 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
  |
Photo: Bastienne Schmidt |
|
Diversity, Languages, Family: Birds of a
Feather
On Sesame Street, Fix-It Shop co-owner Maria Rodriguez can fix anything, from wagon wheels to toasters. And she makes her repairs with flair, teaching preschoolers and their parents lessons in Spanish, multiculturalism, and feminism along the way. But that’s on TV. In real life, Sonia Manzano, the 52-year-old actor who plays Maria, wrestles with the realization that some things in life can’t be fixed, only managed. Manzano is mother to a 15-year-old child struggling for independence. She is daughter to an 82-year-old, who is becoming ever more dependent. She is wife to Richard Reagan, president of the Norcross Wildlife Foundation, with whom she longs to spend more private time. And she is an actor and writer, striving to create a new career as her role on Sesame Street diminishes after 32 years.
Manzano is a member of the “sandwich generation,” baby boomers juggling caregiving responsibilities for parents and children at a time in life when they had hoped to have more time and freedom to pursue personal goals. The hard-working wife, mother, and daughter feels the weight of her responsibilities. “I am in the middle of the sandwich,” Manzano says. A year ago, without warning, Manzano’s mother, Isidra Rivera Manzano, came to live in the family’s two-bedroom apartment. Her arrival threw the family of three out of kilter.
Manzano had been dealing with her daughter’s adolescence. Like every teenager, Gabriela Reagan was struggling to become her own person, independent of her parents. And like every parent of teenagers, Manzano was having a hard time letting go. “I couldn’t even get her to wear a hat on a day like today,” when the wind-chill factor outside is 20 below, says Manzano, motioning toward the apartment’s window. Her daughter’s increased self-sufficiency left Manzano with more free time—time she was looking forward to spending with her husband, reestablishing the romance and intimacy they shared before becoming parents. Then Isidra arrived. Originally, grandmother and granddaughter shared a bedroom. While Gabriela showed understanding, it was tough for the 14-year-old to share her space. Adjustment was not any easier for Manzano and her husband. Isidra liked the apartment hot—very hot. She tended to go to bed at 8:30 p.m., and although she was pleasant and compliant, her mind was clearly deteriorating. She couldn’t remember where she was or how to get to another daughter’s house. She couldn’t answer or dial the telephone. She had problems with door locks. The former jigsaw-puzzle whiz would spend a whole day with a child’s puzzle and not place a single piece. One day Manzano gave her mother curtains to hem. When the former seamstress finished, the stitches zigzagged crazily through the fabric. “She had been a beautiful seamstress,” Manzano says. “She could copy things from Vogue. It broke my heart.” Manzano took her mother to doctors, including a geriatric psychologist. The diagnosis was dementia. “It’s been a burden,” Manzano says simply. Yet the family is finding ways to manage. A wall was built down the middle of the dining room to create a bedroom for Rivera. After it was clear that her mother could not be left alone for long, Manzano hired someone to stay with her so she could go to work without worry. When that didn’t work as well as Manzano had hoped, she found an adult day care center in the neighborhood, where her mother now happily spends about six hours a day. Manzano is not considering putting her mother in a nursing home. It’s something she and her siblings have talked about before and prefer not to do. “I think it’s just more difficult for Hispanics to consider,” she says. One of her husband’s relatives, who lives in an assisted living home, spends all day sleeping. Manzano suspects she is over-medicated. “I would rather have my mother spend all day trying to put a piece in a puzzle than that,” she says. Still, she worries whether the decisions she makes for her mother are the ones her mother would make for herself. She constantly asks Isidra what she is thinking as she stares out the window. Isidra gives vague answers about how the light is so beautiful, reflecting off the clouds. “She lives in the moment,” Manzano says. So there is no way for Manzano to know now what her mother wants for her future. “It’s terrible that I don’t know what she wants, other than to be in the bosom of her family. I would like to give her what she would like,” Manzano says. Years ago, she asked her mother what her late-life wishes were, but she would never say. Her siblings weren’t helpful either, as though discussing the subject would mean they wished their mother harm. “If there is one thing I have learned, it is that everybody should think and plan for what is going to happen to them,” Manzano says. “It’s not enough to say, ‘My family will take care of me.’ Plan the how.” Caring for her mother has also put a bit of a damper on Manzano’s career plans. Sesame Street now focuses more on the puppets and tapes only 26 episodes a year (compared to 130 in years past), which leaves Manzano with time to do other things. But being a caregiver limits her options. “If I try to do other things, like theater, then I have to worry about my mother,” she says. Manzano would like to perform in summer theater, but she would have to make arrangements for her mother, because she would have to move near the theater for the season. Despite these constraints, Manzano maintains a full and varied career. She travels across the country, giving speeches on diversity. She appeared in a production of The Vagina Monologues, as well as other stage performances. Occasionally she does poetry readings. She even designed a line of bed linens targeted to a Hispanic audience. Manzano has been able to continue her role on Sesame Street as well as her other passion—writing. While best known for her Emmy-nominated role as Maria on Sesame Street, Manzano is also a writer on the show, having won 14 Emmys as part of the Sesame Street writing team. Lately Manzano has branched out into different kinds of writing. She wrote parental advice columns for the Sesame Street website, and a children’s book, scheduled for publication next spring. She is currently working on her memoir. “Writing down what people feel is the challenge to me,” she says. “I think that is a wonderful, satisfying thing and I could do it until I am cross-eyed.” Manzano has come a long way from her teen years, when she struggled to write well while attending the prestigious High School for the Performing Arts in Manhattan. Manzano gained entry to the elite school after a teacher saw talent in the South Bronx teenager. But her early education was substandard and left her without the foundation to compete academically. “I went from being an ace student to being a total failure,” Manzano remembers. She was also culturally different from her peers. She was born in New York City to working-class parents from Puerto Rico. Spanish was spoken at home. “The other students conjugated French verbs at the dinner table and visited Europe during the summer. I struggled the whole time,” she says. Manzano’s lack of high grades led her to apply to colleges where she could win admission through an audition. She ended up with a scholarship to Carnegie Mellon University. While in college, she landed a part in the original Broadway cast of Godspell. Manzano was still playing in Godspell when she was cast as Maria in Sesame Street. At first, Manzano thought of the Sesame Street role as merely a job. However, when she discovered that good Hispanic roles are difficult to find, “I looked at Sesame Street with new eyes, as a potential future,” she says. The early days at Sesame Street were energizing. It was a groundbreaking show, founded in the late ’60s. The show was originally designed to help educate inner-city children without the resources for preschool, but it soon found audiences with children and their parents throughout the United States. And the young viewers learned a lot more than their ABCs and numbers. For many, it was the first time they saw people of different races and ethnic backgrounds living, working, and playing together. “It was such a social force,” says Manzano. “I never wanted to be on a kids’ show, but I always wanted to be on Sesame Street.” At Sesame Street, Manzano found purpose for her acting. She began to write scripts, incorporating aspects of Hispanic culture into the scripts. She is famous for teaching Spanish words to the audience but her mission as an actor on the show went beyond bilingual education—the bigger lesson was diversity. “What you learned is that there is a community of people who speak different languages and who have different customs,” Manzano says. But the show also stressed the things the groups had in common. “You were opening up somebody’s mind,” Manzano says. Manzano remembers keenly how she perceived the world as a child and how television affected her early life. “Television was very powerful for me,” she says. “I remember thinking it was like a hole into the world.” But through that porthole she saw a world of mostly white faces. There was no one like her in the television world of the 1950s and early ’60s. And often she felt as though many careers were off-limits to her because of her brown skin. Although she was born in Manhattan and reared in the Bronx, her parents brought many of their Puerto Rican customs with them to New York. She constantly found herself torn between the Anglo and Hispanic worlds. “Growing up, I felt like I was neither here nor there,” she says. She learned of the segregated South through television. The idea of people separated because of skin color frightened her. She has relatives with black skin, some with white, and others with various shades of brown. She wondered what would happen if her family traveled to the South? Could they even go on family picnics together? Manzano remembers telling a childhood friend that she would like to be a ballerina, “but there is no such thing as that”—a brown-skinned ballerina. Because of her work on Sesame Street, Manzano hopes fewer children will think their life choices are limited because of their race, culture, or background. “With each group of children, there is hope of anything happening,” she says.
|
||||||
