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Much Ado About Publishing

Thanks for the Genes

by Nina L. Diamond

When my father was a kid, he looked exactly like Alfalfa from Our Gang. A skinny kid with dark hair, my dad grew up to have two of his own children, one of whom -- me -- looks just like him. So, I guess that in my youth, I must have looked like Alfalfa in drag.

Not only do I look like my dad, but when I was younger we had nearly identical vision. I found out that I needed glasses when I tried on his and the pattern on the chair across the living room was suddenly crisp. We've both put plenty of dentists' kids through college and both have the same strange systems that overreact to everything. One sip of a Martini and Dad is fast asleep on the sofa. As for me, as I write this, I'm drunk on cherries. Well, more accurately, I'm tipsy on the 151 proof rum that friends used to set the cherries aflame over the rock cornish hen.



By the time you read this, we will have celebrated Dad's 80th birthday on May 2nd, by roasting him at a surprise party. In fact, as one of the roasters, I'm reading this column.

Back to the vision we have in common. Dad and I were both born artists (my younger brother, too), but professionally we chose very different paths.

He's a talented writer, musician, and painter who chose what he believed was the most practical path for him back in the 1950s when he was in his twenties with a wife and family: He became a businessman. He had a successful career and retired in his 60s.

Our home was filled with books and music, and I fell in love with both.

I knew when I was only seven that I would be a writer. Soon after, Dad gave me my first typewriter.

I'm also a pianist and have composed music for many years. I have a great eye for design on the page, though I didn't inherit my father's abilities as a painter. I still draw stick figures.

My father and I have very similar literary, musical, and artistic sensibilities and tastes. So much so that it's spooky. In the early 1980s, when my brother, Bob was starting his video production studio, he wrote a brochure and asked my father and I to each edit it but not talk to each other about it or show each other what we'd done until we were finished. The outcome of Bob's little experiment still freaks me out all these years later.

My father and I made the exact same edits. Not just with grammar and punctuation, but with paragraph breaks, the order and organization of the material, and even the suggested cuts and additions, right down to the exact same words, phrases, and sentences.

How's that for genetics?



As a family, we're a funny bunch of people. When I was a kid, one year my parents went to a Halloween party dressed as Fruit of the Loom. Wearing brown pants and green shirts, with plastic fruit hanging off them, Mom and Dad were trees. Each had one end of a rope tied around the waist so that it created a clothesline between them. From the rope hung underwear.

In the late 1970s, when Anita Bryant, singer, former Miss America, and one-time Florida orange juice commercial queen, became America's foremost anti-gay crusader, Dad went with Mom to a Halloween party, but entered separately so no one would suspect who he really was. He was dressed in drag as Anita Bryant.

And quite convincingly, too: A red wig, impeccable makeup, long gloves, and a low cut gown (I pulled out his one and only chest hair when I was little, thinking it was on his t-shirt, not growing through it).

A guy at the party who my father knew very well didn't even recognize him. Well, we assume he didn't recognize him because he made a pass at Dad/Anita.

In the 1980's, Mom and Dad and a group of friends got together every New Year's Eve at a different couple's home. It was always casual. Then, one year, when the party was going to be at her home, their friend Rita suggested that it might be fun to make the party black tie.

Dad thought that it definitely would not be fun to go the tuxedo route just to hang around Rita and Eddie's den.

The other guests did as requested, but Bill Diamond had a better idea.

"She wants black tie," he said. "Okay, I'll wear black tie."

But, basically nothing else.

All he had on was a black bow tie, a top hat, a cummerbund, black socks and shoes...and black bikini underwear. No shirt, no pants.

"Well, she said 'black tie,'" he joked. "So, that's what I wore. She didn't mention pants and a shirt."

So, that's where I got all this from: My love of writing, music, and the arts, and using humor to point out life's ironies and absurdities, even the most serious ones.



My father chose to be a businessman. I wonder sometimes what an amazing creative force he would've been had he chosen to pursue his talents professionally. Instead, he made them a hobby. And, of course, he brought his creative sensibilities to everything he did in the insurance agency he owned and as the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Better Business Bureau down in South Florida.

Still, I know he has a wonderful book in him. And a painting he can also use as the cover. Maybe one day I can convince him to write it.

I'd offer to edit it, but what would be the point? He'd do the same edits for himself that I'd do.

Happy 80th Birthday, Daddy. And thanks for the genes.


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Nina L. Diamond is a journalist, essayist, and the author of Voices of Truth: Conversations with Scientists, Thinkers & Healers. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including Omni, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, and The Miami Herald.

Ms. Diamond was a writer and performer on Pandemonium, the National Public Radio (NPR) satirical humor program, for its entire run in Miami and select markets nationwide from 1984-1998. As an editor, she works frequently with other authors and journalists on both fiction and non-fiction.

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