Rose Marie Zappa
Rose Marie Zappa (Baltimore, Maryland, 7 June 1912 - Burbank, California, 30 January 2004)[1] was Frank Zappa's mother.
My mother seems to like it if she sees my name in the papers, and if she sees me on TV she thinks it's good -- but she's a devout Catholic, so who can tell what she really thinks about what I do or the things I say?[2]
She was born in 1912 as Rose Marie Colimore[3] the tenth of eleven[4] children born to Charles Louis Colimore and Thereza Fava who had arrived in the USA in the 1890s and, settling in Maryland, ran a restaurant.[1] Her strict Catholic family objected to her dating the divorced Francis Zappa so they dated in secret for four years. Her mother eventually relented and agreed to them marrying if they came and lived at the Colimore's family home. They were married on 11 June 1939 and moved into the home on Whittier Avenue[1]. They had four children: Frank (1940-1993), Bobby (1943-2018), Carl (1948-2020) and Patrice (1951).
On my fifteenth birthday, my mother said she would spend five dollars on me (a lot of money for us then), and asked me what I wanted. I said, "Well, instead of buying me something, why don't you just let me make a long-distance phone call?" (Nobody in our house had ever made a long-distance phone call.)[2]
She passed away in 2004 at age 91.
Notes
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Barry Miles - Frank Zappa: A Biography
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 The Real Frank Zappa Book
- ↑ It is not clear if the family name was the English Colimore while living in Italy or if that was allocated during the immigration process. Often documents were Anglicised at the point of departure or a name was adopted after arriving in the US.
- ↑ Several of her siblings died at birth or during infancy - as was often the case at the time.
