Continued Nostalgia
Aug. 10th, 2007 05:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pinksonia Junior year of high school everyone at my school was required to write and autobiography. While going though stuff to bring down to New Orleans I found mine. Some of it is awful. Apparently, I totally forgot how to use spell check and developed some sort of written ADD, where I don't really develop anything that I talked about. On the other hand, my sections, or even just sentences continue to crack me up all these years later. So, I feel this strange need to retool an old high school project. Toward that end, here are two short introductory sections.
Names are powerful things. You can look at a person and say they’re a Scott or a Jennifer. A Katherine can be a Katherine, or a Katie, a Kate, a Kathy, or a Kat. Each one a different person. The shrew (or studious doctor/lawyer/librarian), the cheerleader (sorority girl), the fashonista, the girl scout, or the counter-culture member.
I am named after two great-aunts, Alice and Kathryn. When my parents chose the order of my names they cemented my future. Had I been a Kathryn Allison, instead of an Allison Kathryn, perhaps I would have turned out more like my mother’s side of the family: gregarious, sentimental, emotional, morbid, and interested in propriety. Instead, I am a consummate example of my father’s side. Studious, reserved, introspective, sharp-witted, judgmental, and prone to worry. So, I shall remain forever an Allison, never to be an Allie. Allie’s are perky and sweet, inclined toward cheerleading and working as day-care providers. No, I will remain Allison (except apparently to my pediatric dentist and the creepy guy I worked with a JoAnn’s).
In 1982 Cats opened and I was born. I wish I could give some cosmic similarities between the show and my life, say that it had some major impact, or even that it came back later in some significance. In truth, Cats is an awful show. I know, I’ve seen it twice, and wish I hadn’t. But I plan to make musical theater a thread running through out this, the story of my life, so I needed to start off with a show that premiered in the year of my birth. Really. That’s it. Well, I did name my rabbits Mr. Mistoffelees and Rumpleteazer.
Everyone has family mythology surrounding her birth. Some are born in snowstorms, or taxi’s, or on the turnpike. Some people are delivered by family members, or bus drivers, or former dictators. Some come on their father’s birthday, or mother’s day. or Christmas, or some other holiday when they can be said to be the most perfect present ever. Some are born by caesarian twenty minutes into a new day because the nurses in the OR needed to change shifts. They put their mother through such a long, intensive labor, that their grandparents are able to fly halfway around the world (Philadelphia to Tokyo) and arrive at the same time as the telegram proclaiming the birth of their first grandchild. That last one, that would be me. Or in the short hand version:
Everyone has family mythology surrounding her birth. Some are born in snowstorms, or taxi’s, or on the turnpike. Some people are delivered by family members, or bus drivers, or former dictators. Some come on their father’s birthday, or mother’s day. or Christmas, or some other holiday when they can be said to be the most perfect present ever. Some are born by caesarian twenty minutes into a new day because the nurses in the OR needed to change shifts. They put their mother through such a long, intensive labor, that their grandparents are able to fly halfway around the world (Philadelphia to Tokyo) and arrive at the same time as the telegram proclaiming the birth of their first grandchild. That last one, that would be me. Or in the short hand version:
Allison Kathryn
Born: December 28, 1982
12:20 am
7 lbs, some-such oz
22 in. long
Born: December 28, 1982
12:20 am
7 lbs, some-such oz
22 in. long
Names are powerful things. You can look at a person and say they’re a Scott or a Jennifer. A Katherine can be a Katherine, or a Katie, a Kate, a Kathy, or a Kat. Each one a different person. The shrew (or studious doctor/lawyer/librarian), the cheerleader (sorority girl), the fashonista, the girl scout, or the counter-culture member.
I am named after two great-aunts, Alice and Kathryn. When my parents chose the order of my names they cemented my future. Had I been a Kathryn Allison, instead of an Allison Kathryn, perhaps I would have turned out more like my mother’s side of the family: gregarious, sentimental, emotional, morbid, and interested in propriety. Instead, I am a consummate example of my father’s side. Studious, reserved, introspective, sharp-witted, judgmental, and prone to worry. So, I shall remain forever an Allison, never to be an Allie. Allie’s are perky and sweet, inclined toward cheerleading and working as day-care providers. No, I will remain Allison (except apparently to my pediatric dentist and the creepy guy I worked with a JoAnn’s).