Unfinished Business

12/31/15

There's usually a little unfinished business to attend do at the end of the year, and for 2015, for me at least, it involves the late Ann Meara.

I'm a little too young to remember her from her appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show, but I can recall many an afternoon on the couch with my mom watching Anne and her husband Jerry Stiller cutting it up on every afternoon chat show from Mike Douglas to Dinah Shore. 

I'm not sure how I knew she had red hair since our color TV broke when I was about 4 and we made due with black and white until I turned 18. Nevertheless, I was always thrilled when this scarlet haired entertainer showed up. I know that Stiller & Meara are thought of as a comedy duo, which they were of course, but I hesitate to call Anne Meara a comedian. She never just stood there and told jokes (not that there's anything wrong with that.) Stiler & Meara's routines were based on human nature, character, and relationships. Everything from their routines about a Jewish boy dating a shiksa to their celebrated commercials for Blue Nun wine. 

Throughout her career she vacillated seamlessly between comic characters and more dramatic fare. She was in that starry production of Eugene O'Neill's Anna Christie with Liam Neeson and Natasha Richardson. I've written in the past that seeing that play was the single most exciting night I've ever spent in a theatre, and Anne Meara was a big part of that.

She could also be uproarious and bawdy. I would have love to have seen her create the part of the sexually adventurous but culinarily challenged Bunny Flingus in the original production of John Guare's The House of Blue Leaves, but alas in 1971 I could not yet cross the street by myself, let alone travel to New York to see a play.  

Collen Dewhusrt, with whom Meara performed in the Public Theatre's 1957 production of Macbeth, paints a colorful portrait of Anne with just one sentence from her autobiography:

  "In these years since, [performing in Macbeth] I have been to many gatherings and parties only to be greeted--from across the room--by Anne Meara, upon seeing me, screaming, "Who's the best fucking second witch you ever had!" You, Anne, the best and the only."*

Although I never met her, I do have a few sort of personal memories about her. On the night of my 30th birthday, my good friend Lenore took me to see Anne starring in a wonderful play she had written called After Play. Five years before that, when I was living in Costa Rica for a semester, a crazy dream I had about Anne Meara, a fire truck, and Santa Claus was the very first dream I thought was worthy of committing to paper. 

In my early thirties, I was seeing a therapist who lived and worked on the Upper West Side. She recounted to me how she'd seen Anne in the fitting room at Talbots. Dr. Lowenstein told me Anne dressed like a bag lady. Well, you better believe that was the beginning of the end for me and Dr. Lowenstein. 

About fifteen years ago, when I was trying to get a screenplay I had written off the ground, Anne Meara is one of the people I mailed it to. In response I received a lovely note on a little piece of stationery with the words Stiller & Meara printed on the top, and signed by Anne. That's a greatly treasured memento of my old life in New York, and of a greatly treasured talent. 

*Six commas in one sentence; Colleen Dewhurst was a woman after my own heart!