Hey folks. As you can tell, I’ve been a tad ambivalent about the blogging thing lately. (But not, as usual, about the twittering.) And since I have no dignity (and also because my asshole husband already put this photo up on Facebook), I provide it here, as an exhibit to the wonder that is youth.
As my notations to the image as hosted on Flickr (click through if desired) make clear, I really have no idea what prompted this particular makeup and costume situation. I can say that all the adults in the household were high as kites and engaged in a long, mad medley (a “jam session,” if this very phrase will not cause you to faint) comprised of such classics as Bob Dylan’s Tangled Up in Blue, Procol Harum’s Whiter Shade of Pale, and Eric Clapton’s After Midnight. (Which, I am quite certain, it was. By several hours. And yes, probably on a school night.)
I also recall that I had a partner in this crime: my then-foster sister (a friend from school, whose mother was an even flakier hippie than mine, and thus had simply decided to move to the other side of the island without her), who was dressed and dolled up in an equivalently surreal manner, only I have no photographic evidence of this fact; you will just have to take my word for it.
I also know that when she and I came out of the bathroom, with the intention of seeing how much we could freak out the adults present (they tended to be rather unfreakable, so there was something of a high threshold to get over in that endeavor), that the medley had shifted to a rousing rendition of House of the Rising Sun. Which apparently is some ballad concerning a house of ill-repute.
Naturally, my mother would later seize upon the symbolism of this moment, in that I, her daughter (never mind her generally faultless foster-daughter), had, at the very moment she and her pals had been singing about whores, had come out allegedly dressed as a whore. (Though I’m sorry, but when I look at this picture, I think more “surrealist 1980s clown” than “whore”; plus, there is the detail that I was a bored teenager, who was making a fish face.) Then again, this was my whoredom-obsessed mother (for whom the end result of all equations fell along the lines of “daughter, you are a whore!”) whose perceptions and interpretations we are talking about.
Not that I’m bitter, because of course she has provided me with a lifelong stash of rich material to work with. (For example, the work in progress titled Tangled Up in a Whiter Shade of Pale Blue: The Random Years.) I am nothing if not blessed with (!@#$%^&*) material!
