California Mom
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| My California Mom, 1970s |
Even though this post is about California to an extent, we first have to begin in Mississippi. The capital of Jackson and surrounding area's, as well as the small town of Canton. In 1995, the film adaptation of John Grisham's novel, A Time To Kill, was being filmed. I was only fourteen, so my story does not start here, although this is the beginning.
My sisters then boyfriend, a Jackson native, was a locations scout for the film. So she went a long with him to help and ended up being an extra in the film. She was just out of college, so had plenty of time to drive up there and stay; to be a part of all of the filming. While my sister encountered all of the major players they were not really on speaking terms. Three people from that film, however, would have a hand in her life.
The first was Octavia Spencer. Now, she's a big deal, but then she was just a beginning actress with a small bit role in A Time To Kill. After that film, my sister decided to move to Los Angeles, because that's what all the post graduate theatre kids were doing, so a lot of her friends were out there. The details are fuzzy here because, one; these are not stories from my personal life, and two; I've heard all of the stories so many times that I get them confused. So, I'm only writing what I remember exactly, and saying, "something happened here" for the things that are fuzzy.
So, Octavia had a hand in there somewhere. She either told my sister about the job or the place to live; perhaps she did both. Either way it was her that started the ball rolling, in a way, for the things that happened in my sisters life and ultimately effected me as well. So the job my sister landed was that of a personal assistant. Beth Grant was a major character actress in A Time To Kill. She's married to Michael Cheifo and their daughter, Mary, was a toddler then. This is who my sister worked for. My sister never really conversed with Beth while the film was on, but somehow, out of all the people in L.A., that is who she ended up working for.
Then, her living situation became weird and she had to find another place to live. In comes another player in the Time To Kill scheme of things; Juli; who this is really all about; our California Mom. And again, they never really met while the film was on, but out of all the people in L.A., my sister ended up here.
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| California, 1971 |
Juli is the age of our parents. She was a born and raised southern California native. Which means, she is the exact opposite for a lot of things compared to our parents who were raised in the southern conservative town of Laurel, Mississippi. She used words like, 'far out', and 'tchotchke'. Her first job was to move to Hawaii and work on the Don Ho Show. Later she started her own accounting business and was a productions accountant on several films in the 1980s and 1990s. Juli never married and never had children of her own.
So, in 1996, Juli was looking for a room mate and my sister was given her number. Juli later decided to take the job she'd been pondering, so was going to leave for Canada and said my sister could just house and puppy sit while she was gone. My sister accepted.
At the beginning of July, of that year, I flew out to L.A. to visit my sister. I was 15 years old. The largest city I had ever been to was New Orleans, Louisiana and Jackson, Mississippi, which are tiny in comparison to Los Angeles (or pretty much any other major city in America). I had my first experiences with grocery stores unlike what's in my home state (you would think grocery stores are all the same, but they are not), as well as Starbucks, The Gap, Terra Chips, Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream, Tex-Mex food, Block Buster, Target, Mrs. Gooches, and Trader Joe's. Not to mention my first time seeing the Pacific Ocean.
We went to a yard sale, my first day there, in Beverly Hills. It was the man who owned McRae's, which was a department store we had in my home town. They liked us so much (because we were from Mississippi, I suppose), that they invited us back to have dinner with them. We totally should have, but didn't. I also did get to meet Beth Grant and her husband and daughter, briefly. My sister decided that our mom would kill us if she didn't take me to church, so we chose a Saturday service in Van Nuys and who was there but my sisters employers. It appeared to be a fussy day for them, but they were not rude or mean, so I enjoyed it thought it was weird. And what's not to like really. Both Beth and Micheal are fellow Virgo's and Beth and I share the same birth day. So, they are awesome in my book.
My first night there I slept on the tropical print sofa and my sister threw a goose down comforter over me saying, "This is THE comforter that Tom Cruise and Kelly McGillis had their love scene on!!!" My reaction was less than thrilled. I loved Top Gun, but love scenes? You could have them!
While I was able to hang out with my sister some, she did have to work, so most of the time I was left at Juli's house alone. This woman that I hadn't met yet, and I was alone in her house. I was a bit scared she'd suddenly come home and wonder what some kid was doing in her house. To keep the boredom away, I swam in her pool, played with her two dogs, watched the telly and meandered around her house looking at all the things on her walls.
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| Personalized, autographed photo of Tom Cruise, Top Gun |
A couple of days before I was supposed to leave is when Juli came home from her work trip. Luckily, my sister was there to declare who I was, though I'm sure this woman wouldn't have eaten me alive had my sister not been there. It was just the over imaginings of a teenage girl in a foreign place.
Juli was friendly and INSISTED I go to work with her instead of staying alone in a stupid house. So she drug me to work with her those last few days of my trip. To the Morgan Creek Studios where she was wrapping up her work on Bad Moon. She also INSISTED that I get out of the cramped office and actually enjoy a movie studio, so I wandered around the lot. While I saw a caravan of tourist riding around on a lot tour, I didn't see anyone famous. Even though she wanted to "save" me from a boring house, she ending up trying to get me to avoid being bored by hanging out with her. But you know what, those were a great couple of days just spending "boring" time with her. Not the movie lot or her fancy car or where we happened to eat. But being in her company and just chatting with her.
From the get go, Juli declared herself to be my California Mom (and that of my sister as well). From almost my first meeting, I obtained a new mother. And she dubbed herself cool, because California is cooler than anywhere else. Too funny now that I remember that part.
She kept in touch with us after I left and after my sister moved back home later that year. Eventually Juli decided to leave California and move to Wilmington, North Carolina. Now on the east coast, she was driving through Mississippi and stopped by to see us. Then Juli had my sister come up there to stay with her dogs while she had surgery.
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| Lionel Richie, Juli, and Tom Hanks, The 'Burbs |
It was a nice visit and we learned more about her life, but it was sad to see how far down hill she had gone. Besides the breathing issues, that surgery I mentioned before had been botched, so on top of having health complications from that, there were related health complications to the medicines that had been prescribed to her from that surgery.
She was still herself, the same person I had first met, just a little more worn physically. But her spark was still there.
Now we skip to this year. In July, again. She broke her leg and went in for surgery. She wasn't able to take care of herself after surgery and had no one to help so she went to a convalescent home to recouperate. She was happy. The only thing she complained about was the food. She was planning a dinner for friends when she was better, as well as to celebrate Thanksgiving AND Christmas, which she hadn't done since her mother had passed away many years ago. My sister and I thought this was huge for Juli, and how wonderful. They released her from the home on 30. August and things were fine.
Then on 1. September, my sister comes downstairs to my office to tell me that Juli passed away. It was all over Juli's Facebook wall. Someone we didn't know saying she had passed away and loads of internet friends giving their condolences. I refused to believe it until I heard it from a person who was there.
Thirty minutes later my sister received a phone call from the woman who had been staying with Juli to take care of the dogs. She was the one that found Juli dead. It was official then. And my sister and I were devastated. It's true, she wasn't in great health, but it was still completely unexpected. She had just been posting things on Facebook and talking just like it was any other day.
This also meant my sister had to leave as quickly as possible for North Carolina. Two years ago, I made a promise to my sister that when things went down, that I would be by her side. I didn't expect it this soon, but I was ready to keep my promise none-the-less.
It was weird reading the condolences on her Facebook wall. Juli had family, but was estranged from them. She had unofficially made us her daughters and adopted my entire family as hers. She could never stop commenting on how great my family was. So, really, they were all condoling my sister and I. And that was a strange thing to realize. I've already known that family doesn't have to be blood, and while I knew that Juli made us her family, I hadn't realized she'd done the same with others. This current neighbour and that former one. Her real estate agent. A lady at the bank. Fellow Baha'i's. The lady who painted her house. All the people she had connected with on the internet. She'd made her own family, and it was comforting to know it was more people than just my sister and I.
Going through her things was even more bitter sweet. We found out all sorts of awesome things about her, but at the same time we couldn't hear them from her. She had photo book after photo book of snap shots she'd taken on all her films. Things she'd written and done that she never talked about to us while she was alive. In the mid 1970s she worked at a radio station and recorded her own song. She was manager of the photo lab for the Don Ho Show in Hawaii. She took a lot of funny photo's of herself and money (makes sense). All her high school classmates were SO California beautiful with blonde hair and blue eyes and creamy skin. She adored River Phoenix (from My Own Private Idaho) and Anthony Edwards (Top Gun), but did NOT like Keanu Reeves (My Own Private Idaho), who apparently wasn't not a very nice guy or Val Kilmer, who apparently stole her shirt when she told him not to (Top Gun). She even went so far as to say that River Phoenix was the son she always wanted and even if she was starving she would NEVER sell the personalized, autograph picture that he'd given her. I've seen it. It's nothing at all like Tom Cruises. It's personal and wordy, and obviously special. I felt bad at the thought of selling it, so decided that's the one I would keep. After I decided that, is when I found out how she had felt about the photo, as well as River, while she was alive.
Or how her house in California, she designed and had built the really great pool and hot tub at her house. She had remodeled the kitchen. How the L shaped sectional sofa with the tropical print that I slept on, she had purchased in Wilmington, North Carolina while working on a film, and had it shipped back to L.A.... only to move it all the way back to Wilmington, where it will remain. That she was part Hispanic from her mother and part Jewish from her father. That she was of the Baha'i faith. Or how she had made her own costume jewelry in the 1980s and even had a business name and cards made up for it. Or that I find it highly interesting that her and my sister share the same birth month, as well as the astrology sign of Taurus, while Juli left during my birth month.
Or the most striking; how the small video camera we found, still had video on it. Video's from before 2012 in Wilmington. The ferry, the aquarium, and particularly her video recording of a bird who got lost in her house with her voice emanating from the speakers with baby talk words of 'honey' and 'sweetie' trying to coax the bird outside.
While I am still mourning her loss, it, like all the other deaths I have encountered, has taught me a lot. From learning more about who she was, to random things like how to use an ATM or deal with a funeral, to important realizations that apparently I am a VERY good sister, as well as that I was lucky to know Juli and luckier still that she liked us enough to adopt our entire family and repeatedly declare that she was our Cool California Mom. That all the randomness in the Universe threw us together, over all of that distance and all of those miles, to connect us together.
That she, like all of us, was a bright shining star of a soul walking this earth. She walks no more, but she is not really gone yet either. There are still people who remember, and as long as they do, there is still a spark of that life in all of us who were close to her.
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| Don Ho Show, Hawaii, early 1970s |
Julianna | May 1948 - September 2014
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