but he probably would have made the same decision.”
“That's no surprise to me,” Lucy said with conviction.
“Did you talk at all about the potential response of viewers to Xena's death?” I asked. “You would certainly know that some people would be unhappy because as much as Old Yeller had to die, it still hurts to see it happen.”
“I know Rob and R.J. (Stewart) discussed it a great deal. As an actress, that's not my focus.” Lucy explained further. "I live in the moment when I do those things and I try to make the script live and be as real as possible. When you're living in the moment, you're not thinking about how other people are perceiving you.”
There were discussions about whether Xena’s death was the result of her having to pay with her life for her bad deeds as a warlord or whether it was an act of love for the souls that died at her hand and the lessons she'd learned from Gabrielle. I wondered what Lucy's take was on that debate.
“I don't think it was a quid pro quo so much as an act of love,” Lucy stated after a moment. “If there's an afterlife, that's the only thing you'll remember is the act of love and how much kindness and joy you spread. I don't mean that in the sense of trying to quantify how much good you did as opposed to how much bad. But I think all the joy and goodness accumulates and gives you a lovely feeling if you have time to contemplate your own death. And that is some comfort.”
“Renee said she didn't think it was a global answer,” I told Lucy. “It was the answer under these circumstances for these particular people.”
“Good for her,” Lucy said with appreciation.
“She also talked about the kiss of life and how you kept turning your head when she was trying to put the water into your mouth,” I said with a chuckle.
“Oh boy, Rob got mad at us for that,” Lucy laughed. “Because we were clowning around. I thought he was kidding about an actual kiss. I thought you were supposed to see the drop make its way from Renee’s lips to mine. I thought it was important that it was seen. But, in fact, I was just wrong. Everyone got the message from the kiss. My joke was that Renee was going to spit in my mouth.” Lucy burst out laughing.
I was smiling, but the next topic on my list concerned the second thing in the six years of the show that I disagreed with.
“I wish they hadn't shown Xena's beheaded body,” I said wistfully.
“They did too much of that,” Lucy agreed. “If they had only shown it for one lightning flash because by then you knew what it was. I guess they felt people might not understand what it was, but that would have been okay.”
“Yeah,” I said. “At the first flash, I didn’t know exactly what I was seeing. But the second time I was thinking, ‘I really don't want to look at this.’”
“Okay,” I said, not wanting to think about it any longer. I've gotten too much pleasure from this show to dwell on the one thing I'm planning on deleting from my Xena memory book.
“How about ‘Last Chance,’ the musical that wasn't?” I said, bouncing into a topic I thought would cheer us both up.
“I wanted to do the musical, but it didn't tell a story that had anything to contribute emotionally,” Lucy explained. “I always love playing other characters. I love playing men like I did in ‘Many Happy Returns.’ That was neat. The musical was clever, fast, in and out of doors. But how does it advance the relationship between Xena and Gabrielle. I would have loved to do it for a lot of reasons because it would have been fun. fun, fun. But it was not germaine to the series.
“Another year, it would have been fun to do the farce,” Lucy continued. “But towards the end, we were so tired and people don’t understand how much preparation goes into the music and choreography. There was no energy to waste. We barely crawled through the last episodes. You were there that last day. We just crept off set. We were shattered bodily and mentally.”
Lucy was quiet. Then she went on. “A big change was coming up for all of us. We knew there was a massive adjustment about to happen in our lives. We noticed we were getting a bit snappish with one another. There was never a cross word said in all those years. Never any recriminations. But during those last weeks, someone would get a little irritated. It would only last a second. And we were totally forgiving because we were all in the same boat. This huge security blanket, this feeling of family that had been wrapped around us so tightly for so long was about to come unraveled. It was a difficult adjustment.”
I couldn't let Lucy stay in this place of memory. And then I remembered my favorite part of “Friend In Need.”
“‘If I only had thirty seconds to live, I want to spend them looking into your eyes,’” I quoted.
“I think Xena was having a practice run,” Lucy said with a smile in her voice. “She knew she wouldn’t get a chance later and she wanted Gabrielle to have a profound understanding of the fact that Xena would like to die in her arms.”
That's it. That's the place I want to leave Xena and Gabrielle.
Oh yeah. Two days later Lucy called.
“I forgot to tell you. I feel like a rock star with this haircut,” she said gleefully.
You go, girl!