Aunt Gail's Easter Request

Portraits of her as a weird character.

I got two texts on Easter Sunday morning. One from my Aunt Gail (my mom’s younger sister approx. 70) with a sweet Happy Easter message. She’s excellent about keeping up on Holiday texts and x-mas cards and birthday cards. I reply to the texts obviously, but I’m a shit nephew and rarely send anything to her. Gail is so sweet and kind. I love her as she’s the closest living person to the mother and grandmother that raised me. After texting a picture of Rachel and I to her that seemed relatively inline with the classic pastel holiday.

Aunt Gail mentioned that I look a lot like my grandfather Joe and she apologized telling me that all the time. That’s cool though. If we looked a like, he must have been a handsome guy. A twist to this conversation came up when she asked me to do a drawing of her, “Just picture me in your head the way I looked to you the last time you saw me”.

I have not seen her in a long time. 10+ years and before that I think I saw her at my grandmother’s funeral. So I was happy to oblige and pull from me memory of her that is maybe 20+ years old.

She was always laughing her ass off and wiping tears from her eyes. This was not an easy drawing. I wanted to recreate my mental image of her, but it was like looking at one of those morphing faces generated by AI. “Where her cheeks like this, her eyes were like this, no like that” was the dialog in my head. I felt satisfied enough with this drawing for an impulsive request and texted this photo of the drawing,

“I look like an old lady” was her response. Then she asked if I had photos of her and my mother I could reference.

“I was doing this from memory. And that’s all shot to hell.” I said.

She says to make her like, “those weird characters you make people look like.”

So I doodle more and get into a caricature-like place (which is very uncomfortable for me. I am not a caricaturist).

I do this doodle of Gail and my mom Marilyn from a photo in the 80’s. They were dressed up like greasers for a Halloween party.

Then I think she might referring to the way I draw the Fang and the Muppet-like people I draw. So I do this one quickly too from a photo of her in the 80’s.

These are a hit! She think that I made her and my mom look like Lucy and Ethel from the “I Love Lucy” show. Which was what the two of them would compare themselves to. I knew this and wondered if I should draw her as Ethel in the chocolate factory.

She wants copies of the last two drawings and I was already planning on sending them to her. What a sweetheart and what a way to make Easter 2023 more memorable than I thought it was going to be.