Portrait #15: My Dad

After I drew my mom, I drew my dad while we watched Spiderman with Kirsten Dunst and that nice boy Toby McGuire, made possible by our new digital cable's hundreds of channels. I kept getting really distracted by the TV because I forgot how good and slightly campy Spiderman was. (For example, the green goblin kept saying things like "The itsy bitsy spider climbed up the water spout. Down came the Goblin and took the spider out" and "Can Spiderman come out to play?".)

We laughed a lot at the description under the "GUIDE" button: "Nebischy student finds his new powers..." etc. NEBISCHY? When I think of a "nebisch" I think of the people from synagogue when I was a kid who always smelled like cat pee and were all 4 feet tall, who my mom and I call the Silkopaths. I'm sure Toby McGuire (?) does NOT smell like cat pee. But it is interesting to think about whether or not the person writing blurbs for the network is Jewish (or nebischy).

So the story I was going to tell in my last post about how we can joke about our differences goes like this. My dad told his coworkers the story about how I told him he jokingly should feel like an asshole since I got straight A's my senior year after we'd argued a lot about my grades when I was a sophomore. He thought it was really funny and a symbol of our newly stable relationship, but I think his World Financial Center office of Merrill Lynch thought it was strange we talked to each other so candidly. What can I say, we are Jews.

My dad is also the only man at Merrill Lynch with a beard... their token gay financial advisors look a lot more square than he does.

Drawing my dad was adorable because he looked really happy watching tv, kind of smiling in his eyes. I've learned a lot about my genetics from recording my parents' features, since I have studied my own in drawings for many years. I think I get my nose from my dad but I have bigger lips that him (his lips aren't just buried under his beard, they really just are paper thin.) Also I have learned a lot about facial hair from drawing boys. (More hairy boys later.)