Minutiae #12 It was the best of times

The best of times really were just hanging out doing nothing. But doing nothing in the end was something if you know what I mean. Get this. My mom had this red shag rug, a zebra skin on the wall and a fake leopard bar. A bar! Can you believe it? We lived in this tiny apartment but there was a bar. And her chair, the chair that nobody sat in except her, was this leather piece. Black leather that looked like this except black. She never said nobody could sit in it. We just knew we couldn’t. And sometimes if we wanted to check it out you would for a few uncomfortable minutes and then move. It was like she was always in it even if she wasn’t.

Some days for no reason at all, I would decide to give her the performance of a lifetime. And I would stand in front of her, somewhere between the chair and the fake leopard bar and I would sing. There would be no holding back. No shyness, no thinking about the neighbours.Just pure unadulterated ‘out there-ness”.belting out Edith Piaf when I was going through my Edith phase, or Bowie or maybe a little cabaret. I liked to mix it up. I would strut and dance and sing like my life depended on it. And she would sit there in that chair, my only audience member. Afterwards I would bow and she would just look at me and say “Wow, that was so great. You are so great.” And I believed every single word and for those few short moments I would really feel super human as though I was a real star. And those words and that moment got me through some tough times later in my life. And I’ve always been thankful that I had somebody in my life who was kind enough, generous enough to say that. Because you can get a lot of mileage out of saying that kind of thing to a kid everyone once in a blue moon.