Most Talkative: Stories From the Front Lines of Pop Culture

into action like this more than a few times. For instance, in high school, I was kicked off the water polo team during our final practice of the season for (guess what?) talking while the coach was giving us a pep talk at the very end of the practice. He dinked my teammate Jeff Goldstein, too, and our parents were furious—at the coach, not us. At dinner that night my mother shrieked at my poor dad: “What are you going to DO about what’s happened to YOUR SON?” She wasn’t going to be happy until my dad kicked the coach’s ass with such conviction that he let me back on the team in his last gasp of breath. But my father failed in his effort to get me reinstated on the team, thus enduring years of ribbing from my mother. “I’m glad you weren’t sent to negotiate during the Iranian hostage crisis, Lou. You’d have GIVEN THEM MORE AMERICANS! Are you listening to me???” By the way, it probably bears pointing out that for my part in getting kicked off the team, I suffered no punishment. I was particularly skilled at getting out of punishment, and usually did so by slowly winking at my mom while she was in mid-yell. It stopped working postpuberty, and now pretty much the only winking in my life is from Vicki Gunvalson during RHOC reunion shows.
My talking was legendary among my extended family as well. Once I talked for two days straight in the backseat of my uncle Stanley’s station wagon as it careened toward the west coast of Florida. I was probably fourteen, on a road trip with my sister Em and our cousins, and in my boredom, I came up with the brilliant idea of using Em’s hairbrush, with its clear plastic handle and black bristles, as a microphone into which I did a constant play-by-play of the trip, with no commercial breaks. I sang pretty much every mile marker—“mile marker two-hun-dred and sev-en”—from Missouri to Georgia. I did the weather, monitored goings-on in other cars (“Hairy man in pickup truck to our left is picking a winner! Does he have a problem?”), and interviewed the other passengers. I “reported” on various tidbits of information I’d picked up at Camp Nebagamon that summer, like the rumor that Diana Ross was actually a bitch to the other Supremes.
There were plenty of other things I could have done in that car besides broadcast the station wagon news. I had the new Go-Gos cassette and against my mom’s orders had brought my favorite book, a history of I Love Lucy, which I’d checked out of the public library (again) at the beginning of the summer, each renewal more and more upsetting to my mom. I thought it was great that I was showing an interest in something—even if that something was Lucy’s offscreen relationship with Vivian Vance. (According to this book, Lucy demanded that Vivian be twenty pounds heavier than she during the run of the show. That didn’t seem like a friendship to me!) My mother had told me she never wanted to see that pink book in my bedroom again. It wasn’t pink, it was salmon, but I instinctively resisted the temptation to correct her. After all, I was the boy who, just a few years earlier, used to go door to door in my neighborhood with a broom and ask if I could sweep people’s kitchens.
Back to the car trip. I kept on talking. And talking. I honestly thought everyone was enjoying my commentary, until the truth came out at a Ruby Tuesday’s off the highway in Georgia. My aunt Judy expressed her displeasure not by saying, “Shut up, stop talking into the hairbrush!”—which I totally would’ve understood. No. My aunt—my own flesh and blood by marriage—dumped an entire pitcher of iced tea over my head! Okay, maybe she had asked me to shut up for the love of God once or twice before that. But maybe she should’ve said it more like she meant it. Anyway, I was shocked.
I sat and sulked in the backseat for the rest of the trip to Sarasota. My bitterness was accompanied by a growing panic about the TV situation that awaited us at the condo. Every year before one of these trips I’d make my parents triple-check that there’d be two TVs in our condo, but sometimes the condo owners lied. Here was the awful problem: Not only was my aunt Judy the type of person to douse me with beverages, she was also the type of person to watch Days of Our Lives, and my cousin Jodi had inherited that defective gene. Days came on at exactly the same time as All My Children. How could we watch both our shows when they were on simultaneously? I knew I would be outnumbered, forced to watch a daytime drama of inferior quality, at peak tanning hour, no less. For the life of me, I didn’t understand the appeal of Days. It was all fantasy and improbable plotlines. I hated NBC soaps. And Days looked especially weird to me, like the tape was old or gauzy or something. (You do NOT want to get me started on CBS soaps—so dark!) ABC soaps, in case you care, were bright and urban and smart—at least that’s what I preached.
I don’t even remember what happened that year when we arrived at the condo. Maybe there were two TVs and everything was fine. Maybe I missed an entire week of AMC because I was moping in my room, or because my aunt drugged me with Dramamine even though we were no longer driving. I’m not saying she definitely did, I’m just saying everything is a blank and I wouldn’t put it past her.
I do know that I probably spent some time enjoying the company of my cousins, because we were close and we shared a certain passion. Jodi and I wasted a solid year and a half portraying Donny and