Mark Phillips' Pages: Workbook: 12/4/04: "He's singing about drugs."

Romare Bearden, "Mother and Child," 1977 — Romare Bearden, *Mother and Child* (1977)

December 4, 2004:

"He's singing about drugs."

Scary-thin boy with John Lennon glasses and wildly-striped bellbottom jeans. Dark-haired woman with that Jackie Kennedy flip. Living room, faux-Scandinavian furniture, mostly of cheap particle board and stain, grouped around a Sears Silvertone one-piece hi-fi with detachable four-inch speakers.

She's violently shocked by the suggestion.

"NO HE ISN'T," she demands, a strong note of late-1960s panic in her features betraying public acknowledgement that she lost control a long time ago.

"Tell me then," the boy says sarcastically. The woman's denial in the face of the obvious strikes him as bottomlessly stupid. "What are the initials of the song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds?"

Dark-haired woman is stunned into silence. To what extent she's capable of taking this all in is unclear. Only that for this moment right now her retreat into denial has been resoundingly blocked.