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21 Childhood Revisited as a Musical Debussy’s Claire de Lune and me lying beneath an oak in the yard searching beyond the nest of branches that I might discover something personal in the sky not the storm riding in on an easterly, but my grandmother, Sittu—Ride of the Valkyries, a woman who’s been taught to worship the men in our family with the reverence of Handel’s Messiah, and me—Bombastes Furioso, a tragic comic opera—not for my humor, more my DNA—girl not to be encouraged. In the farce the men shoot each other over a woman. Then stand to do it again for applause. I was shooting for My Fair Lady, damsel in new dress, All I want is a room somewhere . . . knowing Sitto would sooner lock me up than send this Liza Doolittle to the ball— Yet there were times she abandoned her chorus of fates and furies. Saturday nights when the theme from I Love Lucy filled the room, I watched her drop her mask of tragedy, laugh with burlesque abandon, covering her mouth to suppress her natural impulse. Let me en-ter-tain you, let me make you smile— the Gypsy inside aching to sing out. ...

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