That Takes Ovaries!

by Rivka Solomon

  While julia willis, author of the novel Reel Time (Alyson), comes from a long line of Southern liars and storytellers, drunks and teetotalers, she still avoids that moonshine like the plague, preferring instead a good single-malt Scotch. She now resides in Quincy, Massachusetts.

  Yay for Hairy Women!

  mica miro

  “What’s taking you so long, Mica? You’re not the only one who uses this bathroom!” my sister yelled, thumping on the door.

  I grunted in response, too caught up in trying to twist my leg around to see the back of my calf to say more. I had shaved my legs only twice before in my whole life, and I wasn’t so good at it. The first time I shaved, I got a horrible rash. One of my friends said, “Maybe you didn’t use enough soap,” and I thought, Oh. Soap? Even after I found out about the soap part, I couldn’t believe girls took all that time every day just to scrap off their hair.

  At my school, what no one could believe was that I didn’t shave. In seventh grade, I was the only girl with hairy legs. I was aware of it every time I walked down the hall in shorts. My hair was (is) pretty much as dark as it gets. Most girls glanced as I walked by and, shocked, stopped talking or even whispered to their friends. They never said anything directly to me. The boys did. They flat-out asked: “What are you thinking? Why don’t you just shave?” My volleyball team made fun of me, in a sweet way, I guess: “Hippie child,” they’d call me, and they’d say, “You come from the woods, don’t you?”

  My best friends tried to convince me to shave. “You have such nice legs, you should show them off,” Ashley told me as we changed for P.E.

  “Yeah,” Rachel chimed in, “you really should shave, Mica, it would be so much fun.”

  I laughed at my friends, and occasionally talked back to the boys, when I felt brave enough: “You don’t shave, so why should I?”

  I didn’t feel as secure as I sometimes acted. In middle school it was crucial to fit in. At the same time, it was cool to be different. But you had to be different in the right way, a way that fit in; otherwise you were just weird. The cooler you already were, the more your being different was accepted as the right way. I wasn’t the geekiest at my school, but neither was I cool enough to get away with being different. So my hairy legs were considered weird, even a little freakish.

  In P.E. class we were required to wear shorts. I felt super self-conscious, especially since we were seated alphabetically for roll call. I was always next to this popular boy, Markos Matthews. He was flabbergasted that I didn’t shave. Like all the boys, he thought it looked strange and unnatural, even gross, since every other girl he knew was waxy smooth. It was like everyone thought the other girls didn’t even grow hair there. Uncomfortable in P.E., I wanted to disappear—go outside, play soccer, and forget about leg hair.

  So why didn’t I just shave? Well, growing up with unconventional, offbeat parents in a small, rural town, I’d gotten used to the idea of being different from other people. Besides, my mother had hairy legs, though hers were usually hidden under pants or long skirts. Also, when I was six, I had a baby-sitter who didn’t shave. When I asked her why, she told me hairy legs were a wonderful thing, and that all hairy women should always be proud. With that, we took off down the street, chanting, “Yay for hairy women! Yaaay for hairy women!”

  So those two times I had tried to shave, besides the awful rash, the cuts, and the way the pink Bic throwaway razor kept falling out of my hand, I also felt like something of a traitor. Yet, by the middle of seventh grade, I was also tired of feeling so uncomfortable in school. That’s when I came up with my plan. I had gotten the idea from my sister’s friend. He had shaved his head in stripes and everyone in their high school thought it was so cool. Of course, he was already cool to start with.

  “Mica! Get out! It’s my turn,” my older sister banged on the door again, two hours later.

  “Leave me alone. I’m almost done,” I hollered back, rinsing the final suds from my legs and standing up to examine my handiwork in the mirror.

  The next morning, getting ready for school, I was flooded with doubts. At the last minute I decided to wear long pants. But I still had to change into shorts for P.E. What if I made a mistake? I thought with dread, as I nervously walked into the gym. What will the boys say? I have to sit next to Markos and he’s going to flip out. Then I heard someone say, “Hey Mica, what did you do? Guys, look at Mica!” Suddenly everyone crowded around to ooh and ahh.

  “Is that really your hair?” one boy asked.

  “Did it grow that way?” inquired another.

  “Mica, that is so awesome. I would never be brave enough to do that,” said Ashley.

  “Hey, Mica, you are totally cool!” said Rachel, looking down.

  What they were all staring at were the perfectly concentric, evenly spaced, horizontal rings of pale skin and dark hair on both of my legs, from ankle to mid-thigh. I looked like Pippi Long-stocking, and it was a hit. Kids I saw every day, kids who had barely talked to me before, in part because of the dumb tension about my hairy legs, came up to tell me that what I’d done was so cool. Everyone thought it was great. I felt like the Star of the Day.

  mica miro, eighteen now, attends an all women’s college where there are lots of original, forward-thinkers; she is surrounded by hairy legs (“Yaaay!”). The Pippi-look, though, was a one-shot deal. “It took so long, I couldn’t be bothered to do it again.”

  Painting the Town

  sasha claire mcinnes

  Rewind—It’s the mid-70s and I am an artist who has been invited to Ottawa to work for Status of Women Canada to provide input into a Royal Commission on Canadian Culture. I begin commuting—two weeks in my hometown in southwestern Ontario, two weeks in Ottawa.

  One February night I am working late with several other women in the community. After the meeting we each go our separate ways. I walk home along the Rideau Canal to take in a bit of the Winterlude festival; the lights look lovely reflecting off the snow and ice blanketing the ground.

  I am on the fringe of a group of people walking from the roadway down to the canal when I am grabbed from behind and pushed into a van. A body sits on me, and the van drives off. When it stops, there is a very deep quiet and then voices speak in a language I don’t understand. I am kept in the van until the early morning of what I think is the following day, but later find out is the morning after. Finally, they push me out and into the snow, somewhere on the outskirts of Ottawa.

  Fast Forward—I am back home in southwestern Ontario. It is now three months later. I have spent much of those three months in the bathtub.

  One night I awake at 2:00 A.M. knowing it is time to take back my power. Time to stop blaming myself for having wanted to enjoy an Ottawa night. Time to stop believing the men who told me I was a “slut who liked to eat sh*t.” Time for Sasha to really come home—to herself.

  I get out of bed, shower, anoint myself with a favorite oil, tie my long hair up under a cap and go out to the garage to find what I need: a can of fluorescent pink paint, a paintbrush, and a broom handle. I tape the brush to the end of the handle and hit the streets. An enormous calm and focus envelops me as I methodically dip and brush. While I am careful to hide when a car comes along, I don’t much care if I am caught. By 6:00 A.M. I have painted RAPE on five dozen stop signs all across the city.

  I go home and sleep like a baby for the first time in months. I wake to an answering machine full of messages from friends (“Has our favorite uppity feminist finally resurfaced?”); to a newspaper filled with photographs of my STOP RAPE signs; and to the radio reporting traffic jams all across the city. Debates in the Letters to the Editor section of our newspaper rage for weeks.

  Play—“Who did this?” Ms. Everywoman, of course.

  “Why?” Hmm. Let’s consider all the possible reasons, shall we?

  “She ought to pay!” News flash: She already has.

  In fact, this action was my way of saying that we all have to pay, in one way or another, for male violence
against women and children.

  Pause—If you are ever in a city where you see “RAPE” painted on the stop signs, remember that it was done by a woman who was taking back her power. Someone like me.

  sasha claire mcinnes is an uppity tapestry weaver who grew up in Peru and now lives a bit farther north. She runs a travel company, Puchka (www.puchkaperu.com), which organizes cultural/market/textiles tours with textile artists and historians of Peru and Bolivia. Sasha believes all artists should take their craft to new heights—like eight or nine feet, the height of Canadian stop signs.

  Camping with a Ventilator

  connie panzarino

  Imagine me and three personal care assistants (PCAs) squashed into a van packed to the roof with tracheotomy supplies, extra hoses and batteries for my ventilator—upon which I am twentyfour-hour dependent—suction machines, blood pressure cuff, oxymeter to monitor oxygen and pulse, stomach care supplies for my G- and J-tubes, through which I get hydration and medications, and enough pureed food and potato buds for ten days. Plus foam mattresses, tents, sleeping bags, maps, spring- and sterile water.

  I carried an “I’m gonna do this!” attitude like a banner.

  For nearly twenty years I had attended the annual Michigan Women’s Music Festival, where I enjoyed five days of music, hundreds of craft vendors, dozens of workshops, and the sisterhood of thousands from around the world. I even learned to camp in a tent—and I loved it.

  But I was not on a ventilator then.

  Because of Spinal Muscular Atrophy Type II, I am now. Basically, I can move my right thumb, and my head slightly. I have full sensation but no movement everywhere else. This year was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the festival, and the first of the new millennium. Attached to a ventilator or not, Herculean task or not, I had to go. I hadn’t spent all this time trying to stay alive just to sit at home.

  The music festival takes place in August, not far from Lake Michigan. Since I am able to tolerate being up and in my wheelchair only six to eight hours at a stretch, I planned the trip from Boston carefully. On the morning of departure, I stayed on my bed and ate breakfast while PCAs and friends loaded the equipment into the van. I got into my chair while they packed my bedside ventilator, then positioned myself in the van with feet elevated on pillows as they packed more equipment around me. We drove eight hours to Niagara Falls on the Canadian side. Exhausted by this leg of the journey, I planned on staying for two nights. As soon as we got to the motel, I got into the bed, spent.

  The next day, the parking attendant got us a special parking spot directly across from the falls. It was crowded. But it was a clear and beautiful day, and the sun baked my skin pleasantly as the breeze and spray from the falls cooled me down. People did look at me with my big electric wheelchair, ventilator and suction machine on back, but mostly they smiled and made room for me to see past them. It was a little like being an ambassador for life on a vent.

  The next morning we pushed on through Canada, driving only five hours, and afterward I immediately got into bed again. Knowing I would grow more tired as the trip went on, I had planned on less and less travel each day. The last stretch was a two-hour drive to the festival itself.

  When we arrived, I was given permission to drive my van into the center of the festival to unload. Usually one has to transfer to a wheelchair-accessible shuttle bus, but we just had too much stuff. I was met with hugs and kisses from old lesbian friends and exchanged greetings with new ones. “Helping Hands” from the Disabled Area Resource Tent helped us with unloading and dinner while we listened to live music playing in the background. We were tired and hot—but it was so exciting to be there. Women, some topless or comfortably nude in the heat, all bedecked in feathers, big necklaces, scarves, or other outrageously festive attire, stopped to chat as we set up our dome tents. The festival carpenters had built for me a platform bed high enough to transfer from. I put my foam mattresses on top, my plastic tubs and milk crates filled with supplies underneath. I hung bags of clothes and medications on bungee cords and set up my bedside vent.

  Extra ventilator batteries were positioned by the bed, in case of a power failure. Never too careful, I had also brought a special cable that could run either vent off of any car battery. The festival provided outlets from which we ran extension cords to my tent. I plugged several power strips into them for the ventilator, battery chargers, nebulizer (for asthma), electric heater, blender, and hot pot. The hot pot was crucial; the equipment needed to be washed in hot water. I tried to keep things as sterile as possible. I had my PCAs use more gloves than usual, since it was difficult for them to wash their hands between procedures. I put my little rainbow flag in front of the path to our tents. This was our home for the next five days.

  Using the vent in the tent was not much different than using it in my apartment. While traveling around enjoying crafts, concerts, parades, dances, and seven thousand women—four hundred with disabilities—I made sure I had plastic bags and ponchos to cover myself and the ventilator if it rained. I carried my ambu bag and suction machine with extra suction catheters, medications, inhalers, water, and snacks, in case I could not get back to my tent for several hours. A roll of tape and a small toolbox also lived with me.

  The festival was a total success. I saw Edwina Lee Tyler, Holly Near, Rhiannon, Toshi Reagan, and others perform, bought lots of ceramics, and met with many women. I also led a workshop on Ableism, Isolation, and Networking. I ended it with a piñata party, where women had a grand old time knocking down candy with crutches and canes. I got tanned, feeling good about the fact that since we were all women, I could actually go topless. Nobody stared at the two catheters protruding from my stomach. I felt nurtured, exotic with feathers and beads in my hair, and triumphant that even though I was now trached and vent dependent, I could still be here. It was like coming home.

  Life was good.

  We returned to Boston with less stuff in the van, but lots of memories to carry me through the winter.

  connie panzarino (www.conniepanzarino.org) is a lesbian, author, artist, disability rights activist, and psychotherapist. Her writing, including her autobiography, The Me in the Mirror (Seal Press), serves to educate people about ableism and homophobia. This year Connie hopes to write the book on ableism, buy an accessible RV, and speak her way across country. This story was adapted from an article that first appeared in Access Expressed!, published by VSA Arts of Massachusetts. (Rivka’s note: While this book was being put to bed, Connie unexpectedly passed away. She will be sorely missed, and the difference she made with her activism will always be felt.)

  A Room of Our Own

  kathryn roblee

  In the mid-1980s, I was approaching middle age and had already put up with a lot of B.S. in my eighteen years as a tradeswoman. I was a millwright, a heavy-duty field machinist, doing ironwork for large-scale projects. To give people a better idea of my skills, I used to say, “If you want a railroad car put up on the roof, I could do that for you,” including reinforcing the building structure to support the weight. At the time, I was in the construction division of a major company, and assigned to help build a new automated warehouse for them. It was to be one of the largest “under one roof” structures in the world. The company was already huge—300 buildings sprawling over eight square miles. They needed company buses to wind about this manufacturing maze: an efficient system for moving around 35,000 employees.

  There were other tradeswomen in the construction division besides me. Gloria was an apprentice millwright, Deana a pipefitter, Alice an instrumentation specialist. Prudy, Susan, and Jeannie were electricians. Pat was a sheet metal apprentice. On our project, that made eight women and about four hundred men.

  Portable trailers were brought in to serve the crew, including a general tool crib, offices for trade supervisors, a break room, and a restroom facility: a men’s facility, that is. The fact that we women needed a restroom, too, was considered unnecessary. None of us was terribly concerned—at first. When na
ture called, we simply went to the back of the site, across a lot, and into a side door of an already operational wing of the warehouse. But within a few weeks, warehouse workers started complaining about our muddy-booted presence in their territory. The doors to their quadrant were soon locked.

  Our recourse was to go to the corner and wait for the once-every-eleven-minute bus, which we rode for half a mile to the next completed wing. However, within two weeks we were banned from that site, too. It was getting ridiculous. Now a trip to the restroom required waiting for the once-every-fifteen-minute shuttle and a seven-mile round trip, keeping a woman off the job for up to forty minutes. We were there to work, not ride buses.

  When I approached my foreman, I wasn’t surprised that he laughed at me for thinking this could possibly have enough weight to even be considered a problem. But it was, and I wouldn’t leave his office.

  “Kathy, I’m too busy to deal with it. Let one of the other trades’ foremen.”

  “Nobody’s dealing with it, and we still need a bathroom.”

  Finally he said he would bring it up at a meeting that afternoon. I was later told a solution had been found: The men and women would share the washroom facility. When a woman went in, she’d put up a sign, taking it down when she left.

  The first day was tough. Men were angry about having to wait for a woman whom they felt didn’t belong in their space anyway. By midafternoon, a guy came along, tore the sign off, threw it in the mud, walked in, and used the urinal while Prudy was in there. She was furious. We rinsed the sign off and tried again.

  The next day, one of us, I think it was Jeannie, was in the bathroom, stopping to wash her hands, when a man came in and unzipped his pants. He pulled out his penis, jumped in front of her, and made comments that matched his actions. She ran out in shock and quickly notified the rest of us.