When I was in sixth grade, my mom left husband #3 and we moved to Poteau to live with my grandparents. This move was fundamental in how the rest of my life would go, my hopes, my dreams, and really the woman I would become. I'm not sure how it changed my mom, but it did put her in an odd place for a while.
My mother knew she was in a bad situation and needed to leave that asshole husband of hers, but she hated living with my grandparents. Faced with the prospect of feeling like she was always disappointing my grandfather and the outright snide comments from my grandmother, Mom threw herself into overdrive to find a way to get out from under their roof as soon as possible.
She got her usual job in the food industry, but knew she could take shifts doing something else as well. One of her friends had this strange kind of private investigation/gift business going on. She hired my mom to be a character actress.
In essence, Mom's job was simple. She dressed up in costume, met the gift recipient, pranked them, and then gave them their balloon bouquet. But what Mom turned this into was something of an art form.
She knew quite a lot about makeup and costuming. She and her boss gathered up their materials from various places to create her looks. The physical part was only a minor aspect of what she could do. Within her characters, my mother fashioned personality quirks, speech patterns, physical movements.....even looking right at her and knowing it was her, I had a difficult time believing it.
The best one was The Bag Lady. Mom had this series of mismatched clothes, a large bra she'd constructed really droopy breasts into, a fake butt, the worst hat in the world, and this way of scrinching up her face to where she looked like she had twitch issues. She had a shopping cart and all kinds of stuff in it.
The basic gig is that she would walk up to someone or step into their place of business and begin talking to them. She'd talk about how she was their aunt or their mom's friend of something like that. She'd bring more and more crazy into it and then, when they were totally of fgaurd, she'd give them their balloons.
She also had a clown costume. This one was less about the pranking and more straight forward. After all, you don't want to have people getting too emotional around clowns. Scary fuckers.
From what I have been told by various sources, the true magnum opus of my mother's work came in the form of no props or costumes, just her ability to make up believable bullshit. Various friends of a man who was having a birthday had her show up at a bar one night to give him his balloons. She walked in as her usual self, with only some basic facts of the man's history to go on, and convinced him she was his long lost daughter. By the time he was given his balloons, according to his own statements, he completely believed she was telling the truth.
As far as gifts go, what my mom did was pretty amazing. The balloons were the end result, but they were not the real gift being given. The gift was the experience. Having this strange moment in your life when some bizarre crap happened and thankfully, it was all just part of an act. You were in it though. It's one of those experiences you would never forget.
So when the holidays rolled around, Mom was doing a lot of gigs as Santa Claus. She had a fairly deep voice, so she pulled it off quite well. She'd walk into the lives of old ladies or guys doing construction, say her Santa Claus stuff, and give them their balloons.
I was at a new school and having to find ways to make new friends. I was sharing a room with my mom and brother, sleeping on mattresses piled high in the corner of a room. Most of my stuff was still in boxes and phone calls to my old friends in the old town were becoming less and less frequent. However, at least two or three times a week, I got to come home to the sight of my mother dressed as Santa Claus, beard on, red coat, and full of life in the way that people get when they have a really great creative outlet.
It really sucks that Mom's friend and her balloon business didn't take off. It was a good idea, sadly, our town just didn't have the population or funds to support it. I hate that it ended because my mother was GOOD at this job. I wish she could have found another one like it. She was amazing and when I think about times when I thought she was cool as hell, this is one of them.
My mother was Santa Claus. My mother was a bag lady. My mother was a Trickster in the truest sense. A prankster, a giver of gifts, a person who brought a moment to you when you realized life was more than just the mundane. As a mother, she had a lot of problems. As a person, quite often things fell apart for her, quite often because of her own decisions.
But one time, my mom convinced a man she was his daughter. And that's fucking awesome.
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