Why we need parents (continued)

Then there was this older hippy woman (when I say older, she was between 30 and 35 to my 16 years old)  who took me under her wing not long after that, she was also going to teach me to cast. She was going to teach me a lot of things about art. What she did was give me millions of old Life magazine pictures she had collected for close to 20 years and told me to make something out of them. Then she married some hairy, hippy, mountain man and moved away to Humbolt County and that was the end of that. I kept the Life magazine pictures though.

Twenty years later, after I left screaming for my life from Debbie and was living in my new little apartment on Kling Street in Studio City, I pulled those suckers out of storage and wallpapered my kitchen with them. I taped them to the wall and then drew and painted all over them, giving them captions and/or the people in the pictures little cartoon bubbles with my wit and wisdom in them. When I was done with my finally completed work of art, I raised a glass to my almost mentor and thanked her for the 20 year old art project. I almost wished she was there to see it. I almost wish I had taken a few pictures of it. In fact, I almost wish my Dad had seen it. He would never have understood it (especially all the transgendered and gay male references coming out of the mouths of the men in swimsuit pics), but he still would have loved it.

Come to think of it, not many of my friends got it either. They didn't understand why I had half naked male models looking at each other and making propositions to each other in cartoon bubbles. They didn't understand why I, the dyke, found any of that humorous. If only they had known.

But Dad would have loved that I had done that piece at all. Disposable art that was taken down and to the dumpster when (at her insistant prompting) I moved in with Chris Akard. Which is why we have parents. We need them to remember our disposible art. We may file our bad art away as yesterday's disaster, but your Dad will always think anything and everything you do rocks. I still don't know how to cast in plaster or metal, but my Dad thinks I rock anyway.