This Week's Homework: 'M' is for the ...

For this week's homework, Scalzi asks:

Weekend Assignment #58: Post one of your favorite mother/child pictures. This could be a picture of you and your mother (at any age), or a picture of you with your children (again, at any age), or even one of your spouse and kids. But it should be a mother who is important to you personally.

Extra Credit (this is an optional part of the assignment): Share a piece of fun trivia about your mom.

Hmm.  When I was thinking about what photo to use, I had forgotten the bit about me having to be in the picture too.  But I decided on using this one, and this is the one I'm going to use.  I'm just a rebel that way.

There are a lot of things I've gotten from my mother.  You can argue till the cows come home whether I picked them up by some sort of biological predisposition or if it was just that she was so enthusiastic about things that her love for them ended up rubbing off on me.  But whatever way you slice it, I picked up mom's math nerdiness, her love of science fiction, and her theatre geekiness.

Oh yeah.  Big time Theatre Geeks, we are.  Sometimes, she'll just leave my dad at home and hop on a plane to come see plays with me.  That's just Our Way.

And, one of those times, we ended up in New York.  At a theatre flea market and charity auction.  (For details, see this entry.)  At the flea market, different Broadway shows set up different tables or booths, where they try to out-do each other with fun and exciting ways to get you to part from your money in support of the cause -- maybe by selling off props or autographed playbills, or other fun things.  Which brings us to the booth for The Producers.

If you've seen the musical, you know it involves an ensemble of "Little Old Ladies" (young men and women dressed as little old ladies).  One of the highlights is a dance number in which the Little Old Ladies, all identically dressed, do a "tap dance" in which their taps aren't made by their shoes, but by their walkers.  (It's in questionable taste, but funny as hell.)  And, at the flea market (for a small donation), you could get your picture taken with two of the actual Little Old Ladies from the show.  Why, they'd even give you your very own walker to stand behind, and your very own little black handbag to dangle over your arm.

Thus, my mom:

Isn't that the best?