What my cats taught me about gender roles today

Today was a crazy busy day.

The crazy part happened this morning when I was getting ready to take a shower.

I was reading War and Peace sitting on the toilet when a large gray mouse scurried across the bathroom floor.  I instinctively lifted my legs in the air because I didn’t want the mouse to brush up against my bare flesh.  I’m pretty sure you can catch the plague or some other early-century disease from contact with a single wild  mouse hair.

Anyway, I shrieked.  Which leads to this question: If a butch screams and no one is home to hear it, does the scream make a sound?

I started calling for Magic, our ace mouser.  It’s a very un-butch feeling to be stranded half naked, calling for your cat to help you out of a jam.

If Magic was an Angel, she’d be this one.

When it comes to mice, Magic is no-nonsense like Judge Judy and Kate Jackson in Charlie’s Angels, with just a touch of crazy like Lindsay Lohan.  Feral cats, you have to love ’em.

Magic was nowhere to be found.  Apparently, she doesn’t know the meaning of the word “help.”

Instead, I saw our cat Moon walking up the stairs with the mouse in his mouth.  Moon is, well, a little soft.  If he wore clothes, he’d probably don capri pants capped off with a big, billowy pirate shirt, the entire ensemble accented with an ascot.  And yes, Moon would use the word “ensemble.”

Moon is like this guy

I watched Moon skip down the hallway with the mouse.  It was like watching Nathan Lane shoot pool or change the oil in his car.

Usually, Magic is the take-charge cat in the house, cornering mice, sneaking out of the house, engineering surprise attacks on the other cats.

Moon?  Well, he likes to sleep on our bed.  And he likes to have his tummy rubbed.  Did I mention the sleeping thing?

After today’s act of cat-versus-mouse bravado, he’s been walking a little taller and, dare I say, strutting about the house.

“You go, Moon,” I called out to him.

He was so chill that he didn’t even look my way.

It was yet another reminder that we should all break out of our comfort zones every once in awhile.

Inside the Actors Studio

I’m a big fan of Inside the Actors Studio.  It’s something that I discovered recently, so I’ve only seen episodes that have aired in the past few years.

As a movie buff, I like learning the behind-the-scenes stories from big-time actors in iconic roles like Hilary Swank in Million Dollar Baby and Brad Pitt in Thelma and Louise.

Plus, I like hearing about  what people are thinking when they are engaged in the creative process.  It’s like finishing a really great book and finding a final chapter in which the author explains the how and why of his writing process for that particular work.  Bonus.  Stephen King has been known to do this.

I also like trying to connect with the artist as a person and finding a link within myself to the art.  It’s the if-she-can-do-it-so-can-I frame of mind that encourages me to push forward with my own work.

Inside the Actors Studio just celebrated its 250th episode with a two-hour retrospective special.  If you’re familiar with the show, you know that host James Lipton asks each guest the same 10 questions at the conclusion of every interview.

I thought I’d tip my hat to the show by taking a shot at those 10 questions:

1. What is your favorite word?  juxtaposition

2. What is your least favorite word?  hate

3. What turns you on?  a woman in tall black leather boots

4. What turns you off?  ignorance

5. What sound do you love?  heavy rain when I am safe inside my house  

6. What sound do you hate?  yelling

7. What is your favorite curse word?  god dammit

8. What profession other than yours would you like to attempt?  English professor

9. What profession would you not like to do?  grade school teacher  

10. If heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the pearly gates?  You tried really hard.

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How about you?  Share some of your answers here.

Writing as group activity

Good morning, my flannel-lovin’ followers.  I thought I would take some time to talk about some of my favorite things — books and writing.  We’ll have to save some of my other favorite things — Joan Jett, 30 Rock, Heidi Klum and the chips and queso at California Tortilla — for some other day.

I’m still actively participating in my weekly writers’ group.  Every time that I write something about the meetings, W points out that I refer to it as “group” like I’m talking about group therapy.  She says it’s cute.  She pretty much thinks that everything I do is cute.  This is not a bad problem to have.

In a way, my writers’ group is like group therapy.  It is a safe place.  We share our most intimate life experiences.  We support and encourage each other.  We draw knowledge and wisdom from the other group members.  Bonus: It’s a whole lot cheaper than traditional group therapy.

Often, I find myself mentally and emotionally exhausted yet exhilarated from these group sessions.  It is not the physical pen-on-paper aspect of writing that wears me out.  Instead, it is the process of delving deep and transforming some of my life experiences into words that is so tiring.  In the end, it is a rewarding experience that is allowing me to take control of my life and to move forward with my life-long dream of writing a book.

Some of the members of my group belong to another writing group, and they have penned chapters or poems that appear in a published anthology called Slants of Light: Stories and Poems from the Women’s Writing Circle.  It is a wonderful collection of short stories and poems written by a group of very talented women.

I enjoyed the pieces on their own, but I was struck by the power of the anthology as a whole.  It made me think of my own writing group and how we are each made stronger by the other writers.  It might be because of a suggestion in a critique that strengthened a chapter or a chuckle in response to a humorous quip read during a read-around that provides the feedback and encouragement that a writer needs to keep pushing forward.  Even though writing is a solitary pursuit, we can, as writers, gain so much from our fellow scriveners.

I would encourage you to check out Slants of Light.  There’s something inside for everyone, including a very inspiring coming out story penned by one of my friends.  Plus, it’s a great way to support other writers who are honing their craft and working on getting their stories into print.  I know that I’ve been inspired by the mere act of holding their book in my hands.

You can order Slants of Light on amazon.com.

Shopping on the left side of the store

It’s been difficult to find time to keep this blog up to date.  I have been  dutifully attending my weekly writer’s group and trying to press forward with my memoir one chapter at a time.  Between that and the writing that I get paid to do, I haven’t had a whole lot of time for The Flannel Files.  It’s funny, because this blog started the whole creative writing thing in motion.

Anyway, I thought I would share some writing that I did today in group related to the theme of my work in progress.

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My memoir has a number of themes, all related in some fashion.  When I stop and think about the main theme, “gender” is the one word that comes to mind.

It seems to be a clear-cut topic.  Boy.  Girl.  But in my world, it has never been clear-cut, which is why I have a story to tell.  The lines have always been fuzzy.  Actually, not fuzzy but movable.  For much of my life, I have had to put my shoulder down and push with all of my might to move the lines that most seem content to walk within.

Gender is such a common identifier: a capital M or F on a driver’s license or a checked box on a birth certificate.  There is never any room for in between.  Everything is always hard and fast.

Right or left?

I always think of the gravitational pull that I used to feel when I entered The Gap clothing store at our local mall.

The women’s clothes were on the right side of the store.  The men’s clothes on the left.

I always felt a tug of duty to enter on the right side and pass my eyes over the khakis and the button-down shirts there.

Eventually, I would loop around to the left side, which contained more khakis and button-down shirts.  In my mind’s eye, these were authentic khakis and button-downs.  They always felt more real and practical without the extra stitching or pleats or darts.

In a way, my life — my battle with gender — has been a giant loop around a boy/girl clothing store.  At first, I sought acceptance but eventually mustered up enough courage to just shop on the left.

Why Bomb Girls bombed

Last night, I ended up watching Bomb Girls for the first time.  I was surfing the channels and found the Canadian TV drama on some offbeat channel called Reelz.  I knew the show had a lesbian storyline, so it had my attention from the get go.   I’m obvious like that.

If you don’t know anything about Bomb Girls, it’s about a group of women working in a munitions factory during World War II.

Meg in Bomb Girls

Sure, the show had me at “girls,” but there was one thing that made the show unwatchable for me — Meg Tilly, who looks a lot like her actress sister, Jennifer Tilly.

Every time I saw Meg on screen, I immediately thought about her sister Jennifer and her portrayal of Violet, the sexy Sapphic mobster mistress in Bound, my third favorite lesbian flick of all time.  I was like Pavlov’s dog.  If Pavlov’s dog was a lesbian.

Bound came out right around the time that I did, and I was instantly obsessed with the movie.  I can remember one of my co-workers asking me about my sudden fascination with Gina Gershon.

“What is it about Gina Gershon?” she asked, throwing up her hands to illustrate her inability to grasp my sudden fixation with the B-list actress.

Just saying Gina Gershon still gets me all hot and bothered.  Gina Gershon.

I’m not sure that I knew what was up with me and Gina Gershon.  But I knew that Bound, with its Gershon-on-Tilly action, had me thinking about a whole lot of things in a very different way.

I had gone to see Bound with my husband, who was repulsed by the movie.

“I thought the movie was supposed to be about lesbians,” he said.

He meant the kind of lesbians who wear tube tops and make out with each other and the cute pizza delivery boy in a hot tub.

But these were my kind of lesbians.  Real and gritty.  Hot and sexy.  With tattoos.  In the end, Gina Gershon’s character of Corky gets the girl.  There is no pizza boy.  They never even order a small pie.

My first tattoo is actually a labrys modeled after the one that Corky sports in Bound.  I told you — I was obsessed.

Gina and Jennifer in Bound

Ok, so back to Bomb Girls.  Meg Tilly looked old and sallow and haggard.  And, here’s the thing — every time she came on screen, I kept thinking about  Violet.  Why was she working in a factory?  And what was up with that do-rag?

Sometimes we want to stay in that magic bubble where we looked our best and had the whole world spread out before us.  Meg Tilly certainly had me feeling my own age — that whole coming out thing was over a decade ago — and missing that exciting time of self-discovery and all-consuming thoughts of naked women.  Corky and Violet had, in a way, made that possible.  They showed me that it was possible to get the girl in the end and live happily ever after.

Trying to fix the past

A few weeks ago, knee deep in this thing that I’m doing called writing a memoir, I got out a giant box of stuff that I’ve saved over the years.  The box contains newspaper clippings, softball awards, diaries and report cards but mostly letters from my childhood friends.

Our family had moved from Battle Creek, Mich., to Reading, Pa., in 1976.  It was our seventh or eighth move.  I had lost count by then.

I started fourth grade that year, and the rest is history.  By fifth grade, there were four of us.  We walked to school together every morning and did the reverse after the last bell had rung.  We hung out at each other’s houses where we ate tons of junk food (like Doritos when they only came in a red bag and M&M’s when they included the color tan) and had at least four sleepovers a year — one for each of our birthdays — and ate more junk food.

In the middle of seventh grade, my family moved again.  It was only an hour away, but when you are 13, one hour might as well be 20.  I shrieked when I was told.

My brother and I were bribed with a swimming pool and a phone line in each of our rooms, but I wasn’t having any of that.  I wouldn’t have agreed to move for a million dollars, and that would have bought a crap load of baseball cards back in the day.  I spent the next few years with my arms folded in front of my chest, the only protest that I was allowed.

I was this guy

After we moved, my friends added another member to the group, which was always hard for me to swallow.  I guess the number three was too unwieldy and uneven.  I felt like the original Darrin in Bewitched.

We kept in touch by writing back and forth, and visited each other’s houses for two-day weekend sleepovers.  The long-distance portion of our family phone bill routinely hit the $100 mark.

As we got older and obtained drivers’ licenses, there were road trips.  We went to Wildwood, N.J., for senior week and to Live Aid.  Apparently, we were the only ones who applauded Billy Ocean.  It says so in one of the letters.

As I read each card and letter looking for clues to the past, I am reminded about how these communications were a lifeline to everything that was important to me.  I saw how my friends bought cards for me for the major holidays, probably at one of their trips to the Berkshire Mall, and passed them around in school so that each could write a paragraph or two or at least sign their name and offer a quick greeting.  There were carefully printed messages on Ziggy and Snoopy note cards and on lined notebook paper.  They told me about the movies they had watched, the albums they had purchased and the boys they liked.

I was struck by how often they wrote and the considerable length of most of the notes.

The frequency of the missives slowed down as they got older and got boyfriends.

One friend continued to write from college.  I didn’t remember that.

I recall her phoning her from time to time, but we were both busy with school and new friends and our new lives.  She had a steady boyfriend, who she would later marry.

Inside the box, I also found an invitation to the wedding.

I never went to the wedding.  I was the only one from our original group of friends who was invited.  By this time, they had drifted apart.  I was young — 23 or so — and it all seemed too much.  Shit, I’d have to go out and buy a dress or something to wear (this was back in the day when middle-age butch wore dresses — or at least pantsuits) and drive myself there and back.  I was, and still am, directionally impaired.  Plus, who would I sit with.  It was all too stressful, so I didn’t go.

I never knew her boyfriend/husband.  I don’t think we ever met.  I had never crushed on any of my friends, but I think a part of me was jealous that I had been replaced in a way, just like I had been all those years ago when I moved away.  It had always been us girls.  I mean, why did she need a boyfriend anyway.  It was probably because she wasn’t a budding lesbian like me and saw boys in a more practical and useful light.

She never talked to me after that.  I saw her sister years ago, and she told me that I had really hurt her.

It’s a big regret that I still carry around.

I looked her up on Facebook the other day.  She has three kids and is active in her church.  I bet I could get a letter to her through the church.  I want to tell her that I’m sorry.  That I miss knowing her.

I have been drafting the letter in my head, even though I no longer have any Ziggy note cards.  I wonder if she would even read a letter from me once she figured out who it was from.  I’m fairly certain that she would remember my writing just as I did hers.

She often signed her letters, “Please write back.  We miss you dearly and enjoy your letters so.”

I think for a moment how wonderful it would be to seamlessly fall back into that back-and-forth rhythm of letter writing.

A rainy day lesson from my cat

It’s raining cats and dogs outside.

Which is weird because my cat is right here next to me.  It’s probably because she’s lazy and not always up for outdoor adventures.

Anyway, Magic is curled up on a chair that I’ve positioned alongside  my work desk.  Every few minutes, I look over at her and smile.

I remember to be grateful for the little things in life:

• I have a roof over my head that provides shelter from the rain, which is actually a big thing on rainy days like today.
• I have food in my belly, even though I’m dieting.
• I have a partner who wraps her arms around me at night and kisses me goodnight.
• I have a furry companion to keep me company.

I am grateful that Magic allows me to care for her.  She sleeps on the Snuggie that I carefully fluff up for her.  She eats the food that I put out for and laps up the water.  She plays when I crinkle up a small piece of paper into a ball or fetch one of her cat toys.

She rewards me with sandpaper kisses and her company.  Sometimes she crawls up my chest, hooks her front paws over my shoulder and falls fast asleep.  Other times, like today, she is content to sleep near me.

I wonder if she realizes how lucky she is to have such luxuries like a soft Snuggie to curl up on, an endless supply of food, and shelter from the rain, especially on days like today.  After all, she is a shelter cat who spent her first few weeks on the city streets of Philadelphia.

And then I remember how lucky I am to have such a magic creature who reminds me of all of my blessings.

How a about you, Flannel readers?  What have you learned from your pet?

Writing group therapy

I have always been a loner.

As a child, I was drawn to solitary activities like reading, writing, drawing and a game for one called Electronic Detective, an 80s whodunnit game that was a combination between Merlin and Clue.

I still enjoy solitary pursuits.  To me, a good book is as enjoyable as a good friend.  While I would much rather see a movie with W or eat a meal in her company, I have no problem catching a flick by myself or dining at a table for one.

There have been times in my life when it’s been just me.  Single.  Single mother.

During those lean times, I have had no one to rely on but myself.  I think that’s part of why I’m drawn to the steely toughness associated with being butch.  It is an exterior shield from life’s brutalities much like the protective sealer wax sprayed on a vehicle at the end of a car wash.

One of my weaknesses has always been asking for help.  Help?  Who needs help?  Not this able-bodied, flannel-clad butch.

And then I started going to therapy last year, and my therapist gave me a homework assignment to find something to do just for me.

Piecing together pieces of broken glass won’t be my savior but stringing together words will.

The original plan was an art class.  I was going to learn to make mosaics.  But the thought of piecing together pieces of broken glass just wasn’t calling to me.

I remembered reading about a writer’s group that met at a local bookstore and decided to give it a go.  It was free and there was no form to fill out, so it was already beating the pants off of the art class.

I showed up that Tuesday and surprised myself by writing and sharing something very personal and emotional.  I had felt safe among the group members and confident enough in my writing abilities to take a risk.

For the next few weeks, I went to some meetings but not others.  It’s not that I didn’t like going or that I was super busy.  (Full disclosure: When I didn’t go, I laid in bed and watched old Dr. Phil shows and reruns of Sex in the City.)  I liked the people and the writing prompts and the writing that I accomplished within each two-hour session and the way that I felt after each group meeting.

The only thing holding me back was fear.  Because what if I committed to this group?  I would need to start working on a project of some sort.  Everyone was working on something — poems, novels, short stories, memoir chapters.  And what if I started something and it flat-out stunk like those detox foot patches that W and I tried?  What if I learned that a book is too hard for me to write?  Or that I’m not really a writer at all — never have been, never will be?

The funny thing was that the more sessions I attended the more confident I became in my writing and in myself.

Now, every Tuesday, I eagerly show up for group, notepad and pen at the ready.  I like being a part of something.  I like being a part of a group comprised of people who like the same things that I do — books and writing and writers and ideas and a clever turn of phrase.

I use our weekly meetings as a deadline to write another chapter.  I am plodding along.

We’re all like this sometimes

Last night, I e-mailed another chapter to the group for critique.  Right after pushing the send button, I started getting nervous.  I mean, what if it wasn’t any good?  Scarier yet, what if no one understood my words and they all found it really weird and strange?  The morning feedback has once again assuaged my fears.  I have learned that when I make myself vulnerable, people relate to what it is that I need to say.  For in the end, we are all naked tortoises lying on our backs, our soft bellies exposed to the world.

I think it is an ironic twist worthy of any good book plot: How a loner found companionship in a group of women engaged in the solitary pursuit of writing and found her voice.  It had been there all along for she sang in the shower and in the car and to her cats when no one else was around.  But it wasn’t until she was in the company of other like-minded people that she was able to sing out loud for the world to hear.