Model for a Day

Emily: I have had my fair share of body image issues.  Like my mom, I struggled with anorexia for a few years as a teenager, and for years after that I hated the way I looked.  I just wasn’t good enough.  I realized later, during my recovery, that it must be even harder for women who are no longer in their twenties.  Our vision of the perfect body not only depends on nearly impossible or extremely rare proportions, but also on a very young physique.

Geraldine (Emily's mom):  Doing this photo shoot was fun but difficult. I try hard to stay in shape because I like the way it feels to be strong and able to do the things I want. Vanity’s part of it too. Where does vanity cross the line between being a positive motivator and a negative thing? I had a brief struggle with anorexia as a teenager. Oddly enough, I think joining the Army cured me. I learned to love being strong and being able to do things, to think of my body as powerfully mine. 

Emily: Doing this photo shoot with my mom felt natural, though.  Neither of us felt weird, and I realized how great it was to feel comfortable and proud of our bodies.  I’ve included my mom’s sentiments about each pose and the photograph we were mimicking.

Geraldine: I’ve tried really, really hard, as the mother of two daughters, to be body positive, not to criticize the way I or others look. It sounds easy, but sometimes it’s very difficult.The fact that my daughter and I could laugh and joke and feel comfortable together as we set up these pictures makes me feel  happy, like I’ve succeeded at something that really matters.  The main thing I learned from posing for these pictures was that media typically portray women as very weak. Each of these poses required me to twist and shrink and slouch. They HURT. Why can’t we show women standing square and strong, laughing or fierce or DOING things?

Vagina Warrior

A friend of mine invited me to audition for the Vagina Monologues. I’ve acted in some student films and done a little rabble rousing here and there, so I thought, why not? Could be a little scary in a fun way. So Sunday after my long run and a shower, I hobbled over to the community room at the women’s shelter where auditions were being held.

Inside, I wasn’t quite sure if I was in the right place. There were cookies and fruit and sparkly party favors everywhere. But a very friendly women directed me first to the restroom (I’d hydrated really well after my run) and then to the sign-in sheet. I picked up a couple of pages from the script to peruse and found a chair. Scattered on the table in front of me were construction paper, glue sticks, glitter, and fun vagina facts printed in pink ink. So of course, while we waited, we made construction paper vaginas and read the fun facts out loud and laughed and talked about our motivations and said the word ‘vagina’ loudly and often.

I was reminded, as I usually am when I’m around a bunch of activists, that I although I am extremely unconventional in the corporate circles where I spend most of my time, I’m strangely normal-looking-and-sounding around the confident, creative women who make activism a way of life. I am neither a slam poet nor a trapeze artist nor a pierced and tattooed goth nor a woman of color with a deep thrilling voice and braids. I’m just a rather slight, middle-aged blond with a soft voice and faded jeans. In spite of this, I am probably one of the more radical people in any such gathering. You gotta watch out for the quiet ones.

After a few minutes I was called back to read. I sat at a table decorated with lace, with four excerpts from the script laid out in front of me. I have only once before auditioned for anything, so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect or how to play it. They asked me to read two different excerpts, which I did, without a lot of drama, just thinking of the things I had in common with the stories I read, how that old lady could have been my grandmother, or how that dominatrix had once been as corporate as I. It felt good, reading these things aloud, even though they weren’t my stories, because it was an acknowledgement of some else’s experience and pain, an homage to our common sisterhood.

When I left, I called my husband who had given me a ride, to let him know I was done. He was down at the river skipping stones with our daughter. As I waited outside for him to arrive, I noticed that the recent rains had brought out the dandelions. One of them was blooming. I reached down and plucked several tender green leaves and stood by the road nibbling their bitter greenness while I waited.

So now I’m a ‘vagina warrior’ and making time on my schedule for rehearsals. I’m thinking of how to work this new skill into my Linkedin profile. I’m wondering if my boss will freak out when I invite all my work colleagues, which will require a mass email with the word ‘vagina’ in it. And I’m also thinking about stories, my own and those I’ve heard. Could be that’s the most important part of it.

This is the story of a boy....

There was once a boy who was born deaf. Somewhere during the course of his hospital stays and medical treatment, he contracted meningitis. He suffered brain damage.

Still, he graduated high school. Got a driver’s license. Got married. Had two kids. Held down a series of menial jobs. But always with a massive amount of support from parents, psychiatrists, and social workers.

Diagnosed bipolar with schizoid personality disorder, he finally stopped trying to find jobs he couldn’t keep. Lived on disability benefits. Eventually his Filipino wife got tired of dealing with him and filed for divorce.

He can't live at home with his aging parents; he can periodically become agitated and verbally abusive. They fear actual physical violence. He's lived in a serious of cheap apartments and group homes. He wore out his welcome in each one. He forgets to bathe. He forgets to take his medication. He smokes like a chimney. He gives away his possessions. He sells his food stamps for cigarette money and then doesn’t have enough to eat. He adopts stray kittens and stray women. The kittens crap all over his apartment. The women take his debit card and leave.

Sometimes he goes so far off the rails that he gets hospitalized. This happens when the cops are called. Then he stays until his medications are balanced and the doctor agrees to release him.

He’s not very good at washing his clothes or cleaning. He just got evicted again. Apparently the landlord didn’t appreciate maggots on the floor. His mother found him yet another place to live. She’s tired and sick from a chronic disease, but he’s her son so she does what she can. It’s a good thing that his parents are millionaires. If they weren’t, he’d have probably ended up in jail or dead a long time ago. Most people like him do.

Because there’s nowhere to go. There’s nothing for people like him besides the street. There’s nothing to protect him from being robbed, beat up, or hustled. There’s no place that will hire him. There’s no place that wants people like him living there.

Here are a few awkward facts:

• 20-25% of the homeless population suffers from severe mental illness.
• 55% of the men in state prisons are mentally ill. 73% of women prisoners are.
• People with major mental illness live 14-32 fewer years than the non-mentally ill.
• About 35% of people discharged from mental hospitals were homeless six months later.
• Affordable housing – decent housing with rent that can be afforded by someone living on disability (or minimum wage), is disappearing in every community across the country. During a 5-year study (2007 – 2011) median family income decreased by over 8% while rental housing costs increased by over 15%.
• The number of psychiatric treatment beds in American public hospitals has shrunk to the same number per capita as in the 1850s, before the humane and scientific treatment of the mentally ill was even a thing.
• Our current (terrible, inhumane) state of mental health care began a spectacular decline during the Reagan era. Reagan was part of a conservative philosophy that discredited mental illness and regarded psychiatrists as a communist plot. During the 1980s, at least 40,000 beds in mental health facilities were eliminated and the mentally ill turned out. During the decade, somewhere between 125,000 and 300,000 mental patients just ‘disappeared’ out of treatment completely, likely ending up homeless or dead.

But these are just statistics. And most Americans don’t seem to care much. They keep voting for politicians who either don’t prioritize the welfare of the mentally ill, or who don’t even believe that mental illness is real. After all, it’s not their brother-in-law calling in the middle of the night because he’s lost his home again.

What a feminist hears....

When a woman….	And a man…	A feminist hears….
Says “That’s unacceptable!”	Says “You’re rabid/unreasonable”	A woman who is confident enough to demand respect is threatening to me. I will personally attack her in order to devalue her and her position.
Says “My body, my choice”	Says “Abortion is murder/only sluts use birth control”	I will use religion, faux-science, and violence to prevent you from achieving social and economic power. I will do everything I can to disenfranchise you and reduce you to chattel in order to maintain my privilege.
Wears a dress and heels	Says “Wow, you look great/hot/pretty/sexy”	I am titillated by a woman wearing clothes that signal sexual availability and submissiveness. That’s why I didn’t compliment you on all those days when you were wearing jeans and work boots.
Says “I disagree”	Says “Let me explain”	I don’t respect you enough to discuss the merits of your opinion/position. Instead I will lecture you until you agree with me or shut up.
Says “I disagree”	Says “That hurts my feelings/offends me.”	Warning! I am passive aggressive. I will now use emotional manipulation to try to get you to doubt yourself and apologize to me for disagreeing with me.
Says “The proliferation of guns in our country reduces public safety. We need gun control”	Says “If more women carried guns, there would be less rape and violence against women”	You should be afraid, because frightened women are more cautious and timid, thereby reducing their ability to challenge male power.
Says “No means no!”	Says “She was flirting/dressed provocatively/knew what she was doing/in the wrong place at the wrong time”	I may not be a rapist, but I will not condemn a rapist, because rape creates fear. When a women knows that every man she meets could be a rapist, she is more cautious and deferential, which protects my privilege.
Says “Women should have equal pay”	Says “Women don’t work as hard as men/don’t work as many hours as men/don’t take their careers seriously/don’t have to support themselves/take more time off from work”	If you get more, I think I get less. So I will use lies and distortions to reinforce the myth that men are better/more productive employees.
Says ‘No thanks, I’m just not into you”	Says “Bitch/what makes you think you’re pretty enough to sleep with/who do you think you are?”	I perceive that my status in the male hierarchy is dependent on being sexually attractive/successful. I am not an alpha male and your rejection terrifies me with the threat of decreased status.
Says “I am angry/upset/sad”	Says “You’re so emotional/illogical/cute”	Men aren’t supposed to feel/express/understand emotions. Rather than acknowledge that your emotions have any validity or value, I will talk about logic and label you as illogical and therefore wrong in any emotional state that you feel and express.
Says “I need a new alternator”	Says “Leave your car here for two hours. We’ll run a $125 diagnostic and tell you what’s wrong with the car”	My entire business model is built on exploiting your culturally-enforced ignorance of mechanical devices. My estimate will be padded with unnecessary parts and labor because I think you’re too stupid to know you’re being fleeced.
Turns a wrench, pushes a lawnmower, swings a hammer	Says “Let me help you with that/let me do that/let me show you how to do that/don’t you have a man to do that?”	You need to pretend to be weak and incompetent to bolster my fragile male ego, because I base my value on being able to do things that you can’t.
Says “This is what I’ve experienced”	Says “You need to cite studies/metrics/data about that”	What you have lived and experienced has no value. You must offer independent corroboration of everything you say – if you can’t, or you provide a source that I don’t agree with, I will belittle you, Because I’m doing it under the cloak of statistics and science, I’ll get the added benefit of scoring ‘smart’ points.

Roadtripping

There aren’t very many people who get the concept. Starting the day with a full tank of gas and no particular plans, going without a schedule or a route, just a general idea. The adventure starts when the unexpected happens. If you have a friend who gets it, she’s a keeper.

Today started at the Whole Foods at Lamar and 5^th street.  Headed east for La Grange with our sunglasses, a full water bottle, and some sunscreen. First stopping place, a meadery outside of La Grange, a tasting, the discovery of some bottled sunshine which had to be bought, then a picnic outside in a grassy meadow with a hipster young jazz band playing ‘All of Me,’ numerous chickens clucking around underfoot, and a politely persistent white dog who was tall enough to reach casually across the picnic table for my sandwich. A walk through the apiary and vineyard to pet the goats, several of whom were hugely pregnant, and then back to the air conditioning of the car.

Next stop – Giddings, which turned out to have the most fantastic store filled with elaborate hats and retro jewelry. Hats you could comfortably wear to opening day at Ascot. Trying on hat after hat in front of the mirror, sternly forbidding myself to get the $125 black and white gauzy concoction with a silk rose on the front and settling for a nice little green straw cloche. Also fudge, because all good hat stores should also sell homemade fudge.

Then with the fudge melting and the mead warming in the car, a stop in Elgin, which used to have an art gallery and a restaurant with excellent pies, both now out of business. Elgin could have been a bust, but at the last minute an antique store spotted just off the main street, which stank of cigarette smoke and had a space in the middle with a blaring TV and a couple of scruffy chairs and was quite obviously the living room of the proprietor. Browsed through the dime store dishes, old VCR’s, and paperback books that smelled of cat pee with a sinking feeling, then discovered a box full of old scrapbook pages and photos, where a stunning black and white photo of a man’s nude, muscular back and a sweet little watercolor were discovered. Took them to the front desk with a rusty cauldron I found on a back shelf.

“Hey, I didn’t know that old picture was in there,” said the rather dilapidated proprietor. “That’s me, 60 years ago.”

“Oh, I can’t take this then,” I said, blushing.

“Sure you can. Just scan it and send me a copy, here’s my card,” he responded.

He’s probably going to get such a kick out of the fact that I’m going to frame it and hang it in my bedroom.

On the way back to Austin, my friend said “He probably has some great stories if you have time to listen to them all.”

That’s why you go out there.

Old Ladies - Vinita

Today I come to the end of my old lady stories, and of course this one is the hardest to write, because Vinita was my grandmother. How to condense a lifetime of memories and feelings into a few paragraphs?

For starters, Vinita wasn’t anything like those grandmothers in books and movies. I don’t know where they get the role models for those, but not from my family. Grandmother (not Granny or Grandma or Nana or any of those pet names, thank you) was born in Indian Territory in 1904. The middle child of three, Vinita seems to have acquired a remarkable sense of adventure along the way. As a young woman, she sneaked out of the house to go to a barnstorming show, went for a ride in the biplane, and ended up dating the pilot. She later married a nice, prim-looking chap named Kenneth who worked for the phone company and settled down to a normal, rather privileged life as wife and homemaker. Except, of course, that she wandered off the straight and narrow path, for which I am grateful, since otherwise my ginger-headed self wouldn’t be on the planet.

Widowed a few years later with a teen-aged daughter, Grandmother became a librarian and worked at the University of North Texas library until she retired. She lived in a beautiful old Victorian house in Denton, with no AC or heat but wonderful 12-foot tall ceilings and oak plank floors blackened with age. Her bedroom was lined with filing cabinets where she stored massive amounts of genealogy research. Her dining room was furnished with a very small table and a very large loom, where she would create the most amazing woolen rugs and fabrics. The kitchen, modernized to a sort of rustic 1960's aesthetic, seldom saw much use; Grandmother seemed mostly to live on cantaloupe, yogurt, and soft-boiled eggs. Not that she couldn’t cook; she could whip up a really lavish spread, but she was just as likely as not to burn whatever she was making.

This is what I learned from Grandmother – how to thread a loom and throw a shuttle, how to make my own yogurt, how to properly ball a skein of yarn, how to make a rubbing of a gravestone, how to appreciate the delicious taste of fresh wood sorrel and dandelions, to always turn out lights when I leave a room, to never say ‘me’ when I should say ‘I,’ to face old age and loneliness with courage and humor, to never stop learning, stop planning, stop walking forward. 

Looking back, I see that she spent her life hovering on the line between courage and fear. Solo car trips across the country, traveling to Ireland to visit her brother, driving her VW Bug into the Gulf of Mexico to see if it would float, and yet on the other hand zealously overprotective of her family or overwhelmed to the point of tears at minor frustrations, inconveniences or for no reason at all. She was always volatile, often unkind, and sometimes magnificently generous. Grandmother died just before Emily was born. She was living with Mom then, and she called me and my sister a day or two before she went, just as if she knew and was saying farewell. She slipped away quietly in her sleep on my mother’s birthday.

Grandmother’s beautiful old house is an architect’s office now, and the shed in the backyard where she stored her yarn now houses blueprints. For years, I dreamed about that house; often in my dreams it was under attack and I was its fierce defender. Those dreams have faded, but a painting of the house still hangs over my bed. 

Of all those in my life that I have loved and lost, Grandmother’s voice is the only one that has reached to me from beyond the grave. One sunny Houston summer day, when I was kneeling in my rose garden venting all of the frustrations of my corporate life on weeds, allowing the therapy of sweet dirt and pungent herbage to work its magic on me, I heard her voice like a clear, soft whisper in my mind. I sat back on my heels and listened. “Follow your passion,” her voice whispered. “Your passion is never wrong.” To this day, I wonder which passions she neglected to follow and what regrets may have fed her tears.

Old Ladies - Lucy

So, Lucy wasn’t just an old lady – she was my aunt, that is, my grandmother’s sister-in-law. Lucy and her husband Lofland lived in an old house in Shreveport. Lucy was a pianist, had been all of her life. She started her career as a teenager playing piano in movie theaters to accompany the silent movies.

For me, as a kid living a very normal, respectable life in suburban Richardson, every trip to Aunt Lucy’s house was a journey to wonderland. There were two grand pianos in the living room, one white, one black. And there was still room for furniture – a white tufted couch, satin draperies in the window, pastel rugs on the floor. There was a big old-fashioned kitchen and a big black woman who came in to cook for the family. There was a den with walls covered in cork where we would sit in the evenings, watching Monty Python movies, my cousins sitting barefoot on the floor, rolling joints and getting high, Aunt Lucy with a glass in her hand. I didn’t realize until years later that she was a chronic alcoholic. 

I spent one summer in Shreveport. I don’t remember exactly how old I was, about 11, but I do remember the intoxicating feeling of freedom that I felt there. During the days, I would wander Shreveport with my younger cousin Chris Valentine, roaming the streets, visiting various hippie friends, going to the park on old rusty bikes, heading over to the health food bakery the older cousins ran together (Valentine’s Bakery of course) for a breakfast of fresh bread and fresh-squeezed orange juice. 

In the evenings, I went to the theater with Aunt Lucy, where she was playing piano for a local theater group. I sat in the empty theater watching the rehearsals for hours on end. The play was “The Pajama Game.” I  was amused that the male lead seemed to need to practice the kissing scene repeatedly – it being obvious that he was thoroughly enjoying himself. I sat in that theater through the dress rehearsal, watching the actors learn their lines, watching a random group of people become a finely tuned team. Sometimes when the rehearsals became tedious, I would wander around backstage or join another kid who was hanging out there for unauthorized excursions into town. I guess one of those could be called my first date, since he treated me to dinner at a local café. At that age, I didn’t think anything much of it, except I remember there was chocolate pie, which I thought then and still think is disgusting.

Years later, I took little Emily and Dan to Shreveport to visit Aunt Lucy. Lofland was long since dead, Valentine’s Bakery had closed, only one piano remained in the living room, and Lucy was a frail little woman recuperating from a badly broken arm. We spent a quiet weekend, chatting about old times, watching movies, watching Aunt Lucy drink. At one point, in spite of her broken arm, she went to her piano and played, her gnarled, arthritic hands still making magic on the keyboard. At one point during the weekend, Lucy looked at me cuddling Emily and said “My parents never hugged us and kissed us like that. I can’t remember them ever telling me that they loved me.” Then she offered to French-braid Emily’s long blond hair. I watched them together with my heart breaking. 

When we left, Lucy held my hands and told me “This is the start of a beautiful friendship.” She died about a year later. It was Emily’s first experience with death, and she sobbed uncontrollably while I held her in my arms, at a loss as to what to say. There is no comfort to offer without lies that I’m not willing to tell. In the end, saying “I love you” is all that I have.

Old Ladies - Betty

Betty Bailey was an anomaly among my grandmother’s friends. She was the only one I remember who had a husband, that is, a living, present husband. In fact, I think it was Joe Bailey who was my grandmother’s colleague, Betty having not worked at the university library.

Betty was a tiny sparrow of a woman with a round, pretty face and a neat cap of short, straight white hair. Joe, on the other hand, was tall with impressive wavy gray hair and mannerisms that were blatantly effeminate. Even my childish brain was confused about how Joe could be married and have a family; it certainly didn’t seem to be his style. Betty and Joe lived in a house on Locust Street north of University Drive, a larger, attractive home, very tidy, with the best yard ever. The back yard was this wonderful upward-sloping bowl of soft green grass that was absolutely perfect for rolling down, preferably when wearing something light-colored that was guaranteed to stain. 

My memories of Betty are mostly limited to our adventures to Hazel’s decoupage shop together. Betty would pick me up in her little brown VW Golf on Saturdays and drive me to Decatur for a day of craft and camaraderie. She was such a devotee of decoupage that for Easter she decorated with dozens of carefully decoupaged eggs, one of her specialties. I still own one such egg, a small brown-spotted one, unpainted and decorated with berries and flowers, signed by Betty. 

There was one event that really stands out in my memory, when Betty and Joe hosted a shrimp boil of epic proportions. They covered an extra-long picnic table with white paper and just poured pots full of boiled shrimp onto the table. It may have been the first and last time I ever had as much shrimp as I could eat, and even as a kid I was boggled by the decadence.

Betty’s story is marred by darkness now, for two reasons. One is that she lost Joe tragically when he had a heart attack at the pool at the gym. With no lifeguard on duty, he slipped under the water and drowned, she too tiny to help save him. The other reason is a story my mother recently told me - that when she was a child, Betty persuaded my grandmother to sell her a lovely little doll chest that belonged to my mother, one of Mom’s most treasured possessions. The fact that Betty would consider this to be a good, idea, and that my grandmother would have agreed to it, saddens me. I try to put it into context, remembering how much the concept of childhood and parenting has changed in the past 100 years, but it still confounds me. 

Looking up Betty's obituary, I learned that she served as a communications officer in the Navy in WWII, and that she died only a couple of years ago, at the age of 92. Pretty amazing.