Who is Kurtomitch?

  

 I am a Boomer... born in a year that also saw the birth of the H-Bomb... born into a vague approximation of the nuclear family. Although television was culturally pervasive enough in my childhood to function as my de facto "nanny", it was not pervasive enough to be relied upon for that duty while visiting grandparents or elderly aunts and uncles for the obligatory Sunday family dinner. While the grown-ups interacted in all the stages of assembling the family meal, my brother and I would be relegated to a spot on the linoleum floor where we would draw using the ever-present paper, pencils, and crayons that would spill out of my Mother's bag. We, the Children, would draw for hours on the floor, underfoot but never under-loved, returning to the world our reconfigured versions of television images that our sponge-like minds had absorbed during the previous week... lots of cars, lots of dinosaurs, lots of anthropomorphic animals, lots of good guys vanquishing bad guys, with nary a drop of visible red blood... if there was, we didn't know... our TV was only black and white.