The Patio - 1975
As I mentioned before, the carefree island look of the patio was changed into something more formal. Some things remained, however, as you can see. The painting of "Tropical Village in a Hurricane" was executed in 1967 by a Hanna-Barbara illustrator with whom Mom and Dad shared a common friend. Dad was enthusiastic about this picture, and I remember a great fight when Mom eventually painted over it on the sneak. Alas! it had no future in the new way of things (and Mom got tired of looking at it).
Mom was "into" (as they used to say) plants for a time; you can see some of them hanging in the breeze. She also got interested in making the macrame things they're hanging in. Her plant collection got very large; we see only a small fraction of the total number of plants that were in the patio. (One white pot had a "Proud Mother of a United States Marine" sticker on it.) We also had a lot of hanging plants in the house. Being a high-maintenance item (like the aquarium in my room and the fish pond), their days were numbered, however, and with neglect most of them died off. The macrame hangers and the pots weren't removed, though, so for a long time we had a big collection of dead house plants in macrame hangings (I called it "the Addams Family greenhouse").
Dad may have contributed to all this death and destruction: at the time, a theory circulated that plants thrived when humans talked reassuringly to them. The poor photograph here shows Dad choking and speaking harshly to one of Mom's plants.
You can just see a beer sign behind one of the pots. Mom ran a cafe, so we had a lot of promotional beer signs that were used as interior decor in the patio and the garage-turned-billiards hall. (In fact, beer signs were another one of her collections.)
The glass-topped wrought iron patio furniture shown in the photo was obtained via garage sales and patio stores. It was never cleaned.
You may note that the ceiling of the patio is painted, inevitably, avocado.