Bonnie Smith
| Bonnie Smith | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
 | ||||
| Sex | F | |||
| Spouse | Doyle Smith | |||
Children
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Bonnie Smith is the widow of Doyle Smith and mother of Catalina. At the beginning of the book Cattail she owned a home in Amherst, Michigan, and rarely threw anything out.CAT6 She has a sister, but claimed "Christmases have been pretty quiet and lonely the last few years"CAT6
Doyle married Bonnie after she became pregnant with Catalina, named because "they made me in the back seat of my granddad's '58 Pontiac"CAT2 The implication is that it was a Pontiac Catalina. Click for photos
She is introduced as "a tightly wired bundle of dynamite. She had tons of energy for a woman in her sixties [...] and Bonnie definitely didn't look her age. She looked older than Catalina, not much older, and there was lots of family resemblance. Her hair was as black as her daughter's, and cut much the same. She was about the same height, and had a rugged, ageless beauty. "Mom, this is my boyfriend Roger," Catalina said by way of introduction. "Keep your hands off him, he's mine."CAT5 Her daughter once said of her "A lot of people consider her to be a nutcase, and I'm not so sure I'm not one of them."CAT6
Bonnie never got along well with the other members of the Smith family. "The story I always heard is they had Dad all lined up for the next thing to an arranged marriage with some gal in their church, which is a weird bunch of dudes. Then when Mom got pregnant and Dad married her it loused that up, and this other family, whoever they are, got real pissed with the whole family."CAT6
Bonnie enjoys acting young, which includes cosplay (dressing in costume) at ComicCon. Her Lum costume was particularly memorable. She enjoyed Anime and was a Grateful Dead fan.
Bonnie found Amherst dull and kept a front-yard garden of "castor beans, cleome, and Japanese Maple. It's very striking." Those plants could all be mistaken for marijuana. "I'll bet the cops stopped by half a dozen times before they finally quit bothering. Now I can slip the odd plant or two in there and nobody pays any attention."CAT7 She claims to still have Doyle's shotgun in her closet.CAT8
Bonnie enjoyed nudist camps, including Sunny Hill, where she met Larry Herter and family.CAT7 She was familiar with Playalinda Beach, Florida, and found Wamputa Beach, another nudist camp nearer Tallahassee and owned by an old friend, Bill Simpson. She soon was living with Bill and considering selling her home in Amherst.
