Keep It In The Family

Please, do not be unhappy with me dear readers of my little spot on the Internet. I was in a position that made it impossible to do blogs posts since 11am on Saturday 10th. The bad news, I am going to catch up by posting for each of the past 3 days & posting them as if they appeared that day, & force you to read several posts in an effort to catch up. I truly wish that you will stick with me. Post Apocalyptic Bohemia feels as if it might be getting more entertaining as I begin to name names. I'll start with this one: Jon Hamm.

Jon Hamm turned 41 on Saturday 10th. I am totally zany for him. Season 5 of Mad Men, the most intense & surprising TV series of all time, starts on Sunday 25th.

I went on a journey to be with the parental units in Spokane for the weekend. They are healthy & doing well, but in their early 80s, I feel I need to connect with them more than 2 times a year. My father had knee replacement surgery & I felt that I could assist my mother in his recovery.

I enjoyed a very happy & secure childhood. I am an only child of upper-middle class /working parents. They were & remain: supportive, funny, affectionate, open, & they are rather lovely & generous people (which is why my father voting Republican is so discouraging) .My parents attended nearly every recital, concert & play that I was involved in, following me to community theatre, university, drama department, to regional theatre.

The Lilac City, Spokane, with beautiful waterfalls in the center of town... It was a swell place to grow up; the school system in the 1960s had excellent programs of art, music, theatre, journalism, & sports. But, I wanted out & left on the evening of my HS graduation. I strangely returned in the late 1970s to teach & direct at Gonzaga University, after time spent in NYC that nearly killed me. I was not happy living in Spokane the second go around. I would continue to consider it a mistake, except that this where I met the man who would become my mate of 33 years. He also had been away from Spokane, working as a set designer in Europe & had come back to re-group, consider his life &  then decide how to move forward, just as I had.

To friends & classmates that continue to live in Spokane- I don't mean to belittle the place I grew up in, I really feel love for all of you... but you have to admit, Spokane can be a mean little city. You have to admit it. I mean, I can admit that Portland is hipster heaven, why can't you own up to the 1970s clothing (worn without irony) & the firearms?

The home my parents live in, in the country, 15 miles from Spokane, is not the house I grew up in, in fact their last home before this one, I only lived in during a brief school year (1971-72). I was doing summer stock theatre in Coeur D' Alene, Idaho, the summer of 1971. When I returned to Spokane in September, the parental units had moved, but neglected to tell me. It took a bit of work, but I located their new place & moved in a few days later.

When I moved from NYC back to Spokane in 1978, I moved back with the parents. What had been, for a short time, my room, had been appropriated by my father as an office. I took the guest room, painted it & fixed to my liking. About 12 weeks later, the parents asked if I would manage to have dinner with them, where they informed me that they were happier when I didn't live with them & it would be a good idea to get my own place. " YOU CAN"T GO HOME AGAIN..."

I have flown probably 100 times in my life. I am so old, I remember when we used to dress-up for an airplane. This afternoon's flight back to Portland was so roller-coaster that upon arriving at PDX, the passengers applauded.
My father is a car guy, & he always had a job, often that paid well, that allowed him to be a car guy, almost in the manner that I always worked in restaurants so to be able to be an actor. I posted bits & pieces of this on the Facebook, including these photos of some of Ed's cars:

1935 Dodge

1940 Mercury