#my mother is very funny at a very long distance and actively psychologically damaging in close quarters

[elodieunderglass]

Okay, but as a fellow individual of 90s fantasy/formed-by-Tamora-Pierce experience, do you know what conspiracy theories your mom and her husband discussed?!

In return, I can offer a filthy, filthy joke that she apparently shared on a fantasy panel that also included Orson Scott Card 😈

(In reference to this https://www.tumblr.com/elodieunderglass/777169865575464960/pffff-glad-this-entertained-you) no I have no idea!!! I wasn’t living at home at the time. I would LOVE to earn the joke but I’m not sure if I can.

My mother sneaking off to smoke in a strange way and having strange interactions as a result was a constant theme of my childhood, sometimes a mortification and sometimes an embarrassment and sometimes a significant relief. Sometimes people would be sending desperate signals for rescue from her, and sometimes they’d be charmed.

Once she was smoking behind the back of a building where I and other Girl Scouts were having a sort of immersive 1990s mystery theatre experience, in which an actor, lavishly dressed as a wizard in purple robes and splendid hat with an incredible staff, introduced the premise and then vanished magically (did an illusion and went out the back door). The effect was spectacular to our beholding, and we were very impressed. The wizard meanwhile encountered my mother, smoking like a wild animal at the back door, and at the same time, she encountered him. and my mother, a bundle of trauma and highkey stress responses, my mother, well, facing the appearance of a wizard, she emitted her famous Banshee Scream, a scream that in my childhood raised my cortisol levels so high that they’re still audibly sloshing around, a scream that actually hurts a lot. She does not have a fight/flight/freeze/fawn response, she just holds in place and vibrates your molecules until the situation changes. She screamed so accusingly that the poor stricken wizard screamed back, a trembling pile of jelly. Strange woman, wreathed in smoke, lurking outside your magic trick and shrieking at you like God’s own violence.

So they screamed at each other helplessly, as any two primates would, until they reached a plateau of peace beyond this, and allied themselves in friendship, and smoked together, trembling. Eventually they asked each other what they were both doing there, and apparently found the answers so funny (“I am doing the magic show” “was it a magic show? Well. I am hiding from it”) that the nicotine-scented wizard was still giggling about it when he materialised himself into the gift shop, where he was winkingly familiar with my mother. “Elodie does your mother KNOW the wizard” I don’t know. I don’t fucking know. Thought I sensed her screaming earlier, but I’m an incredibly tiny and stressed-out individual.

In this way my mother made many temporary friends (but never any lasting ones.) a random shitty pub in rural ireland: mom has acquired seven new cronies, identical nasty men in flatcaps, and, under a cloud of smoke, is bitching about Margaret Thatcher and heavily involved in a card game that she doesn’t know how to play. She once got hustled away by handlers from the back of the venue of a Bob Dylan concert, because it turned out she was shiftily smoking with Bob Dylan and they wanted him back. In Quebec my mother is briefly possessed by a ghost that spoke French, for only twenty minutes, for the sole purpose of bitching in it about politics over a cigarette TO REVOLUTIONARY REENACTORS THAT PART WAS IMPORTANT. Politician Jerry Brown once held me while she lit up. I once found her smoking with nuns and they were like “you have to promise not to tell” and I was so bewildered like WHO WILL I TELL? GOD? I only know that she smoked with Tamora Pierce’s husband because my sibling reported it wearily. At this very moment she’s probably smoking with YOUR parents. I emigrated a long time ago so I wouldn’t have to follow up on any of this. I’m sorry.