PART ONE Then
Chapter 1 BIG FARMHOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE
Drama has been a part of my life since my birth. I was not just a breech baby, I was trying to come out butt first! I mean, it’s just so typical that I would do that! What an ass!
My mom says that she had to walk the hallways of the hospital for hours to get me to turn the right way so I could enter this world. It’s true, I’ve always wanted to be the center of attention. That is a great picture of how I have been my whole life and still am to this day. I love being the center of attention. It’s how I am wired. But it’s not like I’m a narcissist or anything. I just love to entertain people. I love to tell a good story and make people happy. It makes total sense that my mother put me on stage when I was four years old. I’ve been entertaining people ever since.
I’m a Midwestern girl. I grew up in New Franklin, Missouri—a Middle American town with mostly conservative family values. It’s one of those places where people work hard their entire lives, often with very little to show for it. My hometown sits in the center of the state and is a farming community of about a thousand people. That population has hardly changed in a hundred years, and that’s no exaggeration. The land is rolling countryside and wooded hills covered in oaks, elms, and dogwood trees. Rivers and streams are everywhere, and then, of course, we have the great Missouri, North America’s longest river, making its vast journey along seven states until finding its end at the Mississippi River near St. Louis. Simply put, New Franklin is in a gorgeous part of America.
Even today, it’s a town where everybody knows everybody. There were just thirty-five kids in my graduating class. I would say I was popular in high school for sure, but I was just a simple farm girl and I didn’t come into my own until after high school. I had no style. Everyone was basically the same. No one really had a lot of money, and we all wore boots and Levi’s and t-shirts to school. I did the best I could to be cute, but I didn’t think I was beautiful really until I reached my early twenties. And that meant learning what real beauty was. More on that later…
My childhood was spent riding horses, riding motorcycles, playing pretend, and just being a happy little girl. I loved growing up on a farm. And I always had a strong love of hard physical labor. I’ve never been afraid to work hard. I’m so much like my mom in that way.
When I was four years old, my parents, my two older brothers, and I moved to my mom’s dream home—a huge old yellow house built in the 1800s, on a four-hundred-acre farm. The house had not been lived in for years when we moved in, and it needed a ton of work. My mother works harder than anyone I’ve ever known, and even though she was pregnant with my sister Lesley and already had three young children, she dove into remodeling the place, at the same time trying to get the whole farm in working order and fighting an infestation of black snakes. This is a type of snake that is not poisonous but can grow to be eight to ten feet long. And they WILL BITE YOU!!!!! Every day that first summer, we killed at least five snakes with a garden hoe. We have so many snake stories from that house. First of all, when we moved in and started exploring the huge yards, we noticed that they were literally hanging from the trees! So we started shooting at them with BB guns. I actually got so good that I could shoot a hanging snake from a good ten feet away. One time my mom was sitting on the toilet and she looked up and a black snake was climbing down the wall right in front of her. She just calmly got up and got a broom and swept the snake outside.
Unlike most people, who scream and run when they see a snake, my mother is not afraid of them—or of anything, for that matter! The rest of us were terrified, like normal people, and I still am terrified of snakes today. But mom’s fearlessness, combined with her sense of humor, made life interesting. Mom once killed a black snake, wound it in a circle, wrapped it up, and hid it in the helmet my dad kept on the seat of his beloved motorcycle. So when he lifted the helmet up to put it on, a huge dead snake uncoiled and fell out onto the ground. We were all watching from inside the house through the big window in the front room. It scared the crap out of him and probably infuriated him. It would have made me so mad. But he was a pretty good sport about it. He knew that was just my mom’s sense of humor, and he eventually laughed about it too. Mom would do things like chase us around the living room with a dead spider that she had just killed, laid out on a paper towel. We would be screaming bloody murder and she would be dying laughing. I think it was her way of trying to toughen us up. I know this sounds so mean, but it really wasn’t. My mother is just like that. She is literally the smartest and funniest person I’ve ever known.
I was definitely a daddy’s girl. He and I bonded over a shared love of singing, and until I was four years old, I was the only girl and the youngest child. So naturally I received a lot of attention. And just because I was so stinking adorable! I was also the first granddaughter on my mom’s side, so Granny and Papa (pronounced “Pawpaw”) favored me too. I’m sure of it.
When I’d hear the sound of Dad’s motorcycle coming up the gravel driveway, I’d tear into the living room as the front door swung open. Dad would see me and start singing, “Weeeelllllll, heeeelllllllll-O, Dolly! Well, hello, Dolly, it’s so nice to be back home where I belong.”
He’d pick me up and swing me around as he continued the dramatic theme song to the Broadway show Hello, Dolly! For some reason, “Dolly” was one of my nicknames. And then it turned into Dobbish. We are strange.
Other times when our family was loading up to visit Grandpa and Grandma Evans’s farm down in the Missouri River bottom, Dad would call from across the yard.
“Hey, Sara, wanna ride with me?”
The truth is, I really wanted to ride with him, but I was also a bit terrified of riding with him, because he went really, really fast, and we lived on a winding, dangerous country highway with a lot of sharp turns. He would take those turns like a man on a motorcycle is supposed to—going all the way down to the right knee for a right turn and all the way to the left knee for a left turn. And you know how it is when you are NOT the one in control of the vehicle. It’s terrifying. So my instinct was to lean the opposite way from the way he was leaning. I knew those roads like the back of my hand, so I would prepare myself for the next sharp curve. It made him very angry, and one time he pulled the bike over and said, “What are you doing? Stop doing that! You’re going to cause us to wreck! Just sit still!” I don’t think he meant to be quite that harsh with me, but it hurt my feelings so badly because he’d never been that way with me before. I cried the rest of the way there, with my arms wrapped around his waist and my face cradled into his black leather jacket. But when we got to Grandma and Grandpa’s house, I pretended nothing was wrong.
I have always said that if I could trade places with anyone in the world, I would choose each of my children for a few days so that I could know what they think of me, of their lives, of themselves, and if they are truly happy. There were several things like the motorcycle story that happened when I was little that really hurt my feelings and have sort of stayed with me my whole life. And I had very loving parents. I just think that we need to be so careful that we don’t hurt our children’s feelings, and if we do, we need to apologize to them. Because let’s be honest, we all know when we’ve said or done something to hurt someone’s feelings, and we all can be prideful about it and not want to apologize. But when it’s your own child, you have to say you’re sorry.