From Mother, With Liza

“That Liza Minnelli - I sure do like her.”

That was My Mam, just blurting a sentence out into the room.  It wasn’t directed at anyone, she was just reacting to something on the television, some American TV special that was being broadcast overseas.  Liza Minnelli was singing songs from that Jesus Christ Superstar musical with Joel Grey and Ben Vereen.  I didn’t really know anything about the play, but I sort of knew who the people were from reading the movie star magazines I read and from going to the picture show.  But if my Mother liked that Liza Minnelli, she must be cool, so I undertook to investigate.  

There isn’t a lot a teenage boy can learn about a movie star while living in Portugal in the Nineteen Seventies.  There were a few oversized books in the school library, sometimes in local shops, and, of course, there were the movie magazines.  I read what I could when I found something, and I asked My Mam about her.

Juana was never really into INTO the whole movie star thing, but because she had been the daughter of people who worked in the Hollywood studio system, the information was always there.  There wasn’t a lot about Liza Minneli that I learned from Me Mother that I hadn’t already sort of picked up from books and magazines, but Mama did mention that she had seen Liza Minnelli’s TV special Liza With A Z.  She was so talented, Mama said, she could sing, and she could dance, and she was funny.

“I’ll never forget the look on her face in the special when she said, ‘It’s Lisa Minooli!’ - maybe it will be on in reruns and you can see it. “

And, with that, my interest in Liza Minnelli was locked in. 

When Me Mother and Father took us to England for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, the family did a lot of sightseeing (a really lot) and that often left everyone exhausted at the end of the day, and crashing in the hotel.  I had spotted a record store near our hotel and I asked if I might take some money and go shopping while everyone was resting one afternoon.  My parents said yes, even though I was only thirteen, but they were never helicopter parents, never overly protective, always trusting that I was mature enough to be on my own after school and on weekends, in Cascais and the other neighboring towns of Portugal - why should England be any different?  So, off to the record store I went, where I bought the soundtrack to the new Barbra Streisand A Star Is Born, the soundtrack to Lucy Mame (I didn’t know), some albums by some vocalists… and, what was this?  Two different Liza Minnelli concert albums, one of them, that TV special Mommy had mentioned, Liza With a Z.  It was February.  Mama’s birthday was in August.  I could buy the records and keep them hidden for six months, couldn’t I?  I was sure of it.

So I bought the recordings of Liza With a Z and Liza Minnelli Live At the Winter Garden.  I hid them in my suitcase, took them back to Portugal with me, and hid them in my room until August, when I would make a present of them to Mama for her birthday.

Except the temptation was too great.

I opened the records and began listening to them.  I put on my enormous Seventies headphones and listened to the two albums in the peace and quiet of my bedroom, treating them like they were precious delicate gold filigree jewelry, so that they would  still be in pristine condition in August, when I gave them to Mama.

That’s when I fell in love with Liza Minnelli.

Flash forward to 1978 and I read in the paper that Liza Minnelli would be at the Palais de Beaulieu in Lausanne, performing in concert.  I was only fifteen.  A ticket to the concert and a train ticket would be more money than I had in my teenage allowance bank, and a train ride from Bern to Lausanne would be over an hour, and the ride back after the show would put me back in Bern after midnight, and the transit didn’t run overnight in those days, so someone would have to come and get me from the train station when the entire excursion ended.  But I had to go.  Thanks to Mama and her influence and encouragement, I had become a dedicated fan of Liza Minnelli.  I had all the records, I had seen Cabaret, Lucky Lady, and New York New York multiple times.  I just had to see that concert.

I sat with Mama and, together, we worked out the logistics of how it would be done.  She gave me the money, she had a staff meeting with Daddy, and the outing was approved.  I did, in fact, take the train from Bern to Lausanne, all by myself - and although I generally felt pretty mature for my age (throughout my life), this time I felt like my parents believed me to be mature.  It was my first concert ever, it was an evening I would never forget, and it was all facilitated by my Mother, who started me down the Minnelli path, essentially giving me my own personal diva, the one whose voice has always communicated with me the loudest and most resonant.  

Is it because my Mother said she liked this storyteller that it became so important to me to like her, too?  Or did Liza Minnelli really mean that much to me, personally?  I suspect it was a combination of both, like many artists, many things in my life that I have loved that came from a conversation or any other influence, casual or otherwise, from Mama.  She always taught me to do what I wanted to do, to like what I wanted to like, to be who I wanted to be.  But, most of all, I wanted to be like Juana, who gave me Liza Minnelli, for which I will always be grateful.

She also busted me when she opened those birthday records and discovered they had been taken out of the plastic and listened to.

How well she knew me.