BEVERLY WILLETT

Entries Tagged as: Parenting

05/11/18

Pocketbooks, Spider Webs, and Pre-Mother’s Day Blessings

Some women are obsessed with shoes. I’m more of a bag lady. But, like Nora Ephron, I also hate my purse, especially last Saturday when I changed pocketbooks three times in one day. Connecting the dots a few days later, however, it ended up being a good thing.

“Where’s your purse?” I asked a good friend the night before. She was about to make a purchase, but there was nothing hanging on her shoulder, tucked under her arm, or strapped to her back or midriff. She’d been known to misplace her bag, though, and her hands were lazy dazy free.

“I don’t have one,” she said, slipping a slim wallet from her back pants pocket. My cheeks flushed with envy.

No Comments Tags: Attachment · Corliss on the Bay · Daughters · Fire Island · Garden · Goodwill · Kentucky Derby · Loss · Lowe's Home Improvement · Mother · Mother's Day · Motherhood · Nora Ephron · Parenting · Purses

02/14/14

Me, Nicki and Davy Jones

I was ten-years-old when The Monkees television show debuted on NBC, and I never missed an episode. I bought band paraphernalia with my allowance – a Monkees bracelet, a plastic hologram ring, trinkets I’ve kept to this day. I joined the fan club, too, and still have my official membership materials, along with every one of the group’s vinyl recordings. All four boys were adorable, but it was Davy Jones who captured my heart.

In 1967, my parents took me to see The Monkees perform at the Baltimore Memorial Auditorium in Maryland. That night I fell asleep clutching a copy of Tiger Beat magazine, as I did many other nights, listening to Davy recite On the Day We Fall In Love on my record player, absolutely certain he was speaking those words directly, and only, to me.

When I turned twelve, I decided that looking like Davy would draw us even closer. So I brought a picture of him to my mother’s hairdresser and asked her to give me a bowl cut exactly like Davy’s. How I, Beverly, a small-town girl of modest means, would ever meet the greatest teen idol of all time from Manchester, England, I didn’t know. It seemed an impossible dream. Still, though I wished and more than two decades later, my daughter would make my deepest childhood wish come true.

5 Comments Tags: Artful Dodger · Daughters · Davy Jones · Daydream Believer · Divorce · Hammerstein Ballroom · Manhattan · Micky Dolenz · Mother · Motherhood · Oliver · On the Day We Fall in Love · Parenting · Peter Tork · Rock Concert · Teen Idol · The Monkees · Tiger Beat · Where Is Love? · Wish

" Ostensibly about the break-up of her marriage and loss of her dream house, a four-story Victorian brownstone in Brooklyn's Carroll Gardens neighborhood, Beverly Willett's absorbing memoir is really about finding a home in one's own skin. A delight."

Courtney Hargrave, Author of Burden: A Preacher, A Klansman and a True Story of Redemption in the Modern South, a major motion picture starring Forest Whitaker

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Entries Tagged as: Parenting

Pocketbooks, Spider Webs, and Pre-Mother’s Day Blessings

Me, Nicki and Davy Jones

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