This book is a unique, candid and authentic memoir about my family's relationships among lovers, friends, ex-friends, strangers, and those affected by their bizarre behavior. Bizarre is the only word I can think of to characterize my family-Viennese, Jewish, Bavarian Holocaust Survivors. I like to think of this book as a field guide for the aficionado of a particularly rare breed of bird, daughters of Viennese Holocaust survivors living their own kind of life in the heart of New Orleans for almost fifty years. The word flamboyant doesn't even start to describe the behavior that went on around our home and in my grandmother's X-rated lingerie shop. Daily, family eccentricities provided me a lifetime wealth of dark humor which I use to share my life as child endangered by insanity with doses of exhilaration and-surprisingly-unabashed laughter. However, the horror was real. I tried to make the best of it even though the worst descended upon me regularly and without warning.
It was the 50s and 60s as I grew up working in my family's adult lingerie/fashion/high end clothing store. "Joan's Exquisite French Lingerie Shop" was co-owned by my Bavarian/Hebrew/Viennese, Anti-Semitic mother and grandma, both of whom acted and spoke as if they were bona fide royalty. At the age of three I was sewing bows on laced undergarments using my little fingers trying to grasp needle and thread. Not much older, I waited on customers, who included hookers and exotic performers as well as transgender, transsexual, homosexual and heterosexual women and men. Many of the male customers were prominent New Orleans' businessmen and politicians who frequented grandma's shop either because they were cross-dressers buying lingerie for themselves or heterosexual pimps buying risqué outfits for their hookers.
My mother was a clinically diagnosed narcissist with bipolar disorder and multiple personality disorder. Though still married to my father, she was a highly promiscuous lesbian and a blatant abuser of pills. My grandmother was just as promiscuous, having affairs with both men and women. In a thick, Viennese accent, four-letter words littered their sentences.
I said bizarre, right? This is my story, honest and from the heart, of how I survived in such a world, its highs and lows. More important I reveal its longstanding effects on the formative mind of a child and with her continuing struggles in adulthood.