16 The Meaning of Wife, Always Look on the Bright Side of Life

THE MEANING OF WIFE

There is only one edition of Playboy magazine from the Seventies that does not have a full nude on the cover. It features the beautiful derriere of a lovely lady in blue cutoff jeans on a bicycle seat. It is an unforgettable image, and it became iconic. The curve of her body. The elliptical perfection of those cheeks. The delicious delight of her golden globes. Reader, I married that lady.

Tania appeared on the cover of the September 1974 edition and, oddly, I too appeared in Playboy, in the November 1976 edition, only I would be naked. They reprinted an excerpt from my Rutland Dirty Weekend Book: “The Vatican Sex Manual,” which shows you sixty-four positions in which it is impossible to have sex.

I proposed to Tania after the Hollywood Bowl show in 1980, and high time too. I suddenly realized that I had been with her for four years and what the hell was I waiting for? Being a gentleman, I gave her till morning to consider my proposal. Luckily for me she said yes. Tania was the woman I had been waiting for my whole life, and I have been waiting for her ever since…I wrote on my graffiti wall at 41 Carlton Hill in the Seventies: Time and tide wait for no man, but they do seem to make an exception for certain women. This must of course be amended to people for our more correct times, because of course it is true of all sexes. I have been with Tania for forty-one years now. I gave that woman two of the best years of my life.

Tania was not only beautiful but very funny. She once asked me what I was reading and when I said, “The shorter Pepys,” she asked me if there was a taller one. She could always crack me up. On her Twitter feed she describes herself as a “gagster’s moll.” She once entered England and wrote under Occupation: Pillow. In Sydney, she asked me what Australia Day was.

I said, “It’s when Australians get together and drink.”

“Oh,” she said, “like nighttime.”

Comedy was as vital to her as to me. Most of her friends were in comedy, particularly the Chicago improv theater Second City, and she became friends with John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Joe Flaherty, and Brian Doyle-Murray. She looked them up when she moved to New York, where Saturday Night Live was suddenly blossoming. This would bring us together.

I was fortunate that from the minute we met I inherited from Tania a large, loving family of American relatives. She grew up in the western suburbs of Chicago with her sister, Joyce, and two brothers: Mark, a cop who I saw box in the Golden Gloves, and Greg, a drummer who sold cars. There were three adorable nieces, Kris, Kim, and Sasha, and a whole slew of aunts and uncles. At Thanksgiving, there would be more than thirty sitting down for dinner.

Tania’s mother, Algae, for whom I could do no wrong, was second-generation Italian from Napoli; and her father, Alex, was a Russian who had escaped from the Soviet Union in 1929, when the border changed overnight and it became Poland for a day. Alexander Kosevich drove a Chicago taxi most of his life, loved vodka and laughter and rescuing animals, and had a heart of gold. He played the accordion while his girls would dance the troika. He spent weeks bundling off packages of jeans to all the poor Russian relatives who lived near Kiev. Amazingly, he still thought Stalin was a good thing, which led to many heated arguments with me. Now I was surrounded by this whole argumentative, laughing, loving bunch of kin, who were perfectly prepared to accept that Tania had taken on this weird Brit. I was a very lucky bastard.

We were married in May 1981 in Susan and Lorne Michaels’s apartment in New York, with a party afterwards upstairs at Paul Simon’s. All the relatives came.

Being married. Alex, my father-in-law, and Joyce, my sister-in-law.

We were married by a New York judge who brought her own vows. We both promised “to listen to each other’s silences.”