By Sharon Delaney
The Chakram Newsletter: Issue 09
It’s Tuesday afternoon - wait a minute - Tuesday! Afternoon! ! I never do these interviews on weekdays, much less in the afternoon. Lucy’s supposed to be filming Xena. How come she's not hard at work, nose to the grindstone, burning the midnight oil? Ah-ha, she's goofing off, loafing, feet up on the sofa! Erps ... I forgot, she's working on a production of her own. And I guess moms-to-be are allowed a bit of extra down time. Little did I know.
“What were you filming today?” I asked.
“Xena getting binked by Aphrodite into the body of a child,” Lucy laughed. “We've got a really good little actress, so it should work out well. But I'm finding after eight, nine hours, I'm just wiped out.”
“You were there for nine hours?” I said, surprised.
“You know,” she explained, “they’ve been really great. They've tried to write me out as much as possible, but the show's called Xena.”
“Speaking of babies,” I said, with a deft segue, “I was watching a PBS special on seahorses. Did you know the males are the ones that give birth. And two days after, they get pregnant again!”
Silence. I think she was offering up a silent prayer she hadn't been born a male seahorse.
“I didn’t know that,” she said. “I read a tiny booklet on seahorses at the pet store when we were looking at them. They’re such wacky creatures. When they die, you can dry them and they stay forever. They're so delicate and the way they move in the water, really extraordinary.”
“Did you buy any?” I queried.
“No, we didn’t,” she said firmly. “It was on a day when ‘you can look, but we're not buying anything!’” she laughed.
“Do you have fish at home?”
“We have a tank of fish, but Daisy doesn’t feed her dog so I'm not buying her any more creatures,” she said in that “mom” voice heard by children the world over for the first 18 years of their lives. Or is that the first 50 years of their lives?
“I used to leave my turtles out in the sun,” I said, shamefacedly. “When I kept one alive for a year, we got a dog.”
“Did you meet our big German Shepherd when you were here?” Lucy asked.
“Kaiser?” I asked. “I did.”
“He's gone! We had to get rid of him. He bit a neighborhood girl,” she explained. “He ran out just as the gate was opening and she was crossing the road. Just a nip, but he could have been put down. He used to pick on tradesmen who were on his property. We would keep him away from them, but he never learned. He was never trained to discriminate and I don't need to be protecting the public from my dog.”
“Who’d you give him to?”
“He went back to his original owner,” she said. “She came from Australia and picked him up. She had cancer and that's why she let him go to us and now she's been cured and was able to take him back.”
“What a happy-ever-after ending for both of them,” I said, amazed. “Are you going to get another one?”
“Not until this baby is twoish so that it grows up expecting to have its ears pulled,” she laughed.
I've never been this close to the birth of a new life before. I know to all you parents out there, especially the moms, this is probably old hat, but the closest I ever came were the kittens the neighbor’s cat decided to have on my door-step. So Lucy’s willingness to talk about the upcoming birth of her child and what the experience is like has been something very special for me.
“And how are you doing heading down the home stretch?” I teased.
“Really, good,” Lucy said cheerfully. “It's been a great pregnancy and I’ve only got a couple days over five weeks to go.”
I told her Alina, the woman in my office who was a bit ahead of Lucy with her pregnancy and whom we’d talked about before, had just given birth to a daughter.
"How fantastic. Congratulate her for me. I'm starting to appreciate all those dreadful old mothers who would say (imitating a voice that immediately brought to mind a finger being waved under my nose), ‘I was in labor for 23 hours with you!’ You know, holding that against their children. I can kind of understand that at this age now,” she laughed.
“I was thinking I’d ask for a baby update and then thought I really should call it a ‘mom’ update,” I said. “It feels like as time goes by, the focus is really on the upcoming child and mom gets a bit left out.”
“Yes,” Lucy said.
“Like how you have to sit differently so the baby doesn’t press against your diaphragm and stifle your breathing.”
Lucy chuckled. “I have reached that stage when everything is weirdly cumbersome. Lifting my legs off, if I've got them up on a chair, is a big deal. Trying to put your socks on is ridiculous!”
“Hard to find your feet?” I asked teasingly.
“Yeah!” Lucy laughed, goodnaturedly.
Imitating a woman in distress, I said, “Rob, here’s a foot - put a sock on it.” The laughter that comment elicited was quite endearing as I now added the father to the picture and wondered if her husband was getting more nervous as the time gets closer.
“No, he’s really very calm, and yet very excited,” she said. “He talks to the other new fathers at work about baby car seats and chick stuff like that. They tell him to get the one with the twist in the handle that’s easy to carry. They’re telling him what's good for you, what’s good for the father cuz ‘You have to carry the stuff,’” she said laughing. “He’s very cute. Very into it.”
Let’s see, I thought, collecting baby items in my head - mothers, fathers, breathing, car seats, oh yeah - nurseries. “Have you put a nursery together?” I asked.
“It's been done for a while,” she answered. “A good year ago we had it wallpapered and it's done in blue and white although that was just the nicest color for that room at the time. But we haven't got any of the big items like prams and such.”
Thinking about fathers, the Dick Van Dyke Show episode where Laura gives birth popped into my head. (Not Diagnosis Murder folks, the other Dick Van Dyke show. Thank God for Nick at Nite.) Lucy hadn't seen it, so I gave her a thumbnail sketch. (For those who also haven’t seen that show, Dick Van Dyke played Rob Petrie.)
“Rob sleeps with his clothes on, his hat on his chest and when Laura tells him it’s the real thing and she’s ready to go to the hospital, he runs out of the house with the suitcase, but without Laura. I’ve never asked a new father what he felt like when he realized, ‘This is it!’” I said.
Lucy laughed. “That’s an interesting question. I’ll try to pay attention to how Rob is during that time.”
“Alina said she bit her husband’s finger in the delivery room,” I added.
“I didn’t with Daisy’s dad,” Lucy said. “He was the only focus of love, the rest was all unfamiliar and sterile and kind of crabby old nurses. I don’t expect I’ll bite him, but who knows!” Lucy chuckled.
“Are you having the baby in the hospital?” I asked.
“I want to have it at home,” she answered.
“Do they have midwives in New Zealand?”
“Yep!” Lucy said, happily. “It's pretty common for people to have home birth in the environment that I move in.”
I wondered if she was referring to her work environment or her age group.
“The television industry,” she explained, “and this part of the country. Childbirth has been taken out of the hands of the normal experience of life and hidden away in hospitals and the domain of people with stirrups and forceps and surgical masks. When it’s really the most natural thing in life. It means there is much more apprehension, mystique and, therefore, fear around the whole process because most people haven't seen a birth.” Lucy said.
“Will Daisy be there?”
“It's up to her.”
I told Lucy I'd proofread quite a number of books on midwifery and natural childbirth in my former job. And I wondered if the Lamaze Method was used in New Zealand.
“Yes, it is, but not to the extent that you have in the States.” She explained further. “They do breathing. They’ve taken bits and pieces from all sorts of techniques and approaches and their whole aim is to get people as relaxed as possible, as knowledgable as possible. To arm them with information and choices and take the fear out of it.
Speaking of fear, I was picturing every sitcom father on television as they fainted in the delivery room.
“So,” I said casually. “Rob will be in the room?”
“Oh, yeah,” Lucy said, positively.
“What happens if he faints?”
“He won't. No, he won't,” she said with absolute conviction and trust in her spouse. “He’s seen some childbirth tapes. He was very keen to see those because he was a bit worried about that. He said to me after viewing them, ‘Oh, I feel a whole lot better. It’s not the same as a car accident.’ He’s seen car accidents and he was afraid of the trauma, of the pain. The thought of that is anathema to him. And he said, after viewing the tape, it's not like that at all. It’s pain with a purpose.”
My mind was hopping around from sitcoms to real life to things pregnant women go through during those nine months and I wondered about food cravings.
“I didn’t crave anything exciting,” Lucy laughed. “Cornflakes and orange juice.”
“You weren't pouring the orange juice over the cornflakes?” I asked timidly.
Lucy burst out laughing. “Nothing fun like that. Early on I did have a couple of those moments when, ‘I need to have an apple pie NOW! Get me an apple pie!!’
“Was there a time when you wanted to have children?” Lucy asked me.
I thought about it and answered, “I was a volunteer in a school and I helped with the four-and five-year-olds in the mornings. I also began to tutor a young girl. I don’t know if it was so much wanting to have a child as wanting to be a part of raising a child.”
“Mentoring's important. People need role models outside their immediate family,” Lucy stated with conviction. “At first, a child just thinks their mother is an extension of themselves. You’re very important up until the age of about six or seven. Then they start to separate and the dad becomes more important. Then dad becomes an idiot and they need someone outside the family who they can trust to be the next step in the role-modeling.”
And speaking of role models, we found ourselves talking about Renee doing more of the fighting in the show while Lucy is pregnant. I had heard from someone who had recently visited the set that Lucy was still doing many of the fight sequences.
“I’m still fighting,” she confirmed. “Not doing so much of the kicks, but you still have to have Xena participating as much as we can. Renee’s doing a lot more now. And she's such a damn natural. I've always said that, but now you get to see her really take off. And she completely puts me to shame in terms of ability,” she said cheerily.
“She's phenomenal, just phenomenal!” Lucy added with obvious awe and pride in her voice. “This job’s picked up my skills, but Renee was already terrifically coordinated, strong and with a lower center of gravity. More athletically proportioned than I am. My waist comes two-thirds up my total length. I’m really short from my waist to the top of my head,” she giggled. “Renee's compact and tremendously athletic in every way. And her character’s evolved into quite the lean, mean fighting machine. She’s never looked better.”
There was a pause and Lucy said, wistfully, “I saw a rough cut of an upcoming clip show and it had scenes from the first and second seasons and it was so nostalgic for me. I really thought, ‘Oh my God, look at us there!’ Particularly Renee with her long hair looking like a 14-year-old. You really see the passage to womanhood in Gabrielle.
“Renee and I were talking about it,” she continued, “and we’re both starting to shake our heads thinking, ‘It’s almost over.’ If we do 33 more episodes through the sixth season, it’s going to be too soon for us to say goodbye to this life and the people we love.”
Lucy brightened and said, “Did you see that nice bit we got in the TV Guide when ‘The Way’ was returned to the lineup?”
“You mean in the ‘Cheers’ section,” I said, feeling happy for my friend, “where they said, ‘Every episode of Xena is precious’?”
“I knoooow!” She was obviously grinning from ear to ear. “It blew me away.”
Xena was also listed as one of “TV's 50 Greatest Characters Ever!” in the October 16-22 issue of TV Guide.
I’d also been hearing good things about one of Renaissance's upcoming shows, Cleopatra 2525, and asked if she could give us an update on it.
“I saw a couple episodes of Cleopatra and it looks really good,” Lucy said enthusiastically. “I'm really proud of all the people working on it.”
“Gina Torres did our Santa Monica convention last January,” I told her. “It was her first appearance and the audience loved her.”
“Yeah, she's fabulous,” Lucy said. "And Vicky Pratt, who plays Sarge, looks amazing. She's a good human being and a good member of the team. Jennifer Sky is delightful. She’s a good soul. You can, as Rick Jacobson (one of the directors) said, talk straight to her. If he says something doesn’t work for him, she drops it. You don’t have to pussyfoot around her.”
Having covered real life babies and real life fathers, I thought I’d check out how Xena’s pregnancy was coming along.
“When you first discovered you were pregnant and realized Xena would have to be too, did you have any thoughts about who the father could be?” I asked.
She thought for a moment. “I thought there might be a string of red herrings, but that didn't really occur,” Lucy said. “Nor did Xena question it very much. She knew it was not a bad thing and had to reassure Gabrielle. We felt we needed to explain to the audience who has been with us for a long time, that Xena didn’t feel there was a demon involved. They needed to know she felt this was a good and holy thing. I use the word 'holy' loosely.”
“Especially after what happened with Gabrielle and Dahak,” I added.
“Right,” she said. “Gabrielle’s trying to needle Xena about it and Xena’s just, ‘Talk to the hand, talk to the hand.’ Which also works great on kids, by the way,” Lucy laughed. “Use their own language back at them and they don’t feel rejected. They find it amusing.”
“What will having this child do to Xena?” I queried.
“I think she wants to do it right this time,” Lucy said with conviction. “That she cannot, at this stage in her life, do to this child what she did before to Solan. What seemed like a necessity before. To give up her child for the child's sake now is anathema to her.
“Perhaps this is a shot at redemption in her own eyes for doing the unforgivable and not being able to protect her child when he most needed it,” she added.
“You have said before that when Xena no longer feels guilty - series over,” I said. “And they had you say in ‘Ides Of March,’ to Callisto, ‘You can’t play on that guilt of mine anymore.’”
“Right. I guess I was wrong,” she laughed. “No, what it means is that she's not guilty for that particular crime against Callisto. She’s over that. In Xena’s eyes, Callisto has given as good as she got, I should say. And she cannot push Xena’s buttons any longer.”
Then Lucy started laughing. “You know who it is?”
“Who, the father?” I said, curious and wondering just how much I was going to learn.
“No, the baby. It's (censored)!!” And laughed gleefully.
“Oh, my God!” I exclaimed, absolutely intrigued with the idea and thinking somehow I’ve got to get past the censors and hide the answer to this question in the interview where someone really clever could find it. Maybe a word spelled backwards - every other letter in the words of a sentence. Where’s a good spy when you need one who could help me with this!
I could hear Rob arriving home from work in the background and wanted to ask Lucy one more question. We’ve talked so much about her voracious appetite for reading and I had often wondered if she ever did any writing.
“Yeah, I do,” she said. “But I have little inclination to devote what time I have to that discipline. I did start writing a script for a movie from an idea I saw in the paper, but that’s a long way off. The truth is - and I was just talking to Rob about that last night - I’m pure actor.
“Renee's going to go off and direct one day because it’s important to her to get out the story that she loves and cares about. To get out her own vision of a story. I don’t have a barrow to push in terms of stories. There’s nothing I particularly want to tell the world. But I want to tell other people's stories my way. I want to make the most of a certain role.
“Rob started by acting in a movie that he made with Sam, Ivan and Ted Raimi and Bruce Campbell in college. His decision to become a producer was based on ‘I want to be able to control my destiny.’ Renee’s decision to direct is about telling her own stories.
“I want to be at the end of the line. Nobody can tell me what to do when that camera is rolling. The buck stops here, you know,” she laughed. “That's where all my ambition and drive takes me.”