In 1918, Louis and Rosie ask Mazie to work in the ticket booth instead. Mazie has become a “good-time girl,” as George Flicker calls her, “always swirling around, flirting with her body.” Rosie’s health troubles interfere with her work as a ticket seller at the Venice Theater. “She doesn’t see the shimmering cobblestones in the moonlight, she just wonders why the city won’t put in another street lamp already.” “Rosie doesn’t understand what it’s like to love the streets,” Mazie writes in 1916. When she’s a teenager, Mazie can’t resist walking the busy streets, which aggravates Rosie and earns Mazie a reputation. Louis owns the Venice Theater and pursues a variety of other lucrative, shady ventures, even while offering impeccable love and support to the Phillips sisters. According to Mazie’s first diary entry: “My father is a rat and my mother is a simp.” Mazie’s father abuses her mother, and her mother can’t take care of the girls, so Rosie and Louis raise Mazie and her little sister Jeanie. When she’s a child, Mazie leaves her parents in Boston to live with her sister Rosie and her brother-in-law Louis in New York.
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