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spare you the more grisly details, but the good news is that despite the fact that something extremely unsavory occurred, my mother wasn’t, in fact, raped.
    Anyway, long gross story short, the father of the boy who encouraged my mom to consider a part of his anatomy as a lollipop called my grandmother and pleaded with her not to go to the police.
    “I guarantee you I’ll make absolutely sure he’ll never do this again.”
    “How?” asked my grandmother, to which the boy’s father somehow conveyed his intention to castrate his son.
    “I’ll fix him so he can’t.”
    At this point my grandmother generously reminded the boy’s father that he hadn’t raped her daughter, to which the father allegedly replied, “I just wanna make sure he don’t have the chance to do what he done again and maybe next time it’d be worse. He’s disgraced our family enough.”
    Ah, the lovely family stories one has.
     
    When I was about fifteen, my mother had started dating a man named Bob Fallon, and my brother and I called him Bob Phallus, because he came equipped with exotic creams and sex toys. You know, aphrodisiacs. Well, actually, Anglo-disiacs, because we’re white. Anyway, thanks to Bob, that Christmas my mother bought both my grandmother and myself vibrators! As unusual as a gift like this sounds, you have to admit that they are the ideal stocking stuffers. I mean, you can fit the vibrator into the long top part of the stocking and still be able to get another cute little gift in the toe!
    Well, I have to admit, I enjoyed mine, but my grandmother refused to use hers. She was concerned that it would short-circuit her pacemaker. She said that she had gone this long without an orgasm; she might as well go the whole way. (And that pacemaker, by the way, was later recalled.)
    Now, look, I know you might be thinking that a lot of the stories I’m telling you are way over the top, and I would totally have to agree—but you can’t imagine what I’m leaving out!
    Anyway, I’d been singing in my mother’s nightclub act since I was thirteen (like most teenagers) and I continued to perform with her until I was seventeen. The last show we did together was at the London Palladium, and I got pretty good reviews. So this choreographer contacts me and asks if I want to do my own nightclub act. And I thought, well maybe. I mean, I could end up being financially independent
    and Liza Minelli—but you take the good with the bad. Anyway my mother thought this was a lousy idea. She thought it would be better if I went to drama college in England because it would bring respectability to the family. Like we were a bunch of hookers, and drama college in England is the only way to eradicate a taint like that.
    So now it’s 1973 and I’m seventeen and I’m enrolled at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London. And, like I said, I really didn’t want to go, but once I got there, it turned out to be some of the best times of my life. Truly. I mean it was the only unexamined time of my life, where I was just a student among students, going to voice and movement classes and learning weird little tongue twisters like:
     
    All I want is a proper cup of coffee,
    Made in a proper copper coffee pot.
    You can believe it or not,
    But I want a cup of coffee
    In a proper coffee pot.
     
    Tin coffee pots
    And iron coffee pots,
    They’re no use to me.
    If I can’t have a proper cup of coffee
    In a proper copper coffee pot,
    I’ll have a cup of tea.
     
    Now if you enjoyed my performance as Princess Leia—and who could resist my stunning, layered, and moving portrait not-unlike-Mary Poppins performance—then it’s thanks to tongue twisters like that.
    Consider: “You’ll never get that bucket of bolts past that blockade.” Proper coffee pot?
    Or: “Why, you stuck up, half-witted, scruffy-looking nerf herder!”—proper copper coffee pot, I’ll have a cup of tea!
    And don’t forget, I had that weird little English accent that came and went like weather or bloat all through the