She Has Her Father’s Eyes

The Curb Outside of Eternal Now

San Pablo Ave, Oakland

May 23, 2025

Her mother is an alpaca furred simian, her father an extra terrestrial. Her? She’s just a little girl.

To whet my appetite for the odd (though who are we kidding here, I’m always hungry for the kooky and tongue-in-cheek) prior to sitting down for friend time with Tim Robinson, I stopped to see a family in town for just one night.

At Home! With the Freak Family.

While hardly your average tourists, the Freak Family Roadshow and their sweet vintage trailer felt right at home in their home for the night last Friday as traveling art installation: parked at a San Pablo Avenue curb in front of a trendy artsy event space.

Currently on tour with their maker/mother artist Jo Cunningham, Patriarch Cecil greets intentional guests and curious onlookers alike as they mosey about. The gears in his otherwise empty head churning, mouth agape, arm a-wave, the sculpted old man sits out front as a teaser of what’s to come. His pink skin and off-blond fluff veer into dangerously similar territory to those of a more (in)famous old fool, but his gentle demeanor prevents this similarity from hitting too close— a happy, if grumpy, easy recognizable grandpa in deliciously grandfatherly tweed and railroad striped high waisted trousers, his eyes soft and ocean green. He is welcoming, but also unsettling, just as a herald of freaks show ought to be.

Mah-widge, what brings species together.

Every detail of the trailer’s interior has been treated with care and attention, each messy dish and family portrait, banana-fueled recipe, childhood drawing—the artist’s own—stray piece of fur, and cigarette butt placed with thought and a giggle.

Crafted of paper mache and alpaca fur, encaustic wax, tin foil, trash, tape, inner tubes, and newspapers, the family rest resplendent in their living exhibit. Baby primps, father and mother sit with individual activities (baking for her, sweet solo jams, ciggies, and coffee for him), and together they happily coexist in their dreamy 1950’s atomic family kind of way, guinea pigs at the ready to play should boredom strike.

Must be alienating to be the only one of your kind.

The strange darkness lurking below this placid family tableau comes not from their mismatched species or cramped quarters, but rather from these little tidbits—the half-filled ashtray, the news clippings decrying flying saucers and their riders, father’s dejected posture, mother’s disregard for hair-infused butter. The caged guinea pigs know something is off too, huddled together for comfort.

Cunningham, however, was all smiles and friendly as could be, and open to whatever is to come on the family’s journey; she in her “yes, girl” era, ready to hit the road to a town near you (maybe).