THE THINGS WE DO TO OUR MOTHERS

The fifties woman

I had a great mother.  Everyone should have a great mother, but not everyone does unfortunately.  My mother was very different than most of my friends' mothers, very un-Donna Reed.  She wasn't into personal vanity, or clothes or shiny things (we had no money for it anyway)  My mother was a crazy little Sicilian lady who was years ahead of the movement for Women's Liberation, although she would have conked me on the head if I had told her she was a women's libber. 

However...she did tell me the following: I didn't need a man to have worth as a woman and she told me that anything a man could do, I could do.  She said any woman was as good as any man.  Not radical thought at the present but in the fifties and early sixties she was a raving revolutionary.  Of course, this was the same woman who told my brother Napoleon survived the Russian winter by living inside of a dead horse.  He announced that in class and was nearly beaten to death by an exasperated nun.

Momma also used to forbid me to go to mass if I put up a fuss.  She would say, "Don't you dare walk into that church with that attitude, sister.  Why it would be an insult to God, you sitting there sulking and bored. I don't want you within ten feet of that church!  Don't you dare!"  Just for that I went to church every week - I showed her.

I was thinking of her just now and how my brother and I would tease her so badly sometimes. Especially this one time.  She had a big old fur coat.  It was probably a wonderful coat - in the twenties.  In the sixties it was nothing more than a humiliation waiting to happen to her children.  We called it her gorilla coat and we would whine and wail if she tried to wear it.  My mother had a solution that only she could have thought up.

She took the coat into the dining room and worked and worked, then came out and stood before us.  "What do you think?" she asked.  We were flabbergasted.  She had taken scissors and cut the coat off at the hip line.  There was no hemming involved.  Just a clean chop straight across.  My brother summed it up best.  "Now its the monkey coat."  He and I laughed until our sides ached.

She disappeared once again with the coat.  We could hear her swearing and cutting and swearing and cutting.  She came out and stood before us again.  "Well?"  She had cut the sleeves off midway.  It was my turn.  "Looks like a monkey t-shirt."  Boy was she mad at us. 

She disappeared again and I could hear more snips and curses.  I peaked in and saw the pile of dead pelts and she slipped on the last vestiges of the garment.  Her eyebrows went up hopefully.

"Monkey hat." 

She chased me for a good half hour after that.


WET GORGEOUS MAN CONTEST (BLATANT GRAB FOR FOLLOWERS)
Please choose your favorite wet man - only from these three - or any other you like.  A trip for sixteen Tampa if you choose the right one.  (guess which one is mine)