Dear Future Feminist

An Open Letter to Meghan Trainor:

First of all, congratulations. So many congratulations! You’ve had an amazing year. I can only hope that my daughter has a tenth of your success and self-assurance (and income) at your age. Which is 22. Twenty-dang-two. Barely old enough to buy champagne and you’ve got a closet full of awards and constant radio play. Brava, honey.

What you’ve also got, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, is a lot of attention. I hope that most of it is positive and is filling your life with light and joy. But I know not all of it is. Aside from the assuredly awful comments you must get from a wide range of cretins just by being a woman and existing in public, there’s also been a negative wave coming from what seems like an unexpected source: feminists.

I’ve seen multiple articles decrying your lyrics as regressive, body-shaming, and even sexist. And the reason I’ve seen these articles is because, as a card-carrying feminist, I read the publications that produced them. And while I can see that not every one of your songs is a flawless paean to total gender equality, I totally disagree with their assessment about you as an artist.

It seems like because your first big hit had a refreshingly body-positive message, a lot of people were expecting you to bound into mainstream radio as a fully formed feminist icon. As a result, you got a level of criticism that the typical pop star gets to avoid. People attacked the fact that you sang jokingly about “skinny bitches” without noting that the entire reason you recorded “All About That Bass” yourself (instead of handing your song over to big fancy stars as you’ve been doing professionally since you were EIGHTEEN) was because there wasn’t a single not-size-2 singer out there to take it.

Sure, “Dear Future Husband” isn’t a Steinem-esque manifesto. But it’s not setting the movement back 30 years, either. I hear a woman clearly prioritizing her career, owning her foibles, and demanding respect from a partner, which is 1000 times more feminist than the typical mantras of “you complete me,” “please don’t leave,” and “you treat me badly but I love you” that have comprised female voices in pop music for the last six decades. You’re bemoaned for wanting to be loved even when you’re acting crazy? That sentiment made up 70% of Fiona Apple’s early radio play.

And clearly, the people criticizing these two songs haven’t heard the rest of the album, which my children and I have been listening to non-stop for months. I tend to hit Skip on “Walkashame” at the moment, although will encourage its “Hey, I make my own decisions and at least I was being smart” stance when my kids get a bit older. The way “My Selfish Heart” laments having to pass up love because of a focus on following one’s own dream may not be an ideal representation of an equal relationship, but it’s a realistic portrayal of the struggle many women face. The fact that you’re aware of it at 21 gives me a lot of hope and enthusiasm for your perspective as you move through the first real decade of your adulthood.

And that's why felt like I had to write this, because I want you to know that I represent everyone excited to see where you go next. I believe you’ll grow and learn and change, just like everyone does, and I hope you won’t quit sharing messages about acceptance and ambition and love on your own terms just because some people don’t think you’re doing it exactly right.  Nobody does it exactly right, but most of us don’t have the world watching while we figure things out. Just don’t confuse criticism of your work with your validity as an artist and professional. You’re phenomenal, and as my 12-year-old daughter belts on a regular basis, every inch of you is perfect from your head down to your toes.        

Memorial Day

I wrote this piece as a creative writing student at Northwestern in response to Tim O'Brien's short story, "The Things They Carried." The framework is fictionalized, an evening like many others we've spent but not, in fact, when I had this conversation with my dad. But the story itself and the words he used to tell them are true.

As we remember the fallen on Memorial Day, may we also give our thoughts to those who can't ever forget.

Carrying On

I can't imagine why anyone would set down his stuff in the middle of the jungle, and then walk away. It seems too obvious a trail. I ask my dad if it could have really happened. He was a First Lieutenant, too. Just like the soldier in the story.

"Travel heavy, patrol light -- that was the rule. When we moved from place to place, we took everything along, but if we were just out looking around, then we left most of our things in one spot. Someone was always there with it, though."

He's in a good mood tonight. The Twins beat the Angels, and his boss called him just to say hello. He's even swearing a little, which he only does when he's sure he won't hurt anyone by it. I want to ask him more. I would even write his story if he could tell me how he felt, but his answers usually fly at me like wild pitches, military details too far over my head.

Keep your eye on the ball, he would say, just like when he was my softball coach. I've been searching the sky for years, without ever seeing the helicopters or hearing the artillery fire.

We're quiet for a minute, both drinking Coke out of cans and staring at the empty dinner dishes in front of us. He still seems happy. I don't come home much anymore, so when I do, we stay up talking until even the dog gives up on us and goes upstairs to sleep. I don't know how to ask the big questions that are on my mind, so tonight I talk to him about the story I read.

"What did you carry, Dad? What special things?"

The physical act of remembering pushes his graying eyebrows into the metal frame of his glasses.

"Cribbage. Your aunt sent me a little cribbage game in a leather case. And Kool-Aid, because the water tasted so bad. And we all had O-rings, with bottle openers and other little things attached to them."

"What about the other guys?"

He taps a fingertip lightly on the kitchen table.

"There was this one grunt we called Cowboy. He carried a hank of rope with him. To practice roping. He used to lasso up whatever he could see -- tree trunks, fallen branches, the radio operator."

I can't help smiling. "That sounds like a bad war movie, Dad."

He laughs like three sharp raps at a door. "Yeah, I guess it does."

The dog has been upstairs for a while now, and I can see my father is ready to be done with the questions, but I am suddenly filled with the longing to hear the story he has never told me. I've seen it on his face when we were at the memorial in D.C., and I've heard dismembered details from my older sister, but I'm not even sure that she actually knows. I don't think he's ever told anyone.

He sets his glasses on the table and rubs the bridge of his round nose. I know he's tired, and memories are wrapped around him like the heavy jungle heat. I don't know where to begin. I know this man better than anyone, some people say we're practically clones, but I can't imagine this part of his life. Mom has told me about the nights when an unexpected phone call or ambulance siren jerks him out of sleep and thrusts him back into a muddy culvert or humid base camp. He doesn't scream anymore, my mom has said, or leap out of the bed, but he sits straight up, and his eyes are open, inward, and his knees drawn tightly to his bare chest as the lights flash red-blue, red-blue through the window and then disappear, or the clamor of the telephone gives up and fades away. But that's now. I still can't imagine then. I ask him now about combat and rainy seasons and anything else I can think of. We start talking about accidents.

He says that by the end of his tour, he saw more people killed by accidents than enemy fire. Falling trees, malfunctioning helicopters -- strange, dumb things, he said, those were the worst. People killed by mistakes that could have been avoided.

"Like what?" I regret the question immediately, but then relax, fairly confident that he will skirt around it like many others I've asked over the years: "How'd you get that medal?" "What's that scar from?" And when I was very young, "Did you ever shoot anyone?" I've never heard him say more than he wanted to. But now as I look at him, still wearing his suit five hours after coming home from work, his shoulders lose a little of their usually solid breadth as he leans his elbows on the blue plaid placemat in front of him. He is going there, to the place I want to know, but I still feel far away.

"My sergeant told me where he was in the field, and where the rest of the guys were. My men, from my platoon. He gave me the numbers and I gave them to the artillery battery. Then the first mark round went off and landed about 400 meters away from them." His tone is so crisp and distinct, I feel like he isn't talking to me, but just radioing in reports from the field like coordinates.

"The first what?"

"Mark round. They shot those to make sure the guns were set correctly. Then they followed them with what were called 'high explosives.'"

"Okay, I see." A little confused, I still try to keep up. This may be the only chance I get.

"But then the mark round from the second gun buzzed just over their heads. I called in to say it was too close, but by then, the explosives from the first gun had been fired. And they landed right where the mark should have gone before, but didn't. Right on top of the men."

"So it was a problem with the gun?"

"Just a fluke. It had misfired the first time."

"Was anyone hurt?"

I know the question is ridiculous, but I can't say it any other way. I already feel like I've gone too far. His voice is growing thinner with every answer, and his narrow eyes blink more often than the dim kitchen light calls for.

"Ten people killed. About that many injured, as well." Then he tells me about the investigation and official ruling; more intricacies in code words I don't fully understand, like that base-coach sign language he had always tried to teach me. It makes little sense to me, but I keep nodding, just so he won't forget I'm there, won't forget how far he has gone since then.

It wasn't his fault, any of it, but I'm still afraid that I'm hurting him by making him remember. He rarely says a word about the war, but tonight I wonder how he will stop. He wants to keep talking himself out of the jungle, where in one unforgettable moment, the weight of ten deaths was added to his load. Each word is a step away, but the weight is still there, like the lingering smell of rotting things he says he could never get out of his clothes. His tie is loose and his hair is beginning to fall across his forehead. His palms are flat on his knees, and his eyes, small and deep like mine, are focused somewhere beneath the kitchen floor. He looks young, but burdened. He could burn his uniform, throw out his gear, but the weight is still there. Patrol light. Travel heavy. After twenty-five years, he's still carrying the weight of an ownerless mistake he can't order himself to set down. 

All Doubt, No Benefit

We're just going to go ahead and ignore the year-long blog hiatus (for now, anyway) and get right to the point. There was a very strange and unsettling assault reported here in Memphis last weekend, which happens to be one of our busiest tourism times of the year. The attack reportedly took place during the Memphis in May World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest, an event that you've probably seen featured on the Food Network or Al Roker's Twitter feed. What struck me even more than the story, however, was how quickly people (myself included) spewed forth with reasons the alleged victim couldn't be telling the truth. It was a disturbing reminder of how much we'll fight to believe that the world is rational and predictable, even when it means denying the (possible) truth.

So I wrote about it, and the good folks at The Memphis Flyer were kind enough to post it in my old Wheelhouse spot. So there it is.  

Not In My Wheelhouse

Oh, hey there. I've spent the last eight months writing a weekly column over at The Memphis Flyer's website so things have been pretty quiet around here, but recent budget cuts have sent my Wheelhouse feature into the great pixel graveyard (you can catch up on previous columns here). I'd already written this week's piece before I got the news, though, and due to its timely nature, I thought I'd go ahead and share it today. Hope you enjoy, and thanks, as always, for reading.

New Heart, Old Soul

In direct response to the Ku Klux Klan’s undersized mobile unit appearing in Memphis, our city leaders sponsored an event to celebrate diversity. By all accounts, the Heart of Memphis festivities were a successful undertaking, despite the consistently uncooperative weather. I was not in attendance, however. Instead, I spent the afternoon at an event that celebrates diversity on a regular basis: Saturday shopping at Target.

There, under the fluorescent lights, every shade and shape of Memphis was represented, all ages and multiple creeds. We didn’t need an organized program or all-star line-up to get us there. We just needed dish soap and Pull-Ups and a shower curtain.

I appreciate the sentiment behind Heart of Memphis, and based on what I’ve heard from those who attended, it was a good time. I’m happy it happened. But as my friend Melissa Bridgman (who took her whole family to the event and greatly enjoyed it) Facebooked afterward, “we should not be such a reactive city - react to the state legislature, react to hate groups. Why don't we set the tone ourselves?”

And for my money, the best way to set the tone is often the least intentional. There is no Diversity Day at Target. There’s no multicultural mission to eat lunch at Memphis’ fine assortment of Asian buffets. There isn’t a unity banner over the entrance of the Woodland Discovery playground at Shelby Farms. And yet, all of these places naturally bring together a wide swath of our community, freely and peacefully.

I mention these places not as random examples but because I’ve taken specific notice of this phenomenon there. And I notice because it’s still not the norm. There have been plenty of other venues where I’ve looked around and thought, “Wow, this sure is a lot of white people.” And that’s on me, I’ll admit it. I control where I spend my time. But I also think Memphis, like most cities with anything like a diverse population, struggles to blend cultures and comfort levels.

Unlike other cities, however … well, we’re Memphis. After the violence and struggle and tragedy on either side of April 4, 1968, huge portions of downtown practically disintegrated. It took forty years to bring back the area surrounding the Lorraine Motel, and those were just buildings. Memories hold up much longer, and ideas about who is expected to be where are pretty hard to knock down.

And here we are, forty-five years from that terrible day. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the Klan chose this week in particular to stop by, but I hope they were a little surprised by their reception. Living in the past as they do, I’m sure they felt comfortable in the knowledge that ours is a city clearly divided between black and white. I’m guessing they didn’t factor in that 2013 Memphis has not only progressed, but that it’s also not just black and white. The number of Memphians identifying as Hispanic doubled between 2000 and 2010, and we have the highest population of Asian descent in the region. In the average classroom, a couple kids speak a language other than English at home. In other words, we’re not a place where people are stuck. We’re a place where people choose to be.

And that, ultimately, is what we create whenever we join our neighbors, without motive or agenda, to simply participate in each other’s lives. I wasn’t raised here, but my peers have made it clear that the color lines have softened since their childhoods, and that our own children are growing up in a different city altogether. Of the six children living in my house, every one of them has a best friend of a different racial background than themselves. As adults of our generation, we still observe these things, but they don’t even notice.

And that’s something to celebrate.

Full Steam Ahead

Welcome, Memphis Flyer readers! And welcome back, past reader(s) wondering if I was ever planning to post again (hi, JB)! This summer’s been eventful in all sorts of ways, few of which have involved sitting and writing things down, but that’s all about to change. From this Wednesday on, I’ll be forging a weekly column (that means EVERY WEEK HOLY CRAP) called The Wheelhouse, available exclusively (doesn’t that sound nicer than “only?”) on www.MemphisFlyer.com. For those outside the midsouth, the Flyer is our local alternative press, the home of our best civic reporting, arts coverage, food porn, and adult chat line ads. The website has even more of this great stuff, and also my work. The first piece, which features 901 Day, a birth rally, and an extended sinusitis metaphor, is available here.

In this brave new world of online publishing, clicks count. I won’t be putting the full columns in this space, but I’ll post links wherever I can squeeze them. I hope that if you enjoy what you read, you’ll share them as well. And if you have the urge to comment, don’t fight it.      

Oh and hey, if you just can’t wait a week in between snarkbursts, you can find me over on Twitter @andriakbrown.

Here we go!

P.S. Thanks to Richard and Kristy for the push and the pull. I don’t make encouraging me easy. 

Exile on Main Street

This is the day my Main Street Journal column would normally appear, but unfortunately, the site is now in extended hiatus and my column is on permanent vacation. I'd written one last piece that didn't run, however, so I'm posting it below.

Writing Southpaw was a great opportunity for me and I appreciate all the support I received for that work. Thanks for reading, y'all. And hey, if you need a columnist, drop me a line.

Babies, Elephants, Walks

On a recent summer afternoon, I stood with my two children outside the elephant enclosure at the Memphis Zoo. Because I’m a complete zoo nerd who knows such things, I encouraged my five-year-old son to call their names. As he said each one – Tyranza, Asali, and Gina – their gargantuan ears shuddered and their eyes glanced in his direction, but they couldn’t be distracted from their recently delivered lunch. The kids quickly lost interest and were ready to move on to the pandas and bonobos, but I had a harder time walking away. It had been a while since I saw those girls. I missed them.

Nearly nine years ago, as a brand-new mother with few friends in Memphis, I spent countless afternoons at the zoo. I lived within walking distance and packing my infant daughter into her stroller and making the wide loop to Prentiss Place and back was a regular part of our routine. As a zoo member, I didn’t feel a need to see every animal on every visit. But I almost always went to see the elephants.

There were only two then – Gina hadn’t get joined the herd. As often as possible, I’d coordinate my trips to the keeper chats and docent talks, and I felt even more connected to these animals as I learned about their histories and habits.

One afternoon, though, I was the only visitor at the exhibit. I held my baby on my hip and looked out on their miniaturized veldt. “Tyranza,” I said, my voice no louder than if I were talking to a friend beside me. The stately matriarch turned to look at me. “Tyranza,” I said again. The elephant walked toward us, her eyes bright and curious in her paleolithic head. She came as close as she could to the border of her enclosure, looked right at us, and lifted her trunk. The power of her presence, and her awareness, stunned me. I held her gaze for minutes, not able to look away until the baby began to fuss at my stillness.

Tyranza is the grandmother of the herd, twenty years older than her companions. She has been exempt from the recent reproductive efforts among the younger females, efforts that have ended in a late miscarriage for Gina and the tragic accidental death of Asali’s newborn calf. The latter captured the compassion and grief of Memphians in a way few local stories have. The loss of that animal seemed to galvanize our worst self-perception that nothing good can last here.

At the time I held my daughter and spoke to an elephant, I was fighting a hopelessness of my own. I felt isolated and overwhelmed, unaware that post-partum depression was coming over me like a shadow. Luckily, I soon found my own matriarchal troupe, a gathering of other new moms at a retail store and community center called Mothersville. This space was so essential to my early motherhood that I eventually became the owner, doing the best I could to create a place for women to find support and companionship during those powerfully, and often surreptitiously, difficult days. When I closed the store in 2008, my greatest sadness was for the mothers who might never find each other.

In the years since Mothersville’s  end and Asali’s terrible loss, however, something surprising has happened in Memphis. Even amid awareness of our tragicomic missteps, there is a growing civic pride that exists almost to spite our own long-standing modesty. (Just say the words “Mayor Wharton” to feel a sense of this new mentality.) And from the safe distance of a mother of school-age children, I see an ever-growing community among new moms, connecting through social media and planning time to get together in person.

I hope those women find the friendship and understanding that marked my time at Mothersville. I hope they grow into their motherhood together and still have each other’s numbers when they need help carting science projects and picking drivers’ ed instructors. And if they start to feel under that stealthy shadow, during those earliest, most dangerous days, I hope they’ll find a place where they can get some inner sun – a coffee shop, a friend’s porch, or of course, the zoo.

Tyranza and I will be happy to see them.

___

If you or a loved one is struggling with post-partum depression, visit www.JennysLight.org for information on when, how, and where to find help.

Our Pre-Existing Condition

[Ed. note: My Main Street Journal column this week had some formatting issues, so although I don't usually republish these pieces in their entirety, I had enough people tell me they couldn't open the original that I wanted to provide another viewing option. So on this Independence Week, I patriotically present the original rough draft of the Supreme Court's time-saving combined decision on immigration and healthcare ...]

SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES

NATIONAL FEDERATION OF INDEPENDENT

BUSINESS ET AL. v. SEBELIUS, SECRETARY OF

HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES, ET AL.

CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE ELEVENTH CIRCUIT No. 11-393. Argued March 26, 27, 28, 2012

AND

ARIZONA ET AL. v. UNITED STATES

CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE NINTH CIRCUIT No. 11-182. Argued April 25, 2012

CHIEF JUSTICE’S ROUGH DRAFT – DO NOT DISTRIBUTE

Look, it’s summer. Not just regular summer, but some kind of sci-fi, stupid-hot, super-summer, with every American city including Washington D.C. hovering somewhere near 115 degrees. (Not that there’s global warming or anything, right, Scalia?) And we don’t know if you noticed, but the Court spends the day in ankle-length black wool. So let’s just save some time before Clarence goes commando and get right to what you’re all waiting for.

In 2010, Congress enacted the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in order to increase the number of Americans covered by health insurance and decrease the cost of health care. An Arizona statute known as S. B. 1070 was also enacted in 2010 to address pressing issues related to the large number of unlawful aliens in the State. What do these two things have in common? Well, the Court submits that both laws seek to define the nature and character of what we generally refer to as an American, and in a little-known article tacked onto the Constitution by Daniel Webster, the responsibility of maintaining this definition is handed to the Court at any point in time in which the opinions of a majority of Americans are overpowered by an especially pushy and well-funded minority.

At the time of its passage, Americans found the Affordable Care Act to be a positive thing, by a margin of 49 percent to 40¹. And yet, by the time the Court ruled on the law, 72% of those polled felt the (misnamed) “individual mandate” provision of the ACA was “unconstitutional.²” Which the Court finds kind of funny, being that less than a third of Americans have actually read the thing³. Because you know who has eighteen thumbs and has totally read the Constitution? These guys. Well, more than a third of us, anyway. And we tend to believe that a non-stop flurry of talking points, scare tactics, and misinformation had much more influence on public opinion than anything found in Ol’ Connie (yeah, we nicknamed the Constitution. Jealous?).

Even those who favor repealing the ACA don’t generally believe the entire thing should be scrapped. Less than 1 percent of those polled felt that the coverage of those with pre-existing conditions and young adults under 26 should be revoked⁴. Which means that 99 percent of people agree with these two landmark reforms. And if memory serves, there hasn’t been 99 percent agreement on any provision of any law since the historic passage of the Cake at Birthday Parties Act of 1827.

Likewise, two thirds of Americans believe that immigration is a good thing for the country⁵. Now, asked specifically about border patrols and paper-checks and other methods of enforcing immigration laws, people tend to get a little less generous, but at heart, we are a nation that remembers, way back in our collective conscience, that we’re all immigrants. Well, except for Maricopa County, Arizona’s Sheriff Joe Arpaio, whose ancestors sprung fully formed from the Statue of Liberty’s torch. (What, the Court can’t be sarcastic?)

So here’s the deal. You can’t arrest undocumented immigrants for trying to get a job. You can’t set immigration policy on a state-by-state basis, because guess what? It’s a state. You can’t immigrate to a state. No one ever got on a boat and travelled for five months in filthy, overcrowded conditions to immigrate to Alabama.

And for those lucky enough to be born here, who never for a day have to worry about a traffic stop turning into a thousand-mile one-way trip, our responsibilities are even greater. If we are going to hold ourselves up as an example among nations, we better act like one. And step one is providing access to medical care for every citizen. We’re sure sorry that means that some healthy libertarians and off-the-grid homeopaths may have to pony up a few hundred bucks to remain insurance-free, but if the “mandate” eats at your conscience and sense of autonomy, consider it a tax that pays for you to be protected from the roaming gangs that would be fighting you for your land in any other country that doesn’t have national health care. (Okay, sometimes the Court exaggerates a little. But still.)

From the earliest peoples traveling across the Bering Strait from the mother continent to the immigrant workers upholding today’s industry, our very existence as a country depends on the transfer of individuals from other places to this one. And our continued esteem as a country depends on joining ourselves together for the collective good and assuring that something as basic as physical health is considered a right for all and not a privilege for some.

For centuries, citizens of other lands have risked their lives to find better ones here. In this country. In our America. Some of them were our ancestors, some of them are our neighbors. We owe it to all of them to make it worth the trouble.

Roberts out.


--
¹ USA TODAY/Gallup, Mar. 24, 2010
² USA TODAY/Gallup, Feb. 20-21, 2012

³ National Survey of Americans' Awareness and Understanding of the Constitution and Constitutional Concepts, Sponsored by the Claude Moore Charitable Foundation, Sept. 2010

⁴ New York Times/CBS News, Jan. 15-19, 2011
⁵ USA TODAY/Gallup, June 7-10, 2012

Greetings and Apologies

If you happen to have found this site through any of my recent online forays, welcome! If on the other hand you’ve been hanging around here waiting for something new to happen ... well, sorry. Please feel free to check out any of those aforementioned forays. In May, I had Main Street Journal columns on the blessed and cursed Memphis music scene and a local perspective on the Time Magazine attachment parenting kerfuffle. I also had the honor of publishing a somewhat mortifying memoir on Punchnel’s.

I took a brief summer break from columnizing, but will be back on the home page of Main Street Journal on Tuesday, June 19. I hope you’ll stop by. 

Time Out of Mind: The Problem with (Un)Covering Motherhood

In an era of ever-dwindling relevance, Time sure figured out how to get its name out there. (I mean, quick, what’s the last Time cover you remember prior to last week’s?) Turns out, putting a photograph of a woman with a breast exposed to feed a nursing toddler is pretty much ignored on a Whole Foods magazine rack, but when placed on the cover of a mainstream news weekly, sparks one the most fundamental and potently emotional debates in our culture. No, not “what is the right/best way to parent.” The true question stemming from that cover was, “How self-absorbed do they think mothers are?”

That Time cover and accompanying story were publicity bait, seemingly intended solely to get shared thousands of times on Facebook among the technologically-active attachment parenting community, as well as those equally opposed to it. The first time I saw the cover, I mentally braced myself for the comment threads to follow. I was pleasantly surprised when the most frequent reaction I saw instead was, “Oh, come on.” The cover was so over-the-top, its aggressive “Are you mom enough?” headline so obvious, that it didn’t warrant a response. If there’s anything we’ve learned from the recent so-called “mommy wars,” it’s that no one wins. There is someone on the other side of every parenting issue, and neither side can claim victory. The sentiment I saw over and over was, mothering is hard enough without us judging each other. In short: we’re not taking the bait.

In case the pointlessness of Time’s story wasn’t clear enough, there was another magazine story, coming out of Memphis, that spelled it out in no uncertain terms. If you want a hard-hitting story about the true hazards of mothering, skip over Time and pick up a copy of Glamour. Yes, Glamour. The May issue features four women who are dedicated to lowering the infant mortality rate in Memphis, which is currently the worst in the United States. Local mothers Brittany Spence and Kenyatta Collins-Bolden, nurse Tonya Taylor, and social worker Netasha Bowers, among a growing legion of others, have taken an active role in increasing the number of babies born in Memphis who see their first birthdays. They have had measurable, significant success, but the fight is nowhere near over. The fact that this is a battle still needing to be fought in a major city in the U.S. reveals a “mommy war” that can’t be summed up by a staged (yes, women nurse 3-year-olds, but not one of them does it like that), intentionally provocative photograph of a middle-class woman with every parenting choice at her disposal.

And I say that, I admit, as a middle-class woman with every parenting choice at my disposal. Yes, I can attest that I received unsolicited advice about every major child-related decision I’ve made, from giving birth at home to co-sleeping to nursing my babies past their first year. And I also know that a woman who makes diametrical decisions still gets guilt and pressure for her own path. There seems to be some inherent need to question how children eat and sleep, when these are the elements of parenting that least affect anyone but the family involved. And yeah, it sucks either way. But the mere fact that we have these choices means we and our children have advantages that aren’t even imagined by a mother who cannot access pre-natal health services or afford licensed daycare.

Every Mother Counts, a global initiative to reduce maternal mortality (with one of its most vocal supporters in former Memphian Heather Armstrong of dooce.com), spent this last Mother’s Day publicizing the alarmingly precarious state of many mothers. According to World Health Organization studies cited on EMC’s website, “approximately 358,000 women die each year due to complications in pregnancy and childbirth.” That’s 1000 a day. In case that seems like a far-distant problem, keep in mind that in 2010, the United States ranked 39^th globally in maternal mortality. Thirty. Ninth.

In our city and beyond, pregnant women, new mothers, and infants are dying preventable deaths. And Time wants to stir us up about how long some people choose to breastfeed?

My mother taught me better than that.

First appeared in Main Street Journal, May 15, 2012

(c) Andria K. Brown, all rights reserved

Rock and Soul

In case you missed the Southpaw action over at Main Street Journal over the last few weeks ...
No Stopping Point Short of Victory takes a look at the conjoined legacies of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the city where he was struck down. My Modesty Proposal goes Swiftian on Tennessee's latest socio-educational policy follies.

This week's column dials down the politics but turns up the volume as I ponder the relationships and similarities between Memphis and the music it's created. I hope you'll tune in this Tuesday.

Like All Resolutions ...

A funny thing happened after I wrote my last post about not becoming a columnist.

Turns out, I became a columnist.

If you haven't seen my shameless self-promotion on Twitter and Facebook yet, you may not know that I've begun writing a bi-monthly column over at Main Street Journal, a Memphis-based daily news aggregator and, increasingly, source of original local content. Such as moi.

I began my run with a friendly little intro piece that probably sounds a bit familiar to anyone who reads this space. My next column got a bit more issue-oriented as I discussed the way women, and Southern women in particular, can and do influence the political discourse. Although I couldn't resist such a current and heated topic, I plan to keep a focus on Memphis going forward. My next piece, going up April 3, will bring things very close to home.

I'm excited for this opportunity and appreciate y'all keeping me going in this venture.

Resolved

I began 2011 with an unspoken but nonetheless determined resolution: I would write a post a week, in column-length, for one year. It was like a lazy version of a 365 project. It was a notable mission mostly because I hate the idea of New Year’s resolutions for their implied acceptance of failure. But I thought I’d buck the cliché and finish the year with a portfolio of 50 new pieces.

As a quick peek at the archives would tell you, that plan didn’t quite work out. I started strong and kept the pace going until May or so, and then petered out. In my defense, I did spend the summer focused on fiction writing, which also didn’t go quite the way I hoped. By the fall, I was struggling for motivation and when I did come up with a printable idea, I was lucky enough to have The Commercial Appeal willing to publish it. (For free, but still.) I had pieces appear in November, December and January, and I’ve gotten a larger response each month, so thanks to those of you who are reading and stopping by here for the first time.

Since nearly the beginning of my experience as a writer, I felt drawn toward non-fiction, and even more strongly pulled toward the punchy, concise format of a regular column. While my college classmates were sulking in their Salinger, I was hip-deep in collections from Mike Royko, Carl Hiassen, and Dave Barry. Just when I began thinking the column arena was a man’s, man’s, man’s world, I discovered Anna Quindlen, Maureen Dowd and Molly Ivins, who proved that being funny and feisty and questioning of power wasn’t off-limits to the ladies anymore. I pored over their work and imagined being in their places, romanticizing the constant crunch of deadlines and the grudging respect earned from those who had to admit they’d been pegged.

Since then, I’ve thought of myself as a columnist-in-waiting. And waiting. And waiting. What I haven’t been, however, is a consistently productive writer, nor an especially ambitious one. There are a lot of things I could blame for that – raising small children, writing complex technical stuff as my day job, constitutional avoidance of rejection – but when it comes down to it, I just haven’t made it a priority. And I’m finally starting to wonder why. When I think about the things that have gotten me energized and enthusiastic lately, they’ve had little to nothing to do with writing: I’ve been plotting a volunteer radio show, I’ve been designing wedding jewelry, I’ve been mastering every level of Angry Birds. I’ve been beating myself up over a lack of creative output, but in reality, I’ve just been putting my creativity out in other ways (and crushing digital pigs).

I’m not ready to admit that I’ve let go of those long-time literary goals, but for the short-term, I’ve decided to stop forcing myself toward them. If it can’t be my job right now, it has to be my hobby, and this isn’t how a hobby should go. It’s supposed to be fun, it’s supposed to be uplifting, it’s supposed to be the thing that gets me going in the morning. If that’s not what it can give me right now, it’s not worth my time. I hope it’s able to bring me joy someday soon, but until then, I’ll spend my time on the things that already do.

Setting the Standard

The standard of beauty. It’s something intelligent women are raised to acknowledge and publicly revile, although most of us chase after it just the same. Despite heaps of contrary evidence from living, breathing people, we take the word of two-dimensional images and one-dimensional portrayals of The Beautiful. I always considered the standards set in magazines or movies to be flawed, but I never stopped to think much about why. All I knew was that there were plenty of people who didn’t look like models or starlets – most of us, actually – and yet were considered attractive in one way or another.

I recently came across an article in the UK’s Daily Mail, however, that made me reframe everything I think about beauty ideals. The article was about a plus-size model who posed naked with a “standard” model to demonstrate the differences between real and idealized bodies. The photos were accompanied by facts, and the most telling one, to me, was this: More than 50% of women wear a size 14 or larger, but most retailers do not carry sizes over 14. Aside from the financial stupidity of this fact, what struck me was the plain definition of the majority. Most women are over a certain threshold, and the sizes considered appealing and attractive and marketable are under that threshold. Simply put, what we as a culture define as beautiful is the way we are not.

We all know, anecdotally, that the standard of beauty is fluid and changes over time and geography. We’re aware of Ruben’s era, when zaftig lovelies frolicked in the Vogue covers of the time and gout was considered a mark of high social status. Plumpness was a goal that represented comfort and leisure, things that most of the population rarely experienced. In the U.S, you only have to go as far back as the 1950s to see how the Depression influenced an appreciation for corn-fed glamazons like Marilyn Monroe. Likewise, some contemporary cultures in the Pacific islands still hold pageants that crown the biggest beauty. When access to food is of great value, the best food gatherers are valued. In these societies, weight meant, or means, success.

In most of the modern world, however, access to food is not an issue. Access to good, healthy, nutritious food may be, but cheap calories are rarely more than 100 yards away. So instead of worshipping the weighty, we idolize those who have the time and resources to eat well (or the self-control not to eat at all) and stay in shape. We work indoors and then watch our waists expand in the Chili’s-to-Go parking pad while the Beautiful People hire trainers and personal chefs to keep careful track of every caloric income and expense. You can never be too rich or too thin, the saying goes, and we gaze admiringly at those who’ve achieved both. They are beautiful because they represent the things we feel too weak or downtrodden to reach ourselves. They seem, quite simply, better than us.

So while I admire the efforts of Katya Zharkova to inspire women of all sizes to appreciate their beauty, I think the effort to shift the cultural standard may be wasted. I don’t think you can defeat the inherent human desire to put ourselves down. All we can do is recognize that flawed impulse and give it a little less power in our lives. Perhaps we’d be best served by just changing the name: instead of the beauty standard, perhaps we could call it the beauty myth, or the beauty delusion. We can see the beautiful as harmless anomalies, like Olympic athletes or extreme couponers, without feeling bad about ourselves for not sharing the same genetic quirks. If we can acknowledge that the pinnacle of beauty is determined by what we as a society feel is least attainable, maybe we can stop wasting so much time trying to attain it and be happy with our own standard selves.

Civic Duty

Okay, I'll admit it. When I first got the notice to report for jury duty (or, as it's handled in Shelby County, the notice to report to pick the time to report for jury duty), I groaned. After I got through the hassle of navigating flooded downtown streets at 8:15 on a weekday morning and picked a somewhat acceptable week, though, I decided I was going to shift my thinking. For better or worse, our legal system is based on conducting a trial by a jury of one's peers, and I had to ask myself: if something awful happened and I ended up in a courtroom, who would I want making major decisions about my life?

So in the spirit of judicial karma, I sat through the juror orientation session with my eyes front and my phone off, appreciating the enthusiasm and dedication of our jury commissioner. I was calmly resigned to a day of waiting around and doing nothing, so it was a pleasant surprise when I was called into jury selection about 45 minutes into the morning. (I know you're looking for the sarcasm in those last sentences, but it's really not there.)

I entered the courtroom as the 19th person in our carefully organized line. The first voir dire session lasted longer than I expected, especially since it was nearing 2:00 and we hadn't broken for lunch yet. Because we were sitting for a civil trial, the questions asked of potential jurors were focused on legal and medical knowledge, as well as general attitudes about liability and compensation. After several conferences with the judge, the attorneys dismissed four people from the pool. Some of the cuts made sense - like the lady who insisted she couldn't process anything verbally and wouldn't be able to pay attention to testimony - but others were a little more mysterious. I was surprised to see that the law office intern was sent away, but the law clerk with 30 years of experience in the city's best-known firm got to stay.

It looked like I was about to be sent back to the holding area, but after a little more questioning, another juror was excused. I was called up to fill the fourteenth spot in the box (twelve jurors plus two alternates sit through the trial), and after I answered a few questions about my education, job, and experience with car accidents, the jury was set. I was on a trial.

There was a nervous energy permeating our new group as the judge read through our instructions. Also, we were really hungry. The judge finally let us break for lunch around 2:30. When we returned to the courthouse, we were now officially allowed to enter the jury room through our own special door and our friendly courtroom deputy gave us our official juror badges. She also gave us notebooks and pens to take notes with, but we were given instructions not to read from our notes to other jurors or present them as facts of the case. Our notes were for our own memory-jogging purposes only.

I found this direction even more baffling than the admonishment not to look up anything on our own that had to do with the case – no Googling medical terms, no drive-bys of the accident site, no talking to our lawyer friends about burden of proof. It was clear that the intent of the system was for our “peer” status to be defined very narrowly and literally. We were to approach the case with our own personal knowledge and nothing more, and could present nothing to other jurors other than our own interpretations and opinions of what occurred within the framework of the trial. 

By the time we all got resettled in the courtroom, there was only enough time for the attorneys to give their opening statements and the judge to give us instructions for the next day. When we reconvened in the jury room the following morning, there were already the beginnings of that camp-week familiarity that forms between people in short-term, close-knit situations. The deputy learned all of our names, which meant we all learned each others’. We lined up in the same order each time we entered or exited the courtroom, so we knew our line buddies and who was missing.

The trial itself was fairly uneventful: a civil suit between participants in a minor car accident in which the plaintiff said she incurred a major injury. The testimony consisted of each driver giving a side of the story, pre-transcribed depositions from doctors that the plaintiff’s attorney read out loud for two hours, and an account from the traffic officer who was at the scene of the accident. We were shown photographs of each car and copies of the plaintiff’s medical records. In all, it took no more than five hours. By 3:30 or so, we heard the closing statements and went back to our secret hideout to deliberate. Well, twelve of us did. Right before we were excused, two numbers were randomly pulled from our group to remove the alternate jurors. I panicked for a minute, thinking how disappointed I’d be to sit through the whole trial and then not be able to decide on it, but I stayed in the group.

The case wasn’t clear-cut, and although I had a strong leaning toward one side, I expected the other jurors to be mixed in their opinions. I was somewhat shocked, then, when our first pre-discussion vote came up 11-1 in the defendant’s favor. I guess everyone else had gotten the same impression that the plaintiff’s injuries were real, but she just hadn’t made the case that a tiny fender-not-even-bender had caused them. And as I pointed out in my Perry Mason moment, the only photograph she had of her car’s “damage” was taken at least six months after the accident. Or about 90 days after her surgery. Or about the same time those final notice bills start coming in. Call me cynical, or just call me a peer who has had my fair share of co-insurance responsibility, but it didn’t do much for her credibility.

As we discussed and re-voted and discussed some more, there was still one person who remained unsure, or at least not the 51% sure we were assigned to be (“beyond a reasonable doubt” doesn’t apply in civil cases). It was nearing 5:00 and impatience was settling into the room. Arguments were getting a little louder and more exasperated. At that point, we were at a stalemate, and I humbly credit my experience in living in a household of nine people with getting us out of it. The holdout was a woman in the medical profession who thought the timing of the accident and the injury were too close together to be coincidental. Arguing that such a thing was unlikely but possible didn’t change her mind. So I said yes, you’re right, let’s say they’re connected. But what if it’s not in the way it seems? What if there’s another explanation? When we talked through other options and she could see alternate possibilities, she was able to agree, without reservation, that the plaintiff hadn’t proven her claim.

We were all excited and glad to have come to agreement, but then a somber feeling came over us, too.  I don’t think I was the only juror who thought that a civil trial would be sort of boring and inconsequential, and from what I heard in the jury room, I know I wasn’t the only one surprised by how high-stakes the case ended up feeling. Although the issue at hand seemed pretty minor, the amount of money involved was significant. Whatever decision we made was going to have a huge impact on both of those people.   

When the forewoman read our decision, the trial participants all seemed unmoved, except for the defendant who was beaming with relief. I got the sense that the judge approved, but maybe she just makes a habit of looking passively accepting. The attorneys thanked us and offered to speak with us afterward if we had anything we wanted to share with them, and although it was tempting to point out to them the car photo detail they’d both missed, I turned in my juror badge and went on my way, my week of jury duty wrapped up in two days, my civic responsibility fulfilled for ten more years.

As we were getting back to our cars, several of the other jurors said that they were surprised how stressful the experience had been, and how glad they were it hadn’t been a more difficult case. I completely agreed, but I still would have wanted to serve, and I'll be willing to serve again. It’s unlikely I would have a lengthy encounter with either of the parties in that trial, but our judicial system is more open in its definition of peers. As residents of Shelby County, we are all considered peers because we are members of the same community, and as such, what happens to one of us is relevant to us all. I’m still not certain it’s the most fair or wise or accurate course of action, but you have to admit it’s a beautiful idea.

Veteran's Way

As I sat at a stoplight behind a car with a Retired Military license plate, I tried unsuccessfully to imagine my father making such an obvious declaration of his service. I was raised with the awareness that my dad was a Vietnam veteran, but other than a tucked-away photo album and the occasional appearance of his dress blue hat in our dress-up box, there were no visible reminders of his time as an Army officer.

Not that there weren’t any reminders at all. No matter how much he tried to forget the experience, nightmares and post-trauma responses were unavoidable. He’d joke about the way he jumped out of bed or sprang up to shield my mother when an ambulance siren wailed in the middle of the night, but it didn’t completely cover the fact that some part of his mind could never forget the terror of war.

After drawing an ill-fated lottery number, my father had decided to enlist and go through officer candidate school rather than wait for the inevitable call of the draft. At all of 23, he was the old man of his unit and had more training than most of the soldiers around him, but he was still a recent college graduate from a town of 2500 people who hadn’t been outside the state of Minnesota until his senior year of high school. When he was deployed overseas, he left a 21-year-old wife behind. Now that those ages are closer to my children’s than my own, I can’t help thinking of them all as kids, both my parents and their peers, which makes the difficulties they endured that much more excruciating to imagine.

For as long as I can remember, the sight of soldiers in uniform has made me tear up. I’m especially susceptible to this weakness at airports, when it’s clear that the serviceperson in question is heading away from home rather than toward it. I always thought this was just overactive empathy, but I’ve realized lately, with our military now in multiple conflicts round the globe, that I see my father in every set of eyes that has seen war up close. I know that the lives they led before deployment are over, and that the rest of their days will be touched by the time they serve. Like my dad, some of them may have chosen the military as the best of several less-than-ideal options, and their path afterward may not look much brighter. With the number of reservists in action, we have an older, wiser military than in my father’s era, but I still feel there’s a sense of childlike innocence and safety that’s irreversibly extracted by foreign combat. We send lots of kids to war, but we never get any back.

The very definition of a veteran is someone who has prevailed through trials and gained experience, and my compassion for our troops certainly doesn’t imply the perception of weakness or damage. As much as I wish he hadn’t had to learn them in such a brutal way, the lessons my father took from his time in Vietnam are still valuable, and despite the losses and sacrifices he withstood, he moved forward into a happy, successful, and loving future with his wife and children. Just as his own father had done after earning a Purple Heart in World War II. There may not have been obvious symbols of his service around our house as I was growing up, but my father remains my greatest reminder of the courage of every veteran, not just to sacrifice one’s life, but to face the life that comes next.

Write Now

If you happened to wonder why I haven’t been writing this summer, it’s because, well, I’ve been writing. I took a couple months off from blogging to focus my attention on fiction. There were two big deadlines I wanted to hit this month – the Memphis Magazine fiction contest and the University of Memphis’s Moss Workshop application – and as of June 1, I didn’t have anything ready to submit. In fact, I hadn’t actually completed a fiction piece since 2007, when I wrote a short story/possible first chapter that was rejected by both of the aforementioned entities. I won’t say that the disappointment from that Summer of No-Love quashed my inspiration for the next four years, but it didn’t do a whole lot for my motivation. Perhaps because I’ve always considered writing a career path rather than an artistic endeavor, it’s hard for me to take the time to write if I don’t see any productive results from it. If it’s not earning me money or at least generating useful feedback, then what’s the point?

But then, this past July, while we were vacationing on the Gulf coast, I had an idea. Not just the start or premise of a story, but the whole idea. The beginning, the end, and, most importantly, what it was actually about. I started writing it up as soon as we got back. I changed some of the major details I had begun with, but the original plot concept held steady. In two weeks, I did what I hadn’t managed in four years. I finished something.

Buoyed by that experience, I took a look back at another piece I’d been fidgeting with. I realized as I opened it up that I had begun the story one year before. To the day. (Yes, I put the start date in the file name of everything I write, because I like to wallow in my inactivity.) I’d wrestled with it last summer, hoping to get it into shape for the fiction contest, but just never knew where to take it. Looking at it all those months later, the path suddenly became a lot clearer. I took the two extra weeks granted by the extended Memphis Magazine deadline and reshaped the bits and pieces into theme and plot. Two more weeks, another story done.

Now, I’m optimistic, but I won’t say my hopes are sky-high. I know there are a lot of strong writers in our muddy little local pool, and I’m already telling myself that the public result isn’t as important as the process. The most significant outcome of completing these two stories has already happened: now I know that I can do it. That’s really the best prize I could get.

Although if I happened to win that national magazine-sponsored short story contest that I entered yesterday … well, that would be pretty good, too.

You Suck

Recently, a fellow Memphis mom was harassed in a government office for daring to nurse her eight-month-old baby in a waiting room. She was virtually commanded to move to a conference room, and when she refused, was threatened with legal action. Fortunately, she was completely within her rights as guaranteed by the state of Tennessee, rights that will soon be expanded to protect all nursing mothers regardless of the child’s age. As a show of support and public education, last week she and several other moms staged a nurse-in at the Social Security Administration office where the ugly incident occurred.

Unfortunately, the ugliness wasn’t over yet. Commenters on local news sites sputtered and fumed about the general offensiveness of public nursing. They decried the disgustingness of bodily fluids being bandied about. Even the subtlest opponents tried to couch it nicely by saying “it’s okay as long as you cover up; no one wants to see that!”

I’m not really one for debate, seeing as how I avoid confrontation in all forms, but there is one thing I know about making a persuasive argument: you can never win by pointing out that your opponent is just plain screwed up. And yet, when it comes to those who oppose breastfeeding anywhere but at home or under a baby burkha, there’s really no way around that conclusion. People who are scared of nursing breasts: you are screwed up.

Not that it’s entirely your fault, necessarily. We live in a society that is deeply confused when it comes to female anatomy. But the simple reality is that we’re mammals, and that’s what breasts are for. I can see more boob from Christina Aguilera during an episode of The Voice than I ever exposed during my own four-plus years of breastfeeding, but I don’t see any comments on the NBC message boards telling her to take those things somewhere private (unless they mean … well, nevermind). If cleavage occurs in the course of entertainment, then it’s perfectly acceptable. If it’s just keeping a human alive, however … well, that’s gross.

People. Come on.

Sure, there might be those who’d rather not see any part of a breast or its environs. Everyone has their own comfort levels. I hope those poor folks are never forced to look at a Target Sunday circular or Olympic beach volleyball. But to presume that a woman feeding her child should worry about a couple inches of skin because you’re not okay with the rounder parts of human flesh is ridiculous. I come across plenty of sights that disturb me during the day – topless runners, backwards baseball caps, Kardashians – but this is America, sister. If I don’t want to see it, I use a tool far more effective than an online rant: my neck. In the immortal words of Peter Cetera: look away, baby, look away.

Every single nursing mom I know - which is a whole heck of a lot - does her best to nurse modestly, despite the assertion by some that breastfeeders are all a bunch of hippie exhibitionists. Trust me, most of us don't want them flapping out there any more than you do. But there's only so much that can be done, and if it comes down to your comfort or a hungry baby's, guess who wins?

I can hardly even bring myself to address the idiocy of the bodily fluids argument, but I will do so as succinctly as possible. Implying that breastmilk should be relegated to the same places as human excreta is like saying cow milk should be treated the same as cow dung. To which I say, well, bullshit. Breastmilk is food. It is not snot or blood or urine. Nursing is not sex or farting or sneezing. When we say "breastfeeding is natural," we don't mean it is a natural bodily function. We mean it is the natural method by which all humans are intended to be fed. I will accept "milk is gross" from dairy-refraining vegans and that is it. Dumbasses.

As someone who worked closely with breastfeeding mothers in Memphis for several years, it pains me to see any more challenges put in their way. The act itself is difficult enough, so compounding it with social pressure and misinformation is not only unfair, but dangerous to the health of our community. Shelby County is already woefully below the Healthy People 2010 goal of a 75% breastfeeding initiation rate (at 54%), and in no minor coincidence, has the highest infant mortality rate in the country. There is simply no place in Memphis for anti-nursing attitudes.

But if you insist on judging mothers who are providing their children with the healthiest food possible, I just ask that the next time you get hungry, you stay home, cover your head, and please, just go eat in the bathroom.

L'Etoile Du Nord

“I am a liberal and liberalism is the politics of kindness. Liberals stand for tolerance, magnanimity, community spirit, the defense of the weak against the powerful, love of learning, freedom of belief, art and poetry, city life, the very things that make America worth dying for.”
- Garrison Keillor

Oh, Minnesota. What has happened to you?

I’ll admit that I don’t closely follow all of the political activity of my home state, but there are certain things I take for granted. Like the fact that we were the only state Dukakis won, other than Massachusetts. But my, does that seem so long ago.

I was raised with the safe knowledge that I came from a liberal state, a place where tolerance and personal freedom and community responsibility were not only valued but exalted. I was proud that our Scandinavian ideas about social welfare made us attractive to those fleeing horrendous persecution. And I took to heart the general philosophy that you don’t know anyone’s struggles but your own, and you should probably keep quiet about those, anyway.

So what the hell, people? When did we become a state of uptight, moralistic, right-deniers? What insidious viral fear has taken over where kindness, or at least indifference, used to be?

I was actively involved in Minneapolis’s HIV/AIDS education and social action sphere during the early 1990s. While things weren’t perfect as far as gay/straight understanding went, I felt, overall, that I lived in an open, accepting community. I would have been astonished at that time if a constitutional amendment denying rights to same-sex couples had been supported by our state legislature. The fact that it is happening now, nearly twenty years later, is beyond heartbreaking.

When I dig past the heartbreak, there’s anger and shame. And the face of that anger and shame is grinning blankly from Fox News panel discussions. Seeing the words, “R – Minnesota” under Michele Bachmann’s crazy, crazy head is nearly enough to make me consider calling myself an Iowan. And now with the news of Tim Pawlenty’s bid for the presidential candidacy (T-Paw? Really? Douuuuuuche!), I feel like some sort of secret smear campaign has been invoked against the people of Minnesota. How did these two conservatives come to be our representatives on the national stage?

The answer is simple, I suppose. They were voted in. Somewhere along the line, the people who elected a poli sci professor in a green school bus to Senate and agreed to be governed by a libertarian wrestler (no link required) decided, hey, let’s try fascism. When the pendulum swings back, it swings hard. But I can’t help thinking that there’s also been some trickery involved.

My people are from small, rural towns, far from the Cities, and yet I know they don’t support the ideas that the state legislature claims they do. If the U.S. in general has polled in support of allowing gay marriage, there is simply no way for me to believe that Minnesotans are overwhelmingly against it. Some very misguided politicking is going on up there, with a lot of people suddenly jumping on the tea party boat so they won’t get called out by the narrowest-minded and loudest-voiced.

I cried when I heard of Sen. Paul Wellstone’s death, and I tear up now thinking that any part of his essence might be aware of what’s happened to Minnesota since his passing. I simply don’t understand it. I know fear can make people act against their better judgment (see: any slasher film, acceptance of George W. Bush after 9/11), but what, really, are Minnesotans afraid of? I’m sincerely trying to answer that question in a way that makes any sense, and the best I can come up with is that things are very uncertain and unstable right now, and clinging to what is known and understood can make that seem a little less scary.

But here’s the thing. Preventing gay marriage doesn’t make anything more secure, except the elected positions of fear-mongering politicians. It doesn’t stabilize the economy or improve the housing market or create new jobs. Quite the opposite, really – think of all the gay couples not hiring wedding planners and florists and harpists who cover Depeche Mode. And it doesn’t delete all the porn off the internet or stop your kids from sexting, either. Don’t equate the growing and occasionally disconcerting ease of access to sexual information with advances in human rights. I can promise you that it isn’t gay married couples sending Facebook friend requests to your 14-year-old.

Speaking of fear and fourteen-year-olds, let’s talk about what you really should be scared of. Be scared of your child separating herself from your family because she doesn’t think you can love who she is. Be scared of the ways your child will seek information if you refuse to acknowledge reality. Be scared of your child feeling so isolated and rejected for his sexuality that he feels ending his life is the only acceptable option.

Garrison Keillor wrote, “This is Democratic bedrock: we don't let people lie in the ditch and drive past and pretend not to see them dying.” Every gay citizen in Minnesota has been thrown in the ditch by this legislation. The constitutional amendment defining marriage as heterosexual monogamy goes to a vote of the people in November. My Minnesotans, don’t drive by.

Please click above to view Iraq war veteran Rep. John Kriesel's (R - Cottage Grove, MN) powerful speech to the Minnesota House on why he opposes the marriage amendment.

Postscript: I am no less angered by the neanderthals in Nashville, but the pain isn't compounded by ever daring to expect any different.

Funny Girl

I do not want to be Tina Fey’s best friend.

I say this, of course, to distinguish myself from the millions of my peers who do, because I feel sort of sorry for Ms. Fey, having to live with the constant awareness that legions of college-educated women of Generation X see her not only as an admirable figure, but also an approachable gal who they’d get along so well with if only given the chance. I’m sure she has plenty of perfectly lovely friends and isn’t casting about for sidekicks.

And of course, by so separating myself with my considerable reasonableness, I’m hoping that she’ll PICK ME! PICK ME!

Sigh. Crap.

I just finished reading Fey’s first book, Bossypants, and I can’t help that it left me feeling even more uncomfortably close to the writer/actor/producer/mom than I already did. The solid family life, the tales of geekdom, the social salvation through high school theater, the awkward college years … it all struck an off-pitch chord.

But then her story became like a fan-fiction version of my life, where instead of taking the desk job to pay off student loans after college, she slogged away at the Evanston YMCA (three blocks from where I was racking up that student loan debt) to pay for classes at Second City. I spent high school and college going to improv and sketch comedy shows, and despite a natural draw and fascination, I never took the next step. I thought it wasn’t my world. But then I come to find out through Tina Fey that female comedy writers are, by and large, good girls from good families who went to good schools. Three for three, people. Why didn’t my academic advisor ever tell me that?!

With just a little clearer knowledge, I may have made that leap. I just needed a little security. Between safety and adventure, I tend to choose safety.

Which is the exact opposite tack of Craig Ferguson, whose memoir, American On Purpose, I polished off shortly after finishing Bossypants. Unlike Fey’s autobiography, it’s a story filled with dramatic dives into self-destruction. The clean-and-sober actor/writer/talk show host/novelist that I’ve known and loved since he replaced Smarmy McFratterson on The Late Late Show has a long, messy trail behind him, littered with booze and drunks and overly forgiving women.

I knew from his surprisingly poignant Britney Spears monologue and other frequent references that he was in recovery, but it’s still a little startling to take a close look at what any addict is recovering from. As Tina Fey says, most male comedians are filled with an urge to break rules, and Ferguson follows that bumpy path – dropping out of school, touring with punk bands, hanging out with Emma Thompson (that skank).

A little part of me has long held on to the idea that my (as-yet-unhired) press agent would have an in with Ferguson’s people, and they’d have me on the show to discuss my (as-yet-unwritten) hit novel. And of course the interview would go so well that we’d decide to talk more after the show, when we’d get drinks at the Brown Derby and discuss Fitzgerald’s prescience about the dehumanization of modern America and the genius of Bill Hicks, and one thing would lead to another and yada yada yada, we’d be collaborating on an HBO pilot.

But now that I’ve read the book, I’m not so sure we’re suited to work together. Drinking or not, there’s a dark, driven, slightly dangerous side to Ferguson that I’m not sure would complement my Nervous Nelly tendencies. Perhaps it would be best if we just stuck to the interview. And maybe three or four casual dinner parties throughout the year.

And if Tina Fey wants to stop by, hey, that’s cool.

The Rising

It’s a great time to be a Memphian.

And it’s a scary, uncertain time to be a Memphian.

The inevitability of these two situations happening at once is, of course, very Memphis indeed.

photo by Chip Chockley

On the plus side, our lone big-time professional sports team has not only made it to the playoffs, but ground their way through to a first-round win over the number one seed. The city that essentially forgot the Grizzlies existed a few months ago, except to note their comically long losing streak, is now behind this group of underdogs. Maybe it’s our Hoosier-like innocence about the difference between college athletes, who we’ve always supported, and the NBA, but Memphis seems to be not only excited about the team, but also protective. Professional basketball doesn’t usually lend itself to the feeling that these are “our hometown boys,” but there’s something like family loyalty in the air these days. It’s reaffirming and, I’ll admit, a little disconcerting. We’re not a group-think, high-hopes kind of town. When anything goes too well, for too long, we get a little nervous that we’ll have to pay for it later.

Speaking of … how about that Mississippi River? You know, that three-mile-wide expanse of rushing water that has decided to come on up and mosey down Beale St. himself. (Rivers are male, right? Ol’ Man River and all that?) It’s hard to even get past the sheer spectacle of the situation, but when you do, the realities are dispiriting. Damage is occurring that our already-strapped city will be hard-pressed to repair. People’s homes, schools, and lives are being disrupted. And all this on top of a month of storms that many residents are still recovering from. Navigating surface streets still requires weaving around the piles of lost limbs and chainsawed trunks that can’t be contained on the sidewalks until pick-up day. We’re just a damn mess.

But sometimes being a mess has its perks. Like when the President of the United States chooses to give the commencement speech at your high school to honor all the ways in which students have risen above it all. The same year Michael Heisley declared that the Grizzlies were in rebuilding mode, the administration of Booker T. Washington High School reformed their core systems to not only serve the students in Memphis’ poorest zip code, but to guide them toward success. Over the last three years, the school’s graduation rate has shot from 55% to over 80%. And on May 20th, President Obama is going to stop by to tell them how fantastic they are. Now that’s a true Cinderella story.

Which brings us right back to the Grizzlies. Now tied up with Oklahoma in the second round of the playoffs (I write, as if I have any idea how many rounds there actually are or have paid attention to the NBA since Michael Jordan retired. The first time), it’s getting scary again. The equal proximity of success and failure does not sit well, because Memphians know which way our luck tends to lean. The mere fact that this many Memphians are attentive and optimistic is in itself a bad sign, because all of our best stuff happens when no one is really watching (see: the success at Booker T. Washington, the Million Dollar Quartet, or Jake Gyllenhaal buying cinnamon rolls at the Farmers Market).

The trademark Memphis fatalism has seeped into me over the years, and it’s now natural for me to assume that anything that brings the city together will lead to crushing disappointment, generally within a two-week span.

With that in mind, I suggest that we all turn our backs on the Grizzlies and cheer the Mississippi on to keep on getting higher. And then meet back on Beale in a couple weeks (or months? Three fortnights?) to celebrate a victorious team and a thoroughly dry downtown.