My favorite adolescent photo of my daughter Emma, (seen last week at age 5 along with Jonathan Pryce). I don't write about her much on this blog, because she's nearly 21 now and out of respect for her privacy I keep the current references to her to a minimum. But she was (and still is) an incredibly cool person.
As previously noted, her tastes have always run in extremely eclectic gamuts. In addition to the aforementioned affection for Baron Munchhausen, she was a Marx Brothers afficionado at age 6. Not only did she watch every film, but she read every biographical book she could find about them. She loved musical theater (in part due to my marriage to an actor/stagehand, but also due to the influences of her gay babysitter, or "manny", Arthur), British television (a huge Red Dwarf fan), and anything related to science fiction. She loved old movies, the campier the better. A subscription to the American Movie Channel magazine was a treasure for her.
While other girls her age were playing with Barbie dolls, Emma bought baby name books and invented families and their family trees. I bought her geneology software so she could transcribe the huge 3-ring binder full of these trees into electronic files. She would then write epic stories of these families, ala The Thornbirds, except the children in her stories went to places like "The Judy Garland Elementary School".
Her passion for Buffy the Vampire Slayer led to the buidling of several fanlisting sites (all have been taken down, but they were very cool) and several fanfiction submissions that got rave reviews on the web.
She was a challenge in high school, for sure, because being so unconventional made it difficult for teachers to keep her interested. She aced her SATs but considers herself "not a school person", so she's working a couple of part time jobs while I sit here, hoping that she'll use her multitude of talents and skills and unique personality to wind up in a good place.
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