Tara Clancy - The Moon and Stars Talks

 

All right, so I am a fifth generation native New Yorker. [cheers and applause] Yeah, and while there is certainly something cool about that, there is also actually a downside. Like there was a moment when it occurred to me that while many other American families also first landed in New York, for the most part, at some point they kept going and pioneering their way west with little more than the rags on their backs and all of that. Meanwhile, it's like my own family got off a boat, took two steps and were like, "Good enough for me forever." [audience laughter] All of that is to say I come from a place where discovering the great unknown means New Jersey. [audience laughter]

 

Okay. But seriously, it didn't take me too long to realize that the reason for that was mostly fear and that fear pervaded everything. Where you live, what you do for a living. You find the first solid thing and you don't risk going any further. But as it would wind up, my mother was something of a pioneer herself, although not without her share of false starts. So, at 20 years old, she had hardly been outside of Brooklyn. And when she did finally leave a year later, it was only because she married a cop from Queens, [audience chuckles] which she then called the country. [audience laughter] They had a baby, me.

 

But by the time I was 2, they had divorced. And so, to make a little extra money afterwards, she had to take on a weekend job, cleaning apartments. So, the very first was this duplex with Manhattan skyline views, filled with antiques and artwork. But as it winds up, it would be her last, because over the course of a year, she would go from being the cleaning lady to the secretary to the girlfriend of the multimillionaire who owned it, named Mark. [audience laughter] That's true. [laughs] So, they never wound up living together full time. They were both divorced and so, it's sort of been there, done that. But also, my mom had this philosophy which was “If you take someone's money, you have to take their advice.” And so, when it came to raising me, really, she said, "I wanted to do it my way, which had to mean on my dime." So, she would go on to spend every weekend with him, and then every weekday back home in Queens, living this dual life for the next 22 years.

 

And on the weekends, when I wasn't with my dad, I was right there with her. Together, mom and I would become like superwomen, able to jump social strata, single bound. [audience laughter] So, because of my mom's plan, my life was never very different than anybody around me. I wasn't sent to some elite private school or moved to a penthouse. And so, I just grew into your typical Queens teenager. I smoked blunts and I drank 40s, and one of my best friends had a baby in high school. [audience laughter] I was a walking cliché, right? In every way, except for the fact that I still spent every odd weekend talking with this art collecting, croquet playing, brilliant, if pretty intimidating man at his mansion in the Hamptons. [audience chuckles] 

 

And when I say talking, I actually really mean it. I don't just mean we made a little chit chat, I mean that, after dinner every odd Saturday night for 20 years. He would ask me some enormous question. Right? He would say, "If I told you that the universe was infinite, that it had no end, how would that make you feel?" [audience laughter] And for that, I was like five years old. [audience laughter] But I actually lived for it, really. And we would just go on for hours and hours. And finally, my mother would she'd just kind of leave us to it, and eventually she'd come back in and she'd be like, "Are you two going to talk about the moon and the stars all night?" And that's actually what she came to call them, our “moon and stars talks.”

 

Okay. So, at 16, like all teenagers, I didn't want to be away from my friends for five minutes, let alone a whole weekend. So, I called Mark and I asked if I could bring them to the Hamptons. "Ring. Mark speaking." "Hi, it's Tara. Could I bring some of my friends next weekend?" "That would be fine." Click. He wasn't one for small talk. Right? [audience chuckles] So, he was not the problem. What the problem was that some of my friends had no idea about any of this. Now, that's not because I was trying to hide it. It's really because the details weren't exactly easy to slip into conversation. They'd be like, "Hey, Tara, you want to go smoke and drink on the corner?" "Well, I had been thinking of discussing the Hudson River School painters over dinner in Bridgehampton, but what the hell." [audience laughter]

 

Truly, I was nervous about telling them. The only thing I can kind of compare it to is coming out. I would just be like, "I have to tell you something, and I hope you find it in your heart to accept me, [audience laughter] but I know a rich guy." [audience laughter] But truly, it was awkward because I really wanted them to come, but I also didn't want them to be embarrassed, so I sort of had to explain. And so literally, here I'd be in the schoolyard, and on one side, kids would be beating the crap out of each other. That's how we do recess in Queens. [audience chuckles] And then on the other side, I'd be huddled up with my friend, Lynette, trying to explain antiquing. Right? [audience chuckles]

 

Anyway, before you know it, there we were, me, Lynette, her boyfriend Rob, piled into the back of his red hooptie, flying down the highway heading from Hollis to the Hamptons.  And just for brevity's sake, let's just say that Rob is like Eminem, and then Lynette's like an Italian Rosie Perez. [audience laughter] They're in the front, and I'm in the back. And now as we're getting closer, I'm getting a little more nervous, and I'm thinking of all these things to explain, and I'm like, "Oh, did I tell you about the ketchup?" "The what?" I'm like, "You can't put the ketchup bottle on the table." "Where do you put it?" "On the floor?" "No, listen, you have to. [audience chuckles] You got to take the ketchup out of the bottle. You got to put it in a little bowl with a spoon first, okay? Remember that. Right?" [audience chuckles] And then, "Oh, I didn't tell you. There's no TV there." "Dear God." Always got the biggest reaction. "What does he do all day?" It's like, in Queens, the most diverse place in the world, the one thing everybody has in common is a perpetually blaring TV set. [audience chuckles]

 

Anyway, so that would lead me to have to explain what we did after dinner instead of watching TV, which was the talks, the “moon and stars talks.” And like I said, I really love them, but they weren't actually for the faint of heart, meaning that Mark did not care if you were some kid, unaccustomed to this type of thing. He talked and he argued with you like you were his peer and he fully expected you to keep up. And so, I was not sure if my friends were going to be into that or if he was going to be into them, but too late. There we are pulling into the driveway.

 

So, the most shocking thing you first saw at Mark's place wasn't the hand laid stone pool or even the regulation croquet court or the five-bedroom historic farmhouse. It was Mark himself. He was six foot ten. Again, six foot ten. I mean, everyone just sort of looked at him like, "Is that a man or is that oak tree wearing chinos?" [audience laughter] All right, so likely because my friends ignored my stupid paranoia and were just themselves, the day went without a hitch. But still, that night as we finished up dinner, I couldn't help but to be a little nervous again as I knew the questions were coming. So, he says, "Presuming we can fix all of the societal ills right here and now, where would you begin? Go." [audience laughter]

 

You have to understand that nobody is asking us these kinds of questions. And maybe, sure, we're at an age where you may be starting to think bigger picture, me starting to think about what you are going to do for a living. But it's also we come from a place where it always felt like there were only two job options. Cop, not a cop. [audience laughter] I mean, really, it was like your parents, you took the first solid city job that came along, and you held on for dear life and you were proud and you did your best and you did it forever. So, solving society's ills doesn't get you a pension. I mean, we weren't thinking about this kind of things. So-- [laughs] So, I kind of look away, I kind of look down. But then I hear Rob say something and I look up and then I see Lynette kind of disagrees with that. And then I see that Mark is nodding along and it's on, just like that.

 

And not just that one time. There would be many more “moon and stars talks” over the years. And in a way it was a beautiful thing and, in another way, it was a little bit sad because I think what most of us would tell you now is that those talks forever changed the way we thought of ourselves. Those talks sort of made us think that maybe there was a little more to us than we knew. And for some of my friends, certainly not all, but for some, and definitely for me, they even made you think, "Well, shit. If A, I like talking about these big things and B, the universe is infinite, then C, there's got to be more job options than bus drivers. Correct?" [audience chuckles] 

 

But really, I think that when we stood at that same crossroads as our parents had, I think it was this experience that gave us something that unfortunately they didn't have. And that's just the confidence to know that we had a choice. And so here I am today, living in a whole other world, Manhattan, [audience laughter] a whopping 20 minutes away from where I grew up. But that is not because of fear. That's my choice. Thank you.