Hits and Misses.
Today we are going to talk about things like “lesbian daryl hall saloons.”
But first, allow me to thank you for still checking in to see whether we happened to update this blog today, despite the fact that we have been horribly negligent about posting. I confess that the number of hits we receive each day has substatially decreased in the lackadaisical past few months, and we do truly appreciate your patience.
Really it’s only the hardiest of you that remain. Well, you know — the hardiest of you and those that land on us by googling such things as “little kids little gay gay kids,” “lipstick lesbians in Massachusetts,” and “mongolia lesbians hit video.”
I’m pretty sure, minimally, that this bloggity was a grave disappointment to the Mongolia folks. Oh, and I am also confident we continuously disappoint the good people behind the multifarious daily hits we receive resulting from search terms a lady simply can’t discuss — suffice it to say that they are along the same lines as today’s “two ladies dirty.”
At least we are equal opportunity let-’er-down-ers. Some poor soul’s search for “purposely waiting marital sex.com” landed here at Two Ladies in Waiting instead of at its likely intended target, premaritalsex.info – which is a “Christsites.com top site,” no less. Not to make assumptions, but don’t think we’re likely to find ourselves in the running for the same distinction.
While we’re at it, does anyone know what “سكس امريكي” translates to? Because that has also led more than one person to these pages.
Kevin Bacon Would be Stunned.
My dear mother is a semi-local college English professor. I’m biased, but I believe accurate, when I describe her as much beloved by her students and very highly regarded by her college. (Appropriately, she cares much more about the former.) In the course of her teaching, and over the course of my life, she has had cause to meet many local authors of note, several of whom she now counts among her friends. No surprise there, right?
Well, things have, of late, taken an interesting turn. My mother recently met and subsequently developed a friendship with the woman who wrote that book up there, Lesléa Newman.
You may know or recall that my mother has her struggles with my “lesbianism.” (Ew.) She loves me, she loves Mo, and I know that she’s trying like heck to get there. Or, at least, to get somewhere closer. For instance she no longer says “The Event” when she talks about our wedding– although she does still occasionally refer to it as “March 7th” — as in “Now, Meggie, is this the same champagne we had on March 7th?”
Maybe it’s a silly distinction, but it’s easier for me to let “The Date” slide over triscuits and a shared bottle of sauv blanc than it ever was to let “The Event” thing slide. I’m confident that whatever “The Event” is it has corporate sponsors and I don’t care for my chicken.
I will back-fill this tale a bit for those who have not met my mum. She is, by her own account, square. I think she’s a little proud of how square she is, and I also think she knows quite well how very “square” the expression “square” is. I’ve always though that a little bit of it is an act, that she’s actually a bit more progressive than she lets on. As a devoted progressive myself, I tend to chalk that up to her extreme intelligence.
Because our lives are all so often reduced to the anecdotes others tell, let me scatter a few Mom chestnuts here. She is a lady who is a life-long registered Republican but who dressed her eight-year-old only daughter in a purple “Massachusetts Republicans for Choice” tee-shirt. She looks like Sandy Duncan. She once, in approximately 1969, left a friends’ house in Vermont when, on a hunt for a sweatshirt, she discovered a small bag of marijuana in a dresser drawer. Why? Because she was convinced that she would lose her teaching job in Massachusetts, prompting her immediate, midnight, 100-mile drive back home. (She’s a veritable Paul Revere of the gateway drug. Needless to say we don’t have exactly the same aversion to risk, she and I.) Mom is also a woman who just last week dropped everything to come to Connecticut to help me organize the house. I had, you see, in a moment of incredibly unbecoming panic, called her crying and insisting that Mo and I simply couldn’t take care of ourselves and needed a nanny.
(I was completely earnest about the nanny then, and I have not changed my mind. Mom has advised that she will be gifting us a professional organizer in the near future. I do not think that this is a long term solution, because I understand that an organizer will not follow you around for the rest of your life, organizing you. Alas, beggars can’t be choosers.)
The short of it is, though, that to my mind my mother and I are in a nice place of good, if somewhat poky for my million-mile-per-hour taste, forward momentum in our mother/daughter relationship — of which the gay thing is only the latest twist. If not the gay, I imagine it would be something else, and after the gay thing turns, will certainly be something else still. And so it is for us and so it is, I imagine, for you and yours.
None of this removes the strangeness of my mother’s recent bonding with Ms. Newman: Lesbian Icon. How do I describe how this feels to me? Perhaps as how it might have felt had my mother one day in 1995 offered to be my high school Mary Jane hook-up — and offered a particularly appropriate piece of my Grammy’s Belleek to function as the bowl.
Even though Heather Has Two Mommies was published twenty years ago, in 1989, it remains controversial — likely because it stokes the easy go-to “fear” of the right that we’re all out to gay-up their kids. It was ranked the 11th most challenged book by the American Library Association in the 1990s. It was at the center of the Sarah Palin book banning controversy in the last presidential election. As recently as late May, Heather Has Two Mommies was the subject of an (attempted) zinger in the District of Columbia marriage equality fight. “I do not want my grandkids sitting in a classroom hearing about Heather has two mommies, or the prince and the prince grow up to marry and become the king and the king.” (I know, you’d think they’d be a bit more clever by this point.) Heather is also featured in a current exhibition at the Museum of Sex in Manhattan — I won’t tell you how I know that, though, because my mother may be reading.
And my mom is friends with the author of this picture book that launched a thousand homophobic ships. And I’m not friends with her at all! In fact we’ve never even met! How ’bout that?
Ready for the kicker?
Lesléa Newman is friends with Rachel Maddow.
So, you see, I am three degrees of separation from Rachel Maddow, but my mom is two degrees of separation from her.
Maureen and I are playing it cool lately with my mom. Trying to get her to, you know, introduce us to her friends.
Love you, Mom.
My mother and me at my wedding. Photo by Chion Wolf.
Doodle Zone or Danger Zone?
Before I sign off, I leave you with a picture I took at home the night before last. It is related to the teaser at the end of my previous entry.
On your way here to Hartford yet? If you bring Fever-Tree tonic water as your hostess gift, we promise Boddington will wear false eyelashes and a wig for his role in the reenactment, and that I will play Boddington.
