The Threshold of a New Decade

A deep and primal hunger rises in me when I’m unfettered by obligation.  Images come to mind… my sundress blowing in the Santa Ana winds, Spanish moss in the cypress trees overhead, standing in the shadows of a redwood forest, the crush of Times Square, San Francisco Bay especially with a tiny notebook and mechanical pencil in hand, my finger touching the doorbell of the flat where Tennessee Williams wrote Streetcar.  My twenties were an exercise in personal happiness.  A life governed entirely by inspiration.  It was accompanied by some unpleasantness – working for a director who was verbally abusive, trying to get a Hollywood apartment with no job and no credit, experiencing the pecking order of Nobodies versus Celebrities.  But conquering those challenges were empowering.  I had enough energy to work a full-time job, audition during lunch hours, hit the gym five nights a week, study acting two days a week and party till sunrise.  I’m so grateful for that time.  It’s exactly what I wanted out of my twenties.  By the end of the decade I began to figure out what really mattered to me.

My thirties were about marriage and mountains… proving ourselves again and again to create our family and then facing all the same mountains that come with parenting.  Artistic fulfillment, eclipsed by the miracle of our first baby, then second and third and fourth, was pushed aside and became nothing more than a faint, frustrated cry (a cry I never could ignore).  But given the choice of playing with my kids or carving out time to write, playing usually won out.  I know how fast time goes;  My oldest is in third grade with pierced ears already and it can’t be so, because just yesterday I held my arms out wide and cheered as she stumbled toward me for the first time.  Two full hours of my Burning Man road trip were spent crying over how much I already missed my children.  This is the push-pull of parenthood, the achingly beautiful dichotomy of it.  One part of me flourishes while another withers.

Here I stand at the threshold of forty.  I give you yet another one of my famous early exchanges with TC…

TC:   I guess some day I’d like to get married.  What about you?

Me:  Married?  Ahhh, like NO.

TC:  Never?

Me:  Well… maybe when I’m like forty and there’s like nothing left.

I am so lucky to have a whole trunk full of youthful wisdom to draw on!  Here I stand almost forty with endless possibilities before me.  Where I go is largely up to me.  There will be fevered nights, vomit, potty-training, tears, nap-strikes, and detours that happen along the way, but this is it: This is my life.  I’m alive.  We’re healthy.  I know at least three very special people who aren’t here to say that.  But I’m fortunate enough to be arriving at an age that seemed ridiculously old when I was younger.  A whole new decade.  Maybe my forties will be about trying new things.  Feeding that hunger in me.  Or figuring out what that hunger is anyway.  More reading.  Definitely more sex.  And Less.  Less chocolate.  Less frowning (I can’t afford the wrinkles).  Less repeating myself (this entire post is one big repeat, but I can’t help it).  A milestone is upon me.  On that day I’ll be flying back to Boston with the fam.  Less fantasies about plane crashes.  More fantasies about safe landings.

I’m in a good place.  They say Forty is the new Thirty.  And I’m pretty sure Fifty is the new Forty and so on.  It’s all good.  I’m just glad to be here.

Hump! 5

Foodies have restaurants.  Readers have book clubs.  Cinema fans have movie nights.  Cyclists have… well, our entire city.  Even Labradoodle enthusiasts have regular meetups.  But where does one go and what does one do when the interest is sex?  Until very recently the procreation of our species depended on sex; It’s no accident that it feels good.  Really good.  I don’t know the stats on who’s doing it, in what manner and how often, but strangely enough it’s still a very hush-hush subject and therefore sex adventurists must go underground to find their people.  I teeter on the edge of curiosity, so when I heard that syndicated sex columnist, Dan Savage (of Savage Love), was bringing his Seattle-based Amateur Porn Film Festival, Hump! 5, to Portland for the first time I was thrilled.  To the average Josephine this might seem like nothing more than a glut of smut, but I’ll have you know that Dan Savage is not only a hilarious and knowledgeable sex adviser, he’s also a devoted father, gay rights activist, open adoption advocate, This American Life contributor, and best-selling author.  I proudly support his professional endeavors.  Sex happens to be his line of work.  I happen to be interested in sex.  Thanks to a friend who scored me a ticket, last night I went to Cinema 21 to see Portland’s first Amateur Porn Film Festival.

Before the show Savage said a few words.  He was adamant about no heckling and talked about how brave it is to yell in a dark movie theatre at people on-screen for doing something much braver than any of us will ever do (something like that).  When it came to cell phone use he was downright threatening (“If it is in your hand we will take it away and you will never see it again... because these people want to be porn stars for a weekend not a lifetime”).  This actually made for a supportive and safe environment.  Except for content it was much like any other indie film festival.  Only better.

Hump! 5 was a well-balanced smorgasbord of amateur pornos mostly shot in the Northwest.  Each film was one to five minutes in length and fell into my three general categories: Comedy, Erotica, Disturbia.  The call for submissions included extra credit for films that captured local landmarks such as the Made In Oregon sign, Voodoo Doughnut, and that crazy sculpture across from Powell’s which Savage referred to as “The Devil’s Testicle.”  Filmmakers were encouraged, but not required to use extra credit props such as a pink slip, Mormon clothes, and a food product I’d never seen or heard of before called Aplets and Cotlets. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed, gaped or gasped so hard.  One must be super-duper sugar snooper comfy with sex and all its slimy carnage.  I found it uproariously funny, often disgusting and sometimes too painful to watch.  I realized in retelling it to my husband that I’m not clever enough to make the work seem anything but 100% raunchy, but I can confidently say that the majority of films were highly creative, original and definitely worth the price of admission.  A complete list of entries can be found here under …The Smut That Made The Cut. If this kind of thing floats your boat or even if you’re only mildly curious like me, I recommend keeping an eye out for next year’s Hump! 6.  Be sure to get your tickets early.  It’ll sell out faster next time.

PREJUDICE: An adverse judgement or opinion formed beforehand without knowledge or examination of facts

“Don’t go to Burning Man if you ever want to run for Senate!  A senator doesn’t wanna get caught anywhere near Burning Man!  And you should watch out too if you really wanna to join that (Site) Council you’ve been talking about…” said a relative upon seeing my photos.  I didn’t expect to hear a choir, but that’s what happened.  Angels parted the clouds in song and I was at once able to articulate why I never fit in where I grew up.

Second grade.  This was when McDonald’s was new and exciting, a real treat, and some families when they had finished eating would toss their trash right out the car window.  Cups, straws, wrappings and little styrofoam boxes would scatter from the white crumpled bag while somewhere above us there lurked a Native American man on horseback, crying.  My grandfather was a raging nonconformist.  He ranted incessantly about our country’s racist past and Native American injustices in particular set him aflame.  Having been exposed to his thinking (and infinite hours of television) I joined the fight against pollution.  Sometimes I’d try to clean random trash off the sidewalks causing random adults to hiss, “Leave it be!” My grandfather often talked about how wrong it was to judge a person by the color of his skin.  His words didn’t seem all that important to me.  But it was around this time I began to notice that I was the only second-grader who played with the solitary black girl in our class.  At first I thought she was avoided due to her giraffe-like height, but I heard the whispers and began questioning relatives, “Do you like black people?  I do.  Do you have black friends?  I do.”  It was explained to me that while it was acceptable, honorable even, to befriend black people, blacks and whites should never marry;  It was unfair to the children.  Perhaps it was my grandfather’s influence and my mother’s re-enforcement of his beliefs that molded my thoughts, or the knowledge that my father’s mother protected her black neighbors during the Boston Busing riots, but at six years old this business of whites not mixing with blacks sounded like crazy-talk to me.  “But what if they love each other?” I asked.  My poster said All You Need Is Love.  “Doesn’t matter, ” they replied.  “Children pay the price.  It might not be right, but that’s life.”  It was implied that we should just let it be.  This thought came back to me again and again.  Slavery: what if we just let it be?  Only men have the right to vote or own property: let it be?  Prohibiting consenting adults from getting married: let it be?  It obviously made no sense.  When certain company would leave our home my mother would huff around complaining about how narrow-minded so n’so was, how derogatory his language.  A phrase I heard from certain individuals in high school was, “I know you’re friends with them, but you gotta admit, there are black people and then there are niggers.”  I’d sooner drop the friendship than speak such hateful words.  A close relative once told me that blond girls are nothing but trophies to black boys.  The boy in question was one of the sweetest, most gentle kids I knew, but that didn’t matter.  His skin was brown and he lived on the other side of the tracks, that’s all they saw.  The measure of a girl or boy was based first and foremost on one’s appearance.  But that’s what high school is all about, isn’t it?  No.  Because it wasn’t just high school.  It was life and it was everywhere.  Be presentable.  Speak appropriately.  Don’t get too personal.  Stick to the right friends.  Long-haired kids draw negative attention to themselves.  It didn’t matter how hard I’d argue that these kids, cross-over friends of mine, were decent, respectable people.  It became like Ground Hog Day, years of arguing for the minority, any minority.  Black, Jew, Gay, Atheist, Vegetarian, Vegan, Buddhist, Deadhead, Goth, Punk, Lesbian, Thespian.  It all came down to what it still comes down to today: We fear that which we don’t understand.  Different = Scary = Avoid.  It’s not in my nature to avoid nor is it my nature to judge a person without knowing a person.  I grew sick of swimming upstream.  Los Angeles was my homecoming.  It was like floating in an ocean of strange except that strange was the norm.  Live and let live.  If the people back East thought I was a freak, they hadn’t seen the half of it in Hollywood.  Drag queens walked down the street in peace.  Trans-gender folk hardly got a glance.  Horrible racial divides plagued Southern California and many other West Coast cities then and now, but in my freakish little community we were one big happy family regardless of skin color, sexual preference or how we chose to present ourselves.

At my daughter’s elementary school I sit next to a man whose ink winds down his neck, across his back, wraps around his arms and over his hands, and a woman whose blond hair sits atop a turban of dreadlocks.  A skateboarding dad dressed in rock n’roll black rides his daughter to school.  A goth mom includes the entire class of each of her three kids when invitations to their annual Halloween party go out.  I’ve seen a man in a suit check his blackberry while a teacher with flourescent pink hair greets her first grade students.  My Eastcoast nay-sayers might be surprised to learn we are engineers, graphic designers, lawyers, waitresses, doctors, artists and accountants alike, all of us parents who love our children and support our community.  Racial barriers exist even here and I’ll always fight against them, but I’m thankful to call this little corner of Portland, Oregon my home.  This is where I belong.