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816 views4 pagesBook Excerpt: 'The Friday Afternoon Club' by Griffin Dunne
Book excerpt: 'The Friday Afternoon Club'
By Griffin Dunne
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0% found this document useful (0 votes)
816 views4 pagesBook Excerpt: 'The Friday Afternoon Club' by Griffin Dunne
Book excerpt: 'The Friday Afternoon Club'
By Griffin Dunne
Uploaded by
Here & NowCopyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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GRIFFIN DUNNE
The morning I was born , Dad was a wreck. Having gotten
Mom safely to Doctors Hospital, he was told that she required
an emergency C-section, and to sit in the waiting room until
he was called. Five hours later, he’d gone through a pack of
Luckies, and after making a nuisance of himself to every
nurse who passed, he went to buy more smokes at a deli
across the street. Walking back to the lobby, he saw the
surgeon who was to perform the C-section about to step into a
cab. He ran to him and practically grabbed the doctor by the
lapels.
“What happened?”
“What do you mean, what happened?”
“My wife! Is she all right?”
“Which one is your wife?”
“Lenny Dunne, for God’s
sake!”
“Oh, Mr. Dunne, my apologies, didn’t anyone tell
you?” “Tell me what?”
“We did the C-section hours ago. She’s fine. Baby’s fine.
Someone should have told you, but it’s been a crazy day. I’ve
done three since.”
More relieved than pissed, Dad let the man get in his taxi.
Before it pulled away from the curb, the doctor yelled out the
window, “Oh, and don’t worry about the foot!”
On the long walk back to the maternity ward, Dad pictured
me growing up in a wheelchair or with a prosthetic leg, but
while
1
THE FRIDAY AFTERNOON CLUB
my right foot did curl inward when I was a newborn, it turned
itself out by the time I could walk.
From the moment I was born, my father told me I was
always trying to get somewhere else. My first word was
taxi. I had a toy suitcase that I’d carry around the living room
and raise my hand to hail a cab, yelling, “Taxi, taxi,” as if late
for an important meeting. Elizabeth Montgomery, who later
played Samantha in Be- witched, was my first babysitter.
She was a struggling actress with a small part in Late
Love when she met my mother, and though Elizabeth was
her employee, my mother and she became close friends.
Elizabeth once told her, while changing my dia- pers, that I
had a bigger dick than her husband. That marriage
was, needless to say, short-lived.
There is a kinescope from an early episode of the
Today show in which Arlene Francis, also from the cast of
Late Love, interviews my mother, billed as the “typical New
York house- wife,” while a camera follows her on a routine
day. (The daugh- ter of a rancher who went to Miss Porter’s
was hardly a relatable housewife, but somehow Dad got her
the gig through his con- nections at NBC.) There wasn’t
much content in the early days of morning talk shows, so this
segment is a mundane, fifteen- minute blow-by-blow of the
life of a young family. It begins with Dad heading to work like
a character out of a John Cheever story, while Mom does
household chores, runs errands, and takes me to Central Park
to feed the ducks. At one point in the clip, she enters a shoe
store on Lexington Avenue and leaves me in my pram on the
sidewalk, as if we lived in Grover’s Corners.
When she tries to lay me down in my crib at the end of the
day, I nuzzle into her neck, not wanting her to leave. Anyone
2
tuning in that morning would have seen a little boy who
loved
3
GRIFFIN DUNNE
his mother more than anything in the world. When the camera
cuts back to Mom in the studio, having just watched the
segment she narrated, she looks lost in the moment, as if still
savoring my affection. Arlene Francis ends the interview by
saying to her viewers, “We wish Lenny, Nick, and Griffin all
the luck in the world as they begin their bright future.”
As it turned out, we were going to need it.
