Huffington Magazine Issue 48 | Page 29

Voices smiled and told me it gave her the ability to see the truth. I believed her. She had a way with words, too, and reading the diary I asked her to keep in the last six months of her life was all the proof I needed that, in another time, another place, she would’ve been a novelist. Or a poet. Or perhaps an editor as her son would become many years later. So maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised when, on my 18th birthday, she introduced me to culture. Culture came in a plain white envelope that contained two tickets to a Broadway show along with a simple note in her looping script that said, “I know you’ll enjoy this. Love, mom.” The show was Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, hardly a likely choice for the wife of a bricklayer and daughter of an immigrant day-laborer, who worked as a secretary at a car dealership. It was an unexpected gift on many levels. What had prompted my mother to present me with theater tickets in the first place? I had not yet shown any particular passion for the arts and none for the theater. My idea of culture at the time consisted largely of going to see Doctor Zhivago twice (mostly for Julie JOHN MONTORIO HUFFINGTON 05.12.13 Christie) and never missing an episode of The Twilight Zone. When it came to aesthetic refinement, I was, as they say, a late bloomer. And then, of course, I have to wonder even now, why was she inspired to choose this chilling and funny play about death? That year, as I look back, there were other My mother had dreams, and there was poetry in her. And she had an intriguing beauty, with chestnut hair and one blue eye and one green.” more fanciful options on Broadway — Annie Get Your Gun, I Do! I Do! and Cabaret were all playing to packed houses. Why didn’t she pick one of those musicals? On the night of the performance, I put on the one corduroy sports coat and solid tie I owned and took a bus into the city with the girl I’d taken to the senior prom only a few months earlier. She wore a red dress and heels and smelled of White Shoulders Powder. We settled into our mezzanine seats only minutes before the lights went down. The week before, I had