the voice in my head has a voice in his head... things get fun sometimes.
this is me. i had to build em a house.
of course, i have a story about this - my favorite adult moment with my baby sister. sis & i are very different and she was very timid growing up. i would make up characters which embodied whatever she was afraid of in order to take it down a peg and help her deal widdit. one thing i noticed about the characters is that it felt like they sprung up wholecloth - i knew exactly where they were going as soon as they occurred to me. this helped alot when i got my comedy show on radio - boiling down long improvs was how we did most of the writing.
me & sis grew up without much in common, kept only loose contact thru the decades. when we did talk, they were long conversations and she would usually want to revisit one or another of my characters or elicit a new one if she was blue. once when i visited, i started doing the inner monologue of her very nervous chihuahua dog just for grins and, after the pet died, she would call me just to "talk" to Cisco again.
sis never married. in her early twenties, she fell in love with an older, married man and they had a 25yr affair. when her beau's wife died, she assumed that her day had finally come - tho it was too late to start a family. that wasn't the case - the dood immediately started hunting for a new slave to keep the homefront and told sis, "this wont stop our Mondays & Thursdays, though". sis found the heartbroken courage to break up with him.
my parents call me worried about sis, said she was so inconsolable they didn't know if she might do something. i called her, found her almost entirely inarticulate with pain, knew i had to send someone special to the rescue. what my mind conceived was almost miraculous. out of my mouth came the only lady more pitiful than my sister at that moment. addled, agoraphobic, criminally lonely, all she had beside her fears to keep away the jet nether of the void was the mad facts she'd accumulated from gossip mags and happytalk shows and the thrill of buying any ol' thing she wanted on mail order (Amazon hadn't quite taken over yet). for some reason, this character had always just bought a new pair of pink slippers to tell sis about when she called, so much so that sis called her the Pink Lady. it did indeed seem to get sis out of her funk and i called her every few days as Pink Lady til the fog lifted. to this day, in person or on the phone, sis regularly asks after "her".
i moved back east, to a carriage house on my best friend's property outside Boston, not long after the Pink Lady thing. sis lived about 20 minutes away and invited me, my pal & his young wife over for dinner soonafter, and my pal's wife quickly returned the favor. the wife liked to have bigtable dinner parties so there were their social friends, including the unofficial "mayor" of the neighborhood, a blustery well-to-do guy who was a strong presence on local talk radio. he had already commented quite often on how vociferously i played with my host's 4yo son in the yard, on how odd it was to watch a 60yo, 300+lb man swordfighting a toddler while wearing a bathrobe with epaulets and sandbucket helmet.
the dinner was pleasant & cordial, my shy sis contributing as little as possible. i can't remember how the subject came up, but somebody mentioned pink slippers. that gave sis an opening to chime in.
"one of my brother's personalities wears pink slippers"
if you look up "gobsmacked" in the dictionary, i'm guessing you'll see a picture of the people at that dinner table. from that day, the "mayor" talked to me like Mel Torme to Kramer, the other neighbors would point & talk as i passed, even my hostess has looked at me mostly bemusedly ever since. i dont laugh unsolicited very often, but i been giggling the entire time i've spent writing this up, thinking about em. don't know if it translates but, there you go...