It was, and it wasn’t, business as usual backstage.
“I need to find my band,” droned the star, stripped of makeup, pale, staring into the dressing room mirror. Rehearsal had come and gone without the cow punkers, and now, at T minus 60, they were anywhere but in the house.
Downstairs, the all-male chorus stitched silver sequins to their flies instead of their pink satin fannies. “What do they think this is, burlesque?” she asked, daubing gobs of green paint around her eyes. “What’s with those boys? Let ’em off for 2 1/2 years and everything just falls to pot.”
“God, I don’t even remember how to do this,” she moaned, dropping her brush into the palette of eye paint, swirling around on her stool, begging someone to fetch Ms. Vavoom, the makeup artist with the pierced tongue and lip and the pink T-shirt that scolded across its front, “Don’t look at my kitties!”
As the star awaited cosmetic intervention, hunger struck: “I need some seaweed really badly. I need a seaweed salad.”
When word came that some prima donna dancers had locked half the cast out of the downstairs dressing room, the star ushered the overflow into hers. The dressing room filled: men in hard hats, construction boots and pink satin hot pants; burly bearded guys taking their pick of five satin frocks and wigs to boot (the band, at last); the makeup lady and her sidekick, a teenage kid who slumped onto the couch, sipped from a styrofoam cup and said nothing.
Then this:
“Total emergency! 911! Guys, I need eyelash glue. I can’t believe this isn’t f— working. You guys, I can’t go on.” The star, famous for her Tammy Faye eyelashes, eyelashes that could get a gal stuck in an elevator door if she forgot to take two, maybe three, steps back, tore from the dressing room, darted down the hall, poked in a door or two, then re-stormed the dressing room. “I’ll take Elmer’s glue. Where’s the closest Osco? Frank, can you get Lori to put someone in a cab to get eyelash glue? There’s a Walgreens at North and Wells.”
“Wait, we might be able to get this to stay,” announced the frantic one, pressing two inches of rhinestone-studded synthetic lashes to one lid, wiping the green paint from the other. “You got it, you got it, my God, it’s a miracle!”
The time was 7:59. And, for the first time in 2 1/2 years, Milly May Smithy of “Orchid Show” fame was back in her lashes.
It would be another 34 minutes before Brigid Murphy, the legend behind the lashes, had downed a few chunks of watermelon from her Swiss Army knife, sweet-talked the band, slithered into her own top-to-toe silver sequins, climbed into her trademark cloth cow, admitted to terrible stomach acid, grabbed her microphone and lumbered to the top of the stairs where, clutching mike and cow reins in one hand, stair rail in another, she heaved one, two, three rib-cage-stretching breaths, scanned the packed house of Park West below, told herself over and over, “Oh my God, you can’t cry-you have to sing,” and then, as the spotlight drenched her in megawatts, setting her full-body sparkles to blinding, illuminating even the five faint scars peeking from her halter top, she let loose: “I’m back in the saddle again!”
Was she ever.
Two years ago April, Murphy, now 31, was a phenom in this town. Did all right in the Big Apple, too. The Village Voice loved her. Called “Milly’s Orchid Show” “a hoot!” Fox TV, out of Hollywood, was sniffing around; talk was they were taking Milly to the L’il Screen, the one in all our living rooms.
By 1993 “Milly’s Orchid Show” was a fixture. Third Wednesday of every month for five years-first at Lounge Ax on Lincoln Avenue, later at Park West on Armitage-Murphy, a dancer by training, donned her lashes, her gold lame platforms and the spangliest halter tops and bell bottoms seen since the late ’60s. In true Vaudevillian pack-it-in-a-suitcase, do-it-on-a-shoestring, it’s-OK-if-the-curtain-falls fashion, she assembled a variety show that redefined variety. How’s this for a lineup: a razor blade eater who’d break-dance his way out of a straitjacket, a tub of mashed-potato wrestlers, a family of lariat ropers, a woman who recited Shakespeare while dangling a spoon from her nose, Lynda Barry, Eric Bogosian and Nora Dunn, she, late of “Saturday Night Live.”
And then, of course, there was Milly, holding it all together with her broken washboard and her Nashville twang, belting out her anthems, “Sucker for a Trucker,” and “Raisin’ Hell on My Way to Heaven.” Her banter was brilliant. She brought the house down night after night with her sharings of “intimate moments,” and her commercials for “Billy Ben Bob’s Amazing Expanding Sausage.” And nothing, not even the night the curtain behind her went up in smoke, fazed her.
So it was in the spring of 1993 when she reached up to her neck, sitting on the gynecologist’s table after a routine visit, and there on the right side where the flesh is usually all soft and smooth like a baby’s bum, she felt a couple of lumps the size of, oh, small blueberries.
“It’s just veins,” said the health-care worker who’d just given her the results of a blood test.
Give up coffee, sugar, white flour, urged Murphy’s naprapath, a holistic health practitioner.
“Within a few weeks they spread,” recalls Murphy. “They got big, they were on both sides.” Two big ones, cherry-sized. Bunch of little ones. All kinda soft. And they moved around.
“Oh, it’s nothing, it’s nothing,” said everyone to whom Murphy mentioned the lumps. Cat-scratch fever was a leading hypothesis.
Then Murphy went to New York with her boyfriend, Frank Orrall, the founder and focal point of Poi Dog Pondering, a musical project that started out as a street band in his native Hawaii, eventually moved to Austin, Texas, then settled in Chicago.
“I’m having hot flashes in the movie theater,” she says, recalling the scene in New York. “I’m like passing out, having a monstrous period.” Murphy left the theater to call her naprapath back in Chicago. He told her to call an oncologist. So Murphy called the friend she and Orrall were staying with, got a name and wound up seeing a “country doctor in the middle of Manhattan.”
He took one look, asked her if she had insurance and told her she had two choices: Catch the next plane back to Chicago and see an old friend of his at Northwestern Memorial Hospital or stick around for a biopsy in New York the next morning.
The next morning Murphy and Orrall were in that canyon of grief and drama and sometimes joy that is Superior Street at Fairbanks Court, where the shadows and the pedways and the gray coats and blue coats of doctors and the ashen faces of patients and their families all converge in a medical montage called the Streeterville campus of Northwestern Memorial.
There, in a driving rain, Murphy and Orrall were sent sprinting on the first leg of a race that would last two years.
“The doctor we’d been referred to picked up the phone and called . He’s like, ‘Most impressive case of blah, blah, blah.’ I was like, ‘What the hell?’ It’s raining, it’s blustery. Frank and I are running in the rain to oncology.
“Within a week I’m in treatment.”
Word that Murphy, so young, so alive, so not supposed to be fighting cancer, would be doing just that came in a phone call to her 18th Street apartment in Pilsen.
“I was home alone when they called. Frank was out for a second. He’d been with me through the whole thing. He stepped out for, like, half an hour and they called. They say, ‘Well, it looks like lymphoma. We won’t know till tomorrow. Preliminary tests show lymphoma.’
” ‘What the hell is that?’ ‘It’s a malignancy of the lymph node.’
“I was like, ‘It’s f— cancer.’ I hung up. I was totally crying. I went and got the encyclopedia, you know, to see if there was any more information. Just then Frank came in.”
Murphy is sitting in another Pilsen apartment telling the story 27 months later. It’s a hot, hot summer afternoon, and a single fan is blowing. A bowl of strawberries and plums, beaded with condensation, sits before her. She plucks freely. She is pale, her hair thin but full enough. At the edges of her sleeveless white linen sheath, between her breast bones and her armpit on both sides, faint, bruise-like scars stick out. You can’t see it, but buried in her skull there’s tubing that made it easier for the doctors to pour brutal cancer-beating drugs into the pit of her brain once a week for two months, then once a month for six. She says there’s paralysis in her left lower leg, and she can’t point her dancer’s foot anymore. She can’t remember phone numbers sometimes. But, honey, after all, why did the dear Lord give us phone books?
“Brigid fully appreciates that something miraculous has happened,” says Marc Ellyn Garth, a kinesiologist and close friend of Murphy’s doctor, Lynne Jahnke, both of whom have become close friends of Murphy and Orrall during the last 18 months. “It’s like those women who pick up the car because their baby’s pinned under it. Brigid has had one of those pick-up-the-Chevy experiences.”
The story comes in two parts: Round One is where Murphy, diagnosed with Stage II lymphoblastic lymphoma-a malignancy of the lymph nodes confined to the neck and the chest, beneath the breast bones-is sicker than sin for 12 straight months, enduring full-blast chemotherapy, full-brain radiation every day for two weeks, and six weeks of spinal taps.
The twisted irony of cancer is that the cure can kill you. And Murphy wasn’t one to escape its torments. Her digestive tract was so chewed up by the toxic drugs she couldn’t keep anything down, not even water for days on end. She lost 15 pounds in three weeks. She walked around “looking like Frankenstein” for weeks, she says, with big black magic marker X’s on both sides of her neck, from where the radiologist had mapped out his zone of attack. She got headaches so fierce she’d throw up if she sat erect, so once, for three straight weeks, she did not lift her head from her futon. And another time, the chemo, literally oozing from her body, seeped through her eyes, burning mercilessly, making it impossible to open her lids for days-she lost count of how many.
“I never felt like I wouldn’t make it,” she said. “Lymphoma, I knew, was a good cancer to have if I had to have one. I was scared. I cried, but I also just dealt with it in this way: that when you’re in the eye of the tornado, it’s much easier than when you’re in the tornado, in everything that’s been created by that. I knew in my soul, I knew in my gut, I knew it would be OK but that it would be hell.
“It was a nightmare. But at the same time, part of me was fascinated at watching my body disappear, watching all of my physical being disappear-my muscles, my hair, my ability to speak well and remember things. It was devastating.
“I was this person inside of this shell. I was still here, this me was still there, but all the part of me that connected me to everybody else was gone. I was just sitting inside of this space. I was gone in another world. I had really, truly stepped off the stage, and I was able to observe my life. It was like being in a fishbowl and looking out, ‘Whoa!’ It was, too, that feeling of being under water almost.
“I was immediately thrust into this other world, and it was all I could do just to take care of it.”
Her world, once that of an antic spirit who could field three, four phone calls at once, who never dreamed of going to a movie earlier than the 10 p.m. showing, who put away tequila by night and danced all day in the gym, convulsed as it constricted down to a tight circle of five or six friends who would come to be her survival.
They wiped away her vomit, scooped out her kitty-litter box. They brought her raspberry popsicles by the carton, and Kate Hepburn-Cary Grant movies in multiples. They cooked chicken Vesuvio if she suddenly thought she might be able to keep it down, and stayed all night next to the futon so she would never be alone.
Then, with two weeks left before the end of the chemotherapy, another April, this one in 1994, just when she thought the whole damn thing was done, finished, behind her, she was rolling toward New Orleans on a bus at the crack of dawn with Poi Dog, with whom she was touring and playing her saxophone, and she couldn’t sleep. Her back was killing her. She felt her spine. It was riddled with lumps.
Round Two.
The lymphoma was back with a bang. And this time it wasn’t satisfied to hold out in her neck and chest. This time the erratic little lymph cells had run amok in her spinal fluid and the fluid that bathes the brain. There was no chance any healthy white blood cells, the ones essential to fight infections, could survive in this cancerous soup.
“I had to really face the fact that I might die,” says Murphy, barely blanching.
“This was a bad one,” says Jahnke, the doctor whom Murphy called from a Louisiana pay phone at 6 a.m. with the news of the lumps that turned out to be Stage IV lymphoblastic lymphoma, as bad as it gets with lymphoma.
“The stakes became much different,” says Jahnke, now a staff oncologist at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in South San Francisco. “We needed to up the ante. In lymphoma that’s a bone marrow transplant, which is just a sneaky way to give people as much chemo as is humanly possible.
“If we gave as much as we wanted to, the bone marrow would get wiped out. We might get rid of the cancer, but we’d kill the patient. It’s always this tightrope.
“So we take the bone marrow out and put it in the freezer so it doesn’t see the chemo. Then we give their body as much as we want-within limits-about 10 times the usual dose. Then we give them back their bone marrow from the freezer, usually two days later.”
And then, with the patient stripped raw of all germ-fighting defenses, everybody waits. The sissiest germ could kill-until the bone marrow, the body’s blood-cell farm, sprouts a bumper crop of robust cells. Even then, life becomes an obstacle course, the patient dodging for months the germ that could be deadly.
Murphy checked into the hospital for her transplant on the 4th of July, 1994. But before she let the nurses insert the tubing into her chest that would hydrate her and pour in the massive dose of chemotherapy, she got them to sign her a pass for a little excursion to Grant Park.
Poi Dog was playing at Taste of Chicago that evening, and she was going to be there with them onstage at the Petrillo Band Shell, blowing her saxophone like there was no tomorrow.
One of her home-care nurses was in the back of that huge crowd, and even though she couldn’t see more than a speck on the stage from where she stood, she was “just blown away” that that was Murphy, her bone-thin patient with the killer headaches, up there dancing and blowing away. All the rest of the nurses and clerks and doctors on the 14th floor of Northwestern’s Wesley Pavilion, the cancer floor, listened in on the radio in the nurses’ station. Then they waited while Murphy went out for Thai food with Orrall and the band before finally coming back to the floor where she would stay for the next five weeks.
She had no plans, though, to take any of this lying down. She turned her room into a “veritable spa, a healing temple,” recalls Garth, the kinesiologist. “All the other people on her floor couldn’t get out of bed and Brigid was doing, like, her LaCoste treatment.”
She hoarded one of the treadmills and one of the exercise bikes that had been donated to the floor by the East Bank Club. “I felt like I was the poster child for the 14th floor. I would drag the bike to the big picture window out by the elevators so I could look out and see the water. People stepped off the elevator, and first thing they saw: me on the bike. I’ve got my IV’s, mask, Walkman. Here I am, this bald chick in her Michael Jordan shorts.” She pedaled nearly every day, even while bags of blood dripped through tubing and into her, transfusions for dangerously low blood-cell counts, a sight that at least once made one of her doctors step back and mutter, “Well, I’ve never seen that before.”
She had Orrall drag in an old metal card table, and covered it with a vintage linen cloth. The two of them took all their meals there, in a variety of silk robes and sailor suits, anything except the gowns provided by the hospital laundry. Someone told her the color blue held healing powers, so she lined her windows, both of them, with cobalt blue water bottles and a bluebird. They even brought in a phone-answering machine, and composed messages that made it sound like Murphy was vacationing on the French Riviera. And of course there was the bedside lamp, a junkyard find from years before with a barnyard scene painted around the shade. And the little white Christmas lights.
“How do they expect someone to want to live in fluorescent light? You’re struggling with life, and they’re lighting you badly,” says Murphy, ever of the theater. “The first thing that had to go was the lighting.”
The room, too, had an odd aroma, even for a cancer ward. “It smelled like Mia Francesca,” the always-packed North Side trattoria, where Orrall frequently stopped for as much pasta, garlic and broccoli rap as Murphy could swallow.
Once home from the hospital, Orrall, who barely left her side, got serious about setting up shifts for the friends who would be her round-the-clock nurses. He made a schedule, assigned days and, says Murphy’s friend Rose Spinelli, “It was just like when Brigid and I were waitressing. If you couldn’t make your shift, you had to find a replacement.”
It would go on that way most of the fall and into the winter. Murphy finished the last blast of drugs into her brain last April, the month she decided to apply to the graduate film school at Columbia College. She starts there in September with a full-tuition waiver, a woman who keeps believing she will be the one, the indomitable one, to slip into the survivor column.
“The only way I could survive, psychologically, was if I came to an understanding about my illness,” she says, sipping a wretched-smelling tea from Chinatown that she drinks three times a day for healing. “I understood it as something other than just the physical consequences of what was going on. There was a deep learning that was going on, a deep knowing. My inner self was becoming stronger than it had ever been. It was becoming the only thing that mattered to me, the inner life.
“Things got cleared out,” she says, these thoughts spilling out almost without pause. “It was like a clearing house. I understood what was important to me. I knew that I could die, but I wanted more than anything to live. Not out of fear, but out of a true desire to live. I dispelled the fear, and I think that’s what it’s brought me to today. I’m overwhelmed that I get to have this life that I have.
“I never felt like I was a victim. I always thought, ‘OK, what is this about? What’s here that I need to understand?’ For whatever reason, I had to learn these things this way, and I was allowed to come to an understanding about myself and about life.
“There’s more to this world than what we see. What’s important is what lies beneath all that we see. Essentially love, I guess. It has to do with a clarity of mind, of not being cluttered up, of being aware of how I go through life. How do I speak to the person who checks me out at the Osco? How do I write an essay to get into film school? How do I do the dishes? It’s just about getting into a place where you’re in sync with that underpinning of life.
“If you are in sync with that, everything goes right. Even if it’s going wrong, it’s still right somehow.”
And so, on a steamy Saturday night not long ago, when all hell was breaking loose backstage and in an upstairs dressing room, Brigid Murphy, after the battle of a lifetime, slipped back in the saddle of her old stuffed cow and rode through a crush of 850 whoopin’, hollerin’, standin’-up fans. She climbed on stage in her silver sequins and, by God, she beamed. The woman simply beamed.
It had been one helluva ride.
