Chapter 1

Tuesday’s Gone With the Windra

    Windra was born beautiful. A rather sexy newborn, you might say. Her eyes blazed a polite but penetrating blue at the doctor and nurses of Cedars Sinai New York  Hospital on July 4th 1958. Her mother Deedree Thrope, drunk at the time of her daughter’s birth, had not needed an anesthetic, a feat she was happy to slur to the medical staff  and to the baby itself (as soon as it began to crown).  It was hard to find too much fault with Deedree for her drunkenness. Her husband Lanford Thrope had recently ran off to Harlem with a black woman who ran the numbers racket there.  

    Little has been said or written of the female ego and let it be stated here and now—or back then, rather—that Deedree’s ego was as fragile as a spider’s dew laden web.  From outward appearances—statuesque frame, long cream legs separated by stirrups, chiseled chin and high forehead creased and crumpled with labor pains, a slender necked veined with the constant burble of obscenities—she looked capable of handling being dumped by a rich Wall Street tycoon.

    More on that later. She was now pushing the baby out of her. And sort of away from her, from then on.

    As soon the baby’s umbilical cord was snipped, Deedree requested a bottle of Pimms.  No bottle was brought, needless to say.  “Is it a girl?” She asked after her first question of “Where’s my Pimms?” went unanswered.  By now she was so drunk she was seeing double and tried to discern the genitalia of the newborn with one eye closed.

    Yes, the nurse confirmed, holding the baby up for inspection. It’s a girl.

    “Bootifoo,” Deedree said, a slurred version of “beautiful,” while relieving the last of her bladderial and rectal contents.  She named her daughter Windralyn. She’d meant to say, “Gwendolyn,” (her  own mother’s name) but she slurred yet again and promptly passed out for two straight days, only to wake up with the shakes, a horrible time when she could say nothing, just moan.  In order to save face, she kept the name “Windralyn” as she’d originally stated, or at least the way the nurses had confirmed it on the baby’s birth certificate.  

    To make things worse, an orderly, for a cool crisp one hundred dollar bill, had slipped in bottle of Pimms to Deedree via her food tray.  A few swigs later, she gave the  child’s middle name as “Metamucil.”

    She’d meant to say “Margaret” but the nurses took her at her audible word and put down “Metamucil” on the birth certificate.  

    So Windralyn it was. Windralyn Metamucil Thrope.  

    An aside: Back then mothers could drink and name their babies whatever the hell they wanted and no one, but nooooo one butted in. Especially if those mothers lived in penthouses on Park Avenue.    The following few years saw her living one big cliché: a rich woman eating bon bons and watching soap operas. While drunk.  

    Windra, however, defied the cliché.  By age 8 she was a self-possessed, respectful, bright, well-behaved girl.   Tomorrow.  

    “Mommy,” she said once, after having presented Deedree with a dish of thick, healthful Farina that she’d prepared under the careful eye of their maid.  “Why do you watch so much television?”

    Deedree was insulted.  “Because I think these actresses are pathetic, whores of daytime television. And for what? When everyone knows prime time is where the prestige is. What’s that?” She asked dipping her slender, pointy nose near the steaming wheat cereal.

    “Breakfast,” Windra said proudly. “I made it. Suzie let me.”

    Deedree was surrounded with pink pillows and blankets smeared with chocolate.  “Well you know…” she began, moving toward the edge of the bed, her satin beige nightgown riding up her long slender pale legs. “Her own daughter is your age but weighs three times what you weigh. It’s probably because she feeds her this!” And with that, Deedree grabbed the bowl and threw it against a leather wing-backed chair.   

    Windra gasped at the mess. Moreover her heart lurched at the chair. This had been her father’s chair.  A man she’d never met. Might never meet. Might was good enough to hang her hope on, even while the farina dripped from its upholstery.

    “I want you eating regular food,” Deedree said, suddenly infused with more passion than her opinion of star-crossed lovers, Alice and Steve on Another World, which she’d happened to be watching before she was rudely interrupted.  “I want you to stay beautiful.  It will save you from misery. It’s what’s going to make you a star.”  Although drunk, she was determined to see her beautiful daughter on screen or at least television. That much she was able to manage, in between plucking her eyebrows and pouring Pimms into her cans of Tab.

    For a brief second, she stared at her daughter with something aking to hope.

    Windra had never seen this look on her mother’s face  It was silent lucidity at best. A pending request for another martini at worst.  

    “Milkie,” Deedree said, and clapped her hands.

    “Milkie?” Windra was confused. Was this a new way she wanted her cocktails presented?

    “He’s just the man who can make you famous.” But would Millikeen Evans Jr. be willing to work with her? After all these years? Maybe by the end of the week he could sign Windra on for a Prell Commercial, before they manufactured the stuff with a shatterproof bottle.

    Milkie the Miracle Worker.  Yes!  Deedree sent Windra away to play. She summoned Suzie in to clean up the spilled Farina.  During the commercial break for the second portion of Young and the Restless, she placed a person to person to Hollywood.  

    Milkie’s stock answer was,  “No fucking way, Dee.”