more, 'cause I'm bored.

[rm]

January 1979; I'm six, and yes, those are, in fact, blue suede shoes.
This is my Aunt Dorothy and Uncle Bob's house in Atlantic City. I think she was actually my great Aunt. My great grand-mother was in a nursing home there then and my cousin Steve worked at a casino and we went to visit a lot. But they were tacky, and we talked about that. They cubed the turkey at Thanksgiving with an electric carving knife and this was a very bad thing, it was explained to me. But they gave me butterscotch krimpets, so I learnt not to say anything.


June 1983. I'm 10.
I played Ko-ko, the lord high executioner in the Mikado. That's me with the axe.
I had, up until that point never gotten a goof part in a school play. I had ben relegated to playing a horse on Hades's chariot when he stole Persephone, stuff like that. When they showed up the scripts for the Mikado I decided I _had_ to be Ko-ko, because I could be sarcastic! I had just learnt that word and thought it was very exciting. I got the part and the other kids were mean to me, because I never got parts, was never competition. Ha. The daughter of David Merick ("the meanest man in showbiz") was in our class, and so her family donated the professionally made costumes.


This is my mom at some point in the mid-late '80's. It exemplifies perfectly the worlds I, all of us, had to figure out how to live between. Formal and artsy, monied and not, but a New York that was certainly slipping away then and now, a world of boutiques and never buying food from a grocery store, but going the breadmaker and the butcher and the cheese shop and so forth. This was our life in the otherworld. And yes that coat is covered in decorative, yet functional buttons up the sleeves; my life is funny like that.

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[rm.livejournal.com]

basically, if you don't hold an electric knife with a loose blade ightly, it drifts to one side and sort of up... so my uncle would, instead of replacing the knife of learning what he was doing, sort of cube things. like you'd cut a cake... rows one way and rows another.