My mom's old publicity photo from when she was an opera singer.
Born February 28, 1943 she had me at age 30. Originally an opera singer. A good one too. Most notably she won multiple awards for being number one best or whatever the top award is called from the Greater Miami Opera Guild (yes to my gamer friends, my mom was in a guild for real rofl).
During her early opera years she also maintained a job working for Stembridge Furniture as basically their only office person. And also McKinney Lumber (where my Grandad had worked previously) as their only secretary / office person.
She performed with many great opera celebrities including Luciano Pavarotti which she has pictures with on stage somewhere but I couldn't locate those right now.
Voice type:
col·o·ra·tu·ra [kuhl-er-uh-toor-uh, -tyoor-uh, kol-, kohl-]
–noun
a lyric soprano of high range who specializes in such music.
In 1973 obviously she had me, duh. As a small child I spent 99% of my time with my mom and almost never my dad. When I watched TV as a child it was with my mom and it was her shows, Star Trek, Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, Night Gallery, The Night Stalker. And then eventually Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers, Wonder Woman, Six Million Dollar Man, The Incredible Hulk, etc.
A HUGE Disney fan to this day, in my youth we would go to Disney World at least once a year and often times as much as 4 or 5 times a year for at least one week each time sometimes several weeks.
Sometime in the '70's my mom got me one of the original Coleco game systems. NOT the Colecovision. Before that. It was a LARGE black and silver plastic monstrosity made by Coleco. In the middle it has a big old knob like dial that you turned to select one of about six versions of Pong. Like regular style Pong, and the racquestball version and the 2 paddle version and so forth. And then it had 3 shooting games. It had no controller or joystick. It had 2 "paddle controllers". Those are the boxes with the one dial you turned left and right to move the paddle up and down or left and right depending on the game. Those could be mounted right on the "console" (I use that term loosely for this thing hehe) or you could use long adapter cords to hook them to console. It also oddly enough sported a light gun. It had like skeet shoot and target practice and some other one. Basically involved shooting a giant white box on a black screen and the white box would move around in different ways depending on which of the 3 gun games you selected. Biggest issue with this thing was connecting it with the old school RF switch adapter and the two wires that would go under the antenna screws. Then came the challenge of attempting to get the horizontal and vertical hold set right so that the picture wouldn't just keep flipping left to right or bottom to top or whatnot. For the youngins, back then TV's did not automatically center on the screen the image it was supposed to be displaying regardless of the input source. Point here is that my mom bought it for me and it was her idea to get it not mine. And she played it as much if not more than me.
From that point she bought me the Atari 2600. Had that one through nearly all of elementary and into junior high. My mom and I spent countless hours all night and day playing with or against each other in everything from Joust to Donkey Kong, Centipede, Pac-Man, Bowling, Barnstorming, Air Sea Land, Combat, and hundreds of others.
In my early teen years she quit singing opera and doing operas professionally and got a job with the City of North Miami Motor Pool as their only secretary. Although she still sang select arias from operas such as Lucia di Lammermoor and Die Fledermaus as well as various "pop" songs from the 1940's - 1980's transcribed and arranged to be more operatic and suitable for her voice. Sadly though she only performed during these years for seniors at various condos up and down the Florida coast as well as the occasional concert at one of the band shells that have all long since been torn down. And every now and then something else would come along as well that she might do for a friend or one night thing.
It was sometime during the 1980's when she separated from my dad. It was nearly another decade after that when they finally officially got divorced, though they still remain friends till this day and talk nearly every day and we all go out to eat every week or two, though it turns into chaos before it's over.
Around this point, think it was maybe '84 or so she bought me the good old NES. The original 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System. I spent years mapping every tree, rock and square of sand in Zelda and every wall, room, square and enemy in Metroid. While I still played things like Super Mario Bros. and Kid Icarus with my mom, alternating turns where I'd play for an hour and a half on one life then die then she's come play for 5 mins and die. That plus games like Castlevania, Final Fantasy, and Wizardry though kinda brought me into the single player RPG type games and not as much gaming with her anymore.
During these years though we still both were HUGE Sci-Fi and Fantasy fans. Did comic and sci-fi conventions, movie opening nights, and all that kinda stuff with her for a few years.
As a side note, all through these years from before she met my dad, when she was just a kid, through him and on through the next 2 boyfriends; my mom's other MAJOR hobby was bowling (my dad too, he was WAY better more about that next father's day). My mom did at least 1 league type bowling night a week and usually one more on a week day morning. For awhile she did the doubles thing with my dad and then later with each of her boyfriends. And she did weekend tournaments that had her traveling around Florida and crap.
And in the middle of all this she also was and still is a freak for fishing. I use to get dragged along with her and my dad or just her or her and one of the boyfriends. Piers, drift boats, Islamoroda, all up and down the Florida Keys and stuff like every weekend if she didn't have a bowling tourney. For the record, I HATE fishing! Hate the sun, hate the smell of fish and sea water, loathe the entire concept of bait, don't like the killing of the fish, don't like the boringness of the entire event, and those hooks are insanely dangerous. The whole thing is like a nightmare to me. Thank the goddess for hand held games.
Towards the late 80's she ended up with a boyfriend that worked at the City of North Miami's Parks and Recreation Department. He, however, was a Vietnam Vet and had many mental issues besides being an alcoholic and a pot head. I still can't even begin to fathom how my mom ended up with him when she's never done any drugs and can't handle alcohol at all and can't stand smoke and never did cigarettes or anything like that.
By the end of the 1980's I had hit the teen years and was gaming on Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo, and Gameboy, and doing the book, dice, pen and paper style RPG's with friends. My mom and I spent very little time together as she changed greatly during these years.
Somehow between those years of around '87 - '92 she changed a LOT, and not for the better. Suddenly instead of the outgoing, happy, VERY friendly polite opera singer who played games and liked Sci-Fi and Fantasy and just movies and music and anything fun, I now had someone else for a mom. It was like aliens abducted her. She no longer sang professionally but she stopped singing around the house and in the car and everything completely. Started watching crime dramas and saying Sci-Fi and Fantasy she grew up with from long before I was even born was all stupid nonsense suddenly. She started to refuse to play games. She wanted nothing to do with technology or knowledge of gadgets or anything she use to like that she taught me to like when growing up. So now she hated all the things I liked that I only liked cause she got me liking them when I was younger!
It went beyond that though. She quit answering the phone all together. Had NO friends but her boyfriend at that point. HATED people and spent all day and night talking about how much she hated everyone and how she wanted to just move into a shack in the woods with no phone or electricity where no one can ever find her.
After several years doing secretary for the City of North Miami she moved over to the North Miami Police Department and eventually rose to the position of records supervisor. She spent a total of approx. 2 decades working for the City of North Miami before moving on.
While working at the Motor Pool she met her next and last boyfriend, a mechanic. He worked on the garbage trucks and police cars and such. Nearly 7 feet tall and weighing close to 400 pounds this massive missing link prehistoric barbarian of a human was a total asshole. He was nice to her but tried to sleep with my friends and stuff. Major creep.
Amongst other things that this ass did which was insane were several instances of him with his gun, yes a licensed concealed weapon revolver, my mom had one too cause he made her get it, chasing me and my friends at high speeds in car chases with both of them hanging out the windows waving their guns at me while I drove like Grand Theft Auto through there and my friends ducked to the floor to avoid being shot. Crazy times. He had her under total mind control.
Kind of a good / bad thing that happened was that this boyfriend convinced her to spend a LOT of money she really couldn't afford to to buy a 40 foot camper / trailer. The kind you tow not the motorized kind. We traveled most of the States east of the Mississippi River and all the way north up into Canada. However, by these years my Crohn's disease was starting to get out of control and I spent the majority of most of these trips puking and crashed out in the trailer while they went off wherever. I did however get to see everything from D.C. to NY NY to Niagra Falls. But, it was with HIM and my new altered pseudo mom person.
With the start of the 1990's came my mom's move into retail part time after the Police Department job and on weekends and then as the main thing after leaving the Police Dept. Mervyn's Dept. Store, Eckerd's Drugstore, Marshalls Retail Store (2 different ones). And that was it for that. All-in-all the retail thing lasted about 15 years.
After leaving the Police Department the retail jobs became the main full time and she got another part time job doing security for an event staff company guarding the Marlins, Dolphins, Panthers, Heat, celebrities, concerts, grand openings, the circus, and any major entertainment event. Upon quitting retail this became the primary job she still wastes her time with today. Granted she gets to see and sometimes meet many celebrities but the job is run by idiots, poorly done, unprofessional, pays nowhere even close to what she should be getting as a Florida State Licensed Security Guard. But she's changed so much and hates everyone and everything and is just too blind to realize how crappy that situation is when she could do better.
Around 2k she started getting senile and Alzheimer's like her mom, my grandma. She of course refuses to get help or even mention it to anyone because she has no clue it's going on. She does not understand the things she does that are wrong are in fact wrong even after explaining it repeatedly. She'll be fine, smart, alert, etc. for days, week(s) even sometimes. Then, out of the blue, I'll find her in just a bra and panties outside at 4am banging bbq tongs into a can of gas used for the bbq grill like a dinner bell to call the neighborhood cats to feed them claiming they wouldn't come and eat unless she used the "clanger" despite the fact I was trying to explain to her about if there's a spark it will explode and she'll be blown up in a pile of cats outside with nothing but a bra and panties and how the hell am I supposed to explain that to anyone? But she still didn't get the concept that any part of what she was doing was in any way incorrect.
And I think that about covers everything up until today. If I can think of anything else I'll come back and add it later cause I kinda wanna keep this now that I finally got to write it all out at 4am after being up 2+ days straight now when I should totally be asleep lol.
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