goofballs

I love my grandmother, my father's mother, who died more than two decades ago. She had a file of cards on which she wrote so many terrifying recipes involving awful post-Depression and World War II era processed foods, which my step mother lovingly transcribed posthumously in a binder entitled "Meals With Mildred." Her first husband, a contrite former strike breaker cum labor activist, was murdered. Her second husband, my grandfather, a trucker cum shipping executive, was active in the labor movement as well. She loathed Ronald Reagan almost as much as she loathed Satan himself. She was a Southern gal, and she had many "black friends." And I do believe she did. Her home in Akron was one of the first test markets for a service we called "cable" (prior to what we now call it, "broadband"). My first exposure to MTV was on her green couch in her modest Akron living room with it's brown carpet. Brown and green and orange, the swatch ...

Anniversary. The first time I saw her, after nearly 16 or 17 years had elapsed, she was noticeably thinner than she was in high school. But she was also stylish, in a way I didn't recall her being as a teenager. There was an anxious confidence in her. She talked in stuccato, gesticulating sharply.  We dined on bacon and eggs and talked about LA and TV and the Scientologists across the street, in their color coded collared short sleeves filing out of their Scientology busses as the Scientology private police force circled the big blue building on bicycles. We walked to her house, passing a vitamin store (a Scientology front, but I was just as fascinated to hear the dirt as she was to dish it). She offered, smiling, "did you know my maid is a Scientologist?" We passed a Spanish-Mexican church. This was unglamorous West Hollywood, where staff writers and upstarts scrape by. Of course Emily was also on SSI, for her problems. I browsed her selection of books - novelized fictio...