Read I Don't Know What You Know Me From: Confessions of a Co-Star for Free Online Page B

all the gifts they spent their hard-earned money on during the holidays. Maybe they wanted all the glory, and honestly I can’t really blame them. I would be pissed if my kids were screaming out someone else’s name on the second-happiest day of the year (I considered the day
The Wizard of Oz
was on TV the happiest day of the year).
    Actually, fuck Santa. Sorry, that got dark, but I do kind of wish I had believed in him. It seemed so fun for all my friends, and I would have loved to have that dramatic memory of the day I found out there was no Santa. I didn’t get that milestone, so now I have to rely on celebrity divorces for that kind of shock and betrayal. I have no memory of any gift I ever got from Carey Christmas Santa, but I have photos of myself all the way up to the age of seventeen sitting on his lap. I now think that might have been too old to be sitting on a stranger’s lap, even if I was surrounded by a hundred family members and a gun case filled with rifles was in the next room.

    On Santa’s lap, age 17
    There are other things about Carey that I remember fondly. I was very best friends with my cousin Mandy, who grew up there. We joked that we were the city mouse and the country mouse. She would come visit me, and we would go to the mall, and Iwould visit her, and we would feed sheep and play in the crick (aka creek) behind the barn. It was fun to run around their farm and play with the little goats and barn cats. They used to have pigs too, which I am so mad at myself for not taking full advantage of. I’d love to play with a little piglet. It’s harder than you’d think to find a piglet to play with for an afternoon in Los Angeles. I watched cows get slaughtered in the snow outside my aunt Deanna’s kitchen window. I saw the dead deer that my cousins and uncles would kill during hunting season, and I’d eat it all too. That’s pretty good for a girl growing up outside Detroit. I didn’t think much of it at the time, because it was just what we did, but as I look back, hanging out with my family on farms in Small Town, U.S.A., was awesome. Summers were the best. We would ride our bikes all over, catch lightning bugs in the fields at night and put them in Mason jars with holes punched in the top, swim in my aunt’s pond, and sleep with the windows open all night, listening to the sound of the crickets. The sound of crickets is a major player in my noise machine lineup. It makes me feel like the little city mouse in the country again, and when I hear them, I can still smell the faintest whiff of cow manure as I drift off to sleep.
    The only thing about Carey, Ohio, that I remember being scary, besides the year I read
In Cold Blood
, was the church, Our Lady of Consolation Basilica and National Shrine. I like old churches—I like to visit them when I travel, probably because they remind me of OLC. I think they are cool and creepy, and they remind me of scary devil movies, and this one is no exception. I grew up going to Mass there when I was a kid visiting Carey. It is huge, like Italy-church huge. And old, not Italy-church old, but still,
old
. It has all the makings of a great devil movie set. A huge choir loft, spiral staircases, many entrances and exits, giant stained-glass windows, a huge organ, a massive altar with hundreds of red glasscandles of different sizes burning 24/7, a life-size Jesus statue lying in a coffin on one side of the altar (stage right) complete with cuts and a crown of thorns, and, the pièce de résistance, on the other side of the altar (stage left) a statue of Our Lady herself, holding the baby Jesus and a scepter. It is claimed that miracles have happened at this shrine and that they started in 1875, when the gift of the statue of Our Lady was carried a hundred miles on foot in a processional, from St. Nicholas Church in Frenchtown, Ohio, once construction of the shrine was completed. A storm raged throughout central Ohio during the processional that day, but not a drop