How I Met Your Grandmother Patricia

10 May 2023

She’s Gorgeous

After graduation from Friends Central, some of Patricia’s classmates had summer jobs. Others took trips to Europe or adventure camps like rock climbing and sailing. Many volunteered for Quaker service projects.

Your grandmother wanted to be an actress, so she did ten weeks of summer stock in the Catskill Mountains, apprenticing with a repertory company of actors that played a different part every week. The quality of the performances wasn’t all that great. Still, it was superb training, and the bored escapees from The City got to see Shakespeare, Gilbert and Sullivan, and Shaw on the cheap.

I was an apprentice, too, patching the roof of the Foresturg Summer Theater with Donald, the company’s leading man. The producer wanted a quick fix; his lease was up at the end of the season. We were hard at work when a white Cadillac pulled into the yard. A bald-headed old guy and a beautiful brunette got out. Patricia was seventeen; this was a week after she graduated from Friends Central.

Donald said, “Oh crap, Patsy’s back!” 

After a while, the brunette and another girl came out of the farmhouse that was used as a dormitory. They carried beach towels and were going to a quiet place to work on their tans. Patricia smiled up at me. Oh, my, did your grandmother look great in a bathing suit! 

“She’s gorgeous,” I said to Donald.

“Sure, but she’s nuts. Watch out.”

How I Got To The Catskills

My first dream was to be a jazz musician—alto sax and clarinet. My technique was adequate, but my improvisations were not inspired. Recordings proved it. One of the tapes was a gig at a club. On it, the other players got applause after their solos. I didn’t. Another recording was at a rehearsal. I had taken an upper, and my solos were brilliant, vital, and alive. All the adjectives a musician wants to hear. 

One night, I was at a jam session in an after-hours club when one of my idols, Stan Getz, walked in. He was the top tenor sax player in the ‘cool jazz’ scene. Getz had just been released from the Los Angeles County jail, where he had done thirty days for possession of heroin. The guys he came in with pushed him onto the stage, and the tenor player handed him his ax.

Getz was terrible. He couldn’t find his way around a simple sixteen-bar blues chord progression. And forget about tempo. It turns out Getz hadn’t had time to get a fix after leaving jail. That’s when I decided to give up my dream of being a great jazz musician. I had no hope if a player like Stan Getz couldn’t function without drugs. So, I better find another dream.

A couple days later, three friends and I left LA for New York. We did the usual ‘beat generation’ thing, driving day and night and trying to beat the streamliner’s times. The Super Chief (LA to Chicago) and the Twentieth Century Limited (Chicago to New York) averaged seventy-two hours. Plenty of time to talk, and I told the guys that I had given up on jazz. 

One of them said, “You look like an actor.”

“Yeah? How do you become an actor?” I asked.

“Look in the classifieds. There’s a paper for actors on the newsstands in Times Square.”

There were two such newspapers, Show Business and Backstage. One had an advert that sounded perfect: 

Provincetown Players needs apprentices for summer stock 
in the Catskills. Carpentry skills required. 

Oh, boy! I’ll get to make stage sets, I thought. But first, the roof needed patching.  

Patricia Lee Hopkins Wasn’t Nuts

She was an extreme Gemini, and that’s what confused people. On any given day, you could never be sure which one of those twins from Greek mythology would show up. The gracious debutante, or the hyper beauty who must be off her meds.

For example, she was a terror until she had a cup of coffee, which meant she had to get out of bed. Whoever dared to wake her up risked getting poked in the jaw by her wicked left jab. But I was smitten, so I planned my moves. The girls had bunk beds on the second floor of the farmhouse, and Patricia had a top bunk. After her roommates left, I would sit on the lower bunk, reach up and grab her ankle, and quickly roll against the wall, out of reach from her roundhouse left. She’d shriek curses she’d learned at her daddy’s knee. Russell Hopkins was a former middle-weight boxing champion in the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Fleet, who later rose to sergeant in the Philadelphia police department. Patricia had one hell of a vocabulary.

We began taking walks in the woods, and by mid-August, we were—close.

The season ended, and Patricia was off to Bennington College in Vermont, visiting me in New York on the occasional weekend. I met her friends and got a few well-meaning warnings about getting serious with her, I mean long-term serious, marriage, kids. They usually began with, “Patricia’s my best friend, but…”

Her family was the problem. Not just Alyce, Milton, and Russell—mother, stepfather, and father. The extended family in Scranton wanted to keep me—‘The Portuguese Fisherman,’ Milton called me—away from their Princess.

Patricia’s mother was the ringleader. Your great-grandmother Alyce had been grooming Patricia to marry into Philadelphia’s Main Line society. The social climbing began with Alyce’s mother, your great-great-grandmother, Marie Hennessy Kraner—we called her Nanna—who claimed she was a member of the elite’ Boston Hennessy’ family.

Alyce was very good-looking all her life. She took riding lessons—hunters and jumpers—and learned to race sailboats but was never completely accepted socially. Neither was Nanna. No matter her Boston roots, she grew up in Tombstone, Arizona. 

Words Of Warning

As Patricia and I grew closer, her friends asked if I was prepared for the anger and resentment I would face If I blocked Alyce and her mother’s dream? I guess I was. Patricia and I were married in Alyce and Milton’s Penn Valley living room a little over two years after we met. And stayed married for thirty-four years. 

There was another issue that worried Patricia’s friends. Children. If we did get married, they all said the same thing. Don’t have any. Patricia was too flighty and frivolous to be a dependable mother. 

Friends and family were wrong, of course. The day Mark was born at Jefferson Hospital, we saw an immediate change in Patricia’s attitude when an orderly wheeled her bed into the private room, cradling baby Mark in her arms. 

I admit there were lapses, like when we were at a party, and Patricia was involved in an intense discussion with a method actor—he felt it was all right to mumble if you felt the emotion.

“Hogwash, Patricia shouted, and took out a cigarette. “The audience doesn’t care how you feel. They want to hear what you’re saying!”

And she tapped the tip of the cigarette on the nearest firm surface, baby Mark’s forhead. He was six months old and lying across Patricia’s lap. I guess it was Annie Mae’s, our nanny, night off.  

And Patricia could always work the room. Me too. We’re tag-teaming the crowd. I’ve got the chocolate cake, your grandmother’s peddling raffle tickets.

Patricia had more success modeling than acting, mainly with hats and coats. After Todd was born, it became difficult to stay at a model’s fighting weight. She moved to the other side of the camera and became one of New York’s top theatrical photographers.

There are some great women in the family. I’ll write a NOTE about them someday.

Poppa / Patrick / Whatever