girls of summer

Sun 6.11.23

It’s summertime in Maine and the juice indicating how am reacting to it is best expressed by these joyful girls of summer dancing to Elvis’ All Shook Up. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/PhzMxh1SWK4. Did you notice Megyn Kelly is sporting a tee-shirt with the word FEMALE emblazoned on her tits?  I like that.  I may even get one for myself.

During my last year at University of Southern Maine I became the Director of the University Women’s Forum.  I sort of fell into it.  The woman who created the Forum was the ex-wife of a professor at the school, so an older woman, in the world so to speak, not a student.  She whipped up the crowd at USM and made them aware through sit-ins, boycotts, essays in the college paper, speeches, that attention needed to be paid on women’s rights.  I liked Maddy, and she was speaking truth about unfair situations.  This was her last year at USM, she was moving to Boston, having been accepted in a Master’s Journalism program at Boston University.   She was frantic to find someone who would continue the Forum,  The women she worked with were also graduating and moving on; the ones who weren’t, didn’t want the job.  I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of not having a Women’s Forum.  I enjoyed hanging out there.  What’s more, we were a voice on campus; women came seeking help, and they got it.  So I took the job.  

I have been very lucky to have been been part of girls’ and women’s groups.  At the convent girls’ boarding school, as a colonist  at THE FARM: An Art Colony For Women, owned and operated by the artist and feminist Kate Millett.  We were a colony of women that came from all fields, writers, musicians, photographers, artists, athletes.  We had a season, the growing season because THE FARM produced a harvest each year of Christmas Trees.  We colonists nurtured the trees, pruned, planted, cleared areas in exchange for our time to create. I especially remember celebrating the French Bastille holiday,  We were expected to arrive at dinner in the character of a French personage.  Kate came as Gertrude Stein, I was Jeanne D’Arc, there was Coco Channel in her little boxy suit, etc.  Lots of fun, the group of us sitting at table on the deck of the lavender house late into the starry night drinking red wine and singing French songs.  My contribution to The Farm that summer was organizing our group to paint the main house because I had been a brush painter at the Bath Iron Works shipyard.  It was the summer before moving to New York City and the start of a Master in Fine Arts program at Sarah Lawrence, a woman’s college. It had just recently started accepting men but it was still a woman’s college in essence.  My course of study, Fiction Writing, was attended by only one man in my classes.

The girls and women that I associated with, worked with and fought with, made space for me to be, as I did likewise with them, in a way that is not possible in mixed groups.  The inclusion of transgender women in sports, with their physiological advantage, that cannot be overcome is unfair, but more than that these are women’s spaces, women’s world.  No, we don’t want a trans with penis and balls walking around naked in our locker rooms.  As you can see girls are outraged at having to put up with it.  Trans are also applying to women’s sororities.  This cannot work.  They know nothing about a woman’s world, have not experienced a woman’s life.  It’s not something you pick up by putting on a dress and growing your hair out.

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MANHATTAN SEERESS NOW ON EBOOKS

Eight o'clock Sunday morning, the police arrive at her apartment in Greenwich Village, "How long have you been living here?" The roommate Elizabeth, after having accepted her half of the deposit money and rent for their new apartment, has called the police. 

New York City doesn’t open its arms to welcome her, but she’s arrived and the adventure of her life is about to unfold.  She’s come from Maine with an invitation from Sarah Lawrence College to participate in the graduate writing program.

How one becomes a seeress is what this memoir explores. Stories have been specifically selected to illustrate, from the sublime to the practical, a spiritual journey introduced in each chapter by an atout, the Tarot’s major archetypes.   From the Fool, to The World, our human journey with its risk and folly unfolds. There is also an artist here alive to her new world seeking inspiration among artists on the Lower East side, learning the ways and foods of her Chinese neighbors, falling in love.