listen up

girl to the front - a brief love letter

I’ve been reading Girls to the Front by Sara Marcus, and gosh do I love it.  As someone who had sought out the riot grrrl scene (with mixed success) in my own youth, I feel a little silly that I’ve waited this long to pick up Marcus’s exhaustively researched account of the movement.  It’s not like I hadn’t been meaning to, but when I got out West I remembered why.  

Nikki Darling, who I won’t pigeonhole as a music writer, or a feminist, or as one of my best friends from college - though she is all of those things, let me stay in her sweet little back house when my work out West was done and we got to talking about Girls to the Front.  I spent two weeks in May traveling throughout Southern California for work, and did my best to sneak in some quality time with Nikki when all was done and done.  This is documented on her blog, with an image of me looking awesome as we did face masks and drank rose tea - a tea which I’ve been led to believe doesn’t exist outside of her home.  Nikki’s blog is one of my favorite things about the internet.  

Now she and I actually got to talking several times before we got to Nikki’s place, and she may have referenced Marcus’s book during one of those instances, but I don’t know that the chronology is that important here.  We spent some serious time on the 10 before we made it home, a memory which I’m now wearing as a badge of having some vague understanding of the freeways in LA.  She and I also froze our bums off on the beach the night before (entirely work related), and went to dinner with my boss, who has made a career out of communicating her own feminism to a very unlikely market.  I felt an enormous relief to sit and dine with two other women who had been Clinton supporters in ‘08, and strange to acknowledge that this had been a rare occurrence.  

24 hours later, we washed our face masks off and Nikki tossed the book on the bed. Oh yeah, I thought, and recounted some of my own experiences looking for the the riot grrrls, looking for the music in Chainsaw and KRS mailers. My friends all went punk at the same time, I stuck behind and found some other music, unclear as to if I wanted a scene, a community, new friends or just some records.  I was a little late and a little early, and ultimately found a community in youth glbt organizing - for awhile anyway.  Being young is funny that way, you figure out your thing and then you are different.  

The next morning Nikki took me to Occidental so I could see where the college years of Beverly Hills 90210 were filmed.  We got coffee and she drove me to the LAX, we listened to the new EMA record and I got weepy.

Back in Brooklyn the next week, my East Coast best girl and I rode the B43 down to the botanical gardens, a distinctly Western bit of June Gloom hanging heavy in air.  ”Oh” she said, “so I’m reading this book..”

the end of something

All My Children is my soap, for whatever that’s worth.  I am prone toward believing that everyone has a soap opera.  Maybe that’s kind of false, but I am prone toward believing.  Maybe you had a soap and you didn’t realize it. Some arc on Bold and the Beautiful that really could have sung for you in the nineties, but you missed it…

I have a friend who was born the same day as a character on Guiding Light.  It had been her mom’s soap, and then it became hers and she had her character - who predictably aged at a very different rate than she did.  Characters on soaps can age however they please, it’s awesome.  So my friend and her character, they lived their respective lives and then Guiding Light was canceled.  She was bummed, but it was more than that, something had really ended.  Something that happened in her family, and on TV, and that had been a part of her life from the beginning.

So many of our mothers watched soaps when they were pregnant with us, I think about that a lot.  While they were waiting on us they were watching the same characters in the same rooms having the same conversations.  Every day for a hour in the afternoon.  Luke and Laura.  I don’t know much about General Hospital, but I am aware that those two were a pretty big deal.  The invention of the Supercouple.

Though I don’t identify as a big soap fan, I do understand watching soaps as significant to being a woman in America in the time that I’ve been a woman in America.  Something that could be handed down, or not.  Something that was yours, that was private, but could be anybody else’s too.

I remember peeping bits of soaps as a kid sometimes - disinterested in the mock sexuality of the steamy plots - but I didn’t start watching All My Children until college.  My afternoons were very free then, in a way that they are unlikely to ever be again.  I loved the opening sequence, the actors uncredited, one face after another after another - so many characters.  And that was it for me, I picked my soap.  

I haven’t stuck with it throughout the years like a real deal fan, but I like to check back in when I can.  I’ve liked knowing that life in Pine Valley has gone on, at it’s own strange pace.  And I think Susan Lucci is a cool weird chick even though I can’t really stand Erica Kane for too long a stretch.  I respect the show’s history as well, in 1973 Erica had television’s first legal abortion.  AMC is kind of hip.

I really feel for the women who have been watching All My Children for decades, because they are losing something - for better or for worse.  Something that has belonged to them is ending, maybe it will still be theirs but now it will be gone.  And I feel it, because AMC has been my soap and to a lesser extent, it belonged to me too.

CALL YOUR SENATORS

NOW

Betty please don’t go

Matthew Weiner and AMC just can’t seem to work things out, and these are darks days for Mad Men.   

If we ever get a glimpse at it, the fifth season promises more change and oddness. Don’s new marriage, SCDP without Lucky Strike, the Draper/Francis home no more, motherhood for Joan and I know not what for Peggy but I cannot wait. 

I’ve been trying not to get all that caught up in the drama of the fate of the fifth season, but I admit I am antsy.  This talk of cutting minutes, cutting characters, and how readily the show’s fans are offering Betty as the first to go. Maybe they’d keep her if she sunk her teeth into some real deal second wave feminism or had a full on “ Valley of the Dolls downward spiral”. 

I cannot, I will not imagine Mad Men without Betty Draper, or Betty Francis.  

Betty is in many ways unlovable to the audience. Sure we’ve felt sympathy for her, but in their mutual dysfunction Don was always our hero.  Yes, he fucked her over, that is plain.  We’ve been with Don this long (he is the star, isn’t he?) that we couldn’t help but root for him more than we root for Betty.  She’s so lovely, yet our affection for her can recede into the background.  And in the time since Betty Draper has become Betty Francis her story has been quieter, tense and strange. In a new marriage she is still the same Betty - perhaps with slightly less charm. Maybe Betty cannot make the choice that will change her life in a way that would satisfy her, that would satisfy us, but maybe that’s okay.  Maybe that’s why we watch this show.  

One of the places where Mad Men excels is in telling womens’ stories in a man’s world. Peggy, Joan and Betty have been our holy trinity, three very different entry points into the spectrum of female experience within the limited scope of the show’s universe.  Peggy is strong and young and changing, we want everything for her, we trust her and we are willing to let her make mistakes.  Joan is so rich that she just carries us with her, she has made choices and many of them aren’t what we want for her, but we accept them just has she has.  

Betty is neither of these, and she is hard to watch.  She challenges us in a way that feels very flat.  We sit with her in yesterday’s party dress, unshowered, smoking cigs and drinking daytime wine.  It doesn’t get us anywhere.

I don’t care if Betty ever reads the Feminine Mystique.  

Ahead of the pack…

…and miles behind In South Dakota, as the state became the first in the nation to pass legislation requring women who are seeking abortion to attend a session at a “pregnancy help center.”  Many states have laws requiring counseling before an abortion, “(w)hat makes the new South Dakota law different is that the mandated counseling will come from people whose central qualification is that they are opposed to abortion.”

NY Times