I suppose that the relationships forum is as good a place as any to talk about families, and I'd like to talk a little about the public and private faces of my family. I don't recall reading a post about this before, but I could only too easily be wrong. Anyway, I'm itching to do this so, even if someone else has done it, I'll do it too.

Like many families, ours had the Life Magazine cover photo version and then the real version, locked in the basement. There were six of us, two parents and four kids. Our on-stage presentation was flawless, except for brother Pete, and we could just smile over him and pretend he wasn't there. Pretending was, of course, the name of the game. So there we were in a row, smiling, laughing, singing in chorus, as coordinated and in-step as the Rockettes. And of course, we now all know it was all a lie.

It was a lie and it wasn't a lie. It wasn't a lie because every person there did really WANT it to be true, would have PREFERRED it to be true. And didn't even realize that it WASN'T true. Except Peter. And even he didn't realize anything except that SOMETHING WAS WRONG. And the show went on the road, and played the Palace, and made movies (home movies), And then slowly disintegrated as people grew and moved away or died.

The real family wasn't a family. It was six entirely isolated individuals locked into separate mortuary caskets in which each suffered the pangs of hell. By themselves. THAT family will last until the last person takes his last breath. Or escapes via successful therapy or analysis. Which, as you're fully aware, is tough and comes with no guarantees.

I call them the Hitler-Stalin Family because German and Russian societies under those evil monsters were forced to put on an act displaying their complete satisfaction even while they were frightened out of their wits by the terrors enforced from above. And that's what our family did, except that they didn't know they were frightened and they didn't know what they were frightened of.

Some of you, the older ones, will remember flashing neon lights and photos that came with negatives. For you younger folks, we used to have neon signs on businesses that flashed on and off, on and off, all day and all night. For you folks who only know digital photography, old-fashioned film photography, after being developed, came back with both prints and negatives of each shot. Two different images of the same thing.

The trick about being a Hitler-Stalin family was to be able to focus on one image and one image only (the lighted part of the flashing neon two-step, the positive image rather than the negative photo). And entirely forget the other one. You could do it if you tried. And we did. Oh yes we did. You probably did it too. Will there ever come a day that we don't?