Category: In Which We Mock the Queen Mother

It’s remarkable to me how consumed I have been by Mom’s letters. It’s helped me plot the jumble of my childhood. I know the date Jerry broke his collarbone and made us touch his scalp stitches. (Same day Mom flew me to Saint Louis.) But then why was David in the car with us? (Because…

Naked ladies! ShowMe had crossed the line. The Board lost their minds. The December issue of ShowMe would not be going out until their penalty was decided. Instead, the magazines would sit locked in the ShowMe offices while the Board conferred. ShowMe held a drunken party at the editor Noel Tomas’ apartment, attended by the…

ShowMe had a variety of editors, but it was always a college humor magazine. It always had photos of pretty co-eds, jokes, cartoons, and a pre-digital layout. It had to be profitable, so there were also lots of ads, sex references, and pandering to college rivalries (lots of references to how vacuous the girls at…

Mom worked for a while on the University of Missouri college humor magazine, ShowMe. A remarkable number of college stories stem from the nine months she worked there. Before she landed there at UofM in Columbia MO (Mizzou), Mom went to a local college for two years where she wrote a column for the school…

Here is the impossibly perfect cousin Cindy. Blonde, petite, sporting a mod ‘60’s turtleneck, not a nonsensical purple/white number. She is actually my second cousin. I believe her grandmother was Jerry’s Mad Aunt Jo, my grandfather’s sister. Her mother was the sympathetic woman Mom stayed with during part of the separation. The only other thing…

Remember I thought my Mom and Dad met when he drove her back from Columbia, MO when her sister died? And I couldn’t understand how Dead Sister Dolores was referenced in their letters? I have now developed a forensic reconstruction of the events of Mom’s life from college in 1954 to her death in 2008.…

A friend at work described me as a perfectionist, and it made me think … am I? Still? I can see how co-workers see me as a perfectionist. I volunteer to do quality checks on their work, and my quality checks are brutal beat downs that include unsolicited lessons on colons vs semi-colons. Yet my…

Mom and I both were cursed with pointy protruding canines. Mom chose to have hers pulled and capped. When she aged, and her teeth dimmed, the caps did not, which was a little unfortunate but not a big deal. I always, always assumed she changed her teeth after the divorce to improve her appearance, in…

Still reading through Mom’s letters, and found this random one from Dad to a friend. It is dated Jan 9, 1969. I checked. The son of the founder invented the red Solo Cup just the next year. Coincidence? Or inspiration?

Today’s been a long day. Evidently, everything I know about how my Mom and Dad met, the trajectory of their romance, all of the family lore — is just not true. Had you asked me this morning how Mom and Dad met, I’d have said, “Oh, it was sad. Mom’s sister Dolores died in a…