My Mother and Then Some.

My Mother was Marilyn, Grace and Brigitte synthesized into one woman.

When I was a very little girl, I was spellbound by the attention that ensued wherever we went. Everyone everywhere thought my mommy was a movie star and treated her as such. I loved watching men, trip over their feet trying to ingratiate themselves to her.

In spite of her luminous and sensual qualities and looking camera ready throughout any given day, this was a woman who sang in a jazz singer's voice while mopping "her" floors and keeping her beautiful home interior design magazine beautiful. She made cleaning windows and grocery shopping an art form. On any given regular day she would announce with zeal that she would be making chicken 'n dumpling's for dinner and tell me to invite any friend I wanted.

Summers days were like a "party" everyday. My Mother would pack sandwiches of egg salad,tuna salad and peanut butter with jelly and fill the cooler with soft drinks and fruit. I would invite a gaggle of girlfriends and with The Beatles blaring we would take off for Santa Monica beach. She never complained about how loud the music was or how much we screamed in glee in those pre pubescent days. Our picnics looked like layouts in Vogue or Bazaar with her perfect beach blankets and her in her black bikinis ,platinum hair and sexy cat eye sunglasses.

Those days were the golden days of my childhood when life in Southern California resembled a David Hockney. That was before I knew of wars or divorce and of childhood cancers or nervous breakdowns. Yes those were the days before I escaped to Paris to model and could assimilate what to treasure and what to leave behind and that which I could not make sense of, I attributed to "karma."

There are moments and times to treasure, and as I reflect upon the years the memories I choose to keep are the colorful ones,and the others existing in the gray I will let "karma" keep.