Paddle Your Own Canoe: One Man's Fundamentals for Delicious Living (24 page)

* * *

N
aturally, it wasn’t long before we began a series of discussions about throwing ourselves a wedding. One of the first events we’d attended as a couple was Debra Messing’s beautiful wedding on the coast above Santa Barbara, which was an absolute fairy tale. The breathtaking scenery was complemented by the large gathering of family and friends, a group in which I was flattered to be newly initiated. The one brief moment of displeasure occurred when a paparazzi helicopter suddenly appeared to snatch photos and video of the resplendent fete. Enormous efforts had been expended toward maintaining the secrecy of the particular details surrounding the nuptials, but, alas, there always seems to be some asshole willing to sell out one’s privacy and comfort for a buck. The rest of the evening went off without a hitch, and I was powerfully excited to meet the cast and producers of
Will & Grace
for the first time.

Of course, the topic of the evil helicopter later came up in our own summit for the planning of our own wedding, and so we began to devise methods by which we might successfully avoid such an interruption from the parasites that pathetically invade people’s privacy for a paycheck. I am still enamored of my first pitch, but I understand why it would have been a bad idea. The notion was this: Megan was nominated for an Emmy for the fourth year in a row (of an eventual seven), and I suggested that we ditch the Emmys and hold our wedding in secret during the awards ceremony. You have to admit that no one would have seen it coming, plus all the scumbags would have been otherwise detained, carnivorously trying to nab a shot of a Doris Roberts’s nip slip on the red carpet.

Megan liked the idea but ultimately decided it would have been disrespectful to play such a trick on the academy and the
Will & Grace
family, so we came up with the next-best ruse. Inviting our immediate families to town to attend the Emmys was easy, and we had recently purchased our first house together in the Hollywood Hills, so we simply invited twenty of our family and friends over for a casual “dinner” the night
before
the Emmys.

Our guests arrived and had a lot of ooh-ing and ah-ing to do at our new digs. (I call it “the house that
Will & Grace
built,” because at the time, Megan was in charge of things like the mortgage, and I was in charge of expenses like supplying the household with toilet paper. I also believe the purchase of beer fell into my bailiwick. So, we were both contributing.) Nobody designs an interior like milady, so our guests were well preoccupied with cocktails and visual splendor when we announced, “Now, friends and loved ones, will you please step into the yard, because this is our wedding.”

Mothers wept. There was joy and also jubilation and some tears from the coterie in general. The evening was quite magical, with the entire ceremony taking place in front of our spectacular, sweeping view of Los Angeles as our guests looked on. There was more crying, which I hope and believe were tears of happiness and not “What the hell is she thinking?” My favorite part of the evening was how gorgeous my wife looked, as well as her willingness to make such a promise to me, to stick together as long as we were both still hanging around this big blue marble. A vow of this ilk is literally once in a lifetime, if you’re lucky, and I think a person’s odds of being lucky in that department increase drastically if the person means that simple vow when he or she makes it. Life is unpredictable. We have no way of knowing what might befall us in the next five minutes, let alone thirty years down the road, but the weight a marriage vow carries is that in the face of that very uncertainty, two people are willing to promise to stick it out together. That’s my favorite part.

As I mentioned previously, my sensei, Shozo Sato, came to town and performed a wedding tea ceremony as part of the proceedings, which was also exceptionally special to both Megan and myself. He mixed a special bowl of green tea from which Megan and I sipped, as well as our parents. If you ever have the opportunity to experience a Japanese tea ceremony, I can’t recommend it highly enough. Sato-sensei is a master of the form, and it was a great privilege to have our hearts joined by his ministrations. The simple grace with which I had seen him excel through art and life for the fourteen years I had known him was one of the most touching ingredients in the bouillabaisse of our evening. A beautiful and rousing mariachi band finished off the perfect recipe for our tiny secret wedding, and I reckon it looks like it worked, since we’re about as sappy for each other today as we were on that night ten years ago, if not more so.

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P
eople often remark to us that they’re pleasantly surprised to see a marriage last as long as ours in Hollywood, which is a very sad thing to say about Hollywood. One of the main reasons I think we are succeeding has to do with our propensity to stay home and be boring. We don’t get caught up in the “business” here in town, meaning going out all the time to parties and bars and so forth. We are unencumbered by the need to “be seen.” When we see a red carpet, we head the other way if at all possible. Of course, some of this silliness is necessary, as part of our work is to promote projects in which we appear, but we do try to keep even that to a minimum.

We prefer instead to stay home and read books. We do jigsaw puzzles or play cards. We watch movies. We make our relationship a priority so that it will survive all of the tumult (usually good tumult) that our jobs throw into our paths. A marriage bond needs a healthy elasticity so that when one of us is suddenly touring Australia for ten days the bond will stretch between here and Down Under without breaking. We have a strict rule: We never accept employment that will keep us apart for more than two weeks. In thirteen years together (and counting), we’ve only been apart for two weeks a couple of times, and even that sucked balls.

Megan and I have both experienced the benefit of some powerfully good fortune in our lives, which I believe means that at some point we’ll see some low points to balance things out, as life tends to do. I am grateful beyond description to know that when we find ourselves in those doldrums, I will have a partner as smart and funny and supportive and strong and creative and loving as my wife. Her killer set of jugs also does not hurt my feelings.

Love Your Woman (A Paean to Megan)

Megan Mullally.

Love-time? She is the reason for the season.

My best friend. My legal property. My wife.

I could honestly write a book solely devoted to my wife, and maybe I will, by gum, because there is at least a volume’s worth of amazing magic glistening about her person that will thrill you to pieces and render you extremely envious of the fact that she is, in fact, my legal possession in the state of California. Read the paperwork.

Many know, adore, and rightly lust after her as Karen Walker, the gut-bustingly hilarious stack of curves on
Will & Grace
, one of the finest thirty-minute comedy programs ever to bless our airwaves and our living rooms, but I know her by some different names, particularly around the house. Names like Gettin’ Juggy with It, Queen of My Pants and the Known Universe, Pandora’s Box, Venus-and-then-some, Ark of the Covenant, the Bush, and, of course, Stacy BeaverHouse.

I met her when I was twenty-eight, working on a production of
The Berlin Circle
at Los Angeles’ Evidence Room theater, a company we promptly joined, and one to which we continue to offer our fealty. Artistic director Bart DeLorenzo, a dear friend and genius of the stage, was one of the main influences that allowed Megan the opportunity to absolutely save my life (from myself), and we quickly fell into the grip of an ardor that only continues to grow, thank the pagan gods and their dogs.

This chapter, then, is a song of joy, hollered directly at her beautiful face area. (You check out those cheekbones? Fuck me silly. Also, if you don’t already have it bookmarked, do a Google image search for “Megan Mullally Boobs,” and check out that first picture that comes up. Right?) I have oft enjoyed the word
paean
in my reading, to describe just such a song of worship, and so I thought to discover the proper pronunciation, as I had never actually heard it uttered aloud. A few different friends gave me a few different opinions, so imagine my chagrin when I learned from the Internet that it is pronounced “pee-in.” Perhaps I’ll just stick with
hymn of praise
.

I suppose I’ll start off the jamboree with a salute to another of her characters, the sexually insatiable Elizabeth in Mel Brooks’s absolutely top-drawer Broadway musical
Young Frankenstein
. By the way, if you ever get the chance to see Miz Mullally tread the boards, especially if she’s warbling a tune, run, don’t walk. She makes a noise of pulchritude that would have made Ethel Merman hurl her boa to the stage in defeat and trudge off glumly to the pub. The never-ending cavalcade of chuckles that was
Young Frankenstein
included Megan’s showstopping number, “Deep Love,” a roaring, throaty, filthy tribute to the rigid trunklike love-member of the Frankenstein monster. By the end of the song, she was downstage in a single spotlight, barefoot in a torn dress, “singing her tits off,” as she likes to say of others, to such effect that the subsequent blackout regularly brought the audience to their feet like they were at a rock concert. Have I made it clear that I am a fan?

For opening night, I put together this little ditty in the hopes that Mr. Brooks would bring me on as a writing partner, or at least a backstage broom. Still hoping for a call, Melvin. I give you “Elizabeth”:

Chaste in all her speech

But a terror in the sack

Like a full-force Irish gale

On her feet or on her back

The voice of sweetest songbird

With the gaiety of a faun

Fellows brawl to rise and fall

In labor on her lawn

When she shops for diamonds

Or simply cuts a rug

They say that she’s a handful

Aye (a handful of jugg)

She’s god’s gift to men

Oh she’s keen to unwrap it

When the moon is in its wane

It’s held that she can snap it

So if you wear the tackle

Nature gave man for love

Then “Huzzah” for Elizabeth

She is heaven from above.

And below.

My wife was born with a very unfair portion of talent. She seems to excel at whatever task on which she lays her hand. She decided to cut our poodles’ hair, and an hour later they came out of the bathroom looking like they had just been drawn by someone who draws the very cutest of cartoon animals. Not content to rest on her god-given skills, however, Megan has inspired me again and again throughout our years together with her steady work ethic. For some reason I grew up with the misconception, or fantasy, really, that when a person “made it” in showbiz, they would no longer need to work very hard. I figured that once you hit the big time, you got to just chill in your trailer, smoking a ton of the finest weed, then head in and kill a few scenes on camera, then go meet David Lee Roth at the beach to hang out with some bikini-clad models.

Ah, puberty. It sells the shit out of some Bieber records, right? Or whatever dross from the Disney factory is passing for popular music today. Anyway, it turns out that these people at the top of their respective games in the entertainment industry don’t, in actuality, smoke much weed at all while working twelve- to sixteen-hour days. Because weed is a sedative. Sedatives, whilst mighty pleasing, well, they slow you down. Turns out, the time to party is AFTER work.

I saw my wife rehearse every
Will & Grace
scene to the point of perfection and every song to within an inch of its life, driven by a desire to give the audience the most profound enjoyment possible. As I may have mentioned earlier, I quite enjoy hard work, but I had never seen anyone work, without being flogged by a coach, nearly as hard as my wife. This was a revelation. I realized that success on her level was only achievable through a gift of talent, consistent hard work to back up the talent, and a healthy portion of good luck on top of it. This is but one of the many, many lessons I have been gifted by “the lady with the heavenly poonts” who calls me husband.

Early in our relationship, we were in New York City, where Megan was engaged in some press for
Will & Grace
. In a Lincoln Town Car, the vehicle of note for NYC press work, we were running maybe ten minutes late for an appearance she was to make on
Letterman
, a show of which I was and still am a very big fan. My late grandpa Ray and I used to watch Dave, and the fact that all the fancy East Coast types appreciate his dry, Midwestern sense of humor has always made me feel all the more comfortable when rubbing elbows with the cognoscenti myself. That makes it quite simple to comprehend why I would be completely panicked that we were going to be late to
Late Night
, even though I was merely the husband along for the ride!

Our driver pulled up to the stage door, where there were eight or ten people on the sidewalk waiting for Megan, hoping for an autograph. Of course I barreled through them and opened the door for Megan, only to turn around and find that she was signing away. WHAT WAS THIS?!?! Once she had finished giving them some of her time, which amounted to all of two minutes, maybe three, she came inside and we got into the elevator to ascend to her dressing room. Once alone, I unleashed my righteous indignation: “What are you thinking? You’re already late for Dave!” She replied, “Darling, if it wasn’t for the fans on the sidewalk, and the fans in general, I wouldn’t be on
Letterman
in the first place.” Properly admonished, I stared at the round, lit button that read
5B
in shame. The elegance with which she has always handled herself in such public situations continues to be a master class that I attend daily.

On a more personal note, another of Megan’s sublime talents resides in her acumen for interior design. It’s an art that obsesses her to approximately the same degree which I am enthralled by woodworking, only she can decorate an entire room in the time it takes me to build half of a table. She has turned our home into such a work of surprising beauty that I am often caused to giggle when I trudge in from a day at the shop, covered in sawdust, at the idea that I should reside in a house as inventively appointed as this. Her color palette is intensely modern, using accents and shades that I could never have fathomed working in concert. What’s more, she is an amazing collector of art, which is an attribute I appreciate very powerfully, as I am much inspired by the paintings and drawings that festoon our walls, even the ones with no naked ladies.