My Life So Far (95 page)

Vanessa with her daughter, Viva.

Troy went to Afghanistan with Eve Ensler in 2002. He is standing in a metal box that had been riddled with bullets.

(Paulo Netto)

Lulu with retired NBA player Manute Bol and one of her Lost Boys, Valentino Achak Deng.

Troy studied acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and has become a fine actor, brave, with a range and style all his own. I had the surreal joy of walking down the red carpet on his arm when he was nominated for a Golden Globe for his lead role in Showtime’s powerful
Soldier’s Girl.
Then there was the thrill of someone walking right past me in a mall to ask him for his autograph. But beyond his creative talents, Troy is a beautiful, deep soul, a political activist who works to end youth violence, particularly our gang epidemic. When Eve Ensler asked me for a quote about how the world would be different if violence against women stopped, I said, “More men would be like my son.”

Lulu lives in Atlanta, where she established the Lost Boys Foundation, which grants scholarships to young men who fled Sudan’s civil war. She is also the director of the Atlanta Thrashers Foundation and their community development. She has grown into a confident woman with an insatiable intellectual curiosity.

Nathalie left the film business, graduated magna cum laude from Brown University as a cultural anthropologist, and lives in Maine, where she started a shelter for victims of domestic violence.

Thanks to Ted’s generosity, the five of us continue our work with our family foundation, each with our own unique focus.

Ted and I are close friends and see each other regularly. His children are thriving. Beau runs his father’s wildlife programs; Teddy owns a boatyard in Charleston, South Carolina; Rhett is a fine documentary filmmaker and photographer; Jennie raises children and horses in Virginia. They are all environmentalists and philanthropists. Laura sits on the boards of numerous environmental organizations and is a progressive force to be reckoned with. Their children call me Grandma.

Tom and his wife, the actor and singer Barbara Williams, are also friends of mine. Their five-year-old son, Liam, is Malcolm’s uncle and Troy’s brother. Families come in all configurations.

As for me, I feel myself being drawn forward along a path shaped by my new understandings of gender and of faith. I don’t know where it will lead me, but I do know that my energies will be devoted to helping make things better.

We face a shrinking, congested planet with diminishing resources and no vast, conquerable frontier to escape and expand into. Globalization may be creating one sort of unified world, but for it to be a peaceful, just, sustainable form of unity, our consciousness needs to catch up to it.

2004, in Santa Monica with Tom; his wife, actress/singer Barbara Williams; their son, Liam; me, Vanessa, Viva, and Malcolm.

The new reality
demands
internationalism, multilateralism, humility, and compassion. But these approaches are considered “effeminate” by the men who currently run our country. If Christ returned today, would he be labeled “effeminate” by these same people?
—those disciples, that emphasis on forgiveness, that suspicious identification with women and with the poor!

There’s a lot of work ahead. But the longest, darkest night of the year—the winter solstice, my birthday—is also, in the Southern Hemisphere, the summer solstice, the longest, brightest
day
of the year. It all depends on your perspective.

From
my
perspective, what we are seeing are the final paroxysms, the flailing, dangerous death throes, of the old, no longer workable, no longer justifiable patriarchal paradigm. I believe that just beneath the surface a great tectonic shift is occurring. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Yellowstone National Park. Yellowstone is one of the places where the earth’s crust is thinnest and where thermal activity is closest to the surface (the famous geyser Old Faithful is but the most dramatic evidence of this activity). If you walk or drive through the forests and meadows, you can see steam and puddles of hot mud bubbling up through cracks in the earth’s surface. I have witnessed the equivalent of that steam and hot mud bubbling up all around the world—in the form of women and men who are ripening the time for the bubbling to become volcanic. I am one of them.

My arms and heart are flung wide—welcoming more transformation, wherever it leads. I am filled, rich with an inheritance of memories and lessons: Not only my mother’s lovely, doomed butterflies and my father’s final silent tears. Not only my cherished blood family and chosen family and the men I’ve loved and my trusted women friends. But also Susan and Sue Sally, and Ms. Hepburn’s evocative challenge: “Don’t get soggy!” Hope smiling in the eyes of a schoolgirl in a bombed Vietnamese shelter hole, and pain brimming in the eyes of veterans. Girls in clean dresses making stationery from garbage. Every character I’ve played onscreen/onstage
and
every role I found myself playing in my personal life. All the trees I’ve planted and animals I’ve loved. Some pretty terrific fountains-of-Versailles-and-fireworks sex! The conversations and books—including this one—that changed my life; the lessons of pain; the healing anger that shatters silence; the courage to scrape oneself up off the floor and try
again—
and then
again.
The moments I’ve glimpsed of searing epiphany and simple grace.

2000, fishing on Ted’s Flying D ranch, Roxy at my side and Malcolm sleeping on the shore. Life is good.

(Vanessa Vadim)

Every earned line on my skin and scar on my heart—I can own them now. I can affirm every
im
perfection as my share of our mutual, flawed, fragile humanity.

Each story and individual, each metamorphosis—they live in me now, and celebrate being here, being useful.

Deep in my blood, brain, heart, and soul—they’ve all come back to live in me.

And, finally, so have I.

FILMOGRAPHY