BOSTON RUNS ON DUNKIN’… ENMESHMENT
I know you’re familiar with Boston. So you’ve probably heard of our whole thing with Dunkin’ Donuts.
Our thing. Well, for the record, I’ve never been quite as on board with the place as my fellow Bostonians are, and especially not as much as my family is. I find the place a bit sugary. A bit unsubtle. It’s not like I won’t go there, but it really is a few-times-a-year kinda thing with me. They make a decent blueberry muffin. And I think the Boston cream donut is all right.
Everyone has their Dunkin’ order, though. My Aunt Joan always orders a large coffee with eleven milks and two Equals. Yes — she has an exact number of pumps of milk that she specifies, and it is in the double digits. And yes — she does have a Dunkin’ where this order is “the usual,” and where she knows the personal business of every teenage girl working behind the counter.
Joan and my Aunt Catherine go to Dunkin’ every single day. Multiple times a day. If for some reason you cannot find them, there are definitely Dunkin’ locations where you stand a decent chance of locating them, or at least of talking to someone who knows where they are. Because they inevitably share their entire life stories with their Dunkin’ girls, becoming enmeshed with them in the same way Dr. Isaac Herschkopf was with his psychiatry patients.
Joan is an office manager for a hospice company, and frequently decides she is going to help one of her Dunkin’ girls live out her very own Horatio Alger story, freeing her from her pink-and-orange Dunkin’ garb by giving her an office job.
Every time, this goes horribly. Things always start with Joan crowing about what a wonderful thing she is doing for the girl, raising her up by her bootstraps; then, they gradually devolve into “problems” with the new hire; and finally, one day, a tearful announcement is made that Joan had to let the girl go.
My Nana and I would call it “The Cycle,” and we thought it was hilarious. Nana lived with Joan and Joan’s husband Craig at the end of her life, and I would call her every day on the phone to talk (until the day she died). So she’d keep me updated on Joan and her new hires:
“So what else is new, Nana?”
“Well, let’s see. Joan hired a new girl from the Dunkin’ Donuts. Destiny.”
“Oooh! The Cycle has begun?! Where in the Cycle are we?”
“Well … apparently Destiny has been having a hard time showing up to work on time.”
We’d both start cracking up. (We laughed a lot on our phone calls.)
Nana and I always wondered if the girls ended up going back to work at the Dunkin’, or if Joan had left them totally jobless and bereft. Once a girl had been disappeared, however, she was off-limits for discussion with my aunt.
One thing was certain, though: even repeated failures to acclimate these bright, young fast food workers to office work were not going to stop Joan from trying again. And again. And again.
Nevertheless, she persisted.
A FAMILY AFFAIR
My Aunt Catherine really takes the coffee cake when it comes to her Dunkin’ order, though. Catherine doesn’t just leave the place with a lahge regulah and a donut. Indeed, she has, on multiple occasions, walked out of the place with new, adopted family members.
Yes, Catherine has fully “adopted” numerous Dunkin’ girls over the years. None officially, at least that I know of. If any of her adopted daughters ever got that honor though, it was probably Jacqui. (Yes, that’s how she spells it.)
Jacqui is a very attractive Brazilian girl, who may or may not have her own mother. Regardless, one day, about twelve years ago, Catherine — or “Cathy,” as she is wont to be called when she is at Dunks — walked out with a teenaged Jacqui on her arm, and has been calling her her daughter ever since. Day after day, to anyone who will — or won’t — listen.
Jacqui even lived with Cathy, her second husband Roland, and my cousins Timothy and Stephanie, at some point. One day, Jacqui began appearing at family birthday parties and holidays, where she was introduced to us as our cousin, news to us. Breathless updates about Jacqui’s life were provided to Nana every day, when Catherine called her on her drive home from work.
“Your granddaughter Jacqui enrolled in her teaching program today,” Catherine would brag. “I was so fuckin’ proud of her. I told her, that’s my daughter!”
“Wow, darling. Isn’t that wonderful,” Nana would respond.
I have to say, if Jacqui was indeed our cousin, she made an unusual, and somewhat uncomfortable, addition to the family — especially for some of my male family members. Both my brother and Jacqui’s (presumable?) brother, Timothy, wanted to fuck her, although I don’t think either one of them ever did. (Catherine would have had a heart attack if they had.)
Jacqui did date one of our second cousins, though. James, a dentist who lives up in New Hampshire. The two of them met at a family reunion for the northern New England branch of our extended family. They had a torrid, six-week romance, which led to a horrible, drama-filled breakup.
That didn’t stop Jacqui from showing up at the family reunion again the next summer, though, despite James saying he never wanted to see her again, and the reunion being at his house. She is family, after all! This led to a huge scene, tears, and our side of the family not being invited to the get-together since.
(Not a huge bummer for me, to be honest. I don’t typically attend these events. But I wasn’t surprised when Nana told me about it all, either — Jacqui obviously took after her mother, Catherine. She did things her way.)
ARTS AND CRAFTS AND SINGERS AND SONGWRITERS
Catherine is one of my mother’s older sisters. She’s probably around 60 years old now. I was much closer with Catherine when I was a kid. She would look after my brother Harris and me a lot back then, making the two of us more like siblings with our cousins Timothy and Stephanie.
I had a fun time over at Catherine’s house. I would play Super Mario Brothers with Timothy on his Super Nintendo, and sometimes go and play with the girls who lived in their neighborhood. We would use sticks to draw pictures in a patch of dirt in the backyard that refused to grow into grass. (Eventually, the girls all got in a huge fight over who I was spending time drawing with, to my horror. Not the first time I have been completely oblivious as to what is actually going on with me and girls.)
Catherine has had a multitude of jobs over the years, and back then, she worked at a bank and had a side business selling themed cakes. So her kitchen was constantly in action, and I would watch her use piping bags to decorate her cakes to look like a cow, or Mickey Mouse, or Santa Claus, whatever the theme was. She was really good at making cakes, and at creating decorations out of markers, construction paper and other supplies, too.
Our larger family often spent the holidays at Catherine’s. She always did a marvelous job at Thanksgiving (except for putting rice in the stuffing for several years). Her first husband, Frank, would play that song “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” by Arlo Guthrie, and Catherine would sob hysterically when she said grace.
After Catherine and her sisters had drunk enough, the boots usually came out. My mother and all of my aunts were obsessed with boots. One year, I remember them clearing the living room furniture and all two-stepping to “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’” by Nancy Sinatra. (Without a doubt, my family are showmen, all of us.)
Catherine always made holidays fun for us kids. We decorated Easter eggs with her. Made Valentine’s Day cards for our classmates. Carved pumpkins and made cupcakes with orange frosting for Halloween. Googly eyes went on a lot of things.
Catherine also loved to color, and had her own signature way of doing so. Each part of a picture was outlined with a marker of an appropriate color, then gently shaded in, with a pristinely sharpened crayon. You could clock a work of Catherine’s instantly, by its vividly colored edges.
The kids would color with Catherine a lot, too, either at her house, or up at my grandparents’ lake house in Quebec. She loved to play her favorite music, almost exclusively singers and songwriters from the ’70s (her heyday), while we colored. She liked songs like “Tin Man,” by America, “Band on the Run” by Paul McCartney & Wings, “So Far Away” by Carole King, and, especially, “Aubrey” by Bread.
For the record, I loved this. I thought, and continue to believe, that AM Gold slaps. The radio vixen Delilah was basically the only game on the radio once you drove up to northern New Hampshire, and all of us loved her golden voice and groovy tunes. Catherine would often lead us children in song, like we were the von Trapp Family Singers and she was Julie Andrews.
I remember one afternoon, driving to the grocery store in tiny Coaticook, Quebec, in the back of my mother’s hearse, harmonizing to “California Dreamin’” by the Mamas & the Papas, as we flew past the dairy and strawberry farms that dot the landscape.
MAIN CHARACTER MUSIC
If you know someone with main character syndrome, or perhaps follow them online, you will have no trouble understanding Catherine. Catherine invented main character syndrome. And she has a particularly bad case of main character syndrome when it comes to music.
There are many songs, you see, that are Catherine’s songs. And each song has a story behind it:
“Forever in Blue Jeans” by Neil Diamond is her song with her second husband, Roland, and according to Catherine, it describes their carefree relationship perfectly. Jimmy Connolly, a boy from the old neighborhood, told her one afternoon in the early ’80s that “Crimson and Clover,” by Joan Jett & the Blackhearts, was his song to her, but she never figured out why. Catherine listened to “Live for Loving You” by Gloria Estefan when she baked, and had a signature move for it, where she twirled her wooden spoon when Gloria went, “Oooh, la la la la la la la!”
After Trump’s shock election in 2016, Catherine called Nana in tears, wondering, in between sobs, how America could have elected that horrible man, and lamented that if she had the world’s ears, she would sing the song “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing” by The New Seekers, because it was a perfect summation of her political philosophy and aspirations for mankind.
“Aubrey” by Bread, we were told, many times, was the name she wished she had named Stephanie. The beauty of this song, and of the name Aubrey, was so drilled into Stephanie’s (and the rest of our) heads that, a few years ago, when Stephanie had her own daughter, she named her — you guessed it — Aubrey.
I bonded over music with Catherine a lot. I never quite understood why she felt praising Wings necessitated disparaging The Beatles, but still. About ten years ago, as a thank you for some help they had given me, I took Joan and Catherine to a Stevie Nicks concert at TD Garden in Boston. The Pretenders were her opener. How sick is that?
For all the women in my family, Stevie is their ultimate icon, as I know she is for many women. They dressed like her, they sang with her, they mirrored her journey through mental illness and substance abuse. So it went over really well as a gift, as I knew it would.
They both got dolled up in their ’70s garb, promptly got sloshed, and when Stevie started singing “Gold Dust Woman,” from her days with Fleetwood Mac, they went into a trancelike state, in which they appeared to be either conjuring a spirit, or being possessed by one. It was very dark, very smoky, witchy, Pocahontasy energy.
I was transfixed. The power of Stevie Nicks, people.
PUMPKIN BOY AND CHICK-CHICK GIRL
Since her granddaughter was already named after a song, I’m not sure if Catherine ever made up her own song for Aubrey. But when we were kids, she made up nicknames, and songs, for both of my cousins.
Timothy was “Pumpkin Boy,” and his song, in a sort of nursery rhyme singsong, was “Pumpkin boy, pumpkin’ boy! Sweet little lovin’ little angel boy!” (Timothy did not love that all of the cousins called him Pumpkin Boy for the rest of his life, after that.)
Stephanie, on the other hand, was known as “Chick-Chick Girl,” and her song was a little rockabilly-esque. It went, “Hey little chick, little chick-chick girl! Hey little chick, I’m gonna rock your world!”
We would sometimes call Stephanie Chick-Chick Girl, but our preferred nickname for her was “Bubble Girl,” because she sucked her thumb until she was 12 or 13, leaving a raised piece of skin on her thumb that formed into a bubble. (Yeah, little kids are mean.)
While Stephanie and Timothy are co-holders of the Jason Waterfalls Lifetime Achievement Award for Most Bizarre Misheard Song Lyrics, they too are musical like their mother. When he was five, Timothy’s Catholic school did a pageant, where they performed this hilarious song that went, “I am the church, you are the church, we are the church to-ge-ther! All who follow Jesus, all around the world! Yes, we’re the church to-ge-ther!”
Timothy really blew it out with his facial expressions, jazz hands, and pantomime during the song. He was the star. When Catherine went to the altar for communion during the Mass portion of the evening, she pocketed the host instead of eating it. The priest chased her back down the aisle, and commanded her to swallow it.
She was pissed, and cussed him out.
THE SPOON MAN
Catherine’s main character syndrome went far beyond songs. Sometimes, she’d make herself the main character on the actual news, being featured in local outlets repeatedly, always for memorable reasons.
Her very first media appearance was because of The Spoon Man.
You see, when us kids were elementary school age, Timothy went to a primary school down the street from Catherine’s house. The school had a big field, separated from the main road by a chain-link fence. One spring, for several weeks in a row, a lonely man would pull his car up to the fence, and when the kids were out at recess, he would take out metal spoons and click them together, doing some rinky-dink musical number to entertain them.
For the record, no one really knew what The Spoon Man’s true intentions were in clicking his spoons for the kids, innocent or not. But there absolutely were teachers out at recess with the kids, which is how Catherine ended up getting wind of The Spoon Man to begin with.
None of that mattered to Catherine, who loves nothing more than an opportunity to arch her back up and act first, leaving the questions for later (if at all). As soon as she heard about this old man and his musical spoons, her mind went immediately to pedophilia and molestation, and she roared down to the school in her Kia at recess time, to give The Spoon Man a piece of her mind.
Apparently, this caused a huge scene at the chain-link fence, which escalated when The Spoon Man began to make a hasty retreat, and Catherine started trailing him in her car. She eventually chased him into an empty church, where she ran him literally up to the altar, stuck her finger in his face, and told him that, if he ever came clicking his spoons again, or put his fuckin’ hands on her kids, or any of those kids, she would fuckin’ kill him. (“Fuck” is practically a definite article or adverb in Catherine’s vocabulary, and it peppers her speech with a frequency and ferocity matched only by hardened sailors. And she says it the Boston way, fahken.)
Catherine followed this performance with a call to the local ABC news affiliate, where she was portrayed as a heroic Mama Bear, defending her cubs, and mortified teachers and students were interviewed about The Spoon Man.
Who, incidentally, has neither been seen nor heard from since.
HORRIFIED AND AMAZED
Another time, Catherine and her first husband, Frank, hired a Saul Goodman–type local attorney to handle some legal work for them. After a few meetings and phone calls, however, the lawyer stopped returning Catherine’s messages. So she decided to go down to his office, near Thayer Academy in Braintree, Massachusetts, and investigate. (Catherine loves an investigation.)
She soon discovered that the lawyer had abruptly closed up shop and absconded, throwing all of his clients’ confidential files in a giant dumpster behind his office.
Catherine rifled through the dumpster, finding her files, before she called up The Patriot Ledger with her scoop.
Within days, she was on the front page, in a large picture of her, holding a bunch of files in the air, with a conspiratorial look on her face. It was very “Catherine investigates.” There was even a gigantic pull quote on the front page alongside her picture, where the newspaper quoted her as being “horrified and amazed” by what she had found.
For years after this, everyone in our family was horrified and amazed about everything. It was honestly a pretty apt phrase for much that occurred in Catherine’s world.
ANIMAL FARM
Catherine lived largely in a world of her own creation. This extended to her house, a colonial home known as the Asa Bradford house, which dates back to the 1700s and is on the historical register. Thematically, Catherine loves strawberries and roosters, and you could find them all over the house, on embroidered pillows, tables, the wallpaper, and in the cabinets, along with the good china.
Contemporary times have definitely caught up with Catherine’s neighborhood, as there is a strip mall across the street, featuring a Family Dollar and a Chinese restaurant, where Cathy and Roland go to play Keno.
This has not stopped Catherine from turning her property into a veritable farm, though. Over the years, she has had countless dogs, cats, guinea pigs, rabbits, and ferrets, many of whom have died in traffic, or been swiftly put down after biting a neighbor. (The deadliest profession in the world is being one of Catherine’s dogs.)
My brother and I were asked to babysit some of her animals a few times, when Catherine and her family went down to Florida to visit my grandparents at their Tampa house. I never understood the point of having a pet guinea pig, rabbit, or ferret. All they ever did was sit in their cages, shit, and shiver, like The Spoon Man had at the end of Catherine’s finger.
Having animals was a way of life for Catherine, though. When she was a girl, my grandfather domesticated a raccoon, which they called Ricky, as a pet for his kids. One of the neighbors, afraid of rabies, ended up poisoning it, apparently.
My grandfather, who we called Ganka, also got his kids a black horse, named April, who Catherine would ride for hours and hours at the (actual) small farm she was kept at, down the street from the family home in Weymouth, Massachusetts.
THE TWO BLACK PIGS
Having a horse as a girl left quite an impression on Catherine, and if she could’ve afforded it, I’m sure she would’ve loved to keep one in the small barn she has on her own property.
The closest she has ever come to a real farm animal, though, are her two pigs, who, like their owner, were seemingly destined for the spotlight.
After Ganka died, everyone in my extended family clamored for a chunk of Nana’s cash, knowing she was far more likely to let go of it than my grandfather ever was. One of Catherine’s financial requests was for the money to buy two pigs, which, for some reason, Nana granted.
The pigs were ostensibly a gift for Stephanie’s sweet sixteen. Us kids were thrilled when Catherine told us she was buying two pigs, thinking they would be cute and cuddly pink things, like the pig from Babe.
That is not what these pigs were. They were two black, warthog-like, very ornery, very coarse-haired pigs, who were unfriendly and physically dangerous to people. They (I can’t remember their names) lived in a fenced-in area in Catherine’s backyard.
For years, they were kept back there, grunting and snorting and remaining distinctly unsociable. Catherine would go to the pet store twice a month to buy their expensive food, telling them both to fuck off as they stormed at her.
Eventually, Catherine got tired of this rigmarole — as she tended to with most of the animals she took in — and decided to give the pigs away. Fortunately, one day, she met a woman — I am assuming at Dunkin’ — who owned an actual farm somewhere, and struck up a conversation with her. They ended up agreeing that the woman would take the two pigs, so that Catherine could be free of them, and they would have a nice new home.
In the days leading up to the pigs’ rehoming, Catherine let out a seemingly endless sigh of relief. She was so fuckin’ glad to be done with those goddamn pigs!
But then, something horrible happened — at least, horrible by Catherine’s logic. One afternoon, after the pigs had been at the farm for a few weeks, she logged onto Facebook — Catherine was a big Facebooker, for a time — and discovered that the farm was posting pictures and videos of the pigs, with kids and families coming to pet and play with them.
For the life of me, I could not tell you why this upset Catherine so much. Seemingly, the pigs having company and being loved should have come as welcome news. But seeing this woman put the pigs on Facebook like this — yep, you guessed it — horrified and amazed Catherine.
She was livid, and emotional, and acted like the woman was airing torture porn of the two pigs, tying them up and branding them, or something. This led Catherine to make a speedy journey two towns over, to the farm, where she cussed the woman out to within an inch of her life, took the pigs back, and returned them to her backyard, where they have been living, and consuming their biweekly portion of expensive pig food, since.
THE SAGA OF THE BUMBLEBEE
In addition to the real-life animal dramas on Catherine’s farm, there have also been donnybrooks involving fake ones. The saga of the bumblebee comes to mind.
In her front yard, which had a pretty garden she tended to as a hobby, Catherine had placed a metallic bumblebee, which was made out of scrap metal and painted in bumblebee black and yellow. It really did look nice, and Catherine was proud of it. It had a friendly, jaunty appearance, leaving an impression on passersby on the road.
One day, an old man even knocked on the door, to ask Catherine about it. As it turned out, his wife had noticed the bumblebee, loved it, and remarked upon it every time they drove by. He wanted to know where Catherine had bought it, so he could buy his wife one for her upcoming birthday.
This is when the legend of the bumblebee began. And, just like the Grinch’s heart at the end of the story, did the legend grow and grow!
According to Catherine, she found the bumblebee at a flea market, when she went down to Florida to visit Nana and Ganka with Frank. She had taken it back to my grandparents’ and fixed it up with my grandmother, painting the bee its bright colors as their mother-daughter bond deepened in a Hallmarkian way. It was a very special thing, and one of her most precious memories with her mother. Long story short, the bumblebee was one-of-a-kind.
Nana’s version of the story, by the way, was quite different. When she was told what Catherine said about their bumblebee moment, she laughed and said that Catherine and Frank had spent the entirety of that Florida trip hanging out with a bunch of hillbillies at the biker bar down the street from my grandparents’ gated retirement community. She and Catherine stopped at the flea market on one of the last days of the trip, were there for no more than 15 minutes, and purchased the bumblebee with zero fanfare. And that was the first and last time Nana had ever heard of it. She absolutely did not remember ever fixing it up or painting it with Catherine.
This did not matter to Catherine, though, and the bumblebee became even more special to her when the man showed up at her house a second time, wanting to buy the bumblebee off of her, at a very favorable price.
No way, she told him. This was, after all, a bumblebee that she and her mother had worked on together for years, putting it together from scratch, and that, when they finished painting it, under a double-rainbowed sky, had begun to shed tears like a statue of the Blessed Mother. How on earth could she ever part with it?
The best she could do was to let him take a few pictures of it, so he could find something similar to get for his wife. The man figured he would take what he could get, dutifully took some photos and thanked her.
But, just a few short weeks later, he turned up again. He had had no luck tracking down anything quite like Catherine’s bumblebee. And now, he wanted to take physical possession of the bumblebee, so that a friend of his could measure it and construct him one from scratch.
This is when Catherine put her back up and went The Spoon Man on the poor guy, cursing him off of her property, and telling him that if he ever showed up again, she would call the fahken police. How dare he try to take the last thing she and her dying mother had ever worked on together and experienced the rare phenomenon of mutual stigmata while painting?
The last visit was followed by weeks of vigilant paranoia that the man was going to come by and steal the bumblebee, so it was moved to the backyard, where it remains today.
Out front, Catherine left a sign reading:
MR. BUMBLE FUCK: COME BUZZING AROUND MY HIVE AGAIN AND YOU’RE GONNA GET STUNG. SIGNED, THE QUEEN BEE.
POST-OP, HOT TOPIC, SCHOOL BUS DYKE
For much of her adult life, Catherine struggled with her weight. Around when she turned 40, she had gastric bypass surgery, which turned her into a tiny little thing. Her new physique made her excited about buying and wearing clothes again, and led to a number of lifestyle and personality changes over the years.
One day, she started buying clothes from Hot Topic and Forever 21, at the South Shore Plaza in Braintree, Massachusetts. This disgusted my mother, who said her sister was dressing and acting like a sixteen-year-old. All the kids in the family thought it was hilarious. And Catherine was definitely doing it to be provocative, although all the weight loss significantly affected her ability to hold her liquor, so a big part of it was also just being kind of a lush at that point, and making delusional choices.
It was also during this period that Catherine switched careers. Over the years, she had worked as a banker, a part-time baker, a union official, and at a shipping company. But by far, her most memorable career is the one she tried her hand at during this transformative time in her life: school bus driver.
Catherine not only became a bus driver; she deeply acclimated into bus driver culture. I don’t know how she both got the kids to school on time and knew the business of every mother on the route, but she did. Everyone knew her. That’s a whole lot of screaming out of a folding door.
Life during this time was very much a Magic School Bus kind of vibe for Catherine, and she tried lots of new fun fashions then, too.
At one point, noticing that a lot of the other lady school bus drivers shaved their heads, she decided to, too. This was accompanied by Sinéad O’Connor–esque attire and references.
It actually turned out that most of these buzzcut lady bus drivers were lesbians, and on account of Catherine’s haircut, and the fact that she cursed like a sailor, they assumed she was, too.
I was in middle school at the time. Catherine knew my bus driver, who was a Black lesbian with a shaved head, and played “Got Your Money” by Ol’ Dirty Bastard and Kelis while driving 12-year-old children reading their Harry Potter books. She ended up inviting Catherine out to what turned out to be a lesbian biker bar with the other lesbian bus drivers.
Mizz Frizzle definitely don’t be swingin’ that way even a little, j’know what I’m sayin’? So she had to break it to her colleagues that she was straight. But, it was a night she never forgot, and one that every Dunkin’ Donuts girl in a five-mile vicinity surely heard about.
When I was in high school, Catherine asked me for a mix CD of the music I was listening to, so I made her one. (Apparently there was jealousy from my other aunts about this. Don’t you miss mix CDs?) I put “Short Skirt/Long Jacket” by Cake and “Loser” by Beck on it, and she became obsessed with them. Especially the Cake song.
I had given her the nickname Kitty at one point, because my high school mentor, former three-term nonconsecutive Massachusetts governor and 1988 Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis, had a wife named Catherine, too, and she went by Kitty (#riptoarealone). I thought it was a kicky name.
Everyone in the family took to calling Catherine Kitty, too, so she loved the line in the song that went, “she’s changing her name from Kitty to Karen / she’s trading her MG for a white Chrysler LeBaron.” Except in her case, it was a white Kia Sportage.
Catherine went to Paris once, with my grandparents and a few of her sisters. She hasn’t traveled much in life, and the trip was a big deal to her. It was actually very sweet. Her stories reminded me of that short with Margo Martindale in Paris, je t’aime (2006), where she plays a postal worker who visits the city. Except it was Catherine, so it was full of hilarious events, like a homeless person refusing her offer of bread, because it was Portuguese bread and not a baguette. (I love that even French hobos are snobs.)
Catherine fell in love with the city, and it became her personality for months afterward. She even redecorated one of the rooms in her house to become “the Paris room,” which was later converted into the Paris laundry room.
♦
What else is there to say about my Aunt Catherine?
In addition to being a character herself, I have seen flashes of Catherine in many TV characters over the years — Mrs. Patmore from Downton Abbey (Stephanie is Daisy), Carla Tortelli (Rhea Perlman) from Cheers, Roseanne, and Jerri Blank from Strangers with Candy. Catherine, aka Cathy, aka Kitty, contains multitudes.
I had a lot of fun with her as a kid. She spent a lot of time watching me, and I always felt safe and loved, even though she yelled a lot, and seemed to get angry very easily.
These days, I keep my distance from her, as I do with most of my family. Living in a fairy tale world may suit her — and I do astonish myself with my ability to conjure sometimes — but as an adult, I find that living in the real world better suits my mental health and overall functionality.
That doesn’t mean I don’t love her, though. Or have many fond memories of her.
The last time I spoke with Catherine was over text, right after Nana died. I found her obituary in The Patriot Ledger, and was surprised to learn that, in addition to Jacqui, I had two other cousins who I had never heard of before.
I was upset, and knew it was Catherine’s work immediately. I texted her:
“Earth to Catherine/Jacqui: you either get to fuck our cousin or be our cousin. Pick one. We are from Massachusetts, not West Virginia.
“… And who the fuck are Patrick Joseph and Aiden?!”
Love you, Kitty! ♦