well, i found the box that contained my photo albums and packs and packs and packs of pics over the ages. still none of either of my husbands, but i will keep looking. for now, because i'm horribly Chronically Fatigued and sick tonight, with high fever and such, i'm posting the best of what i've found and will fill in with text as the days go by, and this flare-up, hopefully, dies down at least a little.

but first of all, this is my little photo-essay of Regular people versus Oregonians:

okay, this is a "normal"/book on cd addicted smiling person wearing enormous peacock-colored earrings that make her very happy.

this is the face of your average Oregonian. it's grey and raining for 9, count 'em, 9 months a year and people, for some idiotic reason, don't invest in S.A.D. lights. so everyone here appears to have at least a mild depression, which is called dysthymia or anhedonia (the original title of Annie Hall, btw). it's not quite this bad. well, it kind of is.

and this is the lovely Dick Cheney smile that you get from some Oregonians when they realize that they probably should have smiled at your Wonderpups because they are freaking adorable. it's not right, i can see now, because the "smile" part should turn downward. but, hey, you get the idea.

so here we go now with the scanned pics!

okay, obviously, this is me as a baby. i will admit that i was a fabulous infant. my ears are still too big for my head now, btw. the smile was killer out of the gate, apparently, and the eyes are lit up too, and the haircut would be pretty hip and trendy even now.

my father fell in love with me, he told me, and came home every day to have lunch with me, which drove my jealous ex-con sociopath of a "mother" insane. he loved torturing her. so i was competing with my "mom" for his attention from an extremely early age.

i have a sense of light and kindness for my first two years. we had a housekeeper named Mrs. Massey and i remember being small and hanging out under the ironing board while she did her thang and then the postman rang the bell and he came in and it was sunny and shiny and safe. it was so lovely and i felt safe and loved and all that good carp/crap. after that, it's mostly darkness for more than a decade. i suspect that my "mother" got rid of this woman whom i adored and whom my new baby brother probably appreciated way too much. that whole competition thang. whatever, right?

you would all know better, but i'm thinking that this is me about 2. note the very very short bangs that would be a theme for several years. well, you saw them in the toddler photo in the first Scanned Pics post! *

i don't remember a thing about that time in my life, but i was certainly quite feminine from an early age. i wish i could see the color of the dress.

okay, this is hard. i have no idea what age we are here. this is me with my prominent old nose and my best friend Mary Ada. Mary was chubby when she was younger, so when i was cast as Snow White in the 1st grade play, she played one of the Dwarves, the jolly one whose name i can't recall. it pissed her off that i got to eat the "poisoned" apple and that Richard Aronson kissed me, as the Prince, and other carp. long story there about how he grew up to be a big stud in 8th grade, but at the time i didn't find him hot at all. well, things more than evened out later on, as you can see, when my nose and my thighs (and, on the positive side, my breasts) grew and the cystic acne blossomed while she morphed into a WASP princess, with small breasts and lovely long legs in that blasted era of all Twiggy, All the Time! many of us ethnic gals never quite recovered from that endless excruciating Stick Thin era.

it's a long tale for another time, but i knew Mary Ada literally from the time i was born because she was a few months older than i was. our fathers were fellow shrinks -- my closest friends growing up were the daughters of my father's colleagues, so we were all pretty freaking fucked up in various and lovely ways. her family was the best friend family of our "family". we lived two doors away for years and years.

what makes this rough is that M.A. and i were close in the ways that a very jewy jew (jon stewart) and a WASPy golden girl can be, until we were in our mid to late 40s. at a certain point i sued another of their shrink colleagues, who was a freaking perp, for damages from the childhood carp, and the daughters had to choose between me and their fathers and that was the beginning of the end of those friendships. i understand why they had to do what they did, but, god, it was hideously painful at the time and since, to have no support from my closest girlfriends.

BTW, IF ANYONE COMMENTS ABOUT HOW STUNNING MARY ADA WAS/IS, WELL, IT'S NOT A GREAT IDEA. I HAD TOO MANY DECADES OF HEARING THAT VERY THANG.

okay, this one is completely out of order, but it's time for some comic relief from my toxic childhood. this photo was taken at our 25th high school reunion, so Mary Ada and I were both about 43 years old, which makes this a year or so before the hysterectomy for the Fibroid Tumor that Ate Santa Barbara and all the agoraphobia and shit that followed.

this was one of those fabulous "living well is the best revenge" thangs that i LOVE. (there are photos of M.A. somewhere, that i will share too.) my best friend was still gorgeous, of course, but she was a stay at home Mom and not doing well with it since her husband travelled much too much for his job. she put herself together like a Mother does, and people had already seen her extremely pretty face before, while i had had my nose fixed and felt a quantum leap better about myself than i had that quarter century back, plus i had become a screenwriter and playwright and realized that i was fucking FUNNY, all of which gave me some personal power.

well, you all get it. the photo speaks for itself. i was smiling like a demon because i was wearing my favorite RED and black jacket and carrying my first ever canine-american, my fabulous Neoprene Scottie Elektra!, and i knew from the 'ho years in Hell Lay ** that i was sexy and such. well, the deal was that i ended up entertaining a huge table full of my former high school buddies, including M.A.'s husband. i was clinically depressed and covered with acne back then, so i was happily fielding all kinds of questions.

"you were so quiet in high school. what happened?"

"prozac." huge laughs

"you look so beautiful. what is the deal?"

"nose job." hilarity ensued.

well, you all get the idea.

there is more about me dancing with Danny Cody and a friend's wife (she was the local tv channel's Movie Critic so she was beautiful and charismatic) being jealous because Danny had become hawt over the years, with well-kempt beige shaggy hair and fashionably shabby clothes. he wasn't my taste at all -- my thang was/is those Black Irish guys, like Gabriel Byrne and Aidan Quinn and my late husband Richard, with the curly dark hair and the green eyes  -- but once i heard that some other gals were envious, well, shit, i danced with Danny all freaking night! forget those WOMEN SCORNED, man, there is no hell hath or fury like an ugly and morose Duckling who's morphed into a colorful ethnic Swan.

there are no photos of the 5 incredibly terrible horrible years that my nose and i spent at Miss Winsor's School for girls, a private day school. long story about this for later on. i was there from age 10 to age 14 or 15. if you've read my previous post about my ex-con sociopath of a "mother", then you know that there were six Jews in the school and 50 WASP future debutants. we Jews had to go to a separate dancing school while the gentiles went to Miss Salthers. it's funny the things you remember and all that you forget.

i eventually got to go back to public high school for 3 years. no photos of that time either, thankfully. i was nicknamed Pocohontas because i used a sun lamp to treat my terminal acne and because i had long thick dark straight dark brown hair. most of that time is gone gone gone so that i can't even picture the cafeteria there, although i know there was one. there were tough girls who were on the Technical Track -- we called them Hoods or Rats. they had catfights after school. these girls, understandably, hated those of us who were on the academic track, especially the prissy honors students, like me and my group/crowd/ whatever. We were called the Collegiates. i can remember being scared to go to the bathroom, afraid of being beaten, so there was a lot of running home from school to pee.

Then there were the Freaks and the Artsy ones. Julie Taymore, the outstandingly talented director behind the theatrical version of The Lion King and the movie Frida and so many other mesmerizing and mind-boggling (i wrote blogging first, of course. :)) productions, was in my class at Newton North High School in Massachusetts. i never spoke to her. she and her entourage were too talented and lofty for the rest of us to even comprehend. funny how i can remember the carp that i missed out on but not whatever fun shit that went on. oh, okay, there was the whole Red Sox in the World Series thang in 1967 -- we all left school to go to that game at Fenway Park or Pahhk -- and then the everyone becoming Freaks or Hippies senior year, 1970, and fleeing school to protest the Vietnam war and then there was the draft and the running away to Canada. hmmm...

the only photo i have from that senior year. i, obviously, had the long dark hair and i had gained 10 or more lbs. by eating the chocolate of the month boxes that came in the mail from one of the many aunts and/or the big bags of peanut m&ms that i would buy at whatever was, back then, similar to the 7/11s that we have now. i was so ashamed, because being big was taboo in my "family" and in life back then, so i would tell the clerks that all the candy was for my brothers. it was sad sad sad. one night when the "relatives" were over for dinner, i walked back into the kitchen and i heard one of the great aunts say, "Didn't Teddy get fat?" she was not great at modulating her voice.

the patterned dress was a favorite of mine, the hippie look which is now the Bohemian thang, with the fringe and the big earrings and such, was always my favorite style. i was 140 lbs. and, in Twiggy times, that was not okay. so going off to college, to Radcliffe? a big big big treat for me.

the next series of pics are from the college years. i will comment later because there are so many fabulous stories. i was one of the first women to move into a Harvard House (dorm) from Radcliffe and there were 30 women and 300 guys, preppies and jocks. let's just say that if i'd known that AIDS was on the horizon, i would have lined up all those gorgeous brilliant young men and done them one by one. more about all of that later:

me in college with my old nose. i actually love the outfit i was wearing, very Bohemian. and the beaded necklace. the haircut? not so much. there are many many many photos of this particular night. my college boyfriend John and i went to my parents' house for dinner. when my "mother" answered the door, she exclaimed, "oh my god, you look good. Ricky (my brother), go get my camera! (back to me) you only look this good once or twice a year. we have to take some pictures." so everyone had to line up to be photographed because i, shockingly, looked good. it was a surreal experience at the very least.

okay, this is a trip. i scanned a photo of me, my sister, my "mother" and my first sister-in-law from that famous night, but OS say it can't upload it. hmmm, maybe sociopathic maternal Evil doesn't film well. but here i am with boyfriend John at a mutual friend's apartment, decorating for Christmas! god, i was thin and he was adorable -- with a bit of a Jay Leno chin, but that hair!

the youngest of my two younger brothers. i'm sure he's still this handsome but i will never see him or talk to him again because of that lawsuit. we have the same smile, i think, and that nose looks wonderful on him. he's reading a book by Judith Guest, who wrote Ordinary People. we were all voracious readers, one of the great gifts of an Intellectual "family." for a time there, when i really loathed my looks, i thought about having a sex change since i knew that my features looked fabulous on a male visage. but then i realized that I'd be a 5' 2" gay man, since i LOVED men and that wouldn't go away. i'd be a little Gay, a pocket Gay if you will. that didn't appeal to me, so i suffered for a decade and more with hating my appearance.

this brother and i were extremely close at one time. he's 6 years younger than i am. we would go to our Cape Cod house, to Wellfleet (yes, we were enormously blessed to be affluent because my father was a shrink, as i've said) together and when it was raining, we would Go Places and Eat Things. we took this quite seriously, so over blueberry pancakes at the quaint breakfast place, we would plan what we would have for lunch. it was almost always fried clams at PJ's because they were Legendary, as Barney Stinson would say.

oh, and For the Boys:

another Halloween with me as Elvina, Elvira's chubbier older sister, and my beloved Good Willa Hunting as a Cat, well, she had no idea.

*  open.salon.com/blog/theodora_lengle_knight/2009/10/18/

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** open.salon.com/blog/theodora_lengle_knight/2009/10/10/

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To Be Continued and Continued as i scan and narrate and this suckitude of Flutigue that i have dies down again...

if you enjoyed this at all, please RATE THIS POST. for me, since i have Early Kindergarten taste, it's like getting Gold Stars. and i LOVED getting Gold Stars back in the day. so please humor me with this.