The Full Rosie
I watched her on Stand Up Spotlight and in A League of Their Own and then she got her own talk show, that Rosie, I loved everything about her show. It was a throwback show. She wanted just good stuff. happy things. she would have all your favorite A-list celebrities on and also sitcom stars from the seventies and she would fling Koosh balls at the audience and she generally was just happy. she would make silly banter. she would give away things to her audience.
She was the first. Not Oprah. Not Ellen. It was Rosie who would want to surprise somebody with a college education or a new car or tickets to a show they’ve been dying to see. I watched the entire run. I watched her start sharing more of herself. It was on her show that I saw Martha Manning for the first time, a psychologist who lived with depression and who has written a book that has helped me so much through my struggles.
I would watch her show every day in my dorm room with my friend Michele, who would send Rosie letters trying to get Rosie just to say “hi” to me on air.
Rosie would go off TV and she would do projects here and there but her classic show never came back. She started showing that she wasn’t all bubbles and sunshine and people don’t know what to do with that. They want to see you as either good or bad. They don’t know what to do with the mix of who you really are.
About 10 years ago Rosie would get a website and have a feature on it called “ask ro” where you could send her questions. I would write when I was pregnant with my son Rafi and I was worried about being a mom with depression. At that time I was healthy but I worried what do I do when the disease comes back and I’m a parent and she replied to that question with just one quote, a Leonard Cohen quote that has gotten me through many rough moments. “Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”
I could long for the always silly fun Rosie from the nineties, but there’s something about Rosie and who she is now. Things I identify with so much.
I see so much of my journey in the fact that when the darkness came in, how people had trouble with it. People just want to see sunshine. People will support you to a point but then it gets to be just too much, too scary, too not what you want. Nobody is at fault. Its just how it is and it’s rough.
As I moved into my apartment I found a lot of my Rosie stuff, her CDs that she put out, a poster from when she was in Grease on Broadway, the copy of the note that my friend Michele sent her, a trip down Rosie lane.
Its so weird to have feelings about someone you really don’t know at all but that’s how life is and I wonder how Rosie thinks about her life and does she miss when she was on TV at the beginning and it was all sunshine and smiles or does she know that’s never possible, no one is all sunshine and smiles and how brave she was to be honest about that. I wonder if she struggles her own way to make it through wondering why the person she was then got more unconditional love from the world than the true person she show us now.
I for one am grateful for Rosie opening the crack and letting the light in. Anyone can toss a koosh ball, but Rosie is willing to take the harder things that come her way too, and share as a human, not a celebrity.
How Can I Help You?
I was listening to Fresh Air with Terry Gross and heard David Mitchell – Author, whose son has Autism share this brilliance.
“We cause a hell of a lot of the problems, us neuro-typicals, because we don’t get it. We just jump to false assumptions. We even kind of congratulate ourselves on our knowledge that, for example, kids with autism prefer to be on their own in the corner lining up their toys in a line and they’re happiest there. No they’re not. They want the human interaction, it’s just we’re so lousy at understanding how to do it that we get it wrong, thereby driving them into the corner. We confuse our wrong actions with their preferred behaviors and they can’t point it out because they have autism, what a fate!”
In my limited experience, teaching improv to kids with autism, and talking to parents of kids with autism, this is very true.
The line that “We confuse our wrong actions with their preferred behaviors,” struck me very hard as it also applies how we treat someone struggling with mental illness, especially crippling depression. We often thinking they want to avoid social interaction or be cheered up, getting frustrated when those don’t work.
Though we can point it out, we are often too worn out, too annoyed to have to ask for what we need.
I am healthy right now though, so I can ask, though I don’t speak for everyone, I can tell you, when stuff is bad, I need someone to sit in the dark and uncomfortable with me and abandon any idea of making it better.
So I have shared this, and I hope we all find ways to be of service to others by understanding, not ignoring or trying to fix something.
I believe 97% of people who have tried to help me, have the best of intentions but that doesn’t mean they know what to do, and maybe this will be helpful guidance for someone who wants to be there for someone.
