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When the room was silent, he pulled back the handle on his recliner, rocketing him to an upright position.
    â€œSon . . .”
    He leaned forward and paused to shuffle a cigarette up from the pack, grip it in the corner of his mouth, and light it with a Zippo.
    â€œLife . . .”
    He snapped the lighter shut with an emphatic clink and took a long draw, letting the smoke fill every cell of his lungs, then finally exhaled, slowly, deliberately, until the last foggy fume was purged.
    â€œ. . . is a bowl-a shit.”
    He took another puff and tilted his head, squinting for emphasis. Then through the exhale: “And we just stir it up.”
    He let the words hang in the air alongside the smoke. Then:
    â€œTurn the TV back up.”
    I did, and the baseball game resumed as he jutted himself back in his recliner and I went back to practicing my autograph. Hoping what he said wasn’t true.
    â€¢Â Â â€¢Â Â â€¢
    My mother also had a motto: “Don’t expect anything and you won’t be disappointed when it doesn’t happen.”
    She was a full-time mom/housewife who, I suspect, would have pursued the arts had she not fallen prey to the confines of the small-town women’s mentality of her era. Her overly regulated and expertly organized household, PTA meetings, and Mothers’ Club were a cloak for an often desperately misunderstood and suffocated soul which erupted in dramatic weight fluctuations, bouts of anxiety and depression, and, years later, her late-blooming alcoholism. The family doctor prescribed the popular weight-loss one-two punch: amphetamines and sheep urine injections. It was like Dr. Feelgood meets Dr. Doolittle.
    It was not uncommon for her to raid my bedroom at three o’clock in the morning and tear through my toys and books, forcing me to reorganize them. My homework was meticulously checked, not only for errors but for evidence of corrected errors. If there was an eraser smudge, it was shredded and I had to redo it, so that the illusion of perfection was intact.
    Given that her veins were coursing with speed and sheep pee, I think I got off easy.
    Beneath it all, my mother and I had a covenant, and one Easter we unknowingly began a tradition. While unpacking groceries, she stopped to remove the cellophane wrapping from a package of those marshmallow peeps. Suddenly, violently, she ripped the head off one of the little chicks. Gummy innards stretched like a rubber band and then snapped. There was a moment of silence as she waited for my reaction. I took the box from her and ripped another head off. Then she. Then I. We began laughing hysterically, uncontrollably, all of our pent-up angst of perfection melting away with each sugary, sticky headless chick. The perpetual thin ice on which we circled my father was the silent glue of our alliance.
    In these many years, the ice has thickened, my father has grown into a sentimental pussycat, and my mother has decades of sober recovery behind her, but the ritual of ripping the heads off innocent chicks remains. We don’t necessarily celebrate the resurrection, but come Easter, my mother and I exchange a box of marshmallow peeps, knowing their numbers are up.
    I believe my young parents found themselves in the middle of a cultural crossroads, when their 1940s–50s upbringing and postwar nationalism were being challenged left and right—mostly left. But race riots, Kent State, and the multiple political assassinations of the day were somewhere far, far away, and squirrelly little Sam was right in their own backyard, singing “Stormy Weather” at the top of his lungs.
    And meaning it.
    Though my mother had learned not to have expectations for herself, she had a great deal for me. She recognized me, not for what she could never have, like some stage mothers, but for what she knew I already had.
    When I was seven, she enrolled me in a children’s acting workshop at Tulsa