LIZ: You know, if you grow up with brothers like I did, sandwiched between two brothers and a very dynamic, interesting father, who was nuts, you certainly didn’t … I certainly didn’t want to be like my mother, who was always standing in the front door, in the screen door, with a broom or something saying, “Come and dry the dishes.” I wanted to go off and do what my brothers were doing.

LESLEY: Did it ever occur to you not to work?

LIZ: No. Well, I mean, I knew I had to work if I wanted to get out of Texas. I was raised in one of those real WASPy, Christian ethic things where work was everything. So finally it became everything to me.

JONI: Can I say how different this was. I was not allowed to babysit. We were such princesses, my sister and I, that my mother would not allow us to babysit. That was beneath us. I never earned a penny. And the first day out of college I took a job and I remember my paycheck, I can see it, was $71, at McCall’s magazine. My whole life changed. It was like heaven.

CYNTHIA: My mother wouldn’t allow me in the kitchen. She didn’t want me to learn how to cook. She didn’t like that. She said, “There’re better things in store for you than this.” She wouldn’t teach me how to wash the clothes, run the … no, no, no. “Go study. If you have extra time, go study. Go practice the piano.” I mean, she obviously — though she didn’t articulate it this way — wanted me to have something that she hadn’t had.

LESLEY: Well, my mother articulated it. “You will have a career. And I’m not talking about a job, sister. I’m talking about a career.”

CYNTHIA: Right. She wanted you to be someone. My mother wanted me to be someone. Obviously your mother did.

MARY: She never vocalized it. She just sort of did things. I don’t know, I felt like I wasn’t really on earth. Like I was sort of hovering around everybody else and that I was waiting for my moment. And that at a certain time, a scheduled time, I would just suddenly arrive and life would begin.

LIZ: And you know what happened? That’s what happened. As soon as you let yourself stop being your mother’s creature, where she wanted you to become an actress —

MARY: It happened when I started working in the advertising business. I knew all the time that I was in the theater, and everybody thought I’d stay in the theater because I was a test case. I was the only young one. At that time they had much older, more professional people who were in the theater at that school. And I just hated it. When I walked into that first job, I remember thinking, “This is me. This is me.” And then everything – color came on, lights came on, the music came on. I mean, it was just astonishing.