TWO VERY DIFFERENT BUT DIGNIFIED LADIES

My mother's mother, Babs Hunter Reavis, in 1968. She was known for her imperious beauty and reading everyone every time and all the time. She lounged around her French provincial living room in her townhouse on 80th street having cordials and talking to her daschund. This is actually a very casual and informal picture of her (and I'm sure she would be unwell for the armpit shot). She was usually more dressed up. Babs was very vain and we were not allowed to call her Grandma, but rather Taiti. I thought she was a lot of fun and so fabulous that when she died I even had my sitter who was in art school make paper dolls of her for me to play with which she was really creeped out by but made nonetheless (I wasn't allowed to have real ones). I would be playing with He-Man and a Babs paper doll would walk up and read everyone.


My mother with my father's mother, Inez Eitel, at her house in Connecticut in front of the portrait of Aunt Sophie Ruggles (who, oddly, my Dad resembles. There's a little framed photo of him as a child on the table in front of it). Inez was a Christian Science practitioner (not scientology, actually even more obscure. It was the religion I was raised under). She spent her time in stillness for hours on end sitting healing people. My dad says he would go to bed at night and then get up for school in the morning and that she would still be sitting there with a copy of Science and Health by Mary Baker Eddy in her hands. She died a few days before I was born and predicted I would be a boy and what my coloring would be.

I remember that room. It had some sort of real bark fiber wall paper and a canvas ceiling, something from another time. The hung canvas ceiling was very fragile and dented easily and I intentionally dented it with a broom in front of my dad during some well staged adolescent acting out. Good times.