BLUE TOMATO JOURNAL: December 2015

I think 2015 was the best year ever!!

Maybe because I bought a new screen door

and the flowering crabapple I planted years ago

made a perfect photo

to remember the Spring of 2015

~~~
The OLLI Memoir Readers

gave an outstanding live presentation

at our Library in April

~ ~ ~

That led to my making over forty album covers

and having them exhibited in the UUFA Foyer

in October

~ ~ ~

When I'm Out of Ideas, What do I do ?

I draw a cartoon Fortune Teller in my journal,

then I take a nap until

a new idea comes to me.

Voila!

I've almost finished a new book I began in

November and designed a cover.

T H E C R A Z Y C L U B

The photo on the cover is Mother and her girl friend Grace

on a double date to ride horses in the North Georgia mountains.

(c.1933. Mother has the short hair

and arms draped over her friends)

The book is about Mother and Me and Music.

covering the time period 1936 - 2016.

~ ~ ~

My mother loved the movies.

We went to a movie

almost every weekend.

She had an eye for staging.

She posed me in my pajamas

on the front porch holding her old straw-filled

teddy bear and added the silhouette of Popeye.

~ ~ ~
PREFACE to The Crazy Club

After Mother died in 1991, at eighty-two, I began to write my story of growing up in Atlanta as an only child. I discovered that these intimate mother-daughter stories should be called Shug. I got tears in my eyes, because that’s what Mother always called me.

The story was so much about us, and I hadn’t wanted it to be, fiercely rejecting the My Mother, Myself theory in my thirties. I hadn’t known how entwined we were for those first eighteen years, like two colorful double helixes. I hadn’t realized how much I was living out Mother’s dreams, and mine, too, that one day I’d be so famous my father might come and visit me.

During her stay in a Rest Home, she concocted The Crazy Club and therefore the new title. By the time I came into her life in 1936 when she was twenty-seven, she was nothing like the picture on the cover. Still, the woman I knew as Mother for fifty-five years was the most unforgettable character I ever knew.

This is our story. It begins with the father I never met.

~ ~ ~

I had another another new idea

while soaking in a bubble bath!

WHAT ABOUT AN E-BOOK

"STORIES BEHIND THE RETRO ALBUM COVERS?"

Then I can insert the photo

with the story behind the cover.

For instance, Finding My Way is the opening song

from Silent Dreams: The Musical.

I've been finding my own way,

so I chose photos from several decades

to illustrate the Album Cover.

~ ~ ~

Happy Holidays!

Here's a photo of the music area

I've decked out

with one string of lights.