Michaela Murphy - Eye Spy

 

 

Thank you. Hi. I grew up in Providence, Rhode Island, and for my entire childhood, we were never more than 20 miles away from the core of our universe, the Kennedys. [audience chuckle] We were Irish, they were Irish. We were Catholic, they were Catholic, they were family. We were like the relatives that they never got to see. [audience chuckle] But we knew, they're busy and we knew that they loved us. So, anything that was happening to them was also happening to us. So, their tragedy, plus our own tragedy was a lot. [audience chuckle]

 

So, this one Thanksgiving, after dinner and a family fight at grandma's house, we were in the car and we're driving home and the radio was playing this 10th anniversary of the JFK assassination. And I'm sitting in the back seat and I start to cry. And my sister Erin says, "Hey, dad, Mikayla's crying." And my father pulls that car right over to the shoulder of I95. He stops it, he turns around and he looks at us, and with tears in his own eyes, he says, "Don't you ever be ashamed to cry for that man." [audience laughter]

 

So, my parents grew up near Newport, and they got married in the same exact church as Jack and Jackie, St. Mary's, and my father gave exact replica jewelry to my mother that was replications [chuckles] of the jewelry that Jack gave to Jackie. And every Saturday night after mass, my family would be in the living room and we'd be happily “ever aftering” to the original soundtrack of Camelot. [audience chuckle] And every year during the 70s, my four aunts would take me and my two cousins on their dream vacation. A rented beach house in Hyannis on the very cove, sharing beachfront with the Kennedy compound.

 

Every day for an entire week, my Aunt Pat would roll up her sister's hair. My aunts would apply sunscreen to the back of their necks, the backs of the hands and the tops of their feet. And then they would drag their beach chairs down to the beach and they would set them up perfectly, not facing the water, not into the sun for tanning, but perfectly for spying on the Kennedys. [audience chuckle]

 

They would sit there all day in the broiling sun with high powered binoculars and keep a constant surveillance. And every year they'd have the same exact conversations. Usually around mid-morning, the first sighting would be made, usually by my Aunt Pat. She'd be, "They got Rose out [audience chuckle] walking. Ethel looked drawn." And then about an hour later, my Aunt Gert would say, "How old is Rose now?" And Aunt Momo would make the calculations. "Well, let's see, Jack died in 63 when she was 74. And Rose's birthday was two weeks last Thursday. And Joe died in 69, making her a widow at 81. So, 85." And then they'd break for lunch. [audience chuckle]

 

So, after lobster and drawn butter and hosing us down, they'd all hustle back to their posts and they'd watch. And every now and then there'd be something they didn't know. "Hey, who's that? Who's that? Who's that?" So, they'd draw out the family tree in the sand, they'd analyze it, they'd come up with a profile and they'd crack the code. "It's one of Bobby's." [audience chuckle] Now, any mention of Bobby would always bring up the inevitable. "Oh, I just pray to God they don't tell poor senile Rose about Bobby. It'll break her." So, then the long afternoon stretch would end with the inevitable annual observation. "You don't see Jackie much here." And then all of my aunts would drop their binoculars and look at each other meaningfully.

 

Now all of this meant that no one was paying any attention to me and my cousins in the water. [audience chuckle] And the summer when were nine years old, we found something. Now had an aunt, perhaps in an effort to ease a cramp in her prying neck, just sort of glance towards the water. She might have seen us climbing into this tiny plastic, half inflated boat. She might have cried out in alarm at the lack of oars and life vests. [audience chuckle] She might have had a conniption fit to see us shove off and drift into the violent riptide that would sweep us within five minutes out to the open sea and the Nantucket-bound ferry. [audience laughter] But an aunt didn't, and we did.

 

It all happened so fast that were swept out. And it wasn't until we realized that we could make out the specific features of the ferry passengers that we were really far from shore. We were so far from shore that my aunts were now reduced to four hopping dots. Oh, Oh. It was like Gilligan's Island for real. So, an Atlantic swell crashes over our heads and as soon as the water clears out of our eyes, a powerboat pulls up out of nowhere. And in this powerboat are David and Michael Kennedy. [audience laughter] So, David and Michael pull us up into the boat and we are like, "Oh my God, we are saved by a powerboat." [audience laughter] So, the powerboat sends us back to shore and we're psyched because we're saved until we start to watch the four hopping dots morph back into our four crazed, livid aunts.

 

We are so going to get it. Now, my family, under any circumstances has this really weird thing. Well, they each have their own weird thing about yelling and getting into huge trouble. Like my Aunt Gert, she gets so freaked out that all she can do is yell out our addresses. Like, "Eileen and Kevin, 275 Hooper Street. [audience chuckle] Mikayla, 180 Asylum Road." I swear to God, I grew up on Asylum Road. [chuckle] It's a very telling piece of my childhood. And then my Aunt Pat would do these things where she would say these things that were, like, actually kind of nice things, but she'd say them like they were death threats. She'd be like, "Yeah, I'll save you from drowning. You get on that beach towel and you lie in that sun, now." Or she'd say, "I'm going to buy you a birthday present. You eat that cake, now."

 

So, we knew that this is what was coming. The Kennedy boys didn't. So, they're vivaciously tanned, and they pull up to the shoreline, and we brace ourselves. Now what happens is our aunts are out of their minds. They're ready to flay us. But when they see us in the same boat as the Kennedys, it's like they don't have the emotional capacity to handle it. [audience chuckle] They kind of snap. They're kind of freaking out to yell at us, but they start fake smiling and trying to act all normal. And my Aunt Momo, she takes on this Kennedy-esque way of speaking, which is sort of halfway between Katharine Hepburn and the Queen of England. [audience chuckle] And we're looking at them like, "What are you guys doing?" And they're smiling the smile. But when they smile at us, it's like "You just wait." But they're like, "Oh, David. Oh, Michael, thank you, thank you, thank you." And they're not mad at us for almost drowning. They're mad at us because the Kennedys had to save us. Like, "Don't those people have enough trouble? [audience laughter] now you?” Like as if our almost drowning was yet another Kennedy tragedy. [audience laughter]

 

So, these poor boys finally pull and pry themselves away from my aunts. They get back in the boat and they're leaving, and my Aunt Momo's going, "Please give our best to your grandmother." [audience chuckle] And now it's time for our for real punishment, which was that we, for the rest of vacation, had to stay on the beach because we did not have any respect for the water.

 

So, it's 100 degrees out, and after about a half hour of whining and fighting and, like, emptying out all the Coppertone and kicking sand, we break my Aunt Pat's last nerve, and she says, "All right, you can go in the water, but only up to your knees." So, we're happy for a minute until we get in the water and realize how boring up to your knees is. And then we get the great plan of having chicken fights.

 

So, we start to have chicken fights, but it's kind of weird because there's only three of us. [audience chuckle] But we're doing the best we can to have a chicken fight like that and knock each other off into the water so we get fully immersed. And then my Uncle Al, who never ever played with us ever comes into the water to play chicken fights with us. And he puts his daughter, my cousin Eileen, up on his shoulders. And then I get up on my cousin Kevin's shoulders, and we're having chicken fights. And it's like actual family fun for a moment. And we're hitting each other, falling in the water. And then I take my foot and I accidentally kick the side of my Uncle Al's head really, really hard [audience chuckle] and his eyeball pops out of his head, falls into the water and sinks. [audience chuckle]

 

It pops out of his head and it sinks. Eileen, Kevin and I are in instant, complete shock. Right this minute there is still a part of me that is on that beach screaming. It's like, "Oh, my God." We had no idea that he had a fake eye. [audience chuckle] We didn't even know that you could have a fake eye. Why would you have a fake eye? They didn’t tell us that you think Uncle AL fake eye because they didn't want us blabbing it to the whole neighborhood. So, they didn't tell us, so we didn't know. And, later on, there was Columbo and Sandy Duncan, but this was way before that. [audience chuckle] We had no idea. So, we're all standing there, and it's, like, so horrible. Like, I can't even-- I'm like, "Oh, my God." 

 

And my cousins, Eileen and Kevin are staring at me with complete hate like, "You broke our dad." [audience chuckle] And my Uncle Al is standing there, and he's got the lid open so you can, like, see inside the socket where now it's just skin and the eyeball gone. And, like, you cannot just say "I'm sorry" to someone that you just-- [audience laughter] so, I don't know what to do. And my Aunt Pat is hysterically screaming because that eyeball cost top dollar. [audience chuckle] It was a special magnetized eye so it could keep up with the other one. And now I had just better pray that vacation was over and that they got that deposit back, because now they were going to have to buy a brand-new top dollar eye that was not in the budget.

 

So, I just didn't know what to do. I was like, "My life is over. I am no longer Mikayla. I am now Murph's girl who kicked Al's eye out in the Cape." [audience chuckle] And it's awful and everybody's just crying and pointing at me and now my other aunts are getting in on it like-- and who's the blame part of the conversation's happening. So, I just kind of back off into the water. I'm kind of like going back and regressing back to where life as I once knew it had ended. And I just stand there and I wished I had drowned and I wished the Kennedys hadn't saved me. And I bent off into the waves and I just started sifting through sand and shells and pebbles and it's totally ridiculous. But I will never stop looking for this eye. I'm going to look forever. And I keep looking and looking and I'm sifting through and then all of a sudden there is an eyeball in my palm, staring right at me. And so, I scream and I drop it back and it sinks back into the water. But now we know it's possible. 

 

So, everybody gets back into the water and now we're all sifting through and sifting through and I pray to God for no more future happiness until we find this eye. And I also kind of pray that it not be me the one that finds it this time. So, after like an hour, my cousin Kevin finds the eye and he holds it up in triumph and he does not let go. And my Uncle Al takes the eye, he like washes it off and just pops it back in. [audience chuckle] And then he tests it, and it's keeping up with the other one. [audience chuckle] So, it's working still. And now it's the weirdest thing because now we know it's a fake eye. And now that you know it's a fake eye, it totally looks like a fake eye. And I can't believe that I never noticed it wasn't a fake eye before.

 

So, now vacation's back on and so, everybody gets back into their beach chairs and they start to settle down, to begin telling the story over and over like a million times about what I just did. And I have not really fully reintegrated back into the family yet. I'm kind of standing apart and I notice that there actually has been a group of people who've been watching this whole thing, and then I see something that I didn't notice, that no one noticed, and that's that two of the Kennedy kids, David and Michael, had taken a walk on the beach. And I can tell just by the look on their faces that they had stood there and seen the entire episode, [audience laughter] that they had been there watching us. Thank you.