Infected Worldmind

“I have four children, and I was a terror. My daughters made me believe in a thing called karma. I’ll never forget saying to my older daughter, ‘Why do you want to go to a Halloween party as Marilyn Monroe? You couldn’t think of another woman to be?’

“I gave her the litany of why you should want to be Zora Neale Hurston and Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth. I gave it to her, and she turned and looked at me and she said, ‘But Dad, Pony Boy is Freddy Krueger. He’s Freddy Krueger. You didn’t tell him to be Malcolm or Martin or Frederick.’ And I just looked at her and said, ‘I like the wig.’

“And she went as Marilyn, and what I had to understand from that experience was for her as a young woman, one of her first definitions of beauty are going to be these superstars. This woman has been a definition of beauty for 50 years, and there’s nothing I can do to combat that. All I can do is embrace that and tell my daughter, ‘You’re the most beautiful chocolate Marilyn I’ve ever seen in my life.’ That allowed us to get closer because she could see that her dad didn’t have expectations that were beyond her and not for her brothers.”