Happy Birthday to my Mom one of the first creative role models in my life! ( Note the cool tye dyed tee shirt and my hand crocheted sweater. ) Mom also sports the shag hairstyle that was super hip in 1970 when this photo was taken. Hey I'm giving away my age! Oh well. Mom was always expressing herself creatively. I remember sitting with her outside a church in Echo Park, the LA neighborhood we lived in when I was little while she painted a cubist version of the local Catholic Church. Once we made paper out of the lint from our clothes dryer. We saved the lint from each load and then we pressed it all together. It was labor intensive but beautiful. She was also a thrift shopping and garage sale queen and started collecting Bauer and Fiestware when you could still find it for pennies. She bought and resold cool 50's and 60's clothes and resold them at Blue Moon, one of LA's first cool vintage clothing shops. She also had a small silk screening business where she made really cool punk rock shirts in the late 70's and early 80's which were sold at LA's legendary punk shop Poseur. Our bathroom was always full of her silk screen stuff which she had converted into a quasi-darkroom. Mom had an assortment of unusual friends coming and going. I'll never forget Roxy, Mom's friend from high school who showed up at our doorstep wearing a white Cher - inspired fringed jumpsuit with a giant flower in her long black hair. Now I look back and think how alternative and boho my upbringing was but hey, it was the 70's and Mom had been a real life flower child. She was actually in San Francisco the Summer of Love having migrated down there after high school like so many other of our nations youth back in 1967 , disillusioned with the lifestyle of their World War Two generation parents. However, she did still have my Grandma's Betty Crocker cookbook and enjoyed making us things like fried liver much to my chagrin. My dog Max was the faithful recipient of that fried liver as he stood outside the dining room window near the giant agave plant where I would toss my liver when Mom got up to go to the kitchen !
BTW I posted this on my mom's birthday last year but I thought this was fitting to repost. |
VW bus, she says... Wow very boho upbringing. Great to hear your memories of your mum :-)
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