Essay: "The Embodiment of a Sensibility"

[xchrom]

http://www.advocate.com/Arts_and_Entertainment/Commentary/Essay_The_Embodiment_of_a_Sensibility/


Robert Leleux and JoAnn

Seven years ago, when my grandmother JoAnn was first diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, I couldn’t imagine anything less fair. At the time, I composed a mental list of all the people I knew who could lose their minds without anybody noticing. It amounted to scores of bores I’d never heard say one original thing. While my grandmother, on the other hand, was the genius of the cocktail party, a Texas Auntie Mame, who always seemed poised with a staggering, stiletto quip.

To me, JoAnn was more than a person. She was the embodiment of a sensibility. When I was a small boy, we’d spend hours beside her player piano dancing to zippy 1920s songs like “Toot, Toot, Tootsie” and “Nagasaki” and “Don’t Bring Lulu.” She had a pink telephone that rang “Everything’s Coming up Roses” when anybody called. At restaurants, she’d tip the band to play “Hello, Dolly!” and then, she’d table-hop, until she found a man whose Louis Armstrong impression was worthy of accompanying her. She was a life force, a diva, and very likely the reason I had guts enough to come out of the closet, become an artist, and move to New York City when I was 18-years-old.

So during the winter of 2005, in those early months of JoAnn’s illness, I felt as though I’d been the victim of a bait and switch, as though something magical, of infinite value, had been stolen from me, and replaced with a cardboard copy. At the time, I was probably angrier than I’ve ever been. I was also the most confused. Because though I felt I’d lost my grandmother, she was, at least in a physical sense, right there, present and accounted for.

When I was 16, JoAnn told me, “Sad lives make funny people.” At the time, this remark had just sounded like one more zinger. But eventually I came to consider it the distillation of her philosophy. Humor was the way she’d coped with every unpleasant thing in her life, from her long estrangement from my mother, her only child, to the onset of a crippling disease. It seems that my mother and grandmother had always hated each other, and I mean, from the womb. They were too much alike; too big for the same screen. With them, it was always Bette Davis vs. Joan Crawford, and nobody ever won. But as JoAnn’s Alzheimer’s advanced, she forgot all of that, and thanks to my mother’s good grace, and some heavy-duty arm-twisting on my part, they were able to meet each other for the first time again. And guess what? They went nuts for each other.