My Love Affair with Julie Andrews Continues…

Listen to Julie Andrews being interviewed on Fresh Air regarding her new memoir and you will know what it’s like listening to a goddess.

Okay, that’s a bit much, I know, but I adore her. In talking about her childhood, she responded to Teri Gross’ attempt to spin her childhood as hard or difficult because of growing up during WWII by saying (I paraphrase) : “It wasn’t a hard childhood - it was a childhood -” -

I was thinking the other day about how many of us feel like we spend our adulthoods recovering from our childhoods, and then you’re left with seniorhood, the period in which you remember or forget the other hoods while you wait to go into deathhood… and this seems kind of sad and weird and again I realize how I have a false template in my head of How Things Should Be and if I didn’t have that, I would just be Living, instead of Getting Through or Getting Past or Getting By all these hoods.

Speaking of hoods, I was reading Little Red Riding Hood to my toddler the other day and she ran to the other side of the room saying “I’m not red riding hood!” and I realized she was terrified of the Big Bad Wolf - in the Three Little Pigs, he’s not so awful, so she enjoys pretending to be the wolf - and I felt awful for scaring the crap out of her. But really, tying up Grandma in the closet is a pretty darn scary thing to do… and that’s the nice version…

Anyway, I guess I have such an affinity with Julie Andrews because we had similar childhoods in some respects - well, sort of. She was a child prodigy, touring in vaudeville acts with her mother and stepfather, singing on stage when she was just little… I started acting on stage when I was 3 years old, and we toured and I sang and performed with my parents, as well. I wasn’t exactly a prodigy, but I was a young talent - the young talent - in my parents’ theater troupe for a long time, and just as Julie says, it was a lot of fun as well as being really hard.

Of course, Julie went off at 19 to star on Broadway, and I did not… which is kind of a bummer… sigh…