CommuniKate

When I was coming out and up in the 70s, we were very proud of a local Syracuse, New York girl band, “Sweet Jenny Grit”. They were a proudly defiant rock and roll hair band and toured throughout the northeast. We all went the regular Speakeasy Dance on Friday nights at a friend’s loft in Cazenovia, a little lake town near Syracuse. Once in a while Sweet Jenny Grit deigned to play there.

It was sexy, sweaty, flirty fun, fueled by Bud and shots of Tequila slyly recommended by the crinkly tanned, turquoise laden poet/forest ranger on leave from her fire spotting outpost in the mountains of New Mexico. Her goal was to turn the dance into an orgy. She was on short shore leave, so she didn’t seem to have a lot of time for individual attention to the ladies. She was trouble. Someone always ended up in tears.

You will never see the story line on “That 70’s Show” but those were the days of the much-caricatured lesbian feminist separatist movement. In urban and rural settings, groups of women separated themselves from the trappings of patriarchy, lived together on and off the land, started women’s health care clinics, record companies, writing centers, anti-nuke and peace movements, hydroponic pot wholesaling and tried to live a utopian dream.

In my early years of comedy travel sponsored by production collectives spawned in those communes throughout the country, I would listen to dystopian dyke-dramas in intense twenty-four hour gabfests, interrupted by my show, before I had to trundle off in my van to the next gig. Time and time again I was struck by the inability of another group of women to cope with some member of the group whose mental problems would eventually bring them down.

As an outsider I could see that the woman, let’s call her Jenny, was mentally ill, deeply damaged by her nature or nurture. Jenny was certifiably a narcissist, a pathological liar, manic-depressive or some combination thereof. But the community was completely unable to call it out, get her help, or for the good of the group, send her packing. And another well-intentioned group would fall prey to the tyranny of the weak and bite the dust.

I have no idea how the L-Word will answer the season and series ending question of who killed Jenny. When I saw the season opener shot of Jenny doing her William Holden dead man’s float, I must say I was relieved. I’ve never liked her. But to have the whole last half-season be about establishing a motive for every major character to kill Jenny, who is emotionally ill in anyone’s amateur DSM, is finally a sad conclusion to the initial promise of a show about lesbians. It’s so 70s.

I will miss the final L-Word episode because I will be returning from an Olivia Cruise. Olivia is a travel and leisure company for lesbians which grew out of a lesbian music business which grew out of a lesbian collective that wanted to hear and see their lives as lesbians represented. I will have someone TIVO the show for me. I hope it will be about a miraculous resuscitation, a kindly but stern intervention, some appropriate medication until Jenny is stabilized, then a lot of individual and group therapy followed by everyone’s gracious acceptance of Jenny’s amends. Then her voluntary relocation to the screenwriting department at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia.

My niece declined a glass of wine at dinner, beamed and announced she is pregnant. I am thrilled for her and her husband. I am amazed at the implied optimism – they are going to be able to afford food, shelter, Hello Kitty clothing. They’ll save money under the bassinet mattress. They will be able to afford vaccines, braces, dance lessons, pre-K college tutoring, tuition, treatment for that rare skin problem, therapy for the behavior problems, lawyers for drug busts, a large enough fallout shelter.

But that’s just where my mind goes.

When we first moved to New York, my building was like an ambulatory assisted living facility. I flirted madly with the old women and men in the elevator and loved their stories while we drowsed and waited for the laundry room dryers. Thirteen years and many early morning sirens later, instead of walkers and three-pronged canes, the elevator is jammed with state-of-the-art, plastic encased, dual purpose jogger-strollers.

A recent newsletter announced there are now thirty-three kids in our building, including six sets of twins, with two more kids in the hopper. With the new surveillance cams, I’m concerned how the board got that last bit of info. Everywhere in my neighborhood there are double-wide strollers. When a friend told me her partner was pregnant, my first thought was, “Just one?” and I realized I’d had the same thought when my niece announced. I find myself looking at women pushing single strollers like they are somehow slacking.

And that was before the saga of the Octomom. Nancy Grace you’re wanted on TV. While grimly enumerating the details of the story – Nadya Suleman is Iraqi, single, disabled, unemployed, on food stamps, obsessed with Angelina Jolie, in graduate school in pediatric counseling, lives with her parents, has six other children – commentators look relieved to be covering a story about unscrupulous fertility bankers and absentee octodads rather than the collapse of banking in the fatherland.

Has Bristol Palin weighed in on the Octomom? In her FOX news interview with the tiny, deconstructed Greta Von Susteren, Bristol’s ‘likes’ and ‘y’knows’ certainly disqualified her for a New York State Senate seat. She said she wants to be an advocate for teen pregnancy, even though we already have a pretty good record in that category.

Just before her mom, Governor Palin, inserted herself in the room, Bristol said that telling her mom she was with Tripp [after Linda?] was harder than the actual childbirth. Bristol also said that she wished she had waited ten years, that teens should wait for marriage but that abstinence is not realistic. They had an interesting family dinner table discussion that night. You betcha. Good thing Grandpa Todd is away on another of his snowmobile idiotrods.

It is all very Curious Case of Benjamin Button. The thirty year crusade for family - the straight is understood – makes a young girl derive identity and meaning from her offspring. As a young mother she takes on adult responsibility. Conversely, lack of responsibility and self-regulation infantilizes adults. Tax cuts, endless wars, assaults on mother earth? Trust us, we know what we’re doing. Go out and buy yourself something pretty.

For the last few years, I’ve been fascinated by a growing trend at my local grocery. The produce department is stocked with misted bins laden with baby carrots, baby spinach, baby arugula, baby brussel sprouts. They should call the produce department ‘the nursery’. Once I inadvertently spied a bunch of fully-grown adult carrots. I quickly looked away in baby beet red embarrassment.

Our Inaugural viewing pod thought Dick Cheney’s wheelchair was a clever ploy. We didn’t fall for it. He couldn’t have strained his back lifting file boxes. The files had all been shredded months ago. We bet the wheelchair was intended to garner him some Pinochetish sympathy. Who would prosecute an old, stooped, white haired man in a wheelchair for war crimes? Uh, Dick would.

Well, he’s baaaaack! In an interview with Politico, Cheney astride his high horse, patiently side-mouthed to his scribes that Obama’s policies invited terrorist attacks. He denounced the closing of Gitmo and bemoaned the suspension of his favorite interrogation techniques.

Which caused MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann to go into an eleven-minute, high dudgeon rant addressed directly to Cheney, with a lot of “You sirs” and squinty, glinty eyeballing. As if Cheney were home watching Countdown on his flat panel TV while cleaning his gun. Olbermann finished, and man was he steamed, but it was hard to take seriously because he’d just finished sucking up to Super Bowl players on ESPN. I bet if Cheney was in his barcalounger, back from padding off for another beer, he merely groused, “So?” and shot the TV.

At least George has the decency just to go Baylor basketball games and keep his mouth shut. Okay, cancel the decency.

Old Dick does not follow the Obama way. I wish Obama didn’t either. I know it’s only seventeen days. I know, after eight years, I have to give the new uber-bipartisan gestalt a chance to work. I’ve tried it a few times in my relationship when we’re wrangling about something like, oh, money. I just stop and say, “Honey, that’s not the Obama way.” And we hug.

But from up here in Manhattan, the former financial capital of the world, where more and more stunned young men in everyday-is-casual-day pressed Dockers are seen at the playground mid-afternoon, one hand pushing a kid on a swing, the other thumbing a Blackberry, I just want to say to DC, “Do not make me come down there.”

In his monologue Cheney also grumped that nobody saw something of the size and dimension of our economic collapse occurring. That sounds similar to his claim about the 2001 terrorist attacks. So if he now sees another terrorist attack coming, perhaps he can look out his Wyoming ponderosa windows and see the depression coming, and warn his little conservative, obstructionist pals about it. If certain Republican senators do not like Obama’s stimulus plan, then fine, your state will not get any of the moneys. Is that bipartisan enough?

In the teeth of the economic storm, I often feel silly yapping about LGBT identity politics. “We have no job, no home and little food,” seems to trump, “I want my gay rights!”

John D’Emilio, professor of history and gender studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said recently that it might be more helpful to recalculate our Gay Positioning System. Gay activists can join with labor, civil rights activists, immigrant rights workers, youth organizers and peace activists and together denounce the terrible success of other identity movements – the perfect storm of the filthy rich and Christian conservative identity movements.