When NOT to play horse-y with a baby. (And other adventures from 1973)

Yep.  I’m still stuck in the 70’s, people.  So, all aboard the time machine!  Today, we’re voyaging back to 1973….


(For a refresher of my 1972 discoveries, click HERE.) 


I was about five months old when 1973 began.  According to my baby book, that’s when I started talking.  My first word was “hi”.  I was about fifteen pounds and I had no teeth and virtually no hair.  Oh!  And I lived in a house with hip bright red shag carpet and a faux midget polar bear skin rug on the living room floor.  You know you’re jealous.





My mom was still in her ridiculous wig phase.  Clearly.  *snicker*





Despite my mom’s frightening wigs, I was kind of a happy little thing.





Okay, fine.  Make that VERY happy….





….unless I was having my passport picture taken.  Then I was just freaking confused.  Apparently.





(Funny, I still make that exact same face when I realize we’re out of ice cream!)


That passport picture wasn’t just for craps and giggles either.  When I was about ten months old, my parents took me on a trip to to England to meet all my relatives there.  The flight from Seattle to London was over nine hours long.  Let’s pause and let that sink in for a moment….


A nine hour flight? 


With a baby?!?!  


I don’t know if that makes Mom and Dad really brave or just really stupid. 


But anyway….


During our three week vacation in England, I was Christened.  Here’s a shot of me outside the church with my parents.  (Yes, I’m grinning up a storm.  Again.)





And here’s one of me at the church with my Dad’s parents, my aunt, my uncle, and my newborn cousin.  (Uh-huh.  Still smiling.)





Here I am with my mom’s parents in their home.  They had a huge chocolate Easter egg for me, which I just couldn’t wait to get my little hands on.  (On a related note, I just ate half of Wednesday’s Easter M&M’s this morning while she was in school, so at least I’m consistent.) 





But our England trip wasn’t all church and chocolate.  No, no, no.  I also got to sit on my grandpa’s motorcycle!





I noticed Grandpa is wearing his helmet and riding jacket in that picture up there.  Umm…. yeeeaaaahhhhhh.  That makes me somewhat suspicious that this might not have been just a posed picture on that motorbike, that maybe he might have actually given me a quick little ride down the driveway on it.  Grandpa was a troublemaker and it seems like the sort of thing he and my dad would have cooked up.  (Hey, it was the 70’s after all!)  But if they did, I know it was totally behind my mom’s back.  Grandpa lost an eye in a motorcycle accident a few years earlier and was sporting a spiffy glass eye in that shot up there, so if—IF—he gave me a ride on it, it would have been while Mom was in the shower or something so she’d be oblivious and couldn’t have relieved him of his other eye.  Because she absolutely would have!!!!  I’m soooooo going to ask my dad about it the next time I call him.


Speaking of Grandpa’s troublemaking, there’s also this picture.





That’s me on his shoulders in his backyard.  It looks innocent enough, doesn’t it?  But, no.  No, it’s not.  You see, I had just had breakfast five minutes before Grandpa flung me up onto his shoulders and started galloping around the yard like a horse.  Both my mom and grandma told him that was a bad idea and pleaded with him not to do it, but he did it anyway….  only to end up wearing my upchucked breakfast all down his face about two seconds after this picture was taken.


Yes.  Yes, I threw up on my grandpa’s head.  And Grandpa learned a valuable lesson on when not to play horse-y with a baby.  Just trying to do my part.


In later years, Grandpa was without a doubt my favorite grandparent.  He nicknamed me “Carrots” because of my red hair, and even though those sorts of nicknames offended me when anyone else used them, for some reason when Grandpa did it, it felt like a badge of honor.  And, yes, he forgave me for vomiting on his head.  That takes a lot of love, you guys. 


A.  Lot.  Of.  Love.





Well, anyway, when we got back to Seattle, Summer was in full swing.  As you can tell by the previous picture, I had four teeth now.  And still no hair.  I also had a friend (let’s call him Jesse) whose sandbox I got to play in.  Jesse poured sand on my shoulder, so I retaliated by stealing his cookie. 





Seems fair. 





I liked cookies.  A lot.  I’m told that my favorite kind of cookie at the time was Arrowroot by Nabisco.  Here’s a picture I borrowed from Google that shows what the Arrowroot box looked like in the 70’s. 





I remember five or six years later, I would drool like Pavlov’s dogs every time my mom pulled that box out of the cupboard to give a cookie to my baby brother.  I would beg her for one—just one!—because they were sooooooooooo delicious.  Mom would always roll her eyes and tell me it was baby food and I wasn’t a baby anymore, but deep down inside she knew I was right that those suckers were pure heaven and she’d give me one anyway. 


Sometimes two.  :-)


In July 1973, my first birthday rolled around.  According to my baby book, my parents had a party planned for me, but then my sandbox friend, Jesse, came down with measles, so at the last minute the party was cancelled in case I was coming down with it too (since I stole and ate Jesse’s cookie and all).  No-one wanted to risk any other babies catching measles, so everyone was told to stay away. 


(Seriously?  What the hell?  What kind of 70’s attitude was THAT?!?!)


So, I spent my first birthday with my parents.  My mom was rockin’ her beehive wig for the occasion, and I just wanted to get a taste of the cake.





Which I did.  And I liked it!





After cake (and maybe a bath!), I opened one of my presents.  It was a Dorable Daksy dog.  Dorable Daksy’s tail would wag when his leash was pulled, and he barked and sniffed as well. 





Daksy was so well-loved that he, sadly, didn’t survive my childhood.  I remember being about five years old and Daksy’s fur had fallen half off his plastic and metal body, and was just hanging on by a mere thread or two.  Mom always wanted to throw Daksy away, but I would never go for it.  But I guess Mom won that battle at some point while I wasn’t paying attention because I have no idea what happened to him.


*sniffle*


Daksy dogs are really, REALLY hard to find these days, but they do pop up on eBay every now and then.  I once replaced my long gone Daksy on eBay for about $10, but, sadly, my replacement Daksy doesn’t work—no barking, no uber-cute tail-wagging—however, he’s still freaking adorable.  And he has all his fur!  See?





Anyhow….


The now measles-free Jesse and my other baby friends came over for my rescheduled birthday party about a month later.  (And, no, I never came down with measles too.  Whew!)  Jesse, it appears, was still sore from the whole cookie-swiping incident and attempted to murder me with the elastic on my party hat, but—whatever—I was WAY too enthralled with my new toys to even bother to notice.





Mom and Dad, for some reason, waited until some point several days after my late-birthday party to let me open the gifts sent from my relatives in England.  Mom was in a black bouffant wig and fake eyelashes that day and was looking a bit like Amy Winehouse.





One of my favorite new toys I got that day was a Fisher Price Chatter Telephone.  Here’s a picture of one that I borrowed from Google.





I, obviously, had lots of important calls to make, so I got right down to business.





These days, 1970’s FP Chatter Telephones sell on eBay anywhere from $1 to $40.  And FP Chatter Telephone Hallmark Keepsake Ornaments (jeez, that’s a mouth full) are hocked on eBay anywhere from $55 to $149. 


(Yes, really.)


Around my first birthday, I really started getting into music.  I loved listening to the radio.  I even had a favorite song that would make me drop whatever I was doing, hold onto the coffee table, and sing, dance, and totally rock out to it every time I heard it.  Here’s shot of me doing just that.





So, what kind of song would make a one year old drop all her toys and get her groove on that fiercely? 


This one.





Yeah.  “You Make Me Feel Brand New” by The Stylistics.  Oh, I knew how to party, people.  Definitely.  I loved that song so much that my parents bought me the record album. 





Eight or nine years later, I would still play that record whenever any of my Barbies were dating or getting married.  (In fact, I’m pretty sure my Starr and Shaun dolls conceived a baby to that song once in 1982.  But that’s a story for another time.  Moving on….)


In addition to dancing my ass off, I also liked going on walks to the park with my mom.  Although, why Mom wore a half-shirt, mini skirt, and stilettos to the park, I’m not quite sure.  (????)





(Wow.)


When Fall rolled in, Mom and Dad took me to a reunion with their Lamaze and Baby Care class buddies now that all the babies were one year olds.  For some reason, there was a newspaper photographer at the reunion and, maybe because I was the only girl and all the other babies born to the class were boys, but the photographer was quite smitten with me.  Some pictures of me at the reunion ended up being published in the newspaper and in a Red Cross newsletter.  Here are a couple of them.











When Halloween hit, my mom made me a pumpkin costume and I went to a party with Jesse and my other friends.  Always the jokester, Jesse tried to poke my eye out….





….so, I ate a cookie and watched a poodle’s tail wagging (which probably reminded me of Daksy’s).





As 1973 came to a close, my parents took me to a Christmas party at my dad’s coworker’s house. 





My earliest memory is of that party.  I was only one and a half, but I definitely remember those other kids in the picture up there and that I knew they all thought I was little and cute, and they kept trying to tickle my neck.  I remember looking at their huge, glittering Christmas tree and knowing I shouldn’t touch it and then, when their mother told them to, the other kids took a present out from under their tree and gave it to me.  I remember how surprised I was that there was something for me under their tree!  Kind of sweet for a first memory, huh?  :-)


What I don’t remember is that I somehow made a horrendous mess in their house with a box of packing peanuts, but there’s photographic proof that I did.  Whoopsie!





(Oh, looky.  An eBay Seller in the making!)


For Christmas that year, one of my favorite gifts was my new Fisher Price Music Box TV.





The FP TV played two songs, London Bridge and Row, Row, Row Your Boat, while the pictures on the screen moved and changed according to the songs.  My TV is long gone.  I have no idea what happened to it, but here are some pictures of one just like it that I borrowed from Etsy.








These days Fisher Price Television Sets like my old one sell on eBay anywhere from about $10 to $30. 


And as 1973 ended and 1974 began, I saw my first ever dusting of snow.  And I mean dusting.  (Hey, sometimes Seattle goes a whole year or two without any snow.)  It’s kind of hard to see it in the picture, but it’s there.





In the next post, I’ll be telling you what I’ve discovered about 1974—the year I became a big sister, got into Kraftwerk, and watched my scary little cousin eat a whole stick of butter and then climb on top of my fridge.




©  Coracabana

And that’s one more reason I shouldn’t have eaten those beans! (And other adventures from 1972)

Last summer, I spent five long, lonnnnnnnnngggggggg weeks loitering like a bum on my mom’s couch, 2000 miles away from home.  Sounds like fun?  Yeah, not so much.  It wasn’t my idea to be there.  At all.  I just got all tangled up in the spider webby, complicated, court-ordered crap involving Wednesday and my ex-in-laws—(or are they called out-laws now?  I dunno….)—because I’m Wednesday’s mama and I was ordered to be her rescuer-in-waiting, should things turn sour.   Which they did.  Duh.


(Yeah, it’s complicated, but don’t worry, I’m not going to delve any further into it.)


(You’re welcome.)


While I was stuck out there in Seattle, living out of a suitcase, with nothing to do for over a month but wait for Wednesday to need me, I decided to tackle a hefty task I’ve been meaning to do for roughly twenty years.  Remember how I was telling you about my parents’ pitiful photo-organizing skills which resulted in everyone in my entire family (but me!) completely forgetting about a trip we took to California in 1986?  (Need a refresher?  Click HERE.)  Well, I decided enough was enough.  Before any more memories could go *POOF!* and disappear like M&M’s near a chocoholic, I decided I would round up all the old family photos I could find, scan them all into my laptop, put them all in chronological order, and piece my childhood back together, picture by picture. 


People, this was not easy!  And, at times, it was most frightening!  Ever stumbled upon a full-on crotch shot of your mom giving birth to your little brother?  No?  Well, I have!  And, frankly, I have never been the same since!


(NEVER.)


(*vomit*)


(*twice*)


Most of the pictures (including the horrific beaver shot) (*shudder*) were found randomly crammed into cardboard boxes.  They weren’t labeled, dated, or in any sort of order whatsoever, just a messy hodgepodge of images spanning the 60’s through the 90’s.  Totally overwhelming.  And the pictures that did make it into the family photo albums were often even worse!  I don’t know what Mom was sniffing while she put the albums together, but absolutely nothing made sense.  I found pages mislabeled “Christmas” which featured an obvious Halloween party; and barren pages with no pictures at all; and entire albums that skipped back and forth here and there throughout the years, like Bill and Ted on a time-travelling acid trip.


Oy.


When I came back to Chicago, I brought the scanned clutter of my past with me on my computer with the intention of putting it all in a nice, pretty, labeled, sense-making order so I could preserve all the memories, say “HA!” to my slacker parents, and so Wednesday could laugh at my 80’s hairstyles and my 70’s pants.  *le sigh*  But….  It’s been seven months and I’m still trying to sort it all out!  It’s been taking some effing serious CSI work, my God.  I’ve been scrutinizing haircuts, coats, and shoes; counting candles on birthday cakes; matching up missing teeth in children’s smiles; looking for subtle changes in house décor; and Googling information on toys and books littered in the backgrounds of old photos, all to try to figure out when these hundreds of pictures were taken.  It’s been one massive, aggravating, puppy-kicking, pain in the ass—*snarl*—but, of course, I have loved every minute of it.


I guess I underestimated what a gigantic journey it was going to be.  When I started, I truly had no clue that I would learn so flipping much about my history and that I would spend so much time twirling around in dizzy circles inside old memories that I haven’t stopped to visit in a long, long time.  It sounds like a dumb cheesy cliché (and you know that clichés are the only time that I am NOT pro-cheese), but maybe you need to face where you’ve been to understand where you are going.  (I know.  Deep, huh?)  That’s part of the reason I haven’t been blogging or skipping through Facebook as much lately.  I’ve been busy in my past.  And I’d like to share some of it with you over the next several posts. 


We’ll be lingering in the 70’s around here for a little bit, talking about toys, TV, clothes, books, music, wigs  (yes, wigs) and just pretty much what life was like back then, sifting through scattered pictures and misty water-colored mem-ries of the way we were. 


Can you dig it?  Far out.


My parents grew up, met, and married in London.  In the late 1960’s, they moved to the US (first Atlanta, then Seattle) because my dad got a job with Boeing.  I was their first baby (and the first person in my family born in America).  I popped out into the world in the Summer of 1972.  Here’s a picture I found of my mom while she was pregnant with me.




Yeah, you read that right:  WHILE SHE WAS PREGNANT.  Mom looked fabulous, no?   I don’t know how she pulled that off, frankly.  I know I never managed to squeeze out even a mere millisecond of fabulousness while I was pregnant.  Instead, I just galumphed around in over-sized t-shirts, while oozing blubbery, nauseous, crankiness, and looking like Louie Anderson in drag the whole nine months.  How most unfair.


Being fabulous when you’re pregnant has a price though, I suppose.  After Mom sloshed down drinks at a party five weeks before my due date, I, clearly, took offense at her marinating me in alcohol and I kicked so hard that her water broke.  She went into early labor and then magically found herself the surprised mother of a five pound itty bitty preemie who failed the Apgar Test and had to be whisked away to an incubator immediately.  Oops. 


This was me the day I was born, looking exceptionally pissed off and already plotting my revenge. 




It’s a good thing they put me in mittens, so you can’t see the middle finger I’m brandishing there.  But anyway….


These days, everyone gasps in horror, of course, when they hear about Mom knocking ‘em back while she was pregnant, but she assures me that it was no big deal at the time because, hey, it was a party and that was the norm in 1972 and it’s what everybody did.  I guess life was like that bar scene in Hairspray back then.  (“Wow!  They’re so glamorous.”)  But I’m not complaining; I survived. 


Unlike these days when the hospital kicks you out the door 24 hours after giving birth, back then moms and babies got to live it up in the hospital for four whole days before going home.  (Again, so unfair.)  Once they got me home, Mom and Dad were eager to fatten me up, it seems, because here they are, shoveling baby food in my face while I was trying to sleep. 




I seem really perplexed by the whole thing—and rightfully so, I think, because, obviously, I was waaaayyyyyyyy too young to be eating solid food.  (Hell, I was a preemie, and I shouldn’t even have been born yet!)  But, again, it was the 70’s and there were no rules on… well… anything.  After eating?  Yep, they gave me a bath.  And I was most displeased.




This is me, after being force-fed and dunked in water, further planning out my forthcoming revenge.




(”Well, that settles it.  Now I am SO going to be a shit when I’m a teenager.  You have no-one to blame but yourselves.”)


But I guess I eventually got the hang of the whole eating thing, because I was as round as a beach ball just a couple of months later.




Mom thinks I’m laughing jovially with her in that shot up there.  But I’m pretty sure I’m really laughing at her sagging beehive wig.  My mom had a whole collection of bizarre wigs back then.  She even had a gray one!  (Seriously?  Who voluntarily gives themselves gray hair?!?!)  She seemed to have a different hair color and hairstyle each and every day of the week.  I wonder if I knew it was all the same woman or if I thought I had a whole battalion of mothers coming and going?….


Hmm….


Well, anyway….


There aren’t really any decent pictures of what my nursery looked like back then, but I know from the bits and pieces in the backgrounds of various pictures that there was a lot of yellow in it and that I had a cute hand-painted wooden Irmi Mother Goose mobile hanging over my crib.




I have vague memories of that mobile.  I Googled the heck out of it and found out that Irmi mobiles, lamps, and light switch covers were everywhere in the 70’s.  My one played Rock-a-Bye Baby and had cute wooden nursery rhyme characters hanging from it.  These days they sell on eBay for about $10 each.  Here are some close-up shots of the old, long-gone mobile that I borrowed from eBay and Etsy.










Ahh, the glorious 1970’s!  When people put wooden objects the size of grapes in their babies' beds and the term ‘choking hazard’ hadn’t been invented yet.  Fifty bucks says that was lead paint too.


I was about five months old when Christmas rolled around.  Here I am with my dad (who looked like a young Alan Alda) who gave me a teddy bear.




I still have that bear.  He’s a threadbare old man now.  Like, literally.  These days, he’s dressed like Dumbledore and sitting in my den.  See?




Here I am with my bear and the rest of my Christmas presents back in 1972.  Mom opted for a black wig that day, but I’m pretty sure that’s the same purple dress as before!




See the little pink doll just beneath the bear?  That was my Baby Beans Doll.  Baby Beans was made by Mattel in the early 70’s.  She had a vinyl face and hands with a floppy, soft body that was stuffed with orange plastic “beans”. 


According to family legend, Baby Beans wasn’t with us for long because, one tragic morning, my mom found me sitting in my crib, eating the plastic “beans” that had poured out when I had ripped open Baby Beans’ seams.  Whoopsie!  Even forty years later, Dad still loves to tell the harrowing tale of the Battle of the Baby Beans.  (Apparently, the next several diaper changes were quite beany…. and orange…. and interesting to say the least.  Ugh!)  Here’s a better picture of Baby Beans that I borrowed from eBay.




These days Baby Beans goes anywhere from $5 to $50 on eBay.  $50!  Can you believe that?  And that’s ONE MORE reason I shouldn’t have eaten those beans!



In the next post, I’ll be telling you what I’ve discovered about 1973—that magical year when I rocked out to the Stylistics, rode a motorcycle, discovered the joy of birthday cake, and taught my grandpa a valuable lesson on when NOT to play horse-y with a baby.





© Coracabana

The Rainbow Connection

No.  Sorry.  This isn’t going to be a post about Kermit the Frog, but after typing that title, I just couldn’t resist slipping the song in.  So, anyway….


Remember that stop-motion/claymation video Wednesday made about bullying and self-esteem which won her the top prize and $2000 in the Expressions Contest?  (If not, click HERE.)  Well, we attended the award ceremony a couple of weeks ago; Wednesday was presented with her prize money (cha-ching!); and then we went home and it was over and done with.


Or so we thought.


Then we got a phone call from Expressions last week that the Rainbow PUSH Coalition was all excited about the contest and the kids involved in it, and that they wanted to honor Wednesday and the other winners at their headquarters in Chicago.  (Rumor even had it that Rev. Jesse Jackson might be there!  *mind spinning*)  So, of course, we agreed to go.


Saturday morning, we got up early and dolled ourselves up and headed out to the car.  We were given the address of their headquarters in two different emails the Expressions people had sent us, so we plugged that address into our GPS and off we went.  But….  Unfortunately, the address was wrong!  We ended up outside someone’s home, not the Rainbow PUSH Coalition.  D’oh!  Thankfully though, we had given ourselves plenty of extra time just in case and Scope had noticed a building we had passed a few streets back had the word PUSH on it, so we backtracked to that location, hoping that it was either the correct place or that they would at least be able to tell us where we should go if it wasn’t.


*fingers crossed*


When we got there, they buzzed us into the building and, after a little confusion at the receptionist’s desk, it was determined that, yep, we were in the right building, but we were too early, so we were asked to wait a few minutes before heading back.  As we sat in the waiting area, watching people quickly filling up the lobby, I was suddenly struck by two sharp revelations: 


1.  Everybody was SUPER dressed up.  Like, Sunday best kind of dressed up, with snazzy hats, jewelry, dress shoes, the works.


2.  Scope, Wednesday, and I were the only white people there.


I was suddenly EXTREMELY thankful that I had chosen to throw on my little black dress that morning!  I mean, I almost didn’t.  I almost went casual, thinking that only Wednesday needed to look spiffy since she was the one being honored and all.  But then Scope had put on a tie and, well, frankly, I’d rather eat spiders than be out-classed like that.  So, on a whim, I grabbed the LBD just to balance out the fanciness.


(Ohhhhhhhhhhhh, thank you, thank you, thank you, vanity!!!!  You day-saving, sexy beast, you!!!!)


As I sat there, boiling over in thankfulness that my chosen outfit was a nice dress and not a Harry Potter t-shirt—(hey, if I’m going to be the one representing my heritage, I wanna do it right!….  Or at least not disgrace myself)—it started to dawn on me that this event we had been invited to was a much bigger deal than we had realized.  There were a lot of people there; a lot of really excited people who had gone to much trouble to look their very best.  This couldn’t all be for the four Expressions contest winners, right?….


Just as worry started to whisper in my ear (seriously, what the hell was going on and where were all the other Expressions winners?!), the three of us were called back into a maze of corridors and offices, where, standing near a doorway, beckoning us into a conference room, was none other than the Reverend Jesse Jackson himself! 


Yes.


Really.


THE Jesse Jackson.


I could hardly believe it.  He shook our hands and greeted us warmly, and I told him it was wonderful to meet him, while a very star-struck Wednesday’s eyes grew to the size of dinner plates.  Yeah, we had been told that Jesse Jackson MIGHT be there, but as poor Hadiya Pendelton’s funeral was taking place that same day, I had assumed he would not be, because he, very clearly, had more pressing matters to attend to.


We entered the conference room and were directed to sit down at a big, oblong table, where another Reverend of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, who was practically pulsating with purpose and activity (let’s call her Busy Reverend), came in to meet us and kept talking to us about “the program”. 


Umm….  Program?….  What program?….


She looked at us in disbelief and then told us that Wednesday was supposed to be giving a speech ON LIVE WORLD-WIDE TV in just a few minutes from now.


Huh?!?!


A speech?  On TV?  WHAT?!  When Expressions had told us we were invited, no-one said anything about any of that.  In fact, I had specifically asked them on the phone if Wednesday needed to bring or prepare anything, and they told me no, that they would supply a poster for Wednesday to hold on a stage while she was congratulated, and that would be that.  But now they wanted a speech?….  ON LIVE TV???? 


Holy crap.


Busy Reverend didn’t seem at all amused by our confusion, our unpreparedness, and our ignorance of the weekly TV show Wednesday was about to be a part of.  She wanted to know where all the other Expressions winners and coordinators were and why Wednesday was the only Expressions representative there.  I stammered something to her about how the address they’d given out was incorrect, so, perhaps, everyone was lost and would be delayed because of it.  That didn’t sit well and I was, again, reminded that this was a LIVE WORLD-WIDE TELEVISION BROADCAST that would wait for no-one. 


Poor Wednesday must have felt like bolting for the door!  I know I would have.  But she held it all together and quietly whispered to me out of the side of her mouth, “Mom!  What should I do?”  And the two of us put our heads together at that table to quickly cook up a two-second thank-you speech for her to give, should no-one else show up before the broadcast began. 


A few other people were ushered into the room with us for a quick briefing before the show started, but they weren’t the Expressions people; they were with other organizations who were also slated to be part of the show as well, and they all seemed to know exactly why they were there and what they were supposed to be doing and they were practically doing cartwheels of excitement over the whole thing.  I felt a pang of annoyance that we hadn’t been adequately informed about what we were walking into like everyone else seemed to be, and a double pang of annoyance that my baby would be on Live TV but I hadn’t set up the DVR to record it or been able to tell anyone about it because this was the first we had heard of it!


Jesse Jackson came in and out of the room a couple of times while Wednesday and I were quietly hatching an impromptu speech plan on the sly.  Then he told us he wouldn’t be staying for the television broadcast because he would be attending Hadiya’s funeral, as I’d expected.  He asked us if we would like a picture with him before he left, so we ran out to the lobby with him for a quick photo session. 





(You can’t tell in the picture because she’s behind me, but Jesse Jackson had his arm wrapped around Wednesday’s shoulder in a really sweet half-bear hug!  She was all star-struck after he had left.  “Mom!  Did you see it?  He had his arm around me!  Squeeeeeeeee!”)


But anyway….


The Expressions coordinators and other winners (including the real girl who was picked to give the speech) ended up making it to the right building just in time for the broadcast after all, saving Wednesday a heaping helping of humiliation and stress!  (She practically melted into a puddle of relief when the speech girl showed up, I swear!) and then we were all led into the auditorium for the televised ceremony.


Oh.


My.


Goodness.


I don’t really know what I had expected.  I’d had so little time to concoct any sort of well-formed expectation of what a live TV show stage at the Rainbow PUSH Coalition Headquarters might look like, I guess.  I just know I wasn’t expecting what we stepped into.  It was like a church and a telethon had had a baby!  There was a gospel choir, blinding lights, a stage, massive TV cameras swiveling in all directions, and a very (VERY) excited audience.


We were ushered into the front row, right in front of the stage.  They made us switch seats up and down our row a few times in an attempt to make the audience look just right—and only then did I realize that Wednesday wouldn’t be the only one of the three of us on TV that day, and that the cameras would be on Scope and me too.  *gulp*  An energetic fellow got on the microphone at the front of the stage and told us all to put our “best TV faces” on, and then the show started and we were on live TV.


What happened over the next hour is a complete blur to me.  I don’t know, maybe my brain had just reached its limit of surprise-tolerance for the day and shut down or something, I’m not sure.  All I have left are fragments of it, including bright lights in my face; a preacher making me burst into tears (On!  Live!  T!  V!) when he started talking about Hadiya Pendleton’s murder; and that every now and then the gospel choir would erupt in song and everyone would leap out of their chairs and dance and clap along in that awesome, enthusiastic way that African American’s possess…. and which made me horrifically aware that I have all the rhythm of freaking Fozzie Bear.




(Yeah.  Muppets again.  I don’t know where this keeps coming from.  Sorry.  Oy.)


And, of course, I remember my baby being honored on stage.  She stood there, smiling and looking so brave, so composed, so alarmingly grown up.  *sniffle*





Despite all the confusion beforehand, the show went off without a single hitch.  And, looky, you can even see Scope and me armed with our cameras in the TV monitor over the kids’ heads as they left the stage.





And then suddenly it was finished and we were released back out into the world, dazed, blinking, and bewildered.





If I didn’t have pictures of it in my camera, I swear I would think it had all been just a very strange dream. 


Really.





© Coracabana