Might as Well Laugh About It Now by Marie Osmond, Marcia Wilkie

show and through the evening performance, too. By the way, I didn’t dare leave the theater between shows. I wasn’t about to push my luck!

“Wise Men Say”

    A doll and a good laugh were always my MO.

    The most phenomenal bouquets of flowers that were ever sent to our hotel while we worked in Vegas weren’t for me. They weren’t for Donny, either, or any of my brothers, for that matter. They were for my mother. They were from Elvis Presley.
    Elvis Presley adored my mother. He met her after one of my brothers’ early Las Vegas appearances. He looked closely at my mother’s face and then stopped to talk to her for quite a while. My brothers and I stood by, watching in awe, as my mother began a lifelong friendship with him. Now, both Elvis Presley and the Queen of England had my mother’s phone number!
    Pictures of Elvis’s own mother, Gladys, show a resemblance to my mother. Both of them had dark wavy hair, a round, soft face, and lively eyes. Elvis had lost his mother in 1958 (she was only forty-six), and he never got over missing her. I understand that now. My mother could always sense when someone needed a mom no matter who they were, how old they were, or how thick their pork chop sideburns grew in! Elvis Presley became one of millions of people from around the world who called my mother “Mother Osmond.”
    Often I would see her, late in the night at the kitchen table, or while waiting in an airport, handwriting a letter to one of our fans, someone she had never met. She cared about them all. As I watched her, I learned what it meant to be a truly loving presence in the lives of others.
    In July of 2008, after Donny and I performed at the MGM in Las Vegas, a woman who was waiting outside the stage door handed me a letter, handwritten by my mother more than thirty years before. Though she had never met my mother in person, she told me of getting the letter in the mail as a fifteen-year-old girl, and how my mom’s words had given her hope in the midst of a horrible family situation. She wanted to return it to me, knowing how much I missed my mother. The letter was full of comforting words and positive thinking mantras for the young girl to tell herself. In addition to her amazing capacity to love, my mother was also way ahead of her time. She was ecstatic with the invention and growing popularity of e-mail, and she told me that she couldn’t wait for the day she could strap a rocket pack to her waist and zoom off to visit family and friends living on Mars.
    Every month she wrote a “Mother Osmond Memo” (M.O.M.) to catch up family and friends on everything from our latest news to how well her sweet peas were growing in the garden. She would include good timesaving tips she had heard about, memorable quotes, organizational skills, and recipes. What began as a letter mailed to about fifty people grew to reach thousands of fans around the world by e-mail. She always wrote in the same heartfelt style, as if it continued to be read only by her loved ones. She would end some of her letters by writing, “I’d like to hear from all of you—would like to know who’s out there!!” She’d sign off with “Sing-cerely, Mother Osmond.” She would hear from them, thousands of replies, people writing back, updating my mother on their lives, attaching photos of their weddings, pets, and then kids. She would respond to as many as she could, especially to those who wrote to her of any heartache they were going through. Just as she had responded to Elvis Presley’s heartache as a son missing his mother and his humble need for motherly advice about his loneliness as a iconic superstar. She always seemed glad to hear from Elvis when he would call her to check in. He would ask my mother her thoughts and opinions on choices he was making in his career and even his personal life. He trusted my mother to keep his privacy. He had great intuition that way. He couldn’t have picked a better person. She never shared with us