I Am What I Am, John Barrowman [smart ebook reader .txt] 📗

two-bedroom suite in an extended-stay hotel on the edge of Arlington and Georgetown. As this was summer in Washington, when I called to book two more suites in the complex for my visiting relatives, I was met with a distinct snorting on the other end of the line. The best they could manage, they said, was one extra room and two foldaway beds. There were seven adults, three children, a baby, and two dogs in the family group. Of course the dogs were going to get the foldaways.21

Because Yvonne was an infant, my brother Andrew, his wife Dot, and my nephew, young Andrew, got dibs on the room; my parents took the second bedroom in my suite; Carole and Kevin, the bed settee in my rooms; and Clare and Turner got the two foldaways. On the first night, after we’d returned from the theatre, we were all relatively restrained – only one guest called the desk to complain about the baseball game in the hall.

On our second night together, we decided it was time for the party pieces. Unfortunately, there weren’t many props we could use for dress-up. I think what we did next had as much to do with our enclosed space and that distinct lack of props as it did our having a new baby in the family. Because quicker than you can say ‘breathe!’ and ‘push!’, wee Andrew was folded up inside the portable bed.

The bed had a really supple mattress. It was a normal single-bed size when opened up, but when it was folded in half, there was a soft squishy space in between the two parts that made the whole thing look like a giant birthing canal on wheels.22 I grabbed salad tongs to use as forceps, and along with Dr Clare and Dr Turner’s help, we re-enacted Andrew’s birth. The ‘wean’ popped right out.

Hurrah! It’s a boy!

Well, that was all it took. Pretty soon, all the children in the family had to be reborn23 – including me, naturally.

I have to admit, mine was not an easy birth – and there were complications. For a second, I thought I might have to be born breech as my nephews and niece tried to deliver me. My ‘birth’ resulted in the bed breaking and most everyone in the room wetting themselves.24

Usually, these family high jinks are of the moment: a flare of laughter and silliness that fades to a memory, but one of my dad’s – um, let’s call them ‘tall tales’ – came back to haunt him in a big way. This happened back in Scotland, during my early childhood. It’s a story that still makes all of us laugh.

For as long as we were old enough to believe him, my dad claimed he was a spy during the Second World War25 and he took a bullet in his big toe26 while he was fleeing from the Nazis. Like the von Trapps, he managed to climb – or, in his case, hobble – across the border into Switzerland, where he was hidden from the SS by all the lovely women in a local brothel.

Of course, being kids – not to mention kids who fell for Wee Jimmy’s ‘disguise’ year after year – all the convincing we needed was for my dad to remove his sock and show us the painful deformity27 on his foot.

One evening, after dinner but before we’d started our homework, a neighbour from up the street (who had a son who played with my brother) came to our door, with Andrew in hand. He must have been about seven at the time.

‘What’s he done?’ my mum asked, preparing for the worst.

‘I had to bring him home, Marion. You’re gonna want tae talk tae him. He’s telling everyone at my knitting bee that his dad met his mum at a brothel in Switzerland where she worked during the war.’28

I’m pretty sure my dad had to sleep in the garage that night. Thank God he kept it so clean.

TABLE TALK #1

‘You People Can’t Go in There’

‘I feel a tremor in the Force,’ I said, slowly lifting my umbrella and facing the gathering Stormtroopers in the main street of Oxford. ‘Help me, Obi-Wan. You’re my only hope.’

‘We’re in so much trouble,’ Carole said.

When my sister and I were on the signing tour for my autobiography, Anything Goes, in the spring of 2008, we arrived in Oxford with, unexpectedly, a little time to waste. This stop in our book tour was about midway through a tightly packed schedule, which meant that we’d been confined to a car, and a multitude of store rooms and offices at the rear of bookstores, for three or four days straight by the time we arrived in Oxford.

(The exception to the bookstore routine was a signing at the Costco in Bristol, where the book tables were set up directly in front of a freezer of food. At one point, I had to shift my seat so a customer could manoeuvre in behind me and get his three-year supply of fish sticks and tartar sauce.)

I’d been to Oxford once or twice, but not for any extended amount of time. One of our nieces, Martha, on Scott’s side of the family, went to Oxford University, and we’d experienced just a brief visit with her. I asked our publicists, Sarah Sandland and Ana Sampson, if we could wander around Oxford for an hour or so. I promised that I wouldn’t call attention to myself,1 and that I wouldn’t loiter anywhere near the long queue that was already forming around the store in preparation for the signing session. I grabbed an umbrella big enough to cover both of us2 since rain was threatening, and we headed out into the historic streets.

We decided to walk into the older parts of the city, especially the courtyards and buildings of Oxford University, given Carole’s profession.3 Honestly, I didn’t put up much of an argument, good brother that I am, because I was just happy to be outside in