Parenting & Family Quote by Mink Stole

“Even then” is doing a lot of sly work here: it signals that whatever Mink Stole became later - cult-film royalty in John Waters’ orbit, a face associated with transgressive comedy and bad-taste elegance - didn’t arrive out of nowhere. The line frames extraordinariness as a baseline condition, not a twist ending. She’s not claiming a tragic origin story or a glamorous pedigree; she’s pointing to the kind of ordinary chaos that, in retrospect, reads like destiny.

The kicker is the metric: “ten kids.” In one breath, Stole collapses the myth of the exceptional individual into the blunt math of domestic overload. Ten children isn’t just “big”; it’s a household that runs like a small institution, where attention is scarce, personalities have to fight for oxygen, and performance becomes less an art than a survival tactic. The understatement (“extraordinary” delivered with a shruggy, conversational cadence) keeps it from sounding like bragging. It’s wry, a little deflective, and deeply specific.

Context matters: Stole’s persona has always traded on the tension between sincerity and camp. This quote taps that same frequency. It suggests an early training ground for the heightened characters she later embodied - not because family made her famous, but because it made her fluent in spectacle, rivalry, and the comedy of too many people in one space. It’s biography as punchline, and the punchline has teeth.