Most Talkative: Stories From the Front Lines of Pop Culture Andy Cohen (nice books to read .TXT) 📖

of that day, calling each other back and forth about eighteen times. Who could work? Besides, CBS should have been funding my creativity so I could run wild with an idea like this. Maybe it would translate to some out-of-the-box winner of an idea that would revolutionize morning television! Probably not, but we’d never know if we didn’t follow through. The plan became more elaborate as the day continued, and so did our commitment to it.

At week’s end, I had the ears of both my parents for our regularly scheduled phone call.

“Tad Martin calling collect,” the operator said in classic monotone operatorspeak.

“I do NOT ACCEPT charges,” Evelyn barked. She always felt she needed to act out her rejection of the call, as though the operator were going to call bullshit on our weekly charade and report us. Sometimes I actually took her rejection personally.

A minute later the phone rang. “Well, hello, Tad!” she chirped.

“Hey, Tad,” said my dad. He loved it, too.

Step one of the plan was uneventful. I told them about Grac’s friend the Indian who looked like me. I told them he was Shawnee. They took it as typical commentary from a night out in Mad-hattan and we moved along.

The next week, I told them I’d run into my Shawnee look-alike again … and that we’d spent hours discussing his heritage and that it was interesting—even inspiring—to me.

“What’s so inspiring?” my mom asked.

“Well, his tribe had a lot of land taken away,” I stumbled. “And he just has a lot of passion about his heritage. You should really see him, Mom. I mean, we could be twins.”

“Well, maybe you’re Indian.” She chuckled. My father was silent. Probably watching TV with the phone eight inches away to reduce the impact of hearing Evelyn in quadraphonic surroundsound from the next room.

“Well, maybe I am,” I said matter-of-factly. “He’s bringing me some Shawnee books next week.”

A week later I went for the kill. “These books are fascinating.”

“What BOOKS, Andy?”

“These Shawnee books I got from Grac’s friend. I look like these guys. I’m not kidding. The bone structure, the whole thing. REALLY interesting.”

“Yeah, I bet you look like them,” my mother snickered.

“No, I mean their hair, their eyes are just like mine.”

“Uh-huh—and do they look Jewish, the Indians? JEWISH INDIANS?” She was feeling it. Her son was being a boob.

“I don’t know, Mom.” Time to turn up the volume. “I wonder sometimes…”

Pause. “You wonder WHAT?”

“Just, like, who I really am.”

“Who you really ARE? Who are you? Who do you THINK you are?”

“Well, you know … these Shawnees had reservations in Southern Illinois. And I just wonder if somehow I could have Shawnee blood or be part Shawnee.”

“What do you mean? You’re JEWISH! You’re RUSSIAN and POLISH! How do you think that happened? Do you think your grandfather had an AFFAIR with an INDIAN??”

“I don’t know. You never know. What about YOUR grandfather?”

“WHAT?!?!?! LOU!? Are you hearing this?”

My father rejoined the land of the living. “I hear it. I don’t really understand it, but I’m listening. Andy, do you think you could be an Indian, really?”

“I don’t know. I’m just thinking about it. Is that really crazy? I mean, first this guy that looks like me and now this book.”

My mother broke in. Obviously, my dad was doing no good by reasoning with me.

“The GUY who LOOKS like you has nothing to do with anything,” she said. “I don’t think there were Shawnees in Southern Illinois. I think they’re something else.”

“But you don’t KNOW, Mom. I don’t know either. I’m just thinking about it.”

“Okay,” she relented. “You’re an Indian. What do I know? Your grandfather Allen had an affair and you’re one-fourth Indian.” She chuckled as though she was going to humor me, but I knew the truth: Inside, she was in knots of fury.

Grac and I were in rotten-kid heaven. I had slowly, deliberately gotten under my parents’ skin with the most ridiculous notion since someone gave Pia Zadora a contract.

A few days later I lobbed this:

“You know what I realized? And it’s ironic, actually. You can accept me completely for being gay but not for being Shawnee.”

“WHAT?!” She screamed loud enough to rattle the ASK ME ABOUT MY GAY SON button on her lapel. “Oh my god, that is RIDICULOUS.”

“Well, it may be true.”

Brilliant. Mean, but brilliant.

This silliness had gone on for months when one day a new bolt of inspiration hit me during our afternoon uptown-downtown kill-time-at-work chat.

“We have to do something that gets to them in their home,” I said. “To bring the whole thing to Biltmore Drive.”

“Okay, here’s something,” Grac mused. “We should send them a letter or something from a fake, shady Shawnee organization thanking you for all the money you’ve given them. That’ll get them going: Money that you’ve spent. Wasted money, Andy. YOUR wasted money.”

My parents’ biggest fear in life has always been my sister and me “throwing money away.”

Another spoiled egg of a plan was hatched: Out of fervor for my hidden ancestry, I’d bid on a pair of Navajo Raindance boots at an auction benefiting some Displaced Navajo cause. Because now, one of my pet causes was inter-tribe unity, and I was a representative of goodwill from the Shawnee. The twist was that the boots had been mailed to my parents’ house in St. Louis because the woman who took my check wrote down the address on my driver’s license, which still had the Missouri address. The explanation was VERY iffy, but it wouldn’t get much of a second thought.

Graciela’s packaging was genius. She mocked up some letterhead using Wite-Out, scissors, and a Xerox machine and soon was “Lauren” writing from “Cause-Effective,” a nonprofit who-knows-what of which I was a “booster.” Between the words “Cause” and “Effective” was an arrow. Nice touch. The typed letter thanked me for my generous bid toward the boots and my endless enthusiasm for the organization. She handwrote and signed a PS: “All our books on Shawnee are being reordered—I will contact you when they arrive—Lauren.” The boots Grac found