Picture This

My sister Cindy, once again at Christmas time, also with her future husband George.  Not sure what she's holding in her hand in that top picture.  You can also see Rick and Dorothy in the foreground of that picture.  Note the chocolate box of Toffifay, which mysteriously changed in modern times to "Toffifee", but is pronounced the same.  I don't get that!  Perhaps proof of Steve Kokic's beloved belief of the Mandela Effect? Honestly, Cindy and George don't look a lot different today than they do from four decades ago.  Not to me, anyway.  They seemed to maintain their youthful look; I think true love can do that for people. Cindy's macrame Santa is there again once more photobombing the picture.  Check out the smile on the 'stache-mugged George!  If that doesn't show happiness, what would?  Cindy simply looks beautiful in these pictures.  I'd say George is a lucky man, but Cindy's lucky too.  George has all the elements of what a man ought

The Queen of the Cooks. At the top you see a very young-looking Thora smiling pretty for the camera at Christmas time.  There's a little glimpse also of what appears to be Dad beside her... except it's not, that's Rick!  Dad's mini-me, who's now a major-him.  Boy, am I glad I was a shutterbug in those days.  All these great pictures, especially of Mom. On the bottom, there she is in her favorite robe sitting on the Crazy Quilt hide-a-bed couch with the matching (not so much) cushions.   Not sure what papers she has in her hand there, but let me just note that Mom was extremely savvy with the finances.  She was on a shoestring budget to manage the household, and she did it quite deftly.  It left all of us wondering how she did it.  Mostly me, I guess, because I didn't have a head for money at all in those days.  Still don't, really!  Thankfully, I had the wherewithal to hand over financing duties to Janice shortly after we got into our house.   A lot of these

Isn't she lovely? That's dear Mom, with a probably-too-close picture (maybe it was a selfie??), and another of her working her crafts. Everybody in the 80s had to have had these aluminum TV tables at one time or another.  And in true 80s fashion, it's loaded with colors and flowers and stuff.  We all had many a dinner and snacks with the aid of those tables, and even did our homework or whatever.  Mom's here taking advantage of one doing what appears to be some kind of crochet project.  She was always doing something.  Any kind of art talent I had in me I think has to come from Mom, and now is passed on to Alexandra.  My artwork was a joke compared to my kid's!  But that's how all parents want it to be, right?  For our kids to succeed ourselves.  I'm pretty proud of the stuff Lex comes up with. You can see that Mom's wearing her wedding ring, long after Dad died.  Despite all of their troubles, she was faithful and loyal right to the end, and even beyond

 The Mitzi gets some couch time with the acne riddled Me. I loved that sweater that I have on there.  Mom gave it to me one Christmas..  In fact, in all these youthful pictures, Mom bought me pretty well all my clothes, seeing as I was still in school and stuff.  It's not brown, right?   I have mixed emotions looking at this.  It brings me back to a rather tortured time when I was dealing with such bad acne.  The names I was called, the stigma attached to it all, pretty much forcing me into exile at my own house, which is why you see all these pictures taken at home.  I couldn't get a date to save my life, much less get a girl to look at me at all.   But times changed.  I remember my brother Peter used to tell me he had acne issues, too, so he related with what I dealt with, making me feel way less alone.  It sort of softened the blow of ridicule that I often felt in school, when I'd find out 'friends' were making fun of my 'pizza face' behind my back.  Toda

This is me playing that black drumkit that I mentioned before that I bought off of Mr. X.   I think this kit had 8 drums to it, pretty big for me.  If I could afford 20 drums I'd get them!  But that's pretty unrealistic. The Peavey SP2's are lurking in the picture, which tells me I was singing backups with this practice session.  You can see a mic off to my side if you look close enough.  I would have to pull it towards me and away during mid-song to keep it out of the way.  Singing and playing came with practice.  I didn't find it to be very difficult. Thank God for those milk crates!  Or everything would be on the floor and harder to hear.  Not that we didn't play loud.  We played LOUD.  Probably likely because I laid the hammer down on those drums. I would suspect that this was an Asylum practice as we rehearsed for a gig at the Village Pub in Riverview back in those days.  Either that or the University Club Kacho, which was PACKED.  The cool thing about that Uni

Sticking with the YQM theme for this round of pics... this is Chris Goguen, the guy who produced our CD.  I think we were the first project he actually produced.  It was a learning curve for all of us.  Namely because I didn't get to record with a click track to keep time, so it was kind of off in places on the CD, and I'll take the blame for that.  In retrospect, I wish we could've recorded the whole thing live instead of sectionally. This guy made us sound pretty good, though, at least better than if we did it ourselves.  He's a pretty friendly guy who was ambitious with recording.  I can only imagine how our recordings would have sounded had he worked with us a little later in his producing career, but he did a fine job as it was. I remember Chris used to say 'Mike, you should learn guitar, you've got the basic idea!'  I did, after all, write a few riffs on guitar, but I'd come up with them and get Pete to flesh them out fully.  So I could write that