This Six-Year-Old vs Wall $treet Week
In the days when a house only one TV, there was room for only one show at 4pm. And it wasn’t “Little House on the Prairie.”
When I was six years old, my mother told me I’d be staying after school with my grandparents. I cried. The year before I’d stayed with Aunt Marie, and we played games and baked cookies and did all the things you imagined you’d do with your grandparents. But Marie had moved across the Verrazano to Brooklyn, and Grandma and Pop were now my baby-sitters.
Grandma was funny but Pop was difficult. An actor whose career was cut short by WWII — his draft notice made Variety — Pop burst into song a lot. He had a flair for the dramatic. He would not be ignored. Pop did attempt a return to the stage in the ’70s, when he tried to audition for Daddy Warbucks in Annie. But the best headshots he could get were Polaroids my grandmother took of him in the living room, standing in front of their government-issued landscape painting. It’s a shame, he would’ve made a fantastic Daddy Warbucks.
But I cried because Pop had rules. Strange, arbitrary rules that only made sense to him…
