As a kid I lied…a lot. And this is a recollection of things false, in tribute of that lie that invented the 3-day weekend, Columbus Day.
I don’t recall being particularly fanciful as a child, but it seems I was a natural born liar.
On my dead-end block in Staten Island, along with my best friend, Avis Cardella I pretended alot. I conceived, costumed and judged the “Little Miss Locust Ave Beauty Pageant" and performed on the uneven parallel bars as Olga Corbit on the broken swing set turned Munich Olympics Gymnastic Arena in the Rice’s backyard and for several summers wrote, directed, performed and sold tickets to a weekly variety show in my backyard based on the previous weeks’ Carol Burnett Show.
I went on to choreograph a spot-on West Side Story number in Jill Perpetua’s backyard using her mother's low-hanging laundry line to designate the territory of the Sharks and the Jets. But that was just my Staten Island version of Summer Stock. Just what we did to amuse ourselves back then. Making stuff up with the endless kids on our block was my daily diversion and everything was fine until Avis Cardella found out that she was beautiful and a year older than me and didn’t want to be my friend anymore cause I wasn’t. So I looked for ways to be someone other than me for real.
My first reinvention-of –my-life-lie happened after a talk with my backyard neighbor, Mr. Quick the summer when I was 10. Mr. Quick used to hang his laundry on this metal contraption that looked like a giant umbrella but with just the metal parts. He’d hang his wife’s giant dresses and look at me in a way that made me glad there was a chain link fence between our yards. Mrs. Quick looked like Aunt Bea on the Andy Griffith Show, except mean and even though I only saw her a few times she’d look at me like I’d done something wrong. I’d see her sometimes looking out her window when I was sitting on the back of the roof of the Tancredi’s garage taking a break from climbing the big pine tree in my backyard that when I got to the top made me feel like I could catapult myself clear over the Quick’s house and land in Wolf Langford’s pool three houses over and on the next block. But Mrs. Quick never smiled or waved.
Mr. Quick was the only man I ever saw hang laundry and the Quick’s were the only ones that had that giant daddy long legs-on-a-pole laundry hanger upper...everyone else just had a clothesline.
One day Mr. Quick was hanging the laundry and he leaned over the fence and started talking to me. I always thought that Mr. Quick was nice and until then we had a “Hi/Bye” neighborly wave sort of relationship and I sort of felt sorry for him on account of his sourpuss old wife making him do the laundry. Plus I think he was sort of a snappy dresser, not like the Monkey’s snappy but chinos and a buttoned down shirt like the Professor on Gilligan’s Island. Mr. Quick had white hair and a white mustache and sort of talked like a cross between Vincent Price and Roddy Mc Dowell. So even though he was old, he sort of made me curious to talk to him.
Mr. Quick told me I looked like that girl that sang that was on tv, the one with the comedy show, with the short husband, Sonny. “She’s part American Indian, you know.”
“Cher?”
“Yes, Cher. That’s who you look like, you look like Cher.”
Mr. Quick seemed to really like Cher.
And I really liked that a grown-up said I could practically pass for an American Indian like Cher….so exotic and conflicted…so proud…so other-worldly... I told everyone that didn't know me that I was part American Indian, a half-breed. I told it so many times I half-believed it myself. Pretending I was like Cher made me feel better about not being good enough to be Avis Cardella's friend.
So when I think of Cher or fresh laundry, I think of Mr. Quick and American Indians and my old secret identity.
Yep, when I was 10, I became a Native American.
