My Cousin Vinny/My Mother Marion

Mother’s Day, for obvious reasons, has a different flavor for me these days than it once did. No more phone calls, no good-natured “gut yontiff” which I always began my calls with on secular or national holidays, no more of that sweet voice on the other end of the line. No more recipe sharing, no more cat stories, no more laughs at the expense of public figures, no more of her rich stories about growing up on the Lower East Side of New York, no more plans for my next trip to New Jersey. Now, it’s all just memories.

Still, however, even with someone no longer physically here, there is always the opportunity to continue to learn from that person, and in the most unexpected ways.

For the last few years of my mother’s life, her three favorite movies were “Legally Blonde,” “Miss Congeniality” and “My Cousin Vinny.” Along with her other favorite new show, “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” she watched these movies often, sometimes just a scene or two at a time, thanks to HBO On Demand. I loved "Enthusiasm" and I will never forget how my mother and I screamed with laughter, a week before she died, at the restaurant scene featuring the Tourette Syndrome-afflicted head chef.* As for the movies, I tried to watch them with her a few times, but for some reason I didn’t get what the fuss was all about. Unfortunately, I never asked. Save for Marisa Tomei’s Academy Award-winning scene on the courtroom stand in “Vinny,” I just couldn’t see what she saw in those films.

Several weeks ago, I decided to sit down for once and for all and watch these movies and try to see what it was my mother saw in them. So I watched them, at home, by myself, on three successive evenings. All of a sudden I got it, and all of a sudden I knew my mother all over again.

It’s so simple that I’m almost embarrassed to admit that I missed it while my mother was alive. You see, “Blonde,” “Congeniality” and “Vinny” are essentially the same movie. In each movie, a smart, good-looking woman (Reese Witherspoon, Sandra Bullock and Tomei respectively) is told that she is neither smart nor competent enough to make it in a so-called man’s world, or she is told she is either too good-looking to be taken seriously (Witherspoon as a law student, Tomei as an expert witness on the differences between the 1964 Buick Skylark and the 1963 Pontiac Tempest) or not good-looking enough to taken seriously (Bullock as a beauty pageant contestant). In each film, they prove everyone wrong and, of course, as the underdog does so often in the movies, they save the day. (As an aside, if you think that “Vinny” was all about Joe Pesci, it wasn’t; rather, it was about Tomei, and you owe it to yourself to watch "Vinny" again from this perspective.)


This was something my mother talked about from time to time, during some of our more serious conversations, that she knew she was smart and competent but that she felt she had never been given what she thought were ample opportunities to prove it. My mother graduated high school at age 16 and went straight to work, full-time, as a legal secretary. This is what she did, but it wasn’t exactly what she wanted to do. What my mother wanted was to go to college; in my humble opinion, and with all due respect to the honorable profession of the legal secretary, she should have gone not only to college, but to law school as well. But this was 1943. Of course, women were going to college and to law school in 1943, but many at that time, my mother included, were still taking the more widely accepted route of the secretary-in-waiting-to-meet-her-man.

My mother met her man, my father Saul, when she was 20. She married him two years later, on March 19, 1949, and two and a half years after that my brother Howard was born. I followed in December of 1954, and our brother Allan came along six years and change after that. At the time Howard was born, my mother left her secretarial career behind to devote herself to raising her family. I don’t think she regretted not going back to work outside the home, although I do think that there was a part of her that secretly wished she could have gone back at some point in time, perhaps when my younger brother and I were approaching our teens, but she never did. When she was widowed in 1982, at age 55, my mother had the opportunity to go back to work. But she didn’t. “I just spent 30 years raising three children,” was her response. “I’m retired.”

And retire she did. But not exactly. My mother read constantly, and she used the radio and the television not only to entertain, but to learn from as well. She was continually expanding her already vast knowledge of all things great and small. For someone who hadn’t worked outside the home since her early 20’s, she knew more about what was wrong with the world than most world leaders could ever dream of knowing. She was smart, she was competent, and of course, she was beautiful, and each day of her life she was a little bit more of each of those things than she had been the day before.

What I learned from my mother about rooting for the underdog, about speaking up when you know that something isn't right, was immeasurable and irreplaceable, and I carry it with me every day of my life. I should not be surprised at all that today, 18 months after her passing, she is still teaching me things.

In the three months preceding my mother’s passing, I danced with her at two weddings and a Bat Mitzvah. On Sunday, November 16, 2003, a week after our last dance together, my mother fell and broke her hip. Two days later, during surgery, she suffered a massive brain-stem stroke and she never came back. I was with her when her medical team disconnected her life support, and I was with her for the next eight and a half hours. I was in the room when she stopped breathing, at which point I took the nurse’s stethoscope and listened to my mother's heartbeat for the last few minutes of her life. It was the most powerfully intimate moment I ever shared with another human being, and I wouldn’t trade that moment for anything in this world. Except, of course, for the opportunity to sit down with my mother and watch one of those three movies, the most recent additions to her ongoing gifts and her ongoing legacy to me.

Helen Keller once said that she was not afraid of dying, that “...death is no more than passing from one room into another. But there's a difference for me, you know. Because in that other room I shall be able to see.” Funny, now that my mother is gone, I no longer fear death the way I once did. To paraphrase Keller, I also know that in that next room I will continue to see and hear, and in that next room I will find my mother, and my father, and so many others who have gone but have never really left me, and who still have the power and the ability to teach me new things.

If you are a mother, I wish you health and happiness today and every day of your life. If you have a mother, please give her an extra hug today, and tell her it is from me.

Kenneth Altman
San Francisco, California
May 8, 2005

*no Tourette Syndrome patients were harmed in the writing of this piece.