BOOP!

A trip to the theater ends with a call to 911

I didn’t expect to be calling 911 at nearly midnight on a dark moonless night after a night at the theater, but there I was, on the line with the dispatcher.

“911 what is your emergency?”

But wait. Let’s rewind a bit, to the Broadhurst Theater, before the emergency. Actually, let’s go back even father just for a moment, to my childhood. From the time I could sit still (or maybe not so still), my brother and I were plopped in the seats of Broadway houses. Our parents, while divorced, both loved theater and took us everywhere: Annie (where I sang out loud because I didn’t realize Broadway was not a group sing-along), A Chorus Line (I went three times), West Side Story (Debbie Allen sang to my brother at the stage door), Mornings at Seven, The Real Thing, Frankie & Johnnie, Steel Magnilias, The Goat or Who is Sylvia, Fire in the Mirror, and on and on, decades of theater together.

The theater tradition particularly stuck with me and my mom – through college, law school, marriage and having kids – my mom and I continued going. It was our thing. She would log onto TDF and ask if I wanted to go see whatever was up, and inevitably the answer was, Sure! If we didn’t like a show, we were those people who left after intermission. We never stopped going to the theater, that is until her body stopped. The past five years or so we have not been able to get her to a show. And she’s missed it.

A couple of weeks ago Eiji came home with news that his high school (he goes to a performing arts high school in the city) was giving away tickets to Boop! There were free seats available just a few days after Mother’s Day. I told him to get four, we would try to take my mom.

Taking mom anywhere is sort of a process – she is in a wheelchair so it adds a layer or two (or ten) to the process – but I got it all set up; the kids would go over to her apartment to help get her ready beforehand, I ordered the handicap Lyft to take us to the theater and had one scheduled to take us home. We had plenty of time to get to the theater, but of course, traffic, and we were cutting it close, particularly with someone in a wheelchair who I would need to transfer to an aisle seat. The show started at 7:30 and we pulled up at 7:28. AHHH!!! Sam whisked her out of the van, into the theater, navigating the crowds and the aisle, and we made it, getting her out of her wheelchair and seated just as the lights went down.

The show was like cotton candy — bright, sweet, light and airy and everything we needed in a night out. Was it the best show? Not at all. Was it the best night? Absolutely. There in the dark of the Broadhurst, in the glow of the sparkle, glitter and gloss of Betty Boop’s world, was my world: my kids on one side of me, my mom on the other, all of us, three generations mesmerized by the power of song and dance and the wonder of theater. I held my mom’s hand, I made myself be there in that moment, I wanted to sear it into my mind, into my heart, so I could come back to it when I might need it.

I watched her face, so alive and animated, laughing, clapping, bopping her head to the music. She was in it, she was happy, and the kids, watching her, were teary-eyed. They did this – they were there, putting the pieces together to get her to the Lyft, making sure she looked nice for the show – helping with the wheelchair, getting the tickets, with so much love and patience, making it all happen. I

I was so proud of them. These two babies of mine who have grown into tweens and teens, who my mother would take for sleepovers and pick up from school and push in the stroller to the playground. And now my kids push her in the wheelchair and hold her hand and tell her how much they love her and that it’s okay she can go slowly and they will take care of her.

After the show, my mom was raving – “this was the best night of my life,” she said over and over again — as we wheeled her into the back (pretty much the trunk) of the Toyota Sienna Lyft van, and headed back to Brooklyn. We talked about the show the entire ride home – she could not stop gushing about it, and thanking us for taking her – and we arrived around 11pm. The rain had stopped and we were tired but happy, drunk with the joy of a night together in the theater, puffed up with satisfaction of accomplishing the rather heavy lift of getting mom there (with a bathroom trip too!).

BOOP! With my mom and my kids.

We arrived at my mom’s apartment at the Watermark, and the kids and I piled out of the van as Vlad, our driver went to take the back hatch door down and unfold the ramp so my mom could be wheeled out. I noticed he was struggling. The door was stuck. He kept trying but the handle would not turn. Finally in a burst of energy he got it to turn but it broke off. Vlad put his head in his hands. “Oh no grandma! The door is broke!” he said. He was beside himself.

“I don’t want to sleep in the van!” came my mom’s voice, with a laugh, from inside the hatch. “It’s okay mom, we won’t let you sleep there!” I said, hopefully.

Vlad and I conferred. “It’s broken,” he said, with a panicked tone. “I can’t get the wheelchair out. Can she walk out?”

“No, she can’t,” I said, thinking even if she could, she’d have to crouch down and navigate scooching out of the van from behind the row of passenger seats, gymnastics for even the most able bodied.

I started chuckling to myself, and the situation we were in, after all that effort, stuck on Clark Street at midnight with no way to get mom out of the trunk. I tend to laugh when things get difficult, it’s my coping mechanism. Mom is the same, and we were both cracking up.

“Well this is not how I expected this night to end,” I said, “but it was the best night. So long mom, you're going home with Vlad.”

Mom was laughing, but I think Vlad thought I was serious. I assured him I was not sending him home with my mother trapped in the back of his van.

It seemed she might be stuck in the van for a while though, and I thought about potential solutions. I figured this must be the sort of thing the Fire Department helps with; they rescue cats from trees (or at least they do that in cartoons), and I figured my mom would love getting rescued by a fireman, so I called 911. This is how that went:

“911 what is your emergency?”

“Hi, well, this is sort of strange but my mom is stuck in the back of a handicap van that’s broken. Could the fire department come and help us?”

“Yes, what borough? We will connect you to fire dispatch.”

“Great, we are in Brooklyn.”

“Brooklyn Fire, how can I help you?”

After explaining the van situation again, the dispatcher was unimpressed. “That is not something Fire can help you with,” she said.

“Really? Well how am I supposed to get my mom out of the car?”

She hung up. Hung up.

Okay, well so much for 911.

I went down to the nurse’s station and found a couple of my mom’s night nurses who gladly offered to come up to help us try to carry her out of the van. It was quite a scene there – with Vlad behind her grabbing her under her arms, and the nurses in front, lifting her legs. They carried her up and out of the van and plopped her into my waiting arms, where I held her like I had held my kids as babies, cradled in my arms. It was surreal.

Then I plopped her, rather ungracefully, into the waiting wheelchair. “We did it!”” We were all laughing and high fiving. Just then, a fire truck’s lights flashed up the street, heading straight for us. A big red engine pulled up and a team of firemen piled out.

“We heard you needed help with your mom?”

“Yes, I did but your dispatcher said you wouldn't come?”

The chief was appalled at that response.

“That was a mistake, we heard the call come in and came right over. We are here to help. We are so sorry you got bad information.”

The firemen surrounded mom and asked if she was okay. “I’m fine I’m fine, I just didn't want to sleep in the van. But it is nice to see you all here!,” she said with a wink and a smile. A flirt, always a flirt.

I thanked the firemen and let them know we appreciated them coming out and how my mother would much rather have been rescued by them than our haphazard team. They smiled. We all had another laugh.

Vlad was so relieved, still apologizing. I told him it was okay, things happen, it wasn’t his fault. It all turned out okay in the end. He didn’t have to take my mom home with him after all. I gave him a nice tip.

I settled mom into her room and then grabbed another cab home with my kids. By the time we calmed down from the excitement and stress of getting my mom out of the van, it was quite late. My head hit the pillow and I realized that in just a few hours I had to take mom back into the city for long-scheduled doctor visits – the kidney doctor and the heart doctor! A medical double feature! Whoo hoo!

As the night sped by, sleep stayed away, and I thought more about this moment I find myself in, watching my kids grow up and tip toe into their next chapters — as my mom navigates what is her last one — and the fear, exhaustion, and the ache of all of it. All of that sits with me. And some days it is crushing. What folks call the sandwich generation, I call the mozzarella stick generation, because really it pulls you apart. I feel that deeply.

But also I feel incredibly grateful – because even if I am more her mother than her daughter right now, I still have her laughter and her love. And even if my kids are growing up, like limbs of a tree stretching up and away, they are still somehow rooted to me. And even if we get stuck in the van, we can still have a laugh.