Father Knows Best...just ask him

OK, here's the deal. My father was the boss of everything, and apparently my first full sentence was "you're not the boss of me". It was the on-going struggle I fought to win and thought I had by moving three thousand miles away. But the indiscriminately allotted three months was up and there was no way in hell I was going back. I had an ok job, that cool shag carpeting in my apartment and I was free at last, free at last.

Big Joe - as he was not always so fondly referred to - decided enough was enough and the ethnic composite of my apartment building was his excuse. I just wasn't safe in Los Angeles. As my mother and brother sat silently in the restaurant, Big Joe and I replayed the dinner scene of my youth. He and I were talking loudly in disagreement and she and my brother were nervously coughing, twitching and throat clearing.

Somewhere between the soup and salad at Sorrentino's in Burbank - I'd found my way to the "Valley" - my mother said sternly, "enough". We both looked at her in amazement. This was not part of the normal agenda. Her next words rang clear and true, "she's staying here, Joe....she's staying here".

She usually let me fight my own battles and had only intervened once before.

About ten weeks before I was supposed to be married she came into my room and said "I don't know what's going on with you, but you're not acting like somebody who's getting married". Then, "if you don't want to do it, you can call it off, but you have to do it now - there's a shower for you in two weeks".

She closed with the magic words,"I'll fix it with your father". I think they ate off the reception deposit at the Swan Club for a very long time.

And now for a second time she really proved that "mother knows best" as she saved me from a fate far worse than marriage would have been.

They flew back to New York two days early. She cried at the airport when she said goodbye - she was quite the crier - and I thanked her.

She smiled and said "move to Burbank".