The Beautiful Kind

My mom’s fashion sense is unreal. Her latest t-shirt proclaims: “UNDERMEDICATED”

A typical outfit: a black shirt with one sleeve ripped off, with bleach stains and a “Harley Davidson” patch sewed on, black fingernail polish, aqua shorts, shiny lavender lycra hose, one pink sock and one purple sock, and white tennis shoes colored red with a marker.

Other clothes: orange hunting vest, a brass buckle shaped to look like a hand coming out of the top of her pants, big black Harley Davidson pants with blue flames shooting up the legs, sparkly hot pink tops, lots of spandex, black leather jacket with patches of the band Queen sewn on the back, etc.

She’s had some strange preoccupations. When she gets into something, she gets obsessed. She was really into Queen for a while, and had a whole wall in her bedroom covered with pictures of Freddy Mercury. When she got into the Blues Brothers, not only did she watch the movie once or twice a day for weeks on end, but she dyed both her sons hair brown and dressed them up as Jake and Elwood. She has an entire bookshelf dedicated to true crime books, and had a pen pal in prison for a while.

Her behavior is as unconventional as her sense of style. One time, when we were visiting an animal shelter, she was told she couldn’t adopt a kitten because it was sick. That didn’t stop her. When no one was around, she simply opened the cage, slipped the kitten in her purse, and walked calmly out of the place. (The shoplifted kitten died the next day of distemper.) Another time in the mall, she saw a 13-year-old girl being arrested for shoplifting. Without hesitating, she ran up and claimed she was the girl’s mother, and got the astonished girl off the hook.