Sassistas! Our dish on the social soup.

Open Halloween

 

It's the end of the month AND Halloween weekend!

Step up to the pumpkin and post whatever you like.

The Sassistas! are listening . . .

Miami Beach or Bust?

 

Two weekends ago, Flannista spent a couple of hours on Amazon looking for a new pair of comfortable shoes.  Above is what she ended up buying.  Matissta took one look at them and said: "You should only wear those at a Miami Beach retirement home. Please never wear them outside."

What say you?  Miami Beach or bust?  Why?

Such a Star

In the sass stream to our October 23rd post, Justista shared the following comment:

Just flew back to Vegas. They tell Sukey that she has 3 weeks to 3 months. I trimmed her nails and stroked her fingers. She kept down a little bit of smoothie that I made her and I felt so proud. We talked today about the time when we were 8 and 6 and we wore matching dresses (white Peter Pan collars) and we were invited onto the raft where the band was playing in the Tonga Room at the Fairmont Hotel in SF (I just went to a meeting there) and Sukey threw up in the pool. We laughed. I have to teach for two days and will return to CA to take my old legless Daddy to see Sukey. I feel your love. I am thankful.

Yesterday, the Sassistas! invited Justista to "please feel free to write anything you like" about Sukey in the sassosphere.  "If you want to send photos, we'll post those, too.  Think of it as your travel log."  A couple of hours later, Justista sent the following photo (included in a long newspaper article about her retirement this year):

This photo was taken in Washington, D.C. on November 1, 2006, the day Justista argued a case in front of the U.S. Supreme Court.  Sukey is to the right of their old legless Daddy (he had one leg left at that time). In the email accompanying the photo, Justista wrote:

Sukey doesn't need to be the center of attention, that's why she is such a star.

Justista -- you're a star, too.  We love you and are with you and your beloveds on your journey.

Fall Menu

 

Flann took Matissta out to dinner last night.

This is one of the courses.

What is it?

 

The Lesson

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1973

In 1972, Flannista received "The Silent Secretary" (pictured right) for Christmas.  It became my first daily journal. Five years earlier, my Christmas stocking had included a five-year diary (click here to see the Sassistas! post about that). Santa -- my mother -- must have done the math and determined it was time for a new journal.

This past month, I read "The Silent Secretary" from cover to cover and discovered it to be both tedious and fascinating reading.

The first entry is on the very back page. Dated 1/1/73, it begins with typical Flann drama: "In the event of my death, I want this book given to [name of Forbidden Friend (FF)], wherever she may be. Please make sure she gets this." The page ends with this:

If my parents read this they probably won't understand.  I'm sorry.  They never understood me or my feelings toward [FF]. They (my feelings) aren't homosexual -- they really aren't.  My feelings are of an intellectual kind of love. I feel that everyone should once in their lives have a good friend of the same sex.  Physical hassles are connected with male relationships -- not that I don't like them -- but with a friend of the same sex, one can really grow mentally because the physical end of it doesn't exist. I never needed FF for physical satisfaction . . . everyone needs a FF just to know that there is somebody who will always cared.  I need love, and I need to be loved.  For Flannista, for being me. That's I why I need FF, and why I want her to have this.

I decided to name my Silent Secretary, "Paraphernalia".  The first formal entry is pictured above and includes this line: I am writing all this crap, so 40 years from now I can read it and know where I was.

Nearly 40 years later, it's clear that back then I was in a sad and lonely place in Washington, D.C., where I worked as a file clerk in the FBI Laboratory, hoping desperately to transfer to the FBI Pittsburgh Field Office where FF lived and worked and we could begin a life together. Journal entries are filled with fears that my dream of living with FF would never come true; worse, that my parents would find out about it: God, if I die and my parents find this, I'll be so embarrassed and they'll be so disappointed.

The entries also reveal:

• My desire to be famous: I shall be very famous.  The trick is to figure out what I want to be famous for . . . perhaps curbing the crime rate.
• I was dating at least three different men that year, including a Morman who fervently tried to convert me.  I also had a strange encounter with the man sitting beside me on a Greyhound bus coming back from Pittsburgh (after a weekend with FF): A man from Libya named Ali sat beside me and we talked the entire time . . . we became attracted to each other; held hands and kissed.  He had only been in the United States for 17 days.  He wanted my address, but I did not give it to him.
• The racism of the time: A new colored girl is coming to work in Lab Files tomorrow and none of us are thrilled. Sibyl [name of FBI supervisor] is going to try and get the girl re-assigned.
• I had $761.24 to my name.
• How much I bargained with God: I have to be happy and more tolerant and kind to people.  I have to.  I think God will smile on me then and give me what I want.  The only thing I want is to live with FF.  Oh, how can I be happy here when everything that makes me truly happy is in Pittsburgh?
• My constant struggle with self-mutiliation (not specifically named in the journal): I did not get any mail today and it might be because it is a form of punishment for what I cannot control anymore.  I really think there is something wrong with me. Everytime I say I won't do it again, I end up doing it. I'm so afraid that God will do something about it and that's one way -- not getting a letter from FF.
• How little attention I paid to current events: John Dean testified today that Nixon was involved in Watergate.  What else happened?  Our cleaning schedule here at the home was changed and I have to make sure to stick out my waste paper can outside my door if I want my room cleaned.
• A fascination with the movie, "A Clockwork Orange".  This is the last entry in my Silent Secretary, written on September 1: Bought a derby hat today and false eyelash.  FF and I haven't touched since October 13, 1972 when we really gave each other a good hug.  I am not a lesbian.  I AM NOT.  But every once in a while anybody who needs it -- deserves a good hug.  I miss it.  I need it and deserve it.

Two weeks later, a young evangelical Christian couple -- Tim and Sophia (not their real names) -- moved in to manage the dorm-like facility I lived in on Capitol Hill and reached out to me. I became part of their family, not to mention, a Christian following a "born-again" experience on Halloween night 1973. I made no record of the event. 

In January 1974, I began another journal.

For Gwen

 

Gwen on the back of PEACEsista's Race for the Cure t-shirt.

Thank you, PEACE and noway!

 

For Sukey

 

And for Justista.

With love from PEACEsista and the Sassistas!

 

In the Bank

Well, it finally arrived -- Flannista's first (and perhaps only) paycheck from Hollywood.

Remember that big writing project this past August? This is what Flannista was paid -- the largest check ever made out to her.  She drove directly to the bank and deposited the entire amount. There's still too much professional uncertainty these days for the Sassistas! to be spending a lot of money. We're going to let that dough do nothing in the bank while we continue to discern what lies ahead for us.

But if we WERE to spend the money, what should we spend it on?

Breastplate

 

In his compelling study of self-mutilation, Bodies Under Siege, Armando Favazza describes aspects of the impulse as "a creative act linked with the restructuring of chaos into order."  

It is also a defiant act.  A defining act.  An act of Great Declaration.  "Here I am," it says. "I am alive. I am me."  Ultimately, it celebrates not death, but the will to live.

Self-mutilation is not an easy topic to write about, let alone read about.  However, an estimated three million people in the United States regular cut and burn their skin, bite off their fingertips, even castrate themselves or enucleate (poke out) their eyes. 

Nearly 50 years ago, Flannista was among those three million.  At age 10, I began to regularly mutilate my breasts in an attempt to make them disappear.  At the time, I had no idea why I developed the ritual, but it was elaborate, drew blood and was very painful. Three decades later, a therapist suggested that my ritual was a crude way to individuate from my mother who often moved through our home naked from the waist up. At the time, she was also styling the hair of her five daughters to look exactly like her hairstyle. When we went out as a family, she dressed all of us in shirts and pants that matched hers. Even my father looked like her.  None of us knew where she ended and where each of us began. The ritual of mutilation helped me to know where I began. It was unique and private, something I could call my own.

Perhaps it took a lot of courage for a 10-year-old to create a method for carving out her identity, but nearly five decades later, the pain of that ritual becomes as palatable as it was then every time I show up for my annual gynocological appointment and mammogram. A woman my age shouldn't have such an inordinate fear of the gynocologist or radiation technician, but I do. I always tear up when Dr. Elliott opens the examining room door or when I place a breast on the glass slide.  "Please don't hurt me," I'm thinking.  "I promise to be a good girl."  Many years ago, to his credit, Dr. Elliott asked me about the scars on my breasts. I told him and he listened tenderly. I asked him if doing what I did made my breasts more susceptible to breast cancer.  He said, "I'm so sorry you carry this pain, but no, you can't get cancer from what you did. We're all going to die one day, Flannista, and perhaps from cancer, but you aren't going to die on my watch if I can help it."

I see Dr. Elliott this morning at 11:15 (EST) followed by my annual mammogram. Like my mother, I don't like doctors, but unlike my mother (who has never had a mammogram), I move forward through my fear and show up for my annual appointments. Still, it's not easy to sit in those waiting rooms, year after year, feeling like a 10-year-old.  But there I am.  Alive.  And utterly me.

The image in this post is of an ancient Aegis Shield. An Aegis was the breastplate of both Zeus and Athena.