Mommie Dearest

The Hot Air Balloon
Originally uploaded by middleagedteacher

I'm not quite sure why, but I've always been crazy about Joan Crawford. I guess it's her looks mainly - that amazing face with the huge eyebrows & mouth & the enormous shoulder pads. And all those roles - Self-Made Mildred Pierce who was no match for her Evil Daughter; Crystal, the Scheming Shop Girl who stole poor Norman Shearer's Hubby from her in 'The Women'; and who could forget Joan-in-a-Wheelchair being fed a Dead Rat Lunch by her mad sister, Bette Davis in 'Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?'
So many Roles, so many Parts of Me that she explored!
But one area of Joan's life that never appealed to me was her Parenting. When her adoptive daugher, Christina Crawford. wrote her explosive tell-all book, 'Mommie Dearest' I lapped it all up. I voraciously read the book & believed every word. I mean, how could you make up a child having to scrub every inch of the bathroom floor with a toothbrush, or be terrorised with wire coathangers? I even started to re-write my own childhood, imagining my mother performing similar acts of Domestic Torture on me.
As I moved into my thirties & was finally told I was adopted (something I'd always kind of known), I really felt sorry for poor Old Adopted Christina & her Siblings. I found it ghoulishly fascinating that Joan dressed them all in Matching Outfits, something I swore I wouldn't do with my old child.

Fortunately for all of us, I managed avoid doing this all throughout my daughter's childhood & adolescence. But now she's twenty, I've seemed to have embraced The Matching Outfit, as evidenced from the pictures above. On my recent trip to LA, I couldn't resist buying two incredibly cheap dresses from the dreaded 'Forever 21 ' for both of us.