Portrait Collection: Mary Anne's Book
It’s Mary Anne’s turn to take a crack at her autobiography. Or, knowing Mary Anne, it will be an auto-cry-ography. (Just call me Abby, cause that pun was good.)
Of course, a lot of Mary Anne’s earliest memories revolve around playing with Kristy and Claudia, and growing up with her dad but not her mom. She tells a story about a first-grade Mother’s Day tea party, to which she invites her dad. But then when Alan Gray and other kids laugh at her for not inviting a mom, she invites Mimi instead and hopes her dad forgets about the tea party. (He doesn’t.) Mary Anne is mortified, but Mimi and Richard handle it very well, and it helps bond Mary Anne to both Mimi and her dad. In straight-up Mary Anne fashion, I may have cried at the end of this story.
In the second story, Mary Anne has a baby-sitter named Mrs. Manson, which made me start daydreaming of a Baby-sitters Club / Manson Family crossover. Oh, it doesn’t exist? Guess I’ll have to write it.
Speaking of my life story, Mary Anne’s second tale is ripped straight from the headlines of my childhood. In Mary Anne’s case, she gets signed up for a ballet class with Kristy and Claudia and she doesn’t like it and she really doesn’t want to be in the recital. But she’s too shy to speak up, and she thinks she’ll disappoint her dad if she quits. This leads to her barfing not once but twice on the morning of the rehearsal at the ballet studio. Kristy goes and gets Mr. Spier, who’s like, “dude, don’t do something you hate just because you think it will make me happy.” Mary Anne is relieved and peaces out of ballet class with her dad. In my case, when I was young I was taking swimming lessons at our local YMCA and I was terrified of our instructors. They were cold and curt and would just, like, chuck you in the water in a “sink or swim” method. I hated it but I didn’t want to disappoint my mom, and then one day she caught me throwing up in the locker room before swim class because I was so nervous. She was like, “what the hell” (but in a much more sensitive way) and switched me to the YWCA in the next town over. I loved it! So, yeah… I feel ya, Mary Anne.
Also like me, Mary Anne got glasses in the fourth grade. She actually faked failing her vision test, though, because she wanted to get cute glasses like the new girl in her class. But it turns out she actually did need reading glasses. Ha! Mary Anne’s final story reiterates some things we already know about how she discovered the existence of her maternal grandparents and learned she’d lived with them for the first year or so of her life after her mom’s death. Then she details some of her two-week trip to Iowa to visit her grandmother Verna. It gets off to a rocky start, to put it politely; Verna won’t stop talking about her late husband, she doesn’t tell Mary Anne anything about her mother, and she keeps shit-talking Mary Anne’s dad under her breath. If it were a horror movie, Mary Anne would have shoved Verna in an oven in a fit of rage.
In the end, though, they find common ground and bond over finishing a quilt Verna had begun many years ago, made of Mary Anne’s mom’s t-shirts, wedding dress, etc. The quilt ends up winning a blue ribbon at the Annual Farm Festival in Verna’s Iowa town.
And that’s Mary Anne for ya! Oh, and she got an A+.
