Book - Where Quirky Meets Menacing
This award winning book of true stories has been seen on the Today Show. An Autobiography in Collage - by Kim Smith 96-pages, a collection of 45 collaged stories from the life of artist Kim Smith. $30
2. My mom and dad married quite young. I’m sure my mom felt like she was raising 3 kids. One of my earliest memories is of sledding down a hill with my dad and sister on the overturned hood of an old abandoned car.
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3. Another early memory is of going to the dump at night and shooting rats as they ran in front of the headlights. I later discovered my co-worker Liz had the same early memory. We were so lucky!
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4. I learned to tie my shoelaces in a good, strong, double knot at an early age. When I was in kindergarten, I’d get home tired from tying the other kids’ shoes all day. I considered them to be unfortunate and neglected because their parents hadn’t taught them the way mine had.
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5. When I was little my sister was bigger, smarter and stronger than me. If I wanted to get back at her for something I had to do it in a pre-mediated covert manner. One time I placed thumbtacks on the floor and called her in to the room. It worked perfectly, but she is still bigger, smarter and stronger than me.
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6. When I was a little girl I frowned a lot. My mom would tell me to think pretty thoughts, so I would think about tulips. I don’t know if it did any good though, because I still frown a lot.
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7. When we were young, my mom made almost all of our clothes. I hated wearing store-bought clothes. Except that she liked to dress us to match, I was very lucky because they were beautiful, well-crafted and made from nice fabrics. I felt sorry for all of the other kids whose mothers couldn’t sew, because they had to wear store-bought clothes. You’d never know today, because as an adult I usually dress like a complete slob.
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8. When I was a child my mom told me that I didn’t like desserts. I believed her until I was about 25, when I tried them on my own. Boy was I surprised.
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9. In Pirmasens our backyard was a junkyard. On weekends my sister and I had free run of the place. We would build forts in a warehouse full of shoe leather remnants, slide down a chute into a basement full of paper, and play in bins of metal scraps. We often found treasures, like WWI era money, to take home to our mom.
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10. When I was little we would listen to Gun Smoke on the American radio station AFN. I wanted to be a saloon-girl like Miss Kitty because she was an independent, successful business owner and had the trust of the most important man in town. I didn’t realize that she was a madam and her name was a play on her occupation.
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11. My dad taught my sister and me how to do a lot of important things like jump on the bed, and spin the car on the ice. These lessons were usually prefaced with, “Don’t tell your mother.”
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12. When my sister and I were little we would walk our baby dolls up and down the street in carriages. The little old ladies in the neighborhood would stop us and coo over our babies. I always thought they were stupid, surely they knew the babies weren’t real.
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13. Rather than take my sister to the hospital when I jabbed a pencil into her leg, breaking off the lead, my father warmed a bottle in a pan of boiling water and tried to create a vacuum to suck the lead out. It didn’t work. To this day the lead is in her leg.
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14. My parents weren’t big believers in medical attention. When my crooked teeth were coming in, I was told to sit in a chair, read a book, and guide my teeth in by putting pressure on them with my fingers. It’s surprising my teeth are straight. I was a terrible reader and rarely read.
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15. When I was 6 living on Herzogstrasse, my sister locked herself in the bathroom. My parents were frantic trying to explain to her how to turn the key. I walked up and told her, “T.C. slide the key under the door.” After that my mom always said that I was calm in a crisis.
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16. Once when I was about 8 I was in the outhouse at the Ramstein Skeet Range. A rat crawled out of the hole and brushed my butt as it ran by. I flew out the door with my lavender jeans down around my ankles. But true to my nature of being a quiet child, I didn’t scream.
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17. Another time at the Ramstein Skeet Range, we were playing in the woods. I must have stepped on a bee hive because suddenly I had a swarm of bees buzzing up my jeans. I ran out of the woods into the parking lot while trying to tug off my jeans.
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18. In 1970, our family moved to Utah for 2 years. As part of our move, we took a long vacation through the Western States. That was the first T.C. and I were aware of meeting our relatives, and the first time we ever saw false teeth. I remember us looking in the bathroom mirror trying to pull our teeth out because our Grandma Hazel had removed her teeth and put them in a glass of water. Obviously, ours didn’t come out. We also had our cat, Porsche, in the truck that trip. She meowed the whole way. After that, she was a bitch for the rest of her life.
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19. When I was in the 4th grade my parents gave me a Pepto-Bismol pink parka for Christmas. I hated pink and consequently, hated the parka. I tried to ruin it by sledding down the hill on my back. The only thing that happened is that I got in trouble for getting my coat dirty. It took me 2 years to out-grow the ugly thing. To this day, my family won’t buy me pink.
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20. When I was in the 4th grade, my family failed at our attempt at having a dog and two ducks in the same yard. Bandito was a beautiful, muscular black and white dog – very strong and very active. We had to keep him tied up with a logging chain. On Easter morning my sister and I ran into the backyard to hunt eggs only to find that he had grabbed my sister’s duck by the neck and flung it all over the yard.
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21. My mom hates peas. They make her gag. Especially canned peas. Once, in Utah, our younger cousin Cindy came to stay with us for two weeks. My mom convinced her that if she ate peas she too would gag. To this day Cindy doesn’t eat peas.
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22. In 7th grade science class we raised our own mice for dissection. I snuck one home, named it Bertha, and hid it in a coffee can under the bed. Mysteriously, my mom said it got out; it was never seen again. The rest of the mice were dropped into a big bottle of formaldehyde. Unfortunately for me, I had the smallest hand in the class and was the only one able to stick it in the bottle to retrieve all their little dead bodies. They were really smelly.
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23. Also in 7th grade science class, we responded to an ad in a science magazine for free frogs for dissection. We waited in eager anticipation. A couple of weeks later, a mail plane went down and we never received our frogs.
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24. One day in 7th grade gym class, I realized that I had dog poop on my sneaker. Embarrassed, awkward and shy, I nonchalantly walked over to the wall and tried to scrape it off on the radiator. It worked to some extent. But since the radiators were on, I had myself worked into a perfect 7th-grader tizzy imaging that by the end of class the smell had permeated the entire gym.
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25. I grew up in the 60s and 70s listening to AFN on the radio. I was quite young when I gave up on hoping for peace in the Middle East, as I heard news of the turmoil every hour on the hour. But I gained an appreciation for all kinds of music because they played a different genre every hour. And at night we would lie in bed and listen to old radio shows from the 40s.
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26. When I was in about the 8th grade my sister and I had a beautiful miniature rabbit named Thumper. He was an indoor bunny, but we took him out one day to play in the grass. He must have eaten too much. When I brought him in and had him on my lap his stomach swelled beyond capacity. I’ll spare you the details, but he died while I was holding him. In shock and not knowing what else to do, I cried.
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27. One evening at the Sweat’s house the grown-ups were having a party. Us kids were supposed to stay in the bedrooms with the hallway door closed. But of course curiosity got the best of us. We huddled behind the door and peeked through the crack so we could see the action. This worked fine until I inadvertently stuck my finger in the door jamb and Ricky closed the door. At the snap of a finger, the room went silent and all heads turned.
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28. My sister and I once saw 2 UFOs while waiting for the school bus. One was a big ball of fire, the other a small orb with what looked like a haze around it. They came up from opposite horizons, met in mid-air and hovered for a moment, then turned 90° and receded below opposite horizons.
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29. My family traveled a lot throughout Europe with our little green camper. My sister and I had lousy sleeping bags, so at night we would heat the camper with a Coleman heater. When our parents cane home, they would turn the heater off and go to bed. This worked perfectly until I decided that I was tired of waking up in the middle of the night freezing. I hid the cover to the heater under my dirty clothes. Later that night, as it glowed red hot, my mom accidently sat on it while undressing. Her scream probably work up half the campground. The next morning she showed me a perfect grid from the top of heater seared on her butt.
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30. In our teens, our best family friends had 2 sons, Ricky and Colby. We would travel with our parents to skeet ranges around Germany. Us kids would head off for the day to see where adventure would take us. We climbed hills that looked like the Sound of Music, built a raft and launched it on the Danube, and once in Neu Ulm had a fight with thousands of dead beetles piled along the roads. We managed to tree my sister by chucking them into her waist-length hair, She was mad at us for days. That same weekend, I stepped on a banana slug while running through the woods in my bare feet. It squished between my toes, Karma, I suppose.
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31. In the 70s, we skied with our friends Ricky and Colby and the Johnson girls. Talk about a lucky childhood, we got to ski in the Alps. It was such a sense of freedom to head off for the day in search of the best runs. At lunch we’d try to find a parent to buy us lunch so that we could save our allowance for souvenirs. And at the end of the day, we’d pull out the trail map to find our way home before the last lift closed. At night the adults would party and we’d explore the town.
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32. My Uncle Rex used to take me to the woods in Kaiserslautern to teach me how to ride his motorcycle. Later, my father was adamant that I ride his big bike on my own. I fought him on it, but he won. So when I drove away, I tipped it over and fell off. He ignored me and picked up the bike. I was happy that I’d broken the brake handle and walked home in a tiff.
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33. We lived in Germany during the mid-70s energy crisis. One winter, driving was banned every other Sunday. Our family would join friends and have parties that went from house to house. One night, walking home in the snow down the long, winding road to our house my sister and I convinced our mother we were tired so she would pull us on the sled. It’s amazing how much energy she always has.
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34. In spring 1976, my mom, sister and I went to Yugoslavia for a week. My father stayed home because he wasn’t allowed behind the Iron Curtain. We had an amazing week exploring the Dalmatian Coast. We camped some and stayed a few nights in big Soviet-style resorts hotels that had very few guests. Even back then people knew that when Tito died, the country would fall apart.
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35. In 1977, my mom and I made our last trip south before moving back to the States. We meandered through Southern Germany and Austria with no solid plan. We shopped, ate well and I got to ski one last time in Austria. On our way home, I requested that we stop at Dachau outside of Munich. It was an overcast, dreary day, and I wasn’t prepared for the impact it would have on me. I can’t remember if I said a word the whole time we were there. To this day, I can’t talk about it without choking up.
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36. When I was 18 and lived in L.A. I was beaten up by a homeless woman on my way to school one day. Dressed in a white petticoat and lace socks, I felt wimpy. After she shoved me around a bit and scratched my face she walked away. When I turned to walk into the building I realized a crowd had gathered. A man came over to me and said “You need to be careful what you say to people.” I looked at him and said, “Yes, and thank you for helping me asshole.”
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37. Once I wrecked a car that I was test driving. While I was backing up on the sales lot the agent kept yelling at me, “Watch out for that Starion! Watch out for that Starion!” I kept looking and backing up, saying “What Starion? What Starion?” When I finally hit it, she said, “That Starion.” I looked her dead in the eye and said, “THAT is a Toyota Corolla.” Back inside the showroom, she asked if I liked the car. I told her, “ Of course not, I can’t see out the back window.”
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38. I used to live in a Chinese sewing factory with an 80 year old Chinese lady we called Goo. The building was later sold to a dot com for $12 million.
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39. I grew up in the shadow of the Iron Curtain during the Cold War. I literally had an image in my mind of an iron wall – dark, tall and imposing. What lay beyond was only darkness. I don’t think my U.S. raised friends understood my tears of joy when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. Nor did they realize the significance of my first trip to Prague and Budapest.
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40. In the 90s, I would go to Mara’s cabin in the woods. After dinner we would sit on the deck, drink scotch, smoke cigars, and throw our table scraps over the edge to attract bears. As they would approach we’d turn our flashlights on to scare them. Is it any wonder her step-father would get mad at us?
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41. I once stayed on the phone with an obscene phone caller for half an hour because I thought it was my ex-boyfriend. He sounded very strange and said he’d taken ecstasy, which caused me great concern. I was flattered, angry and concerned all at once. I didn’t find out it wasn’t him until 4 hours later when I called to check up on him.
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43. Every year my mother gets two turkeys and names one Thanksgiving and the other Christmas. A couple of years ago, we ate Christmas for Thanksgiving though, because he kept pooping on the porch and my mom was tired of cleaning it up.
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44. My father is one of those people that can fix anything. He also likes to tinker and run experiments. One time when I went home to visit my parents, he had a distillery in his bathroom and was making hooch. It smelled nasty.
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45. After 4 years of internet dating as a straight woman in San Francisco, my photos were stolen and posted in NY as part of a lesbian couple looking for sex. What upset me the most is that I was billed as the older woman.
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