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Our first day with the new cook on board, it appeared that my mother was finally going to be able to enjoy her first full meal since leaving California. After an afternoon of interviewing for the BBC, we arrived back at the castle to an amazing aroma. All of our faces lit up at the smell that we recognized as pot roast. We hurried to chairs around the dinner table as the food arrived on our plates. My mother smiled up at the cook and took a forkful to her mouth.

“This smelled so good when we came through the front door,” my dad said. “What is it?”

We all waited for the answer because it didn’t quite look like any pot roast we had ever eaten before.

The cook beamed and said, “I thought you’d like it. It’s my specialty: kidney pie with oxtail.”

My mother never wanted to be the center of attention, but she was that evening. All ten of us turned simultaneously to look at her. The forkful of kidney pie was already in her mouth, but her jaw wasn’t moving. We all watched as a line of perspiration broke out along her upper lip, her skin took on a pale green tint, and she raised her hand to cover her mouth. She excused herself to the powder room and didn’t return for about ten minutes. I believe my father and I braved our way through three or four of my brothers’ plates so as not to offend the cook, but I definitely recall that my brothers and Mom each had two large helpings of the bread pudding the cook made for dessert. That may have been where it all started. Dessert was always safe.

That same night, Jimmy, who was eight years old, decided it would be hysterical to dress up as Dracula and jump out of a shadowy nook to scare the family. With his face powdered white, his eyebrows arched with black liner, and red lipstick covering his mouth, he leapt toward my poor recovering mother as she made her way to her bedroom. He flapped his black cape and yelled, “I vant to drrrink your bloooooddddd. Bwawhhhhhaaaahahahaha.” My mother screamed, even though she knew right away that it was Jimmy. It probably seemed totally possible that a pint of O positive blood could very well be the standard after-dinner drink following a plate of kidney pie.

I don’t even need to tell you what happened with the haggis in Scotland, do I? Yes, the very sight of tender morsels of
sheep’s liver and lungs boiled in the casing of some other organ was enough to give my mother and brothers PDSD (Predinner Stomach Disorder).

Touring the Asian countries was even more of a challenge to my mother’s delicate sense of what was edible. On the streets, she would shield her eyes from the baskets of sun-dried toads, dehydrated pork ears, squid dangling from hooks, and small mammals that looked like they had been caught in a flash fire with their teeth still in place. When we went out to explore the fabric stores or local shops, she would do her best to avoid any type of food market.

For the most part, when it came to eating dinner, my mother would stay in the hotel and hope that something on the menu would be recognizably American. At one point in Japan, my mother was starving for a good meal. We asked Yoshi, the tour promoter, where we could find something that my mother would like to eat. Yoshi told us he knew the perfect restaurant, and we all set out to get my mother a feast that she could enjoy. Once we were seated, Yoshi pointed to a plastic food replica display dish that looked like stir-fried chicken. He smiled from ear to ear.

“This has no seafood. It’s everybody’s favorite,” he told her.

My mother nodded her approval, and Yoshi ordered for her. The presentation of the food was beautiful, and the surroundings were peaceful. My mother seemed to really enjoy the food. My father was happy to see her finally be able to eat.

Halfway through, Yoshi asked my mother, “Do you like it?”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “It’s delicious. Thank you.”

Yoshi smiled again. “Good,” he said. “It’s vegetables and fried white mouse.”

My father tried to convince my mother that Yoshi was just pulling her leg, but even the mention of eating a rodent was all she could handle. She couldn’t take even one more bite. This time she turned glow-in-the-dark green. She pushed back from the table and weaved through the restaurant quickly, a napkin covering her mouth. That evening was the end of my mother’s willingness to experience any more Japanese restaurants.

After my father got her back to our hotel and found her a ginger ale to sip, he went out and bought some Japanese cookies and candy bars and whatever baked fruit pastries he could find, which is what my mother survived on for the next two weeks. Desserts were always safe.

My father and I would go off hand in hand on daddy-daughter excursions to sample the local cuisine, which could be anything from shark fin soup to pigeon eggs to sparrow spit stew. He always told me he was glad he had one “man” in the family. My mother rarely forced any of her children to eat what she couldn’t. Since she found almost everything foreign to be unpalatable, unless it was recognizably chicken or beef, we kids took full advantage of her tender stomach. While we were on tour, and only then, we sometimes got to choose from the dessert menu for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Our family developed such a notable reputation for enjoying sweets that to this day, when Japanese fans come to Las Vegas to see the
Donny & Marie Show
, they bring us bags and bags of yummy Japanese candy.

My father never teased my mother about her sensitive stomach, and I never really understood why until I was an adolescent and my older brothers started to raise families of their own. My father was a cowboy and a true rancher at heart. He could brand cattle, break a horse, catch, scale, and gut a fish, milk a cow, and pluck a dead turkey without blinking. That was the way of life on a ranch, and my dad was fearless about all of it. However, there was one thing he absolutely could not stomach. Even though he was the father of nine children, my dad could not stand to change a dirty diaper. He would become completely nauseated and would feel like he was going to faint.

I remember one day on our ranch hearing my father call out, “Good morning,” to me as I came outside after breakfast. I turned to see him wearing a long rubber glove up to his armpit, as he and the other ranch hands checked to see if the cattle were impregnated. I remember thinking to myself, “You can do that to a cow and you can’t change a diaper? I’m not buying it, Dad! You just don’t want to help with the diaper duty.”

But it was no joke. One afternoon, my parents were at my brother Alan’s home to babysit for the day. There were four little boys at that time, and the youngest was just learning to walk. My mother decided to go into town to the post office. My father got a concerned look on his face and said, “Don’t be long, in case something happens.”

Shortly after she left, the baby filled his diaper, and my father panicked. This was before people carried cell phones, so he knew that he was on his own. He let the baby wear it around for about an hour, hoping my mother would return quickly to
clean up the situation. Once the baby started crying in discomfort, my father felt so bad for him, he knew he would have to take action. He called the other three boys into the house and herded them all into the bathroom, where he could keep an eye on them. His plan was to set the baby in the bathtub, remove the diaper and hose him down with the shower sprayer, so he wouldn’t have to really look at or touch anything. As my mother told me the story, she arrived home and heard the shower running. Curious as to where the children were, she peeked into the bathroom to find my father and the older boys all crowded around the tub, in which the baby was standing. Dad pulled the tapes of the disposable diaper, and as soon as it came loose, he “tossed his cookies” all over the baby while the other three little boys looked on wide-eyed in shock and horror.

My mother said she exclaimed: “Oh good laws, George! What a mess.” She moved my father to the side and grabbed the baby in a towel. My dad lay on the bathroom floor, sweaty, green, and trying to recover. Each of Alan’s sons, with the exception of the poor baby, still remembers that incident. Who wouldn’t? Post-Diaper Stress Disorder! Many grandkids remember going fishing or building a birdhouse with their grandpa; those three boys remember the day Grandpa threw up on their little brother.

This just proved to me that all people have an issue with at least one thing that they can’t stomach. Even my steady army sergeant–rancher father, who had toured the world and could eat almost any type of food, could be taken down by a full diaper! All of my brothers inherited my mother’s tender stomach
and her sweet tooth, but thankfully for their wives’ sake, none of them inherited my father’s inability to change a diaper.

While pregnant with my third child, I had a horrible bout of morning sickness that involved a carryout pizza; to this day, the smell of hot pizza resting in a cardboard box can make my mouth water…but not in a good way. I still have to be in a very specific frame of mind to enjoy pizza.

Like my mother, I can be guilty of making sugar a major food group when I travel. It’s one of the reasons I’m a Nutrisystem girl. You can have for lunch a Fudge Graham bar, which tastes like a delicious dessert, and be nutritionally set! After all, I can’t always risk what might be hidden in the sauce at certain restaurants or wondering how long the chicken was left out on the counter. And I admit that—like mother, like daughter—I’ve given in a few times when my kids wrinkled their noses at what was on offer when we went out on tour together. I have encouraged my kids to be more adventurous in their dining selections, like their grandpa. They have all liked sushi since they were small. But still, my most daring eater will sometimes get a little green at the thought of dinner looking back at him. While we have been touring internationally, there have been days when we’ve had cookies for breakfast, doughnuts for lunch, and milk shakes for dinner. I’m not proud of it. But at least I’m not up all night with a kid or two with travel-related food poisoning!

Of course, the sugar-as-main-course meals stop when the tour ends, and balanced meals are routine again.

All of my kids have gone through phases of not liking vegetables,
even if I prepare them. When I’d encourage them to eat a salad, my sons used to drown one sliver of cucumber in a cup of ranch dressing. I’ve seen my kids hide green beans under the edge of their plates or fill their mouths and then pretend to sneeze into napkins and throw them away. After eight children, I’m onto all of their tricks. Some of my kids will claim that they “ate a spinach salad” when all that really happened is the bacon bits and hard-boiled eggs got grazed off the top of it.

Even though I know the secrets of their disappearing tricks, I choose not to get into a power struggle with my kids, insisting that every vegetable be eaten. I have been invited to family dinners at the homes of friends and watched a dinner conversation be ruined by an upset child being forced to eat.

I’ve also known children who grew up with very restrictive parents who insisted on low-fat, no-sugar, and even no-dairy diets. I’ve noticed an interesting backlash, in that as soon as the kids have more independence, they tend to overindulge in everything that was restricted early in life. I also have to wonder if there is a correlation between our current culture and our pursuit of “healthy” eating, wherein we count every calorie and study every ingredient, and the rise in eating disorders such as bulimia and anorexia among children. My mother’s motto when it came to our eating habits was “Everything in moderation.”

For the most part, I don’t overly stress about what my kids eat, especially since I don’t keep many unhealthy snack foods in the house. I found that if healthier food is just what’s around, instead of insisted upon, it’s usually tried and usually liked.
Sugar snap peas, butternut squash, fresh chopped salsa, and edamame in the pods have produced a willing smile on all of their faces, though I’m careful to make sure they don’t see me noticing that they like them. Saturday, though, is the morning that my kids know they can have a big bowl of their favorite sugary cereal. School mornings it’s always oatmeal or eggs or a whole-grain cereal.

When Donny and I were young, we called broccoli “poisoned trees.” We dreaded eating it and made sure our mother noticed the severity of our dislike if she served it for any meal. We would sit at the table and chew the broccoli spears slowly, with exaggerated grimaces on our faces. Then we would pretend to choke and fall unconscious. I’m sure our mother found it all very amusing. While our older brothers could entertain any dinner guests by singing four-part harmony, I knew I could probably bring the curtain down with my dramatic paraphrasing of Shakespeare’s Juliet in her dying speech: “What’s here? Poison broccoli trees, I see, hath been his timeless end.” Our one saving grace was that it didn’t grow in the garden, so we didn’t have to suffer through it too often.

For my own kids, I did discover one clever way to prepare broccoli without even a whine being heard. Put your cooked broccoli into the blender and then mix it into the mashed potatoes! Most children will eat mashed potatoes. In the same way I did as a child, my kids find that a pale shade of green can be unusually funny.

Since I have to be away from home five nights a week to do our show at the Flamingo, I really cherish the times we can
have family dinners. If the older kids and my daughter-in-law, Claire, are in town and can join us, it’s the best night ever for me as a mother. I want us to all enjoy one another’s company as a family group and not have to focus on the food groups.

I appreciate that my mother knew, because of her own sensitive taste buds, that food tastes are very individual, but they can also change as a person gets older. I think if my mother had forced asparagus on me as a child, I never would have tried it again as an adult and fallen in love with the way it tastes. And in a real twist, I now prefer fresh-squeezed grapefruit juice to any sugary drink! However, there are going to be the special occasion days when junk food rules the plate and the palate, and that’s okay once in a while.

My brother Jimmy and his wife and four children stayed at my home the night before my wedding in 2011. My kids love having their cousins around to play with, so they stay up late and have extra treats. For breakfast the next morning, I put out fresh fruit plates, eggs, and whole wheat toast. When I walked into the kitchen, I found eight kids gathered around the table, all eating bowls of sugary cereal in various shapes and neon colors. Jimmy hovered nearby, enjoying his own bowl, wearing a grin. He just shrugged. “Your pantry was too healthy. I had to make a grocery store run. What can I say? I’m my mother’s son.” When I told the kids they should have some fruit with their cereal, my eleven-year-old replied, “This is fruit-flavored cereal.” The truth is, if I hadn’t had to squeeze into my original wedding dress from 1982 in the next three hours, I would have happily joined them.