April Salazar - The Reveal

 

It started as a typical Saturday night. My mom and my stepfather were out while my stepfather played a cocktail piano gig. This was becoming really common on Friday and Saturday nights. My brother and I really loved it, because it meant that we got to stay up late and watch as much television as we wanted to. If we were really lucky, we'd get to watch Saturday Night Live. My mom and my stepfather returned a few hours later. My stepfather returned his electric piano to the stand in the dining room, and she sat on the couch and made a patting gesture next to her. She called me and my brother over, and I could tell by the look on her face that she had something serious to say.

 

We sat next to her, and she looked at us and she said, "I bet you've been wondering where I've been going all of these nights." And I hadn't, because duh, she was with my stepfather on these piano gigs. My stepfather was a tenured professor. He was a scientist, and he liked to earn extra money playing piano. Just the Thanksgiving before, he had dragged us to the yoga center in Manhattan just in exchange for a vegetarian meal. So, I said, "Not really, Mom." But she continued, "Well, I've been working as a stripper at private parties. [audience laughter] Your stepfather's my escort, and just so you're comfortable with what I'm doing, I'm going to do my routine for you." [audience laughter]

 

So, my mom stands up and she smooths the front of her dress and she nods at my stepfather, which is a cue. I look over at him, and I see that he's crouched over a boombox and he hits play. The sound of a screeching saxophone fills our living room. I instantly recognized this song, because just a few months before, my stepfather was obsessed with hunting it down. It was a song from the Lenny soundtrack called Lament, and he had dragged us to Colony Records in Times Square, so that we could dig through records and 45s and even sheet music, because we couldn't find it on vinyl. 

 

And now I understood why he was so obsessed with finding this one song. [audience chuckles] My mom walked over to the 4x6 brown shag rug and she started her routine. She started to slowly remove her clothes, but she had no rhythm. [audience laughter] So, as she was doing her routine, she was basically just walking back and forth between our big console television and the rocking chair in the corner. The entire time, my brother was staring at the bookshelf behind her. [audience laughter] 

 

Eventually, she removed the dress and she was wearing nothing but her black bikini. And I recognized it, because it was my mom's bikini. [audience laughter] It was what she wore whenever she was in the backyard with a short shovel picking up dog poop. [audience laughter] Only now she was stripping out of it. My brother looked down, and I thought, “Oh God, Mom's being embarrassing again.” [audience laughter]

 

It wasn't that shocking. My brother and I were used to seeing our mom naked. She was the kind of woman who left the door open when she used the bathroom. But she was also a nudist. [audience chuckles] We had even been members at a family nudist camp called the Treehouse Fun Ranch. [audience laughter] It's where she had met my stepfather. The Treehouse was like a country club. It had swimming pools and tennis courts. The only difference is that its members were working class and stark naked. [audience chuckles] It was also done up in a Wild West theme, for some reason. [audience laughter] 

 

This was all totally normal to me. In fact, when I first visited the Treehouse, I didn't notice the naked people so much as I noticed the Olympic-sized swimming pool and the Western saloon. I was really excited about that. There just wasn't a time that I wasn't naked when I was little, and my mom never ever made me feel ashamed of that. I think that that was in direct defiance of her strict Catholic upbringing. She had even made me the flower girl, a nude flower girl [audience chuckles] at her nude wedding to my stepfather. [audience laughter] That one was an intimate affair. It took place in our living room and it was broadcast on Manhattan public-access television. [audience laughter] 

 

It was all fine and good until I hit puberty. And then I started to feel self-conscious. I felt self-conscious about being nude myself, and I started to feel self-conscious about having a nudist family. My mom, though, her feelings were unwavering. She still was very comfortable being naked all the time. She also realized that with just a high school education, she could earn a lot of money by working as a stripper. But she wanted me to have the educational opportunities that she hadn't, so she enrolled me in private school. I was a super, super, super nerd. So, I loved private school. I got to take Latin and philosophy and a lot of other classes that I knew I would never ever be able to take in public school. 

 

At the same time, I was so afraid that the other kids in my school would find out about my weird family, and that I would be ostracized. So, if anyone ever asked me what my mom did for a living, I would say that she was an actress. And if I was really pushing it, I would say that she was a dancer. This was working really well for me. You're dealt with the cards that you have, and as much as I wanted a normal mom, I so wanted a normal mom. I wanted the kind of mom who joined the PTA and who spent hours sewing Halloween costumes for me. But I felt like I could live two lives. I felt like I could cover it up at school and then just ignore things at home. 

 

And of course, I started to rebel just as my mom had rebelled before me, I started to wear turtlenecks and high-waisted pants. [audience laughter] So, I was living my double life, and I think I was doing well with that until the eighth grade, when my mom decided that she was going to throw a Halloween party and invite my entire classroom. This was really bad, because it meant that they were going to be in our house, and it meant that these little things that we took for granted might give us away. 

 

Things like my mom's costume rack, which was filled with various uniforms, but also feather boas and a leather whip. My mom totally got this. So, before the party, she and I went through the house and we hid everything away. We hid that costume rack, and we hid all of her promotional materials, [audience chuckles] like her pens and her mugs and her T-shirts, which were printed with her stripper name, which was Amber Graham. [audience chuckles] We also closed the curtain on the pot plants that were growing in the window. That's not necessarily nudist, but in my mind, it's connected. [audience laughter] 

 

And then, when we were done with all of that, she let me choose a costume from her costume rack. I got to choose between nurse and police officer and French maid. [audience chuckles] I was pretty happy about that. It wasn't the same as my mom sewing a costume for me, but it was pretty close. Once we were done with that, we decorated the house with black and orange crepe paper. My mom went so over the top that she asked my stepfather to bring dry ice home from his lab, and she placed it in a black cauldron on our porch. I felt like we were a normal family. 

 

My classmates started to arrive and I was starting to feel really great, because you could tell that it was going to be a successful party. They were munching on English muffin pizzas that my mom was bringing out, just like one of those PTA moms. I was getting a lot of compliments on my costume, which was sexy cop, by the way. [audience laughter] I had the hat, I had a shield, I had way too much room in the top, but no one seemed to notice that, and I was wearing a badge that said Amber. [audience laughter] And just as I was starting to feel great about how the party was going, one of my classmates pointed to the top of a bookshelf and he said, "What is that?" And I looked and my heart sank, because I realized that we had overlooked one thing. It was a three-tiered gold trophy with an angel on top. Naked angel, her arms outstretched. There was a nameplate with my mom's name printed with her title. I knew there was no hiding it. I said, "That's my mom's."

 

Of course, by this point, my entire class had gathered and formed a semicircle around us. My classmate looked at the nameplate on the trophy and he squinted at first, and then his eyes got big, and he turned to me and he said, "Your mom's Miss Nude International?" [audience chuckles] The room grew quiet, and I knew it was over, and I knew that I would never, ever be able to show my face at that school again. And then, finally, he broke the silence and he said, "Your mom's cool." [audience laughter] Everyone chimed in behind him, "Yeah, she's cool." I didn't think my mom was cool, but it was definitely the first time that I thought that maybe she wasn't as embarrassing as I thought she was.

 

My stepfather told me a few years ago that he and my mom had really debated whether she should do a striptease for me and my brother in our living room. [audience laughter] He thought it was a terrible idea, but my mom was really insistent. She said that she wanted us to feel comfortable with what she was doing. And she was right. I never had any question about it. I thought that my mom could show her love for me by decorating our house in crepe paper, and making English muffin pizzas. But I realized that she could show her love for me in other ways, too. And she did. 

 

Thanks to her, I got a damn good education. And she paid for that one bachelor party at a time. [audience laughter] She also showed me a whole world beyond the tiny one that she had grown up in. She taught me that clothes are kind of meaningless. You can strip all of that away, and what you're left with is heart. Thank you.