Alex, Vladdi, It, and the Egbert Flute Concerto

When my mother was in college, she and her best friend Dolores Humberg created male flute-playing personae. My mother (in the plaid shirt) went by Alex, and Dolores went by Vladdi. My aunt Jeanne, who took most of these pictures of their backyard antics, appears in the tableaux as "It," the page turner. In order to dress herself as "It," Jeanne decided to wear her gym suit, the most non-gender-specific item of clothing she could find. Notice all you grammar people that one caption referring to "It" does not use "whom" or "who" to refer to It's (and I guess that the apostrophe is in the right place there) lateness, but rather uses "which."

Jeanne grew up to be a high-school English teacher (her student Scott Simon quoted her in a recent Teacher Appreciation Day tweet), Dolores grew up to be a flute teacher, and my mother, who began her adulthood as a professional flutist, gradually moved her creative life to painting.