And Then Mama Cass Tried to Eat Her

The whole thing is sad, really. I can't blame MacKenzie Phillips for writing a memoir in which she claims that she slept with her father, "Papa" John Phillips. Assuming it's true, of course, which, based on the reactions of most of her relatives, it is.

The little I knew about MacKenzie when I was younger, other than the fact that she had what was to me a weird name (the "Mac" and the capital K in the middle of it), was that she was fired from One Day at a Time. When I'd heard about her being fired for drug use, to my young mind at the time I pictured someone just falling asleep on the set, and not really comprehending, as I do now (or, at least, better than I did then), what cocaine addiction might really be like.

Then when I read that her rich successful four-times-married junkie scumbag everything-bad-about-the-1960s dad (not that I'm in a position to judge anybody) actually helped her take drugs, I think back to when I used to watch the show back in the 80s during the summer when the reruns came on in the morning after the cartoons but before The Price Is Right or before we headed outside to play with our friends.

One Day at a Time was like Alice, another favorite of mine, about a single mom living in an apartment in a strange city, struggling with being alone, being a woman, being a mother — all foreign concepts to a kid just into his double-digits in age living with a relatively normal family in a relatively normal neighborhood.

The show was a "dramedy," and even at a young age I could detect, despite Schneider's wackiness, a current of melancholy running through the whole thing. One of the few episodes I remember was when MacKenzie's character was going out with a much older man and she embarrassed herself at a restaurant because she asked for a beer over ice. She was the free-spirited daughter whose desire for independence and adulthood her liberated/divorced mom could admire, only with a weary eye because Bonnie Franklin/Ann Romano had a better idea of what the real world was all about.

Man, that last part didn't make any sense. In short, one wishes that MacKenzie had more people in her life that could have helped her along the way as she grew up too fast. Like Ann Romano. Or Schneider.
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