Fredde and Doreen

Doreen and I have known each other since high school but it took years until we found each other again.  And we have REALLY reconnected.   A lot of us on the “other side of the tracks” in Beverly Hills  (south of Wilshire) gravitated to each other.

Most kids I knew then had the perfect, or seemingly perfect nuclear family; a mother, usually stay-at-home, a father, and 2.5 children.  (Why they never had a complete third child, I don’t know.)  Doreen, though, was being raised by a working, single mother. No father in the picture at all.  She was a latchkey kid before there was a term for it, a girl who cooked her own dinner at a very early age, and who often called her mother when it was getting very late, well past dinnertime, to ask when she was coming home.  She had made a meal and wanted her mommy there to share it with her. (more…)