All She Did Was Listen to Her Mother

You know about extreme sports. Now apply the concept to mothers. Imagine a mom so protective, anxious and obsessed with the well-being of her daughter that she extends motherliness beyond rational limits, achieves an excess of intrusive concern so bizarre that she (and her mothering) become ... a comedy routine.

It all began innocently enough: Amy Borkowsky left home in the Bronx at 18 to live in Manhattan. Her divorced mother moved to a city 1,000 miles away. And every day ever since, the disembodied voice of Borkowsky’s mother has floated onto Borkowsky’s answering machine--exhorting, cajoling, wheedling and inquiring.

She does not command, having undoubtedly learned over the years that, with a daughter like Borkowsky--who’s a member of Mensa and an award-winning advertising executive--a long-suffering mother has little leverage. Yet she is still so determined to shield her daughter from discomfort, illness and obscure hazards that she leaves multiple daily messages reminding her to perform the most basic tasks--as if a daughter pushing 40 might forget?

“Hi, Amila. It’s me, honey. If you haven’t already left to go to the motor vehicle bureau, keep in mind that the wait is very long. So before you get in line, you may wanna empty your bladder.”

The messages are delivered in a gravely drawl, made particularly piquant by a Bronx accent and a splatter of Yiddishisms. She adds the Yiddish “ila” suffix to Amy’s name as an endearment. No matter where Borkowsky has gone, or what she has accomplished, she cannot get away from the voice or the messages.

So she has embraced them, and thereby found a new career, which is the one she wanted all along--show business. Borkowsky has created a comedy act, a book and a CD (both titled “Amy’s Answering Machine”) from her mother’s daily phone messages. She plays nightclubs, conventions, events of every sort, peppering her act with the orange, yellow and red alerts that her mother offers, just like the Homeland Security office.

“Hello, Amila. I don’t know if you heard the latest on the portable stereos, but they’re saying that the foam earpiece on the headphones is a prime breeding ground for bacteria. So if you still insist on walking around with the headphones on, you may wanna take an antibiotic. OK, hon?”

Or: “Amila? I wanted to know if you, by any chance, happened to catch the story on the new squirting scam. You’ll be walking along the street and, unbeknownst to you, some guy or maybe a woman will squirt you from behind with a bottle of ketchup. Then, someone else who’s in cahoots with that person will say, ‘Excuse me, Miss, but there’s some ketchup on your sweater.’ And then, just as you go to wipe it, they grab your bag and that’s the end of that. I just figured I’d mention it, so if somebody tries to point out any ketchup on you, you’ll be wise to it.”

Borkowsky’s mother has railed in messages about the hazards of wearing nylon-crotch panties and rubber-soled shoes, and the harm that might come from wearing her ruby-colored robe when she goes to the mailbox or takes out the trash because “my friend Eileen’s grandson said that red is a gang color.”

And then, of course, there’s the weather.

“Amila? I hope you’re on your way home. I just heard on the weather there’s a big storm headed for New York and they’re expecting 4 to 6 inches in the city, with accumulation of up to a foot in the outlying areas.... On the weather map, all over New York, they had snowflakes the size of bagels. So if you have to go out, wrap a scarf around your face to protect it, cause y’ know there was that man who climbed Mt. Everest and lost his entire nose.”

Borkowsky’s mother sometimes watches TV and fears that her daughter is in trouble: After a late-night newscast about the Hells Angels motorcycle club, she phoned Borkowsky to tell her that she’d seen “a big bear of a guy from Greenwich Village who was covered in tattoos, and on the back of his motorcycle was a very pretty girl. Was that you? She had your hair, and she was wearing a green blouse that looked like the one I gave you for Hanukkah. I’m hoping it was just a coincidence, because you know how I feel about motorcycles. Do me a favor: If you wanna go for a ride, it can be just as exciting to go in a cab.”

Borkowsky is so secretive about her mother’s first name and whereabouts (she will not divulge either), and about her mother’s reaction to the levity her messages have provoked, that one wonders if the whole routine could be pure comedic fiction. And if she made up the messages, could she have also faked the photo of her mother that is on her Web site--a photo that looks like Borkowsky, made up to look older than she is? “No, I could not have done that,” Borkowsky retorts by phone. “I mean, I could have, but I wouldn’t. Those messages are real. My mother’s picture is real--taken by her neighbor at the beautiful undisclosed location where she lives. I am secretive because I am protecting her like she protected me. I am returning the favor. I am grateful to her. I will not permit her to be vulnerable.”

After obtaining a promise of absolute secrecy from a reporter, however, the younger Borkowsky revealed not only her mother’s first name and whereabouts, but even cross-connected a call to her mother, who was not at home. A machine answered: “Hello, if you are calling about ‘Amy’s Answering Machine,’ I do not do interviews. Anyone else, please leave a message.” Amy’s mother answered a later phone call but referred all questions back to her daughter.

Borkowsky says people ask her all the time if her mother is upset that she’s being made fun of--and by her own daughter. “I’ve talked about this with her,” Borkowsky says. “Her typical answer is, ‘Whaddya think, that I’m thin-skinned?’ My mother was very excited about the whole thing. She’s even played the CD for her friends and neighbors.”

During her 10 years in the ad world, Borkowsky says, she worked long hours and also played a lot. She was hardly ever home. So she bought a good answering machine with dual tape cassettes--and soon realized that “my life and everyone in it was preserved on those tapes in that machine.” She replaced each tape when it was full, instead of reusing it. “I just threw the used ones in a drawer.”

Her mother quickly adjusted to talking on tape as if it were a two-way conversation. She learned, too, exactly when Borkowsky was most likely to be home. If the schedule deviated even a bit, she might lose her cool. She’d first assume her daughter was in the laundry room, in the tub, taking out the trash. Late one night, when Borkowsky still wasn’t answering her phone, her mother started phoning all Borkowsky’s friends--people she remembered from years back. A number of them called Borkowsky to say her mother was looking for her. One left this message: “It’s Andrew. I just got a call from your mom.... She wanted to know if you were spending the night at my house. I told her we broke up four years ago.”

Borkowsky began to realize what comic treasure was stored on the tapes, what hilarity they caused when she played them for friends. She wanted to share the tapes with colleagues at work, she says, but feared it would cause a lack of credibility.

“Here I am, responsible for major accounts, and my mother thinks I don’t even know when to go to the bathroom.”

Borkowsky became executive vice president and creative group head at the Lowe advertising agency in New York, where she worked on accounts for Mercedes-Benz and Courtyard by Marriott--and won five Clios, three Cannes Festival lions and an Emmy.

In her spare time, she did stand-up comedy and formed a production company through which to market the CD she eventually produced, which carries 28 of her favorite messages from Mom. It is sold only through her Web site (www.sendamy.com).

Two years ago, at what she calls the peak of her advertising career, she took a six-month leave of absence to promote the recording. She never went back.

“This thing with my mother is full time now.” She spends her days pursuing comedy gigs, promoting the book and CD--and has a few possible new projects in the works. They are all mother-centric, she admits, including a TV show idea in which her mother’s messages would play a starring role.

But a strange thing has happened on Borkowsky’s way to success. Some of her mother’s zany wisdom suddenly seems sane, practical--almost prophetic.

A few years back, for example, her mother warned that Borkowsky might not be able to get out of her high-rise apartment building if the elevators didn’t work in a fire. “Maybe you oughta get yourself a parachute,” she growled into the machine.

Borkowsky roared when she heard it. “It seemed so insane,” she now recalls. The other day, a friend gave her the same advice in an e-mail, along with links to some of the Web sites now selling chutes to apartment dwellers.

Exactly two years ago, her mother reminded her: “If you have a few extra dollars you should make sure to stay out of the stock market. It’s a roller coaster, and remember, the last time you went on a roller coaster, you threw up.”

And four years ago, her mother warned her not to wear an underwire bra when she goes on planes, because it might set off the metal detector. Borkowsky laughed at that one too, she says, because in all her years of traveling, she had never seen a metal detector set off by a woman’s bra.

Over the July 4 weekend, however, Borkowsky was detained briefly at an airport when a bit of metal in her bra set off the highly sensitive metal detectors that are used these days. “I could only think of how unbelievably ahead of her time my mother’s message was.”