Confessions of a Bar Brat
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Confessions of a Bar Brat is a memoir that spans five years, 1949-1954, and is narrated by Judy from the ages of seven to twelve years. She shares how she grew up in the coarsest, and most hell-raising bar on Main Street, in Rosendale, NY, a rural cement mining town with mixed ethnicities, each favoring one of the eight bars in one mile.
Judy's story is told graphically through her child-eyes. She details the day-to-day events that occur living in a bar, her mother's alcoholism, and the effects of several forms of abuse, and parental neglect, and a violent, tyrannical father who insisted she and her siblings be raised strict Catholic.
Judy tells her tale in a very visual manner which was fostered by five years of movie-going at the Rosendale Theatre on Main Street. The female actor's defiant actions would become her future role models. From them, she learns to question the drunken antics of her mother and defy the physical threats from her tyrannical father. She also begins to question the dogma of the Catholic Church.
The memoir is peppered throughout with bawdy barroom scenes, salty language, red neck hard-working, hard-drinking humor. There are many references to actors, their latest movies, and the music of the times. The characters in the memoir speak in a colloquial dialect and with all the grammatical errors of the 1950s rural community. There is a historical reference to businesses on Main Street and their owners, giving a complete sense of time and space.