Photos

PHOTOS

"These are mostly for my family and friends, I don't think they're anything strangers will care about. But I loved going through old albums and finding these."

A favorite picture of my mother, Anita.

My dad nicknamed me "The Chief" and made this headdress for me, which I still have. Donnie Sanders thought I looked very Indian; I have a fair amount of Nez Perce blood.

My mother might have been one of the smallest babies to survive the Depression era. Her Aunt Elsie, not one given to fibs, swore to me that Mom weighed barely more than one pound at birth. The doctor, or whatever he was, took one look at the size of the newborn and told Elsie to "just wrap it up in a rag and throw it out, it won’t make it." Instead, my grandmother and her sisters-in-law incubated the tiny, premature baby with a combination of hot water bottles and hugs. More than once, my mother’s heart stopped beating and she turned blue; they’d flip her over and over like a flapjack until she started up again.

My mother and father, just after they were married.

With Mom and my beloved big sister, Christine.

My dad’s '57 T-Bird. My favorite when-I-win-the-lottery fantasy is to hire a private detective to find that car, wherever it is now, make the current owner an offer he cannot refuse, and bring Dad’s car home.

My mother, not long after she was freed from the orphanage she was raised in. Both her parents drank themselves to death before they were thirty.

My dad packed an incredible amount of accomplishment into his tragically short life. By his mid-twenties, he held several patents and devised a car-parking technology which is still in use all over the world. There was something else going on, too. He was doing some kind of work for the federal government – no one can say what it was, but it was important enough for them to send an airplane for him. I was too young to remember, but my sisters recall the whole family getting aboard an Air Force B-29 that had been converted to an airliner. Dad somehow contracted leukemia and died at age twenty-seven in 1959. My mother was very secretive about it and wouldn’t talk about him at all.

My mom remarried very quickly after my dad’s death; truth be told, she was eight months pregnant with my younger brother. Maybe she panicked at the thought of being alone with five kids and said yes to the first man who came sniffing after my dad’s insurance, I don’t know. Not long after my stepfather moved in to commence his reign of terror, a photographer was engaged to take pictures of me and my siblings. I was three, and the day this was taken is one of my earliest, rawest memories. The lights were very hot and bright. When the photographer began to pack his gear and leave, I became indignant at the poor guy, yelling at my mother: 'He has to take a picture of my daddy. He has to stay and take a picture of my daddy.' No adult would reply to me, even when I began to weep and flail. Only my sister Chris – she was six, I guess – was able to pull me outside into the garage and hold me until I cried myself calm.

Eventually my mom had eight kids, five with my dad and three more with my stepfather, who proved to be – I know no other words for it – the worst person I have ever known. In spite of this, I’ve never considered any of my siblings as anything less than full brothers and sisters. I'm on the right. I know, brown shoes with a black suit... well, they were my only pair.

All eight sibs in the same place at the same time and in correct birth order, 1990. In the car, my mom would literally take roll call before we went anywhere. "Don, Chris, Amy, Dan, David, Dawn, John, Annette..."

At fifteen, making the jump from AM to FM. A haircut like this is sort of like getting a tattoo on your butt: hey, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

My splendid great aunt Elsie, who saved my infant mother’s life and took me to live with her after my father died. She looked out for me, which means a lot when you’re the fourth of eight kids.

In Moliere’s The Bourgeois Gentleman, early 1980s.

In my twenties and thirties, I was the actor's equivalent of a guy who hit .240 in the big leagues: I could do it, just not often enough to make a living. To be honest, I started writing because it was the only thing anybody was willing to pay me a living wage for. But things changed, because as an actor I've sort of outlived my competition. So many have given up and gone home. Of course there's still a lot of guys in their fifties trying to be actors; there's just not the galaxy of them I was up against two and three decades ago.

Respectable at Last: December 17, 1989. One of Emily’s bridesmaids backed too close to a candelabra by the altar, and – God’s truth, I’m not lying – her hair caught fire. I guess it’s a good thing I’ve only gotten married once.

"We have all heard the chimes at midnight..." With my mom, not long before she died in 1990.

Emily and Joe: the best woman I've ever known, and the son I used to dream of.

Our much-adored beagle, Cleo.

Joe and Cleo, 2001.

I bought my 1971 Pontiac Firebird with my first real writing job. 360 horsepower is a bit like insurance: you'll probably never need it, but it's nice to know it's there. That's Joe at the wheel.

Second from right, with my fellow inmates of the rock band Groaning Mona after one of our shows at The Roxy. The concept was a twisted mix of rock and soap opera; I played Dante Velveeta, your brain-damaged master of ceremonies.

With best friend Kevin Skousen, 2004.