I've been moping around the house all day, as melancholic and weepy as the year before and the year before that, and truth be told, I just ate a whole pot of macaroni and cheese...out of the pot...like a broken hobo...I hope I don't pass out from a sodium overdose before I finish this post.
Anyway, I thought maybe I should torture myself (as I do every year around this time) and go through some family photos/mementos. I was glad to find a few photos that I had never seen of my mom in the early 70s and I was also happy to find some photos of a male stripper giving my mother a lap dance in the 80s.
*If you are averse to male, hairy butts, scroll down very fast to pass the pictures below*
The story here is not so much that my mother had a stripper at her party because hey, it was the eighties and hairy male strippers were all the rage.
No, the story here is what happened 20 years later when these pictures first came to my attention.
A few years ago, when I was still living in Queens, my stepmother gave me a big can of old family photos that she had found in the basement of my childhood home. My mother had already passed away by this time but I still had her car, which my poor husband had to move several times during the week for alternate side of the street parking because I didn't have my license yet. I hadn't looked at the pictures--it was too difficult--so they basically lived in my mother's car for months.
So one day I came home and sat down by the window to have a cigarette. As soon as I put the ashtray on the windowsill, there was a loud boom that shook the house and knocked the ashtray out the window. This was all post 911 so of course I imagined bombs dropping and buildings collapsing. When I went outside to investigate, I saw my neighbors (about 100 more than I thought I had) standing outside looking around all puzzled. There were a few roads in front of my apartment complex that were pulled up and broken. It turned out that Con Edison, the main electric company in NYC, had accidentally triggered an underground explosion that caused all the manhole covers within a 6-10 block radius to go shooting up in the air! I had no idea where my husband had parked the car but I thanked my lucky stars that it wasn't parked in front of the apartment complex where the roads and several parked cars had been damaged.
The next day we headed out to the laundromat but when we turned the corner, we saw my mother's car sitting in the middle of the street, windows shattered, glass everywhere. I screamed and ran towards the car--The police had left a mini police report/note on the windshield since they didn't know who the car belonged to. I was in total shock.
Pretty soon, the people on that block started to make their way to the car to tell me that they had seen the car go up in the air and come crashing down--unfortunately, my husband had parked it over a manhole cover--what are the odds? As people came closer and looked in the car, I realized that there were a million pictures of a hairy, bare ass all over the car seats. I looked like a complete pervert. It was one of the funniest, strangest things that could have happened. I guess you had to be there to appreciate the awkwardness of it all...but my neighbors did look at me differently after that incident.
Anyway, here's to the male stripper from the 80s with the hairy buns!
and p.s: miss ya ma!
