The Waits household was, in it's inception, a wonderful and harmonious situation. The personalities of Michael and Sandra (Sandy to her friends, of course) were polar opposites - and that's what drove them to love and find the appreciation of the other. They got together while Michael had been in collage, studying night and day to eventually graduate and pass his bar exam, he wanted to be a lawyer and help out those who needed it - it had been that idealism that brought Sandy around in the first place. She was taking courses here and there - they met through friends that thought they'd wind up trying to kill each other two weeks in. What resulted was a whirl wind engagement but rather long courtship, yes he'd asked her to marry him rather quickly. But it was with the promise that he'd be able to give her a real ring and they'd have a real service where their parents could keep pictures and look back on it fondly. Sandy, of course, said yes.

Everything was as planned, eventually Michael was promoted up through a firm and Sandra opted to try to take things a bit more seriously in her own efforts as a vocal instructor -- and then the wedding. The honeymoon was short due to time constraints but it was no time at all before the couple became pregnant and immediately started putting away for the baby's college fund. There was a little brownstone house that Michael's mother lived in all through his life. They moved in and eventually became the parents of a baby girl who had, in her father's words, an abnormally high lung capacity - barely giving the young couple any time to themselves as she grew.

Around the time that Sarra turned 9, her mother decided that the long silences at meal time and being expected to handle the little girl all by herself while her husband worked long hours was too much and gave him her walking papers leaving him alone with the baby. After the separation and the divorce was finalized, his mother moved back into the little house and helped take care of her grandbaby. This would be the time where she learned to match her shirts and her pants by herself, write her name in cursive with her father's expensive pen and started to take ballet lessons and began watching Rodgers & Hammerstein movies with her Nanna -- singing the songs from the movies with her grandmother sang all through the house when Michael was gone. Learning nearly everything in song, Sarra was actually, despite the somewhat rigid way her father kept house, a very happy little girl.

School was what it was, as she grew up and out there were boys, of course. There was almost a girl that one time at home coming, there were dances and most of the time if she managed to get to go at all, Sarra wound up hanging out near the DJ's booth - because what school paid for a live band anymore? (She had dreams, there was a garage, but.) She studied and her father gently (not so gently) enforced a rather strict curfew and mandatory check ins, called her teachers and went over her home work every weekend until the day she graduated - at which time the world very nearly went in on itself at the house. Sarra had been listening to her grandmother's stories about her mother and why she'd left - none of them too terrible, though she was rather sure that she was covering up for the other woman. She did just up and leave and her father never said a word about her to anyone. It was that night that they had dinner, as planned, and her father had set out to tell her that he'd made several appointments for schools surrounding the area so she could be at class and at home when time permitted. That was when she'd told them - she'd fallen in with a crowd at school and as such, she'd met someone who was going on tour. And they were going on tour for the summer, her father automatically going through the motions of how it was idiotic, childish and absolutely no daughter of his was doing anything of the kind while her grandmother was shocked at the new information. She was going to go on a summer festival tour and help. She would learn the worse and better parts of crew management and how to set up amps, light cues and how to get over with the girls who stood around the merch booths. While she desperately wanted her father to be happy, she also knew that she had to do things for herself. And this would cause a rift, as per with any father.

And perhaps there were times within the years that followed that she would call home and wanted to tell her grandmother that, yeah, maybe he'd been right sometimes. But they didn't happen all that often - she was determined to prove him wrong. Or at least admit that what she was doing was viable - she learned mixing and lights, It wasn't the New York Ballet Company, but it paid the bills. Granted, when she'd first started out, there had been someone who liked her ear for picking out production qualities - took her aside and tried to make her say yes to a few things that she was absolutely never going to say yes to. But her father didn't need to know about that. Or the time she fell from the rafters. Or being jumped a couple of times. Or the car accident in Oklahoma.

Like all good things, it had to come to an end sooner or later and her traveling was no exception. Sarra - came home when her mother made her presence known again, turning up with explanations and a whole new half of a family, she gave Sarra the locket her father'd given her before they got married as a sort of.. promise, she supposed. She moved back in with a few doubts, reaffirming to her father that her way was the right way - not his, and went off to study cosmetology in the mean time. People would always get divorced, and women would always throw money away to look better afterward, that was her grandmother told her father, which was enough for him for the time being to let it go. But he didn't need to know about the dancing part, was the thing.

It was like that for three years, and she wouldn't have traded it at all. Sarra picked up and moved to Brooklyn - a friend of a friend of a friend having a spot in a record shop down town had a place for someone to watch and haggle, which she'd gotten pretty good at. And, like the woman said, there would always be people who wanted to throw money at everyone else to make them look better, she got hired at a fairly well upscale beauty bar rather quickly as a way to supplement the record store hours where she loves to hang around for hours on end if at all possible.