Is a fictionalized memoir based upon muddy facts. If you’ve lived through the 50s and 60s you will easily reconnect to a time that now seems so much simpler than today’s more accelerated pace.  While Jimmy tells his tales of what it was like growing up in small town, Pennsylvania, many readers will be able to recognize themselves taking a similar journey through those two decades, laughing and wincing along the way. It took strength, courage, and a ridiculous sense of fashion, to be Jimmy.

   How were his proud parents, Mama Dida and Daddy Paul, to know that their plump, pink baby boy would take the road adorned with bright-colored pansies instead of tall, firm, deep-rooted oaks? Almost immediately after the doctors cut the umbilical cord at the Allegheny Valley Hospital, Jimmy’s dad began to have fatherly dreams for his first-born son.  Daddy Paul’s dreams for young Jimmy included a son who would tramp across hardened, grassy football fields and tackle manly, thoroughbred competitors in an expected, neighborly way.  Daddy Paul saw himself walking proud and cheering loudly against the small town crowd, for his son. My father was to be disappointed time and again, but his disappointment was lessened since Mama Dida delivered four more sons in the following four years. As a consequence, Daddy Paul paid more attention to my younger, more athletic brothers, and tried his best never to look me square in the eyes, if he could help it. On the other hand, Mama Dida accepted me as I was, without question. She supported , laughed with me, and encouraged many of my choices. 

     I’ve always known that I was different. And because of this difference, I was often called a sissy, or worse. But it takes a tough man to be comfortable as a sissy and I learned to live the way I wanted, one step at a time, in heels or in flats. The Sissy Chronicles tells some of those stories about a boy who walked his own, sometimes painful, often hilarious walk, on the perilous path to adulthood in a middle-class, Catholic family in the ‘50s and ‘60’s. These stories are nothing less than a triumphant celebration of life.