Voices
At 14, in true hippie fashion, my father stopped cutting his hair, started hiding an ash tray under his bed and picked up a guitar. Just a couple of years later, he watched my mother sing for her audition to the 87th St. Gang, their high school’s folk group. “He told them to pick me because I was cute,” she always chimes in at this point in the story. She got in and six years later married my father with flowers in her hair before they moved to San Francisco so he could try to make it big with his band. Had he succeeded, my parents’ early life would make a hit biopic, complete with stills of my mother in hotpants and my father’s face obscured by a massive beard.
By
Perry Collins
March 22, 2007
