There's a giant new ad on a bus shelter downtown that reads:
YOUR DAD WAS NOT A METROSEXUAL.
The photo is of a white Lutheran-y kind of dad guy with some guy-pals in a boat, being manly killers of fish.
(The bus went by too quickly for me to see what the ad was for.)
I'm sure this funny juxtaposition works for many Midwestern Americans, but it doesn't apply to me. My father wasn't exactly a metrosexual--which for his generation would've been someone like Cary Grant--but he sure wasn't Mr. Cleaver or Opie's dad.
He was sorta more like Jack Kerouac meets the Godfather, grows a beard, and works for civil rights. Something like that.
He even wrote a poem (!) about how the one time he brought a fish home when he was a boy, his mother didn't believe he had caught it. Did this emasculating experience push him into being an... intellectual?
The photo of my father, here, is from the late 1960s, I think. He's standing in his office (I recognize the poster of caricatures of American presidents behind him--he taught poli-sci), with a drawing someone made of him.
I'll have to ask him what the scoop is.
He replied:
"The photo of me looking at me was done when I ran the Upward Bound program (for poor urban black teens) in 1966. There was a student program and one of the kids made that drawing of me!! Pretty good likeness."
YOUR DAD WAS NOT A METROSEXUAL.
The photo is of a white Lutheran-y kind of dad guy with some guy-pals in a boat, being manly killers of fish.
(The bus went by too quickly for me to see what the ad was for.)
I'm sure this funny juxtaposition works for many Midwestern Americans, but it doesn't apply to me. My father wasn't exactly a metrosexual--which for his generation would've been someone like Cary Grant--but he sure wasn't Mr. Cleaver or Opie's dad.
He was sorta more like Jack Kerouac meets the Godfather, grows a beard, and works for civil rights. Something like that.
He even wrote a poem (!) about how the one time he brought a fish home when he was a boy, his mother didn't believe he had caught it. Did this emasculating experience push him into being an... intellectual?
The photo of my father, here, is from the late 1960s, I think. He's standing in his office (I recognize the poster of caricatures of American presidents behind him--he taught poli-sci), with a drawing someone made of him.
I'll have to ask him what the scoop is.
He replied:
"The photo of me looking at me was done when I ran the Upward Bound program (for poor urban black teens) in 1966. There was a student program and one of the kids made that drawing of me!! Pretty good likeness."
