My brother lived there, and he helped me land a few small acting roles. After I got divorced, I moved to California. I didn’t call it show business to me, it was just my mother’s weirdness. Penny Marshall: I didn’t want to be in show business, but I had sort of been in it already. Preserving Your Memory: How did you go from dancing to acting and directing? We were three- time winners on the Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour we were on The Jackie Gleason Show. But we did every benefit there was, whether it was for arthritis, the March of Dimes, Army camps, veteran’s hospitals… Wherever they would feed us, we went.

I wanted to hang out with the boys, and I didn’t care about dancing school. Especially as I got older, I was a little boy crazy. Penny Marshall: I was good at it, but I didn’t like it. Preserving Your Memory: She hoped you would follow her dancing footsteps. We’d hear that tapping noise all day long. She’d tap dance around the kitchen when she was eating or cooking, tapping on the linoleum. Penny Marshall: She wasn’t only obsessive about teaching dance she was obsessive with dancing itself. Penny Marshall in dance school in the 1940s. Preserving Your Memory: You describe her as being obsessed with her work as a dance teacher. She always compared me to the 360 kids she taught in the basement of our building. She thought it was very important that everyone got the chance to see what it’s like to entertain, I did tap dance mostly, but she taught ballet, acrobatics, and jazz. She wanted to be a dancer, but in the period when she grew up that wasn’t something you did. She said some of the weirdest and harshest things. Not because of Alzheimer’s, but before that. Penny Marshall: Because my mother was nuts. Preserving Your Memory: Obviously, people will wonder about the title of your memoir.

We talked with Penny about her mom’s experience, her own health issues, and how her mother’s memory will live on-even after Alzheimer’s. Penny’s memoir, My Mother Was Nuts, gives a humorous and brutally honest look at the relationship the two shared and how Penny went from dancing in the basement to calling the shots on the big screen.

Her mother, Marjorie Marshall, died of the disease in 1983. What many people don’t know about Penny Marshall is she, like many others, is the child of a parent who developed Alzheimer’s. Others know her as the award-winning director who worked magic on films such as A League of Their Own, The Preacher’s Wife, Awakenings, and Big, which was the first female-directed movie to gross over $100 million at the U.S. Many know her as the spunky Laverne DeFazio of Laverne & Shirley fame.

Penny marshall memoir