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comedians do really well the first time they do stand-up comedy. I don’t know what it is—some cosmic/karmic free pass because what you’re doing is hard enough. But when you’re just starting out, you don’t know that all comics kill their first time—that’s why we stay comics. We think we’re special.
    A few months later, my parents came to see me perform. Let’s just say therewas another kitchen-table discussion—this time with my mom in tears. She didn’t understand why I was humiliating her in public and revealing family secrets. I tried to convince my mom that making jokes about how she pretends she’s not home when the annoying neighbor knocks on the door is not a “family secret.” My parents didn’t come back to see me perform and things weredefinitely strained untilmy mother saw the Margaret Cho movie I’m the One That I Want. Margaret had proven herself to be a successful and famous comedian who also imitated her mother. Just like she came to accept Lauren Bacall’s sex life, she saw via Margaret’s documentary that comedians are actually honoring the ones they love when they make fun of them in their act. My mother not only gave me her seal of approval butalso started to come to see me perform regularly so that she could watch the audiences laugh at . . . her. And just like Margaret’s mom, mine stuck around after the show to get attention from the crowds.
    MY MOM HAS a really good singing voice. She’s part of a singing group—you may have heard of them, they’re called the Musettes. Oh, you haven’t heard of them? That’s probably because you don’tlive in a senior citizens’ home. That’s where they tour. My mom plays piano and sings with three other women and leads them in a rousing (for those settled-down seniors) rendition of “Oh, We Ain’t Got a Barrel of Money.”
    One of my mom’s favorite stories is that when she was a teenager she met Patti Page. I’ll spare anyone under forty who is reading this book the trip to Wikipedia. Patti Pageis one of the biggest-selling female recording artists in history. She’s famous for songs like “Old Cape Cod” and “Mockin’ Bird Hill.” When my mom met Patti Page she told her that she wanted to be a singer like her someday, and Patti said to her, “You can be anything you want to be.”
    That story always depressed me because by the time my mom relayed Patti’s words to me, I knew how it ended. Sure,my mom could have been anything she wanted to be, but she didn’t become a professional, Grammy-winning, popular American singer. Instead, she had three kids and raised them in a time when you couldn’t really just strap your kid into a stroller and pursue your dream of becoming a singer. American Idol hadn’t been invented yet.
    I can’t imagine dreaming of wanting to be a singer, meeting myidol,and getting her words of encouragement—and then getting married, having kids, and touring the blue-hair circuit. Luckily, my mom raised me using Patti Page’s insight “You can be anything you want to be,” and not “You can be anything you want to be but it probably won’t work out that way” or “You can be anything you want to be but also please still make time to be a mother and wife.”
    Some of herfriends have accused her of living vicariously through my show business life. I don’t see it that way. She’s definitely not a stage mother. My mom just always knew how much my career meant to me and she’s a realist. She doesn’t just blindly say, “You can have it all!”
    Life is like a closet full of clothes—you can have it all, but it doesn’t mean that you should. I can wear four cardigan sweatersall at once with a pair of sweatpants over my jeans—but it doesn’t mean that I should.
    I credit my mom with giving me the delusional level of confidence I needed to think that I could actually make a living in show business. For example, she resented that in order to get accepted as a theater major at Emerson, I