One Saturday afternoon in the late 1960s, Papa Al took all the boys to a Dodgers game, and Nana Betty took us girls to the Valley Music Theatre to see our very first stage musical, Peter Pan. Now, this was back before terms like gender bias and heteronormative were invented. This was back when theater was for girls and ball games were for boys.
My cousin Cathy and I were all dressed up, in scratchy petticoats and shiny shoes. The lights go down, the orchestra tunes up, and without warning, I can’t breathe. Nana Betty thinks I’m having an asthma attack. She scrambles through her Nana-bag for the inhaler. But actually it’s my brother (at the ball game) who has asthma. I just can’t breathe because it’s my first time in a theater, and I don’t know it yet, but I’m about to sneak a peek at the rest of my life.
Because I am a girl, when the curtain goes up, I latch on to the only little girl onstage. Wendy Moira Angela Darling—sister of Michael and John, “mother” of the lost boys, and would-be “wife” of Peter Pan—is just like me. Well, except she has golden curls and a lilting soprano, and I have a frizzy Jew-fro, Coke-bottle glasses, and a freaked-out grandma. So actually, no, Wendy is nothing like me. But she’s the girl I want to be. Pretty and perfect. Peter and the boys all love her so much they even sing a song about her: “Oh what joy she’ll bring to us! Make us pockets and sing to us.” I want to bring joy and make pockets. I want to be that kind of loved.
But Wendy isn’t the only girl up on that stage. Another female is hiding in full drag. Wearing green tights and a belted tunic, the leader of the lost boys is played by a grown woman. Little me doesn’t know it yet, but the message I’ll take home from the Valley Music Theatre that day is this: You can act like a girl, sew pockets, and sing pretty. Or you can put your hands on your hips, crow like a rooster, and lead all the boys to amazing adventure.
CROSS-FADE (that’s a TV term that means we’re changing the scene now, moving forward in time): It’s twenty-five years later. I am in the writers’ room of Cheers, the Emmy Award–winning, top-rated show on TV. The action is set in a Boston sports bar “where everybody knows your name.” Like a lot of sports bars, Cheers is a benevolent boys’ club. And so is the Cheers writers’ room, a rotating brotherhood of comedic geniuses distinguished by their shared love of foosball, Cuban cigars, and Chinese take-out served with whiskey. Then there’s me, the female writer in the room, distinguished by a new baby at my breast and an age-old drive to keep all these playful boys on task so I can get my baby home to her crib before midnight.
Being the Wendy, the de facto mom, in the writers’ room is a mixed bag. On the upside, you’re not expected to be as funny as the guys. On the downside, they rarely notice when you are. More often than not, I’ll pitch a joke and get … crickets. My words evaporate into thin air as if I didn’t speak them. I think, Did I say that out loud or just think it to myself? I learn to whisper my best pitches to the closest funny guy. Because when he repeats my joke, boom! The joke gets heard, it goes into the script, and we’re one joke closer to getting home by midnight.
In TV, writers grow up to become producers, and producers grow up to become executive producers, aka show-runners. This is where I go from being Wendy to Peter Pan; from being a girl among boys to a leader of men; from being the Joke Whisperer to the Show-runner.
The show-runner is responsible for … pretty much everything the light touches. On any given day, I live in the past (editing the episode we shot last week), in the future (prepping the episode we’ll shoot next week), and in the constantly challenging present (rehearsing, revising, and extinguishing fires on the episode we’re shooting this week). As Cheers’s first, and only, female show-runner, I do all that stuff … and push the show to number one. While nursing my newborn baby, backward and in high heels.
Not all the boys want to be led by a girl. No matter how the ratings soar, no matter how many awards roll in, no matter how early I get us home—I still manage to piss people off in a way that my male colleagues do not. I’m called “A” words like abrasive and annoying to my face. Behind my back, I am called “B” and “C” words I won’t repeat. I am told to “shut up,” “play nice,” and “ride the horse in the direction it’s going.” I respond, “Yeah, but who stops the horse if it’s going off a cliff?” I am told, “Honey, you’ve got to stop caring so much.”
I try to stop caring. Not caring is not easy. So I stifle my caring until I can sneak off to the back lot, hide behind the fake New York deli facade, and cry it out. One February, I cry every day. Luckily February is a short month. Come March, I get back up on that horse, grab the reins, and ride it the direction it’s going—until I need it to go a different way. Sorry, boys, that’s just how I am. And how I want my daughters to grow up.
The guys in the writers’ room nicknamed our firstborn daughter, Kit, Cheers Baby, and today our story comes full circle, with a neat ending that I did not see coming:
AS CHEERS’S FIRST, AND ONLY, FEMALE SHOW-RUNNER, I DO ALL THAT STUFF … AND PUSH THE SHOW TO NUMBER ONE.
When I finished writing this draft, I Googled gender fluid and Peter Pan, just to see if anyone else had made that connection. To my humbled surprise, there were 606,000 results. To my even greater surprise, the very first one was a link to an article titled “Why Peter Pan Matters Today.” I clicked it, and swear to Google, it was written in 2014 for a website called HelloGiggles by none other than … my Cheers baby, Kit Steinkellner!
Because we are girls, and storytellers, and pocket-makers, and tribe leaders, I can now see that I wasn’t in my position of leadership just to win the awards, make the big bucks, and play with the boys. I was there to walk the walk for our Cheers baby, who grew up to become a writer herself. In fact, the week that I wrote this story, we saw the debut of her first TV show—all about another woman writer named Zelda Fitzgerald. And Kit wrote it in a room full of women.