Old Wounds

This picture was taken in front of the St. Peter's Basilica in Rome when I was 20. My friend Sharon and I were doing the backpacking-in-Europe thing with friends and she couldn't get in to the Sistine Chapel because she was wearing a mini skirt. I was wearing a mini skirt, too, but had the good fortune to have also worn a matching pair of pants (okay, so it was a top not a miniskirt, but it was the 70s and I was young and had good legs and could get away with wearing indecent clothing at the time.) The photo shows Sharon with her mini dress and my pants as we took turns seeing Michelangelo's masterpiece.

Within 24 hours of that picture being taken, I was groped on a crowded Rome street in broad daylight. It happened in a flash and as I stood there shocked the groper faded into the flow of people around me. I burst in to tears and as my friends comforted me a little old Italian lady stopped to ask what was wrong. She could have been anywhere from 50 to 80; short, she had a figure that only eating a ton of pasta can form--a typical Italian matriarch if there ever was one. I don't know how she understood what my friends told her but she did, and I watched anger darken her face. Her voice rose and she turned to the mass of humanity walking by, jabbed her finger in the air and launched into a verbal tirade , scolding them one and all for what had happened to me.

I still remember how much pain the assault caused. Absent any wound, bleeding or aggrieved nerve endings, it was surprising how raw the experience was. This woman who stopped soon melted into the crowd, too, as my friends carried me off, but I'll never forget how grateful I was to her for showing that she, too, was assaulted by what had happened to me. No matter that what happened was part of the Italian male culture, not only at that time, but to this day. She didn't once make me feel like I'd "asked for it" by the way I was dressed. She was outraged on my behalf. I felt taken care of by her defense and it helped me recover quickly from something that would otherwise go unpunished.

The press coverage of the assault by the head of International Monetary Fund on a maid last week in NYC reminded me of what happened in Rome. Reading about how rampant this sort of sexual predatory behavior is in France, how accepted it is in the European business environment, is truly shocking. Women, it seems, feel voiceless after such assaults. Many women, it appears, accept it as the cost of doing business; some, like Strauss-Kahn's wife apparently, seem to view it is as acceptable behavior.

So even though I can't say for sure what that very caring, angry woman said all those years ago, I'm gonna take a stab at paraphrasing her words: Shame on you, Dominique Straus-Kahn. Look what you've done. Look who you've hurt. You have money and power, yes, but you had no right. You had no right.

Language of the South

Just back from Charleston, S.C. and there was much to love about it. It was green, historic, fragrant, charming, and most of all during this cold, cold Wisconsin spring, it was warm.

Still, true to form, what I loved best was the language of the South. For instance, the words "civil war" are rarely if ever spoken by Charlestonians; instead those destructive years are known as "the War of Northern Aggression" or the less specific, more genteel "The Great Unpleasantness".

And then there's the singular, possessive and plural of the pronoun "you." They are, in order, "you all", "you all's", and "all you all". What fun!

So, go south when you get a chance and smell the jasmine, feel the warm sun beating down on you, enjoy fried green tomatoes, sweet tea and tupello honey, but at pain of a trip-half-done experience, don't forget to listen or you'll miss all the fun!

PS: Thanks for sticking with It Was a Cold and Stormy Night when I haven't posted anything for awhile. My excuse is mostly time, but I have written two posts that have not uploaded successfully. Let's see if we all can't get back on track with this post. I appreciate your support . . .

Reality Check

NOTE: Unsuccessful at posting this at the time it was written. Finally posted on 5/17/11.

Water for Elephants is now a movie staring Reese Witherspoon, and I caught the star talking about it on TV the other day. The film is set in a circus and Witherspoon is the beautiful woman who works with the elephant and the horses. She talked about how hard she trained with the animals and how, despite her fears, she actually did much of the handling and riding that was filmed. She spoke about Roman riding, where the circus performer has one foot on one beautiful galloping white horse and the other on another beautiful galloping white horse--very tricky when you think about it. And she did it, she actually did it. Very impressive.

And then, she added, the scene got left on the cutting room floor.

"I guess it wasn't very attractive," she explained.

I thought about that and conceded, yeah, of course, how beautiful can you look when you're trying to keep your balance on 2,000 pounds of fast rocking horseflesh running in tight circles? I could see it in my mind and it really wasn't very attractive.

The thought took me back to my youth.

I've always had a vivid imagination. I was a kid who used to think in the third person. Walking to the drug store as a 10 year old, my thoughts went something like: "She put one foot in front of another, avoiding the cracks in the sidewalk, avoiding the opportunity to bring bad luck on her mother even though she was mad at her." This kind of thinking made me realize I would be a writer someday. I found it very reassuring.

My imagination was only enhanced by the hormones that arrived with my teen years. I was boy crazy to the max and much of my imagining dealt with romance. I imagined being married, waking each morning in a beautiful silk nightgown, my hair flowing over the pillow, my arms gracefully akimbo on top of crisply folded sheets and fluffy blankets. I never tossed and turned, my hair never flattened, my nightgown never crept up, my face was flawlessly made up, my breath sweet as freshly fallen rain. I was a vision.

Well, I got the married part, but unfortunately poor Katz wakes up day after day beside a blurry eyed, snarly haired, blotchy looking wife with breath that smells like unwashed socks.

No vision for him.

Hearing someone as adorable as Reese Witherspoon talk about being visually compromised was reassuring. And it gave me hope to know that somewhere a writer, perhaps not too unlike me, imagined something he felt would be captivatingly beautiful, only to see if fall flat. Yes, it's nice to know reality touches those very successful people in the world, that they too find it can be rude and unkind.

Even for the beautiful people, reality's edges are sharp; there are no shadows to hide in. But, truth be told, reality is the hand we are dealt and fighting it is an exercise in futility. Learning to embrace life warts and all isn't easy but if you can learn to do it, it will prove very freeing.

Still, there's part of me that wishes that my body hadn't shape-shifted over the years, or that I could finish my book in the not too distant future, or that Katz could leave his difficult job and retire today. Part of me will always wish that every day was a perfect hair day or that a beautiful circus performer could stand on the back of galloping horses and look like a goddess on air.