electra ….reflex

 It should not be any great surprise that my great grandmother from Warsaw was a trapeze artist because —

because this was my grandmother, her twelfth —remember? when I would guess she was about fifty more or less. 

So when she was young, she tried out to be a Broadway dancer because she loved to dance and was very good; she also loved the stage. She told me the story a long time ago when I was about five—she had beautiful legs but—as a child was malnourished and, unfortunately, she wound up bow legged. She had a terrible complex about it. She hid it in pictures. But, she went to the tryouts anyway just hoping for the chance, I guess. And she did the tryout well. But then the manager asked her to lift up her skirt. So. She slapped him. And left. And was the end of her career on the stage. My grandmother had a brother—“uncle Martin” as we called him, who was a magician and worked with Houdini. Then there was Uncle Marvin, the son of one of the other much older sister’s among the twelve, who was on stage but wound up working—personally— for Helena Rubinstein (he retired in Tuscany with a vineyard on his estate and such a view I’ve never seen anywhere else)

My aunt, the one who lived to 98 last 2017–she did amateur theatre; am/tram all the way until about 2002 when my mother passed, so—it is the bohemian in all of us 

my mother had it too but she tried very hard to be someone she was not for a useless man