My name is Seraphim Constantine, and if you've spent any time on YouTube, the odds are good that you already know who I am. Eight years ago, Artemis and Holly, my older twin half-sisters, were faced with a dilemma. Being pack-rats by nature, they’d held on to almost all of their childhood toys, refusing to part with even the most tattered of dolls or obscure gum ball machine prizes. By middle school, their rooms were filled to capacity with toys they were either too old or too busy to play with. Faced with the impending sale of their beloved childhood memorabilia, the twins got resourceful. More to the point, Artemis did.
The summer before 7th grade, Artemis, the eldest and arguably the most motivated of the Constantine girls, started a home-movie 'theater project.’ Holly and I got dragged into it when The Moms - my mother Sophie and the twins’ mom Val - decided that our heckling couples on Divorce Court was not a worthy past-time. Holly was put on recording duty and would help Artemis voice the dolls. I was given the task of making up scenes and sets for their little dramas - a job the twins had deemed boring. Artemis took the ‘interesting’ job; writing scripts for her show. Mostly she parodied things: books she’d read, TV shows and movies that she thought were either interesting, awesome, or really stupid. These, puns, and anecdotes from our family history gleefully supplied by The Moms, were her first material for Bitter Irony Productions.
No one can really remember where we got the name ‘Bitter Irony’, but it fit and we all liked it. The Moms created a YouTube account for us, helped us build a website, and bragged to friends. Between their nepotistic PR and the twins’ classmates who would help with voices sometimes, we had the beginnings of an audience.
The first two years of Bitter Irony Productions got the three of us attention, both online and in New Orleans where we lived. During that time, we each honed our respective skills. Artemis’ writing improved. Holly, in addition to becoming a video whiz, acted in almost every show, quickly becoming the official ‘face’ of Bitter Irony. I became the show’s Prop Mistress, dealing with sets, costumes, you name it, with occasional cameo appearances as the dour and smartass little sister.
When the twins went on to high school, they got involved with the student run local access channel. By the end of their freshman year, the show had moved out of our house and onto a sound stage. With a budget, cheap-to-free labor and a steady viewership, we had created a cult sensation. By senior year, Artemis had expanded from one show to three, with short bits, commentary, and contests interspersed between commercials. Eventually, the whole of New Orleans became the backdrop for Bitter Irony. And New Orleans came to love us for it.
Artemis earned an Emmy nomination for her writing last year and has been negotiating with a number of interested parties about moving the shows into syndication. Holly, post graduation, was whisked away to Broadway where she's been glorying in chorus line work and the occasional small part.
And I, meanwhile, took over the management of Bitter Irony. But while Artemis and Holly basked in the opportunities their talents had drawn to them, I seemed to attract only the dark side of fame. At the beginning of this year, it came to everyone’s attention that I had a stalker.
Let me tell you, having a stalker is not half as interesting as it sounds. I got a few irritating phone calls on the company voicemail, some creepy letters in the mail, occasional off comments in the fan site forums, but that’s it. I lived in a city with some of the highest crime rates in the country; that runs the annual risk of being flooded out by a hurricane, and go, wellwent, to a high school with rampant drug abuse. None of this, ironically, had ever given my mother Sophie, or the twins’ mom, Val, cause for concern. But having a stalker was a risk to the family, worthy of rearranging my life. Their answer to this crisis: send me to Baltimore City to live with my father.
My father, Mike Constantine, Baltimore born and bred, dated Valerie Grey during his junior year of high school. Over spring break, they did the deed and Valerie ‘went away’ for the rest of the semester. Dad, for reasons unknown - though ‘stupidity’ has been suggested -, didn’t realize that he was to blame. Life went on and he began romancing one of Valerie’s friends, Sophie Lorenzo, never suspecting that he was father to twins. They married a few days after graduation in 1988.
I was conceived in 1989 in a last ditch effort to save their marriage. Mom and dad were Catholic enough that they felt they could get away with naming me Seraphim, but not so Catholic that divorce hadn’t been an option when their brilliant plan failed. They stayed together until February of 1990 - long enough for me to be born within the sacrament of marriage in case my grandparents raised a fuss - then filed for divorce in March. And in the midst of the legal proceedings, Val re-emerged to see about getting some child support for Artemis and Holly, now three. (The resulting drama from that meeting is an epic saga involving many tears, screaming matches, and at least one pizzelli iron hurled at dad’s head. It’s a tale which The Moms will retell and embellish even more at the slightest provocation. The twins and I reenacted it with Barbie’s for our first Thanksgiving Special.)
In the end, mom and Val, having always enjoyed the company and friendship of each other more than dad’s, thought it might be fun to raise their little girls together. They returned to Nevada, where Valerie had been living with her parents and the twins since she’d conceived, and proceeded to do just that.
We stayed there, in relative peace and quiet, until I was 8. That was the summer before we started Bitter Irony. That summer was perhaps the busiest of my life up until now. I for one had had an accident that landed me in the ICU for a few months. Dad had moved to Kansas for a job, which was entirely too close for comfort in the Moms opinions. Then to top it off, one of my mom’s aunts died.
In her will, she’d left possession of her winter house to mom. Said winter house was in fact an old mansion in the Garden district of New Orleans. It was dirty, cluttered with mismatched furniture and lace doilies, suffering from wood rot near the foundation, and there was a snake nest in one of the closets. We all agreed to move in when we saw it had three bathrooms.
Dad, during all of this, had pursued a career with Baltimore’s boys in blue. He rose in the ranks pretty quickly. He became a detective for a while, and then took a job as sheriff of some farm town in Kansas; I’ve forgotten the name of it. Six years ago, he had a nervous breakdown, preceded by a series of psychotic episodes. He was booted from his job in Kansas, went into therapy for four years, moved back to his parents’ house, then tentatively rejoined the police in Baltimore.
The Moms never talk about dads’ breakdown. The subject was labeled completely taboo at home and, eventually, the twins and I learned to stop asking about it. Not that we really cared about him as a person; he’d never been involved in our lives enough for us to think of him like that. It was just morbid curiosity – and, I’ll admit, potential fodder for the show.
The twins and I had visited him occasionally as children. His parents had always made a fuss over the three of us, and been happy to take us off our mothers’ hands for the summer. But since their deaths, the only one of us to go back was Holly. Holly was peppy and friendly and pretty and, this part is vitally important, low maintenance. Even dad was usually happy to see her. But Artemis and I were too morose, too odd looking, and according to our Nana, a little too much like him for him to be happy with. So to Artemis and me, he’d made himself a stranger. And now, he was a mentally unstable stranger.
Dad lived in the house he’d grown up in, in a part of the city called Highlandtown. It was in what he assured me was still a nice place to live in the city. But I’d watched “The Wire;” I was dubious about his definition of ‘nice.’ Memories of prior visits to “Charm City” prominently featured a homeless guy who curled up to sleep on our stoop at night and car chases where police drove on the sidewalks. But more than anything else, I remembered Sunday Mass at Our Lady of Pompeii.
I can’t imagine how anyone could forget Our Lady of Pompeii if for no other reason than the horrible, soul numbing tackiness. The church showcased a Virgin Mary statue lit up with neon rays shooting from her fingertips. My parents had been married there and I’d been baptized there. Mom kept a photo of the light up Madonna in the guest bathroom. Kitschy? Yes. Surreal? Only in a horrible 1960’s sort of way. I was abandoning Anne Rice for “Hairspray.”
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