Teri Garr, with Henriette Mantel,
Speedbumps: Flooring It Through Hollywood
(Penguin, 2005)


We may know her best from her role as aspiring actress Sandy Lester in Tootsie. Yet Teri Garr has been much busier and much more successful than Sandy ever was. Here we learn the rest of her story.

Teri had an unusual childhood. Her father was Eddie Garr, a vaudeville performer in the old style of showmanship. Teri's mother and older brothers followed him around the country, from one extensive series of shows to another. Maybe his approach and his commitment to work set the early example for Teri herself. When she became a working dancer and actress, she was personally driven to find roles and to stay as busy as possible.

In the 1960s, Teri appeared in movies with Elvis and with the Monkees. She was in London at the same time as the Beatles and got to hang out with them. It's not "name-dropping" if you actually worked with and knew these famous celebrities, right? Teri was certainly in the right place at the right time, over and over again. For us, she sails through her decades-long catalogue of movies and TV show appearances, occasionally stopping to give more insights into certain now-familiar scenes. Like the "knockers" reference in Young Frankenstein. And who would have known that the shouting-match kitchen scene in Tootsie between Sandy and Michael was simply frustrated improvisation by Teri and Dustin Hoffman? These are among the juicy tidbits that she feeds us from her past.

Sometimes she recommends that we watch one of her old movies or episodes, just to see her in the background and to have a better understanding of what was REALLY happening at the time.

As a John Denver fan, I was most interested in what Teri might have to say about the movie Oh God! I was not disappointed. She had not been a fan of John's when she was first cast for the part of his character's wife. She talks about meeting him and seeing him in concert for the first time. And she notes how sweet a person he was on the movie set. Thanks, Teri.

Of course, the subplot to Teri's entertainment career is her eventual diagnosis for multiple sclerosis. It turns out that the disease has many disguises and is tricky to confirm. Once she gets verification, however, Teri learns how to adjust her life accordingly. She eventually becomes a motivational speaker and a resource person for others with MS. Her experiences remind me of other actor memoirs: from Michael J. Fox, about his challenges of living with Parkinson's disease, to Melissa Gilbert and her confession of working on stage with a broken back. These entertainers are indeed human. We need extra prompting at times to remind ourselves of this fact.

I listened to the audio edition of this book on CDs. Teri narrates the manuscript herself. She's animated and seems to have fun with the text. She talks just like Sandy Lester in Tootsie. Or maybe I've watched the movie so often, I've become ultra-familiar with her nuances of speech. In any case, she does an excellent job here, as you would expect.

Speedbumps offers us just what we want to find in a celebrity memoir. We get the actor's background. We follow their career and their many performances, good and bad. We learn some details about some of their colleagues, the famous and the not so well known. And when this person faces health challenges, we find ourselves cheering them on. Read or listen to Teri Garr's memoir, and you may be surprised at both the depth of her experiences and her perspectives on them.




Rambles.NET
book review by
Corinne H. Smith


24 August 2024


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