Mood: a-ok
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Thank you kindly,
Still Mz Au after all these years.
Updated: Tuesday, 26 June 2012 12:32 PDT
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Please follow me to my new site: www.womanofevil.weebly.com
Thank you kindly,
Still Mz Au after all these years.
Above: Charles Conrad, 2002, taken in IL. Below: Taken about 16AUG06 with the free vacation timeshare promotional digital camera she "borrowed" from me before I opened the box, this home is somewhere near Squamish, BC, and is another beautiful example of my daughter's creative eye. I call this one "Canadian Glen" and wish peace and prosperity forever to whomever resides there.
This photo is one of the very few surviving from Sharon Judith, my mother’s, first professional portfolio, she was 29 months old. Photo Credit: Bob Plunkett, Los Angeles, CA, 1942.
Everyone lived happily ever after until my mother was ten years old and her sister was born; after that it was just a long series of unfortunate events which left her and I (effectively ignoring all the other children my mother brought into the world entirely) disowned and abandoned by 1968 for marrying a black man instead of having an abortion.
My father seemed to live two completely opposite lives in cycles, his respectable life as an artist/architect, husband and father which everyone knew and loved and the daddy I knew who spent every other available moment rehearsing us for some talent show or magic faire or production audition. I rode with him to his rehearsals while my mother finished dental hygiene college and took care of my brother and within a few months of my brother’s very open adoption with terrific foster parents equipped to provide my brother a healthy, stable home life geared specifically for folks with his challenges; my mother joined the group and for so many reasons I’m sure I have zero clue, that lasted about a year before things turned ugly.
My parents divorced, damaging themselves and breaking me into little pieces, literally, and when the dust settled I lived with my mother and new baby brother and one of the other approximately 150 troupe members I’d known as long as my father had who was now my step-father although he pretty much lived at the jazz nightclub where he worked most nights. We lived in “Holly Park,” city owned public housing which even with new linoleum floors and natural gas rather than coal heating, they were basically slave quarters for single women with children and poverty stricken old people.
However, my mother was a popular and brilliant young woman who had launched herself out of her mother’s abusive clutches and with the prestigious dental assistant degree in her grip she continued to alternately pop Valium and speed and worked full-time at the private dental practice and studied nursing at the community college on the honors rolls every quarter and after two and a half years of learning to spell big words and poking oranges (and eventually people) with needles she proudly came home one rainy afternoon with her midwifery license. She quit her job with the dentist and hired full-time from her 10 hours a week volunteer job at the revolutionary Planned Parenthood clinic and two weeks later I held a ten second old screaming baby boy while my mother helped the boy’s mother reposition herself, three or four feet of clamped cord carefully held by the mother’s lover huddled over us; and that was how mom became known as a “lesbian” … a woman who loved women. She really only had two or three female lovers in her entire life (as opposed to sex partners where there seemed to be a distinction in my mother’s mind and just about anyone with clean breath was prospect), and only one of those actually identified female in private as well; but on the butch scale, she was right up there too.
Back in the swing of things, my mother rejoined the troupe, my father and step-father were still there and unless you know carnival/theater people you might think that was an uncomfortable position, but there was only the reassuring family bickering and backstage dramas and not only did we thrive, we grew. By this time, just about all the adults who’d not already joined the troupe as a family had paired off and procreated and about two dozen children about my age and I were also working members of the troupe. There had been only three or four children involved when my father first contracted us, himself and me, just a few years before.
Three years and one record album later, the troupe disbanded and we moved into a big house with a half dozen Vietnam Vet nurses and their girls (or bois), and the occasional male lesbian or gay couple, and women continued having babies from turkey basters and persisted in hedonistic and unprotected sex and somehow no one was particularly bothered by their poverty and my mother was the darling in the center of it all.
She hauled me to the Democratic convention for Dixie Lee Rae and marched us in every demonstration and picket line for the feminist movement and gay rights. My mother did want me involved with her activities to a large degree to educate me and involve me in bringing peace in the world; but I was eleven and dealing with kids whose parents had taught them ugly words like “nigger lover” and “fag hag” where I was forced to defend my half-black brother and Shawn Cassidy look-alike girlfriend and when the hormones fully kicked in, that was about all I could handle and the next year when social services swept through our neighborhood I was snatched away from all that I’d ever known and made ward of the state. I closed my mouth, found a quiet place on the fringes, listened and learned and waited for my call to rejoin the fray…that time has come.
My handwriting reads: Top; My father at about 19 (1945) off to seek his fortune in show biz. Middle; 1952, In front of the broadcasting studio where he worked as voice actor and “weather man.” Bottom: 1953, In the “back lot” about the time he met my mother and became enamored of her. My mother was the best friend of his cousin and an admiring 12 year old fan of the radio shows.
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