This is something I wrote on Tumblr earlier today, as part of an ongoing music meme. Each day presents a new theme, and anyone can post a song that relates to that theme in some way. I’ve recently gotten back into it after a couple months of non-participation, and I’m remembering how much I enjoy going through my catalog of songs and fitting each one to specific memories. Today’s theme was “The first time I saw…” which I almost interpreted personally, like the first time I saw Dan this song was playing, except I have no idea — I could have posted the first time I saw Dan sing at karaoke, which was possibly the bravest song I’ve ever heard him sing and it was fantastic, but that’s maybe a story for another time — but instead, my mind flashed to this song, which I heard for the first time when I went to see Robyn Hitchcock in concert for the first time, and so follows my post:

The Yip Song by Robyn Hitchcock & The Egyptians

So the first time I saw Robyn Hitchcock in concert was in Chicago in early 1992. I have a vague recollection that it was Valentine’s Day, but I’m not positive on that. I was a junior in college and living alone for the first time, after I FUBAR’d my living arrangements of the previous quarter (which frankly were FUBAR’d from the beginning and I was too stubborn to admit it and too scared/broke to change it, so it became one of those tough situations one learns and grows from, or something) and I can still clearly see that efficiency studio apartment I was exceeding my work study hours in order to pay for. The kitchenette along one wall. The “closet” that the landlord never bothered to equip with a clothes rod. The three windows that overlooked an alley, over which I draped one of those faux-Indian elephant print cotton sheets. The tiny bathroom with the super-powered radiator that would warm my towel while I showered. The hand-me-down furniture from my aunt and uncle for which I was so grateful. The first centipede I killed by myself. Those were lean, lean months. I remember the panic at the end of each month when I wasn’t sure I’d have enough money to pay the rent and the phone bill, I remember many sleepless nights because of financial worries, and yet somehow I remember this time as exhilarating and free as well.

And in the midst of all that I went to see Robyn Hitchcock (and the Egyptians) for the first time, having fallen in love with him about five or six years before. I went with a friend (who would become a roommate our senior year) and we wound up at stage level, where we met other people we knew from school, and it was one of the best concerts I’ve ever been to. He’s a tremendous performer, but I didn’t know that then, and I didn’t know the extent to which his most loyal fans participate in the show, so experiencing all that for the first time … I’ll never forget it. The theatrics with which he performs some songs, the incidental monologues which interrupt others … and then there was this song, which no one had heard before. It was silly, it was strange, and by the end of it we were all singing along: YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP, etc. I was thrilled to find it opening their next album, and whenever I hear it now I go back to that show, and that time.

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I saw some study or other on the Internet recently that purported to debunk the myth that “the case of the Mondays” is an actual thing. At least, that was the headline. I didn’t bother reading the article because OF COURSE “case of the Mondays” is an actual thing. For Pete’s sake, the weekend is over and everyone has to go back to work — if they’re lucky to have work, that is, which then could layer on a guilt complex for being pissed off that they have to go back to work when there are tons of people out there who do not have work to go to at all. I was one of those people. Monday was just like any other day. And when it was just like any other day, the fact that it was Monday didn’t make me mad or upset. And it does now. So there.

I don’t even want to contemplate the grammar in that previous paragraph. I’m just trying to get this done before I have to make dinner because I didn’t have time to write anything here this morning because I was finishing up a book review that I should have done over the weekend but I didn’t, because now I work during the week and want to play on the weekends. It’s nice to have structure, but I’m still adjusting to that.

Speaking of book reviews, here’s one I wrote for Rachel Shteir’s The Steal, which is about shoplifting. It’s really good. It’s well written, it’s informative, it’s smart. It’s SO smart. I remember seeing it on the list of potential review books and thinking, “Someone wrote a cultural history of shoplifting? That’s so cool! I wish I’d thought of that! I don’t normally request nonfiction books, but I would love to read that!” And I’m happy that it was as good as — no, better than — I wanted it to be.

Reading it I was reminded of two shoplifting experiences from my childhood. Yes, I had them. Don’t get all bug-eyed on me.

1. When I was about 8 or 9 years old, give or take a year, I swiped candy from the SuperAmerica gas station near my house. To be specific, it was one of those disgustingly huge hamburger-shaped bubblegum dealies that came in a small plastic fast food container. Anyone else remember those? Oh god, they were so gross. (Wait, I found a picture! SO GROSS.) But I loved bubblegum and when I saw the display of the candy-colored containers I knew I had to have one. I don’t know why I stole it, though. Maybe it was because I didn’t have the money to pay for it, or I didn’t want to waste the money on something so ephemeral. And I got caught! My mom noticed either the stupid plastic container or that my mouth was so full of gum I looked like I had the mumps. Either way she demanded to know where it came from and I had to tell her everything. She marched me back up to the SA and I paid for what I had taken, utterly humiliated.

2. A couple years later, lesson not so much forgotten as ignored, I was in a neighborhood drugstore and pawing over the Hello Kitty products (like you do) and really really wanted the set of tiny colored pencils and whoops, it found its way into my jeans pocket. And I didn’t get caught. I walked out of that store holding my breath and trying so hard to act naturally that I’m sure I looked abnormal, but I didn’t get caught. And when I got home I hid the pencils and never used them because I was both afraid that my mom would see them and, to be perfectly honest, the thrill was gone.

Fortunately I’ve never been much of a thrillseeker, and to the best of my recollection that was the last time I “liberated” anything from a store. OK, maybe a unicorn sticker here and there. But that’s it.

Wow, I feel so much better having confessed that. Thanks, Internet.

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Actually, I started writing something else this morning — actually following through on one of my ideas from earlier this year! Progress is being made! I am advancing in my personal growth! — but as things often do, it exploded in my face. What I thought was going to be a quickie post about cool books I’ve read so far this year developed into a 400-word dealiebobber about ONE of those books, and I don’t have the time this morning to finish getting my thoughts down and then editing them so that it’s not like 1500 words on a book none of you have read (probably. Maybe you have. It’s been out for a while. Anyway). So I’ll finish that up tomorrow.

So instead, here’s the back up. PEAS.

Yeah. Hated them as a kid. I think more than any other vegetable. I even liked lima beans, and could tolerate broccoli if it had parmesan cheese on it, but nothing made peas taste better. And it seemed like we always. had. peas. at dinner. Usually from frozen packages so they were extra soggy. Their saving grace was that they were usually included as part of a vegetable medley and I could eat around them. I went out of my way to avoid eating peas. I would offer to eat other hateful vegetables. I would eat liver before I’d eat peas. Sidenote: once, when I was about 9 or 10, I declared myself a vegetarian so that I would get out of eating liver. True story. My point is, I hated peas more. Wrinkled pellets of despair.

Except in soup form, with little pieces of ham. I could handle peas in split pea soup, which once ranked higher than tomato on my list of comfort foods to be consumed along with a grilled cheese sandwich. I’m sure I liked split pea soup because it was processed with a whole lot of sodium and other flavor enhancers, unlike the Green Giant frozen packets we’d heat up with dinner, and I’m pretty sure that split pea soup was not at all a viable alternative for my recommended daily allowance of vegetables, but I couldn’t get enough of it when I was a kid.

I love those little inconsistencies, don’t you? Hate peas, love split pea soup? It’s the same way with oranges and orange-related citrus. I like the taste, but I can’t stand eating them, and I haaaaaaaaaate pulpy juice. It makes me gag. And the stuff that sticks to orange slices, that skin, membrane, whatever that’s called — haaaaaaaaaate it. It’s a textural thing and it ruins the experience of eating the orange. So every time winter rolls around and you’re all “Yay, clementines!” I’m all, “That’s all you guys. I’m out. When do the berries come back?”

And you know what? I still do not care for peas. I don’t like them cooked at all, though I’m a grown up now so I’ll eat them when they’re included in things like fried rice (fried rice is just about the only thing in which I don’t mind the peas so much), but every time I bite into one my tongue cries a little and wonders what it ever did to me that I would treat it so cruelly. I am generally OK with snowpeas, though I tend to buy bags of them thinking they’ll be a healthy snack but then I never eat them because, you know, they’re peas. More snackable are wasabi peas, because they bear no trace of pea taste, but again, wasabi peas probably don’t count so much toward my RDA for vegetables.

I knew, when I was 8, 9, 10 years old, that the day would come when I would never HAVE to eat peas again. I actually remember thinking, in melodramatic fashion worthy of Scarlett O’Hara, staring at my plate of peas and trying to hold back the tears, that when I was grown up and living on my own, I would never eat peas (or liver) again, never thinking that I would grow up and maybe be able to handle some kinds of peas, in certain situations. And the day that I became a grown up would be glorious indeed — because when you’re a kid, you do think that adulthood is something conferred upon you overnight, that one day you’re eating peas under duress and the next you can confidently tell your mother, “No thanks, I require no peas” and she’d reply, “Very well, then, may I offer you anything else?” and that would be the end of the torment.

And aside from those awkward dinner party moments when you suddenly confront a heaping bowl of peas and, because you are a grown up, you are expected to not only partake of these peas but praise them to your gracious hosts, I can confidently say that not HAVING to eat peas is one of the very best things about adulthood.

In the interest of consolidation, feel free to go back over this post and substitute “raisins” for peas. You don’t want to hear me rant about raisins.

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I moved to New York in the summer of 2002 — so many of my stories start this way. It was the end of July, it was the hottest day of the year so far, something I’m sure it’s hard to fathom today, seeing as New York is today galumphing its way through more snow than currently lies on the streets of Minneapolis (and as I wrote this last, my brother texted to ask “Enough snow for ya?” in retribution for my “cold enough for ya?” text to him when the temperature there plummeted to -14F or so last week) — and I pulled up to my, let’s face it, pretty ramshackle railroad-style one bedroom in “East Williamsburg,” on a part of Grand Street that I liked to call the Auto Repair District, with one suitcase worth of clothes, my laptop, coffee maker, a couple plants and fans, and — of course — Scout.

Scout occupying the shower in my old place. 2004-ish?

I was fortunate to find a place that allowed cats without an additional deposit — the place I left in Ohio had required a pet deposit, and I want to say it was pretty high, but I can’t remember what it was now. I had carpeting everywhere, though, and there were spots that became Scout’s favorite scratching areas, and I didn’t worry about it too much because I’d given the landlord all that money as a deposit. Carpeting needed replacing anyway.

I digress again! I remember talking with the agent who showed me this apartment a month earlier, and going over the application, and telling him I had a cat. “How many?” he asked.

“Just the one,” I said, girding myself with all sorts of untruths about my cat’s meek and quiet nature and his lack of interest in destroying things, in case I had to fight for him. I needed to find an apartment on this visit, and despite its flaws I wanted this one. It was affordable enough (although it was, naturally, about $500 more than the two-bedroom place I had in Ohio, the one with the carpeting that Scout liked to rip up) and it could hold all my stuff. If I had to lie about a cat, so be it. People have lied about worse to get apartments.

“That’s fine,” said the agent — an Orthodox Jew who wouldn’t shake my hand at the end of our negotiations, which is part of the whole Orthodox deal, I know, but which succeeded in making me feel more less-than and unclean than I think anything else in my almost-40 years on this planet has (though I’m probably forgetting something. Still).

“We don’t take dogs,” he told me, outlining the building’s pet policy. “But one cat is fine. Two cats is OK.”

(Whew, I thought, considering that at 17 pounds, Scout was as big as two cats. See above picture.)

“But three cats . . . ” he paused for effect, or maybe he was just doing the math. “Three cats equals a dog.”

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1. In which I get to hug all the cats

I’ve been inspired by that Facebook meme (oh, and all your sources of inspiration are highbrow gems?)

(OK, I honestly don’t know where that attitude is coming from, but I seem to have loads of it today and it has to come out somewhere, and neither the book reviews nor my NaNo writing is the right place for it. Sorry! You lose!)

(Gah, there it is again)

that asks you to list 15 influential authors — the note says “authors who have influenced you and that [sic] will always stick with you” — to think back on all the truly influential writers I’ve encountered in my lifetime.

It’s possible this meme is for many people the equivalent of putting books on your shelf that you have not read but that make you look smart. Not my friends! My friends are honest. But we all do that to some degree, anyway. I know I went three or four rounds of “Should the Complete Works of Plato and/or Complete Works of Aristotle go on the living room shelves for all to see?” I mean, I haven’t cracked either of these open since at least my third year of graduate school and possibly before that but they LOOK so good and impressive. I do not believe that we create our “15 _____” lists on Facebook without thinking about what our friends are going to say about them. (Plato and Aristotle are not on display, by the way. But I can’t bring myself to get rid of them just yet.)

And I am not questioning the veracity or validity of anyone’s claim that [Important Author] meant a lot to him or her, merely stating that this particular meme has prompted me to examine my own list in greater detail than simply jotting it down in a Facebook note. (Mostly I’m just trying to not be on Facebook so much, but that’s another issue.)

My own list of authors who have stuck with me, who have profoundly influenced the way I read, write, think, etc., would probably include the obligatory literary canon writers — Dickens! Eliot (George, that is)! Woolf! — but would also include Madeleine L’Engle and Douglas Adams. But what does it mean to “influence”? For me it means more than valuing their works. “Influence” means these authors made me want to accomplish something, or caused a sea change in the way I view the world. To that degree, reading Dickens really only made me want to read more Dickens. Michael Chabon makes me want to write like Michael Chabon, so while he’s one of my favorite writers I wouldn’t put him on this list. Douglas Adams makes me want to write like Douglas Adams, but he was also my introduction to science fiction and that special British comedic style that I value tremendously in both literature and visual media — so he made me want something outside his writing. George Eliot is the reason I became an English major, and she remained a significant figure in my graduate studies, so she stays on the list.

Madeleine L’Engle — OK, forget what I said before about Douglas Adams. Madeleine L’Engle was my introduction to science fiction, and to this day I have not read a book that affected me more than A Wrinkle in Time.

A bold claim, I know, but I’m going to stick to it. That book changed the way I thought about what girls could do, it made me want to learn more about science and math (“you mean tesseracts are a real thing? She didn’t make that word up?”), it is the book I want to be buried with. My copy, the one that has that fantastic musty aged paper smell, the one with the cover pictured above (it was $1.25? Wow), the one where I inscribed my 3rd and 4th grade room numbers and teachers on the inside cover just in case I lost it because I took that book with me everywhere for two years.

And here’s another influential writer: Else Holmelund Minarik.

(Who?)

She wrote the Little Bear series. I don’t know how many of you are familiar with them, either as children or as parents, but these were the first books I fell in love with. I can still hear my mother’s voice reading them to me, which must have inspired me because they were the books I learned to read on — not surprisingly, since the publication of Little Bear in 1957 launched the whole “I Can Read” series.

I loved this one especially:

(I know you’ll recognize the illustrator’s name.)

Little Bear’s friend is named Emily, and she has a doll named Lucy that she takes everywhere. In one story, Lucy has an accident — she falls out of a tree, I think? And her arm breaks, and Mother Bear fixes it. (I think. I remember most of this story, and if that doesn’t speak of the book’s influence, that I can remember the salient details 36 years after reading it, I don’t know what does.)

The book held so much sway over me that I wanted a Lucy doll too. So my grandmother made me one. And it’s only now that I really get the implications of that particular cause and effect, now that I can make things too and willingly, sometimes unsolicited, create things for the people dear to me. And my Lucy doll had a bandaged arm, too. My grandmother was thorough. If I’m not mistaken, that doll still lives with my mom.

The books live with my nephew.

I wrote on Twitter earlier

and I was joking, sort of, but not really. That the vast majority of us understand any cultural reference originating from a Dr. Seuss book (there’s a restaurant near me, Olea, that serves Green Eggs and Lamb for brunch. The eggs are scrambled with cilantro. It’s delicious!) speaks volumes about his influence. Even if he hadn’t written The Lorax, Dr. Seuss would rank near the top of my Influential Authors list.

So I guess my broader point, not that I have to have one, but if I did it would be that the authors that influenced me as a child might matter more to me than the authors I admire and who influence me now. Not straight across the board — there are authors and books that have mattered to me as an adult that I would not have comprehended at 9 or 15 — but I do think it’s true that while we may look on the books we read as children with nostalgic longing, we tend not to put much weight behind their significance in our adult lives, or at least we forget about it, or maybe downplay it.

Which is poor tribute to the books that made you who you are today, really.

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Next month will mark my five-year anniversary as a non-smoker. I’m happy to say that I don’t miss it at all — which surprised me at first, since all I’d ever heard from ex-smokers was how much they still craved cigarettes. Once, during one of the eleventy thousand times I tried to quit, someone who had successfully quit told me “not a day goes by that I don’t long for a cigarette. Not a day.” As you might imagine, this was less helpful than he might have intended. But once I decided that I’d had enough, that was it — I really had had enough.

I lied. There are times I miss it. Not enough to run out and spend $12 on a pack of smokes. (I remain ever curious about the cost of cigarettes both in and out of New York.) What usually drove me back to smoking was watching someone else enjoy it. That doesn’t make me crave a cigarette anymore, except when I’m watching Mad Men. It’s not even that everyone on that show smokes, it’s that they make it look so damn GOOD. Occasionally you’ll see Don reach for a stress cigarette, but mostly the actors on the show make it seem natural, like breathing. And it looks like they all truly ENJOY it.

And I think I know why. They had accessories.

I’ve had this collection stashed away in a dresser drawer for a while and rediscovered it as I was cleaning it out to get it ready to move (I’m not moving, just the dresser is). Most of it belonged to my grandmother, who I believe started smoking at a very early age (if I’m wrong, I’m sure my mother will correct me in the comments) and didn’t quit until her 70s. The case was made in Italy and holds less than 10 cigarettes, which I associate with ladylike behavior. Ladies didn’t chain smoke. There would be no reason for ladies to keep more than 10 cigarettes in a case at a time.

What kills me, however, is the small oval box with a cigarette on its lid. I remember finding this at my grandparents’ house and asking whether it was a pillbox. (Why would a pillbox have a picture of a cigarette on it? I don’t know. But cigarette advertising used to promote the health benefits of smoking. People were crazy.)

It’s not a pillbox. It’s an ashtray. A portable, fits-in-your-clutch ashtray for the lady smoker on the go. There’s even a tab on the inside on which to rest a cigarette. It’s fabulous. Oh, yes: I used this.

(Wouldn’t it be great if smokers had these again? No more sidewalks littered with butts!)

The lighter belonged to my grandfather, who quit smoking long before I was born. The lighter doesn’t work, but it’s a gorgeous art deco-y piece, engraved with his name on one side and initials on the other.

Equally gorgeous is my grandmother’s cigarette holder. I think it’s ivory, which makes me a little uncomfortable since an elephant was probably slaughtered in order to make it, so to make amends for how much I love it I will donate money to the World Wildlife Fund. But I do love it. I love that it has its own case. And the rose design is so elegant.

This I did use. And you know, I did feel more elegant and glamourous, as though I should have been wearing elbow-length gloves and had my hair piled in curls on top of my head.

(OK, I might have worn elbow-length gloves while smoking a cigarette in the holder. And also pearls. When I was in graduate school. Possibly while grading papers.)

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My grandmother was a classy dame. So classy, in fact, that she’d probably disapprove of my calling her a dame. She was a lady.

(When she died, and family gathered together to talk to the rabbi about her life, I remember my mom and aunt saying something like, “She never wore pants. Because ladies didn’t wear pants.” And in that moment my mind positively reeled, as though I was flipping through scene after scene with my grandmother from my childhood to the last time I saw her, and by golly they were right. I’d never realized it in those terms before, but that woman never wore pants. Only skirts. Only ever skirts.)

My grandmother wore hats, though, when it was fashionable to wear hats, and even when styles changed and ladies didn’t wear hats on a daily basis anymore, she kept most of her hats, the daily wear hats as well as those for fancy occasions. True, my grandmother was a skirt-wearing lady who never threw anything out, but I like to think she kept these hats not because she thought they’d come in useful someday — like the jewelry boxes filled with paper clips we kept finding in her desk drawers — but because she thought they might some day become heirlooms. Right now I think she held on to them because she knew someday I would have them, and even though they were meant to be worn, that I’d treasure them as works of art.

Because you guys — look at these hats.

The top one, with the hearts on the veil, is one of my favorites. I think it’s one of the older hats, from the 1940s maybe? And the bottom one intrigues me as well because I’ve never seen anything like it and have no idea when it’s from. All I really have are the labels inside to work from.

So I know that she purchased most of her hats from Field-Schlick, a now defunct department store whose flagship was in downtown St. Paul, on Wabasha and Fifth. I dug a little and found this photo of the Wabasha St. entrance in the Minnesota Historical Society’s online collection:

Although it’s more likely that my grandmother went to the store on S. Cleveland, since it was closer to her house (the house I grew up in).

I also found out that Field-Schlick used to be D. W. Ingersoll & Co. and opened in 1856. By 1896 it had become Field-Schlick, according to an advertisement I found in the St. Paul Globe. (The ad was for a sale on fancy parasols and something called “crash skirts,” but I couldn’t find any information online about what a crash skirt was.)

I do happen to have one of the hatboxes from Field-Schlick:

And one that might interest other native Minnesotans, from Dayton’s. Look at that old logo:

(Oh, Dayton’s. Now you are Macy’s. It’s a little sad.)

More hats:

This one strikes me as a winter hat. The beadwork suggests it was for nice outings like to the theater, but based on what I know of my grandmother I’m more inclined to guess that she wore it on a regular basis, like for shopping or lunch with the girls, or perhaps to normal Friday night services at the synagogue.

This one I can’t picture my grandmother wearing at all, even though it’s her favorite color. The style looks like it would be suited more for a young girl, so my guess would be that this was my mom’s or aunt’s:

I almost didn’t see this one when I was unpacking everything, but it must be part of a bridal veil.

And this one . . . this one simply takes my breath away.

How on earth did hats like this go out of style?

Ever since my grandmother’s hats came into my possession I’ve pondered the best way to display them — well, best and least expensive. I’m wary of simply hanging them as is because some of them are fragile and they’ve been preserved so well through the decades, I don’t want to be the one responsible for their decay. So I think a sort of acrylic box that could be wall mounted would be the way to go, but that’ll take some scratch, and I’m not there yet.

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First of all: I am not going to spend the month of April going on and on and on about MY PLAY. I can’t promise I won’t spend the first week and a couple days thereafter discussing it in some part, because it is a brand new project and I am excited about it and I’m in the first week’s throes of passion for it, like I can’t wait to work on it every day. We’ll see how long that lasts, but for right now wheee! I’m writing something I’ve never tried writing before! It’s fun! And actually, this post isn’t so much about MY PLAY as it is about the research involved in writing it, which is where you come in, which is why I mention it at all.

Second of all: yes, this is a plea for your contributions, whether in comments or email, and one that I would greatly appreciate getting passed around. (Normally I’m not one for reblog/retweet/link back/Digg/etc. requests, but this is in the name of Research, which makes it OK according to my set of arbitrary rules.)

So. My Script Frenzy (screen?)play takes place during September-December 1991, against the backdrop of the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings and their immediate aftermath. It’s not the central issue of the story, but it’s pretty crucial. This story, though many key elements have changed, is largely autobiographical.

I was a junior in college. The public hearings took place in early October, just a few weeks after the beginning of fall quarter. I had yet to be comfortable calling myself a feminist — at the time, I was telling people I “believed in feminist tenets,” like equality and respect for all people, but I wasn’t strong enough to stand up under the severe stigma the label had at the time. The fact that it’s nearly 20 years later and this much has not significantly changed is in part what inspired me to write this particular story (I still can’t decide whether it’s for the stage or screen, even though I’m writing it as a screenplay and I just wrote a flashback scene — I may be in denial here). And no — spoiler? — what happened during these hearings didn’t spur me to any sort of internal revolution or revelation. In retrospect, it had to marinate for a while before I could fit it in with other experiences.

I remember the hearings in brief flashes. Most of what I clearly remember involves the crude jokes that the guys I knew (but wasn’t necessarily friends with) would tell in mixed company, often targeting one or two women in the process. And I remember feeling hopelessly trapped by that; on the one hand wanting to tell these guys off because they were being disrespectful on so many levels, not to mention reinforcing the inequities that these hearings exposed, but on the other hand not wanting them or anyone to think I didn’t have a sense of humor. Even though they weren’t being funny. But that wasn’t the issue at the time, you know? The point I would be trying to make would be lost amidst the “It was just a joke, JEEZ” dismissal I’d surely have gotten. And I don’t remember anyone else telling them off in public either, though if we were in a group of just women we’d have all sorts of rebuttals that we’d promise to use next time it happened — but then we’d all chicken out or something. There wasn’t any sort of clear communication between me and my female friends that we had each other’s back. I think we were all still struggling with our (socially conditioned, culturally reinforced) need for male approval.

(And again, this much also hasn’t changed significantly over the past 20 years, and the idea that one doesn’t have a sense of humor and therefore one’s argument is invalid is . . . pretty stupid. Never mind how it deflects attention away from the issue by immediately putting one on the defensive. “Of course I have a sense of humor! Let me tell you this horribly offensive joke to prove it!”)

ANYWAY.

There’s more, but that’s what I remember in a nutshell. I’ve tracked down a number of resources about the hearings (as well as partial transcripts), but I’m more interested in hearing first-hand recollections about the hearings. What do you remember? (If anything?) Were you more politically advanced than I was? Were these hearings more galvanizing for you? Did they have a different impact on you? Did they have no impact at all? Were you one of the jokesters? (No judgment!) (Honest!) Please tell me your story in the comments, or send an email to smartgrrrl [at] gmail [dot] com.

Thanks in advance! I’m off to write more pages.

No related posts.

You guys.

I’m reading the diary I kept when I was 13. The one I got for my bat mitzvah, the one with my name embossed on the inside front cover, only it’s spelled incorrectly. (Who leaves out the final E in Michelle? You may have your one-L-or-two preference, but that last E is pretty crucial.)

(I mistakenly hit “3″ instead of “E” just now and had a mad impulse to start signing my name “M!ch3LL3,” but I’m sure someone is already doing that. And fortunately the impulse passed.)

I found this diary and two others the last time I was home (May 2009 — has it been that long?), out in the open in my brother’s old room that now serves as mostly a storage room and also as my nephew’s play room (my old room, or at least the room I stayed in when I was home from college, is now the computer room). I was mortified, even 25 years later, to think that my mom might have looked through them — though I think to her credit she would have opened one up, seen what was there, and shut it again without reading further. And if she read the one that I kept during my freshman and sophomore years in college, well, then, my mother knows a few things that I never wanted her to find out. And the thought that she might still read them was terrifying enough for me to scoop up all three journals and dump them in my suitcase and take them back to New York, all the while wishing I had a fireplace in which to burn them.

But not really. I knew I was going to read through them, but the first few pages of each one was enough to tell me that I wasn’t ready to. Funny, isn’t it? I was writing so long ago that it might as well not be me, and it’s not me, not really, but at the same time of course yeah it is. There were a couple things I glanced at that just made me wince, partly, I will admit, in embarrassment that I was ever this . . . STUPID (because in my present-day head I was never this stupid and I even have a number of testimonials from adults to the effect that I was altogether too grown-up and mature for my age, which . . . makes sense, actually, considering how immature adults really are) . . . but mostly because oh god, the anguish. The pain and the obsession and the desolation that comes with being 13.

I don’t know how many of you have kept the stuff you wrote, the personal stuff, from when you were that age, but 13-year-old me is breaking my heart. I just went through five pages of all the things she thought she needed to do to change and make people like her. (See, I have always had this ish.)

#1 on that list? “Don’t laugh a lot.”

Oof.

It’s too much. It’s not even that I want to hug her and tell her that everything is going to be OK, because you know, 13-year-old me wouldn’t listen to any adult, much less one the same age as her mother (ok, THAT’S FUCKED UP, PEOPLE). But I want to protect her, reach through the fabric of time and shield her from all the crap she’s dealing with now, and all the worse crap I know is coming in the next year. That’s diary #2, and it’s not going to be pretty.

At the same time, there is plenty of material here that I feel comfortable sharing with you all, because I think it is hilarious. And I also think it’s a good idea from time to time to remind ourselves of a basic truth — or at least, one of my basic truths — that what you think is so crucially important at the time may not actually stand the test of time, that taking a step back and gaining a little perspective never hindered one’s progress.

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The following was inspired by a writing prompt courtesy of Write One Leaf.

My family wasn’t the outdoorsy kind (too much nature), but I don’t think it’s possible to grow up in Minnesota and NOT go fishing at least once. And while ice fishing is definitely something one needs to experience — again, at least once — it’s lake fishing, in the middle of summer, on a 90 degree day, with a peerless cloudless sky, in placid waters, that I remember with such fondness. I don’t remember the first time I went fishing, but I do remember going out one day in North Dakota, during the month I was visiting my father, though my dad didn’t go with us. Again, not the outdoorsy type. Instead, one of his colleagues and friends took me out with his two sons, one of whom was roughly my age, out to some park or another that must have been outside Grand Forks because honestly, there isn’t a lot of natural beauty that I remember in Grand Forks. It’s been a while since I’ve been back, so forgive me if I’m wrong.

We had a picnic-style lunch of hot dogs and chips and pop (I say soda now, but I want to stay true to my Midwestern roots for this story), and then set out in a motor boat, life jackets at the ready. For the purposes of this story I’m going to make this the first time I’d gone fishing, and I’m going to say that this is why my dad sent me along without him, because he had no interest in it but knew that I was keen. And so Ed and his sons whose names I have forgotten (Tom? Mike?) taught me how to how to bait my hook, first offering to do it for me. I took that to imply “cuz you’re a girl” and I wasn’t going to let that happen, so I said, “I can bait my own hook, just show me how.” And I put a worm piece on my hook, remembering at the time how I used to dig up the backyard looking for worms because I thought they were fascinating creatures, and I used to collect them and put them in plastic buckets of dirt and I guess I was trying to start my own worm farm? But then my grandmother caught on to what I was doing and berated me for digging up her lawn, and that was the end of my worm farm enterprise.

We sat in the boat for what felt like hours, drinking pop and eating chips and listening to the water lap at our boat. We weren’t catching anything, and the boys and I were becoming frustrated, and we were running out of worms, because the fish would grab the worms right off the hooks and say thanks for the snack and then rush off again to tell their friends that there were free snacks availalbe if they were careful enough. I’d just lost my last worm but I didn’t want to give up fishing because I liked the experiment in patience, the possibility that at any moment something could happen, and the tranquility that comes with being on the water. (On certain summer days, those around me will hear me openly long to be on a boat. And not on the Hudson or East River. I mean on a lake, far away from anything. Give me a canoe and a paddle and push me off.)

We had leftover hot dogs, so I reached into the cooler, found the uneaten dogs, broke off a small chunk of one, and put it on my hook. The boys laughed at me. Fish don’t like hot dogs, they jeered. That’s never gonna work. I shrugged, because clearly they didn’t get it, and flung my hook back into the lake. Within minutes, I had a bite. A real bite, not a tug that would’ve told me that I’d just lost my worm to a hungry fish. This fish was threatening to pull my fishing pole right out of my hands if I wasn’t careful. I whooped, and Ed was right there to back me up. He told me how to move with the fish as I reeled it in, he held my shoulders down so I wouldn’t get jerked around. I held on, and while the fish wasn’t that big I felt like I was in danger of getting pulled right off the boat. The end of the pole was starting to chafe, my arm muscles were straining, it was all happening too fast and too slow at the same time. But we finally got the fish out of the water, and I whooped again, looking triumphantly at the boys who dismissed my hot dog experiment. I’d caught the first fish. I’d caught the only fish that day.

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