A Little Bit Wicked by Joni Rodgers, Kristin Chenoweth Read Free Book Online

a woman go into the woods and get naked, the woman gets on the man’s shoulders, and they pray to God about what kind of baby they want, and that’s where babies come from.”
    Something about this just didn’t ring right to me.
    “Mom?” I said when I got home. “When people go naked in the woods, and the woman is on the man’s shoulders, and God gives them the baby—what if they get a baby with no arm? Do some people ask for a baby with no arm? Or do you have to ask specifically for a baby with two arms?”
    Mom looked at me for a long moment, then turned her head toward the dining room door and called, “Jerry!” Dad came in, got a whiff of what the conversation was about, and experienced a burning desire to mow the lawn. Immediately. As the conversation continued, it became sadly clear to me that Mom knew nothing about the real facts of where babies came from. (She thought it had something to do with a penis, the poor dear.)
    Karla keeps it together admirably, but I’m a mess by the time she gets to the end.
    “‘But this last Sunday afternoon, they were reunited in Heaven, with so many other kin. But I’m sure Grandma was awaitin’ and wonderin’ where had he been? She probably met him and said, What took you so long? For you always knew you were my very best friend. ’”
    We hug each other as she’s on her way back to her seat and I’m on my way up to the podium, which I am now tall enough to see over. Just barely. I peek around it, step to the side. That gets a good laugh. But now my heart fills up. My larynx doesn’t feel right. Instead of looking at the clock, I look at my freshly orphaned father, and I’m crying. Sitting next to Dad is his sister Judy. She smiles at me, carefully forming silent words, just moving her lips.
    You don’t have to, she tells me.
    After Grandma died, I brought Judy up to New York to see me do The Apple Tree and a concert at the Met, and while she was there, she gave me my grandmother’s diamond-and-opal ring.
    “Here,” she said, pressing it into my hand. “I want you to have this.”
    “Aunt Judy, no. I can’t. You should keep it.”
    “It’s too tiny to fit anyone but you,” she laughed. “Wear it when you sing. That way your grandma will be with you.”
    Aunt Judy and I have always been close, but it seems as if she’s been more expressive of her feelings since she came down with breast cancer. She’s a farm wife who also works a job in town, and she’s worked steadily through her chemo, scheduling treatments on Fridays so she could be sick over the weekend. She keeps on keepin’ on. How can I not put one foot in front of the other when I have women like this in my life to show me how it’s done?
    I sing “Amazing Grace.” It sounds like I swallowed tacks.
    “I’m sorry,” I tell Aunt Judy in the limo on the way to the cemetery. “That was awful.”
    She takes my hand and says, “Kristi. This wasn’t a performance. It was perfect.”
    “No one else can ask me to sing at their funeral. I’m never doing this again.”
    “What? You’re certainly going to sing at my funeral,” says my mother.
    I look at her as if she did actually reinstall the oven upside down. “Mom. Are you high?”
    That gets a good laugh.

chapter three
SING FROM YOUR HOO HOO
    P eople don’t believe me when I tell them about Hum Dum Ditty. It sounds too folksy to be true, but I assure you, it’s as real as Southern Comfort. Writers found the name so charming, they decided to use it in an episode of My Huge Hit Sitcom Kristin on NBC. (Huge hit. We’re talkin’ Zsa Zsa Gabor doghouse huge. Ask anyone in my extended family.) People called BS on it and said I was too nice to be true. That’s an image problem I’ve been aware of since eighth grade, when a girl named Jill cornered me in the girls’ bathroom and said, “Why are you so freakin’ happy all the time? It makes me want to beat you up.”
    Half her size and truly astonished, I stammered, “But—but look