sweetheart redux

The texts in black are Mom and the pink ones are Me. The last one is from her pastor when he was trying to reach me to tell me she'd passed away earlier that morning. The pictures are of some of her favorite things.

I already borrowed from this old art project of mine (something from my early twenties) once, in a 2014 post about self portraiture -- it's just a bunch of self-portraits ("selfies," now) that I took when I was crying, which was something I did for years starting in my teens, mixed in with self-portraits my mom sent me of herself being sad, and captioned with lines from Dorothy Parker stories, in the vein of sad girl chic I'm always so fond of.   Here are 6 of my favorites, on this the week before the first anniversary of her death.  

    Above - both sides of a valentine mom made me  in 1993 or 1994 Pages from one of the magazines mom and I used to make for ourselves in like the early nineties.   The hand is mine and the pretty stargirl hippie drawing is hers:

Well, it's going to be my mother Jill's birthday this Sunday, September 18th.  She died May 2, 2016.  I'm going to post things that remind me of her this weekend.  this (above) is one of our favorite scenes in the 1991 film Dogfight .  The first time we saw it was shortly after River Phoenix died.  We turned to each other simultaneously when this part came on and started crying because it was so sad that River was dead. This was another movie we loved, Housekeeping (1987):   My mom and I loved Guns N' Roses.  We had the video for Patience (above) on VHS and both loved the scene (at 5:19 - 5:21) where he's watching TV in his hotel room and looks disenchanted and handsome.  We rewound the tape just to see that part once or twice and even had it on "pause" at that scene before, and took a picture of the TV screen.     us in front of her apartment, garage sale, 1997  one of her many (possibly over a thousand ...

When I was a little kid my mom lived in this rooftop apartment on Marengo Street in Pasadena.  But rooftop apartment isn’t quite the right description – it wasn’t an open-air bar atop a fancy hotel.  It was this building:    My dad had custody of me during the week, letting my mom have me for the weekends. This apartment was the first and best location for my mom weekends.  I was still crazy about her and she wasn’t out of control yet.  She was an alcoholic but she managed to keep the same part time job for years.  In her later years she became a hoarder; but at the apartment on Marengo she was just a scatter-brained collector with a perfect eye trained towards trash and cheap stuff that was beautiful.  In this apartment, the vintage children’s books weren’t on the floor and soaked in cat pee like they were in her last apartment, and the old toys weren’t mixed in with clothes she never wore in the bedroom she couldn’t ope...