Normal Gets You Nowhere

by Kelly Cutrone

  A warring lovemaking session—now that’s a fucking great vibration!

  Chapter Three

  Holy Daze (Holla, Days Off!)

  Illegal aliens have always been a problem in the United States. Ask any Indian.

  —Robert Orben

  Years ago, in my twenties, when I was reading tarot cards on the beach in Venice for a living, I was hearing a lot about the end of the world. I remember thinking about what it would be like to experience the apocalypse. One year, it occurred to me that I already was experiencing the apocalypse, and that it was Christmas! You know, the holiday where everyone runs around buying ridiculous and unneeded gifts for $19.99 in the name of their God as they trip over homeless people on the street wearing signs like “Hungry. Please help” and ignore Santas ringing bells for the Salvation Army. I mean, wouldn’t it be wonderful if there really was an army for salvation? Instead, there’s just one big long line outside the UGG store.

  When my daughter was born, I was adamant that I did not want to bring her up with lies. I was willing to celebrate Christmas and even have a tree, but I wanted to tell her that Santa represents the spirit of giving, not that he was literally someone who lived at the North Pole and brought presents to kids. Similarly, I’d tell her the Easter Bunny represented spring. As for the Tooth Fairy, well, she’s such a great creation that I figured I’d just give in and go along with that one. (I mean, whose idea was it to make having a tooth fall out in the middle of the day something to get excited about?)

  So I told my mother I was not going to do the whole North Pole, Santa thing with Ava. I mean, we spend so much time and money getting our kids all wound up about Santa and the Easter Bunny, making them think these fake apparitions are going to appear and make life magical, when everyday human kindness can really do the same thing.

  “Are you crazy?” my mom said. As soon as Ava could hold the phone to her ear, my mom could barely wait to shriek, “Santa Claus is married to Mrs. Claus, and they live at the North Pole, and their reindeer are Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen, Comet and Cupid and Donner and Blitzen! And the elves make all the presents! Santa’s very modern now, you can e-mail him!” Last year she even topped herself, convinced this would be one of the last years when Ava would believe in Santa. She literally bought Ava a copy of The Night Before Christmas that came with a voice recorder into which she’d programmed herself reading the text aloud. Ava is a pre-tween at this point, and my mom’s still trying to give her one last hit of Christ-mess!

  Why have we all been suckered into celebrating a holiday that very few of us actually believe in?

  Wouldn’t it be great if we all just decided we didn’t want to do Christmas one year? What if, instead, we found things that do matter to us to celebrate, or at the very least just took a really great vacation? I want to go on record as saying that if you have children, Christmas is possibly something you should do. And don’t get me wrong; there must be a few Christians out there who actually believe Christmas is Jesus’s birthday, and by all means they too should celebrate it. If Christ is your guru, throw him a party and get down with it. But he’s not my guru, and I resent the fact that I’m still supposed to spend $8,000 on presents for everyone I know each December, including vendors, business acquaintances, and my trainer. There’s so much pressure to buy gifts and plane tickets and go home to our families and be intimate, but then we do, and no one even talks about real things or has real conversations! I mean, even Jewish families are being pressured by the Christmas complex; they’re buying blue Hanukah bushes at Target, because their kids feel bad Santa’s not coming to see them!

  We don’t have to go along with this. Remember, normal gets you nowhere—you don’t have to celebrate the normal holidays, especially when they get you stuck in an airport on December 23 with a bunch of angry, violent people. Why not make your own holidays, just as I’ve urged you to make your own religion? Merriam-Webster defines “holiday” as “a day on which one is exempt from work; specifically, a day marked by a general suspension of work in commemoration of an event.” I hate to tell you this, but as a single mother I spend the Christmas “holiday” running around like Mrs. Brady on crack. I get off work at nine or ten at night, fly up to Times Square in a cab, work my way through Toys ’R Us, then try in vain to cram my bags into another cab in the freezing cold before giving up and opting for delivery. I mean, there’s nothing restful about it. Frankly, anyone who tells you it’s restful is either lying or on meds.

  Instead of these fake holidays commemorating things that didn’t even happen (Most scholars don’t even think Jesus’s actual birthday was in December!), I propose all employers give their employees at least five to ten personal days per year in addition to their sick and vacation days. This way, we could take a day off work anytime we think something is holy. If you want your self-made holiday to be January 5—which I highly recommend, since travel is cheaper than ever and everything’s 50 to 90 percent off—then go for it! If you’d rather celebrate the Navajo Sing Festival in February or the Hindu Ganesh Chaturthi festival in September, go for it! People who aren’t religious could vacation à la France, combining all these days into a month off in August. Alternatively, they could just stay at the office on the traditional holidays and get paid time and a half while everyone else goes home to celebrate their holidays!

  Let’s be honest. Presidents’ Day? Is there one American who actually spends this day celebrating our presidents? Columbus Day? Do we really need a mandatory day off to celebrate one of the most destructive humans in history? No one’s sitting home reading about Columbus on that day, anyway, so why not just eliminate it? Mother’s Day is actually the only current American holiday I can really get behind, provided we combine it with Father’s Day to turn it into Parents’ Day, so that kids who only have one parent or two same-sex parents don’t feel bad. I mean, why should I be forced to take a day off on Columbus Day instead of on my own guru’s birthday, February 21? Leonard Cohen’s birthday would also be a holiday in my church. I’d probably also take a yearly holiday to Amsterdam with a few girlfriends to celebrate our friendship and our love for each other. Doesn’t this all make much more sense? What matters to you, and what would you celebrate?

  Dude, You’re Talking Turkey

  Thanksgiving is one of my least favorite American holidays. Like Christmas, it has become a huge industry. Each year, we celebrate it by slaughtering 45 million turkeys and eating (on average) 4,500 calories in a single meal. There’s just one problem. What are we celebrating? I didn’t figure out that Thanksgiving was a totally fabricated holiday until I met the American Indian leader John Trudell—who became my lover, teacher, and lifelong friend—in 1991. That’s when I started thinking honestly about the fact that every year, hundreds of millions of Americans sit around and eat turkeys to celebrate our annihilation of an entire race of people.

  All throughout school, I’d been taught in history class that Thanksgiving was to commemorate the pilgrims and the Indians shaking hands, making friends, and eating corn and squash for dinner. But what really happened is that Europeans came over and obliterated this continent’s inhabitants with guns and diseases and then stole their land. The ones they couldn’t kill off, even after hundreds of years of wars, they crowded onto the worst tracts of land—Indian reservations—and plied with cigarettes and alcohol. Over the years, the “Americans” told the Indians to give up their spiritual practices, from medicine wheels to Sun dancing, to cut their hair, change their names, and learn English if they wanted to continue to receive subsidies.

  This is what we celebrate when we celebrate Thanksgiving. In many schools, we’re still brainwashing our children with these lies. Can you imagine what the Indian kids must be thinking? It would be like everyone in New York City having cake for Hitler’s birthday! I don’t understand why there aren’t twenty-five thousand Indians outside Macy’s each year protesting this! Where is everyone? Are they all on the Internet?

  Despite the fact that the
first alleged “Thanksgiving” happened in 1621, it wasn’t until 1939 that Thanksgiving became the caloric binge it is today. That’s when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt officially proposed that it happen annually on the last Thursday of November—not in order to celebrate history or our heritage (even lies about our heritage), but to extend the Christmas shopping season and stimulate the economy! In 1941, Congress took Roosevelt’s lead and gave us all the day off. Yes, that’s right. This holiday is fewer than a hundred years old, which means it can still be stopped!

  Don’t get me wrong. No one loves black and white together more than I; in fact, dozens of designers have done amazing interpretations of the buckle shoe already. And Black Friday—please. I know it’s a huge day for my industry and has helped pay my bills by bolstering my clients’ businesses. I have nothing against holidays or celebrating; I just don’t know why we’d want to celebrate a holiday with no meaning that makes us strung out, fat, and broke.

  And I resent the fact that, when I go to my local farmer’s market on weekends in November, I have to see a poor turkey in a cage under a sign that says, “Order Here,” and be forced to explain to my daughter that this beautiful creature, which Benjamin Franklin wanted to name our national bird, is about to be slaughtered and eaten. Humans have celebrated the solstice and the changing of the seasons for thousands of years. Why can’t we just say we’re taking a time-out for four days to each celebrate what we want, with a smile on our face and a prayer and a song in our heart?

  When I first found out the truth about Thanksgiving, I fasted on that day, refusing to justify this fake, violent holiday with my participation. After a few years, I decided it would be more productive to make it into my own holiday. So I started throwing a “harvest dinner,” inviting a handful of friends and sometimes employees to my apartment, where we’d cook root vegetables and celebrate the harvest, the changing of the seasons, and everything in our lives we have to be grateful for. We don’t need a fake historical event to justify this—and I can assure you we are not missing out on anything.

  When you really start to look at our modern holidays, you’ll see they have almost nothing to do with history, religion, or tradition and everything to do with capitalism—which wants to keep us acting “normal,” or distracted from what’s real and numbly consuming as much stuff as possible. Until the 1980s, most stores were closed on holidays like Presidents’ Day. But these holidays have become huge boons to retail; stores stay open to capitalize on the fact that the government has given us all a mandatory day off when we’re free to shop! Presidents’ Day now is best known not for presidents, but for car discounts. Yes, it has become one of the biggest car-buying days of the year! Valentine’s Day, meanwhile, is a huge day for the chocolate, flower-delivery, and restaurant businesses. I mean, entire industries revolve around these supposedly restful “holidays.”

  Meanwhile, Anna Jarvis, the West Virginian who invented Mother’s Day and got President Woodrow Wilson to approve it in 1914, was arrested later in her life for protesting the commercialization of this holiday she helped create! Yes, she gets one holiday celebrating women on our whole fucking calendar, only to be disgusted when it’s taken over by capitalism. Jarvis even opposed selling flowers and greeting cards, calling them “a poor excuse for the letter you are too lazy to write.”

  Please, will you join me in putting these holidays out of business?

  Let’s celebrate the things we want to celebrate by creating our own personal holidays and traditions, making them restful, meaningful, and yes, even spiritual.

  And let’s stop shopping on days when the government and capitalism tell us to and instead shop when everything’s on sale!

  Chapter Four

  Awakening Universal Motherhood:

  My Three-Way with Wonder Woman, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Amma

  I have spent many years of my life in opposition, and I rather like the role.

  Do what you feel in your heart to be right—for you’ll be criticized anyway. You’ll be damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.

  —Eleanor Roosevelt

  Part I: Ultimately, There’s No Such Thing as Coincidence or Bad Publicity

  One day last summer, I received a phone call from the New York Post informing me that DC Comics had created a new look for Wonder Woman and asking for my opinion. What? I thought. Why would they change her look? She looks amazing! I happen to think Wonder Woman’s look is one of the few things in the world that shouldn’t change. After all, there’s really nothing like a hot chick in star-spangled briefs, knee-high boots, arm cuffs, and a red and gold corset with a lasso and supernatural powers. Who doesn’t love that?

  I hadn’t seen the new look yet, so I pulled it up on the Internet. I was disappointed, to say the least. This was surely a fashion “don’t.” As in, don’t take a really hot superhero known for saving lives in a Thierry Mugler-esque getup and reduce her to jeggings and a cropped bolero. It was pathetic! Besides, we were in the middle of a recession. How had no one thought to call some American designers to ask them to redesign her look? That would have been a good PR strategy! I told the Post exactly what I thought, and then later I vlogged about it on “Wake Up and Get Real,” the internet talk show I do with my best friend Justine Bateman. Wanting my comments to be alliterative, I said that Wonder Woman had gone “from Paris to Poughkeepsie.” (I consider myself something of an aficionado of mall looks in Pough-keepsie, since I spend many a Sunday strolling the Poughkeepsie Galleria near my weekend home.)

  It wasn’t long after the New York Post piece and my vlog appeared that I started receiving calls from a guy named John W. Barry, a reporter for the Poughkeepsie Journal. At first I didn’t call him back. I didn’t have to be psychic to figure out he was probably calling with a feather up his ass over my comment, and I was not in the mood to defend myself over such a lame topic or to let some reporter turn me into a big Poughkeepsie hater. Especially when Poughkeepsie is a place I’ve been very connected to for years. I mean, I spend a ton of cash at the Target there every weekend. I let my love flow! Would I really be in the process of buying my first home just a few minutes from the town if I hated it so much?

  But after his fifth phone call, I thought, Oh God, I’ll just throw him a bone and be nice. Unfortunately, talking to him was a bit of a joke. My initial feelings were confirmed; he had prepared a list of journalistically prodding questions and kept pelting me with them over and over in hopes that I’d break down and admit I actually did hate the town, which in fact was simply not true. I hurried off the phone.

  The next day, driving up to my country house, I stopped at my usual gas station. The attendant, who looks like a Bangladeshi Clark Kent and whom I’ve seen every weekend for the past eight years, seemed especially excited to see me.

  “Ohhhh, you’re on the cover of the paper!” he said.

  Oh fuck.

  In that moment, I got what it must be like when you’ve robbed a bank and you’re trying to quietly skip town. There I was, standing at the counter with two pink Snowball cupcakes that looked like big nipples, reaching for a loaf of white Wonder Bread—yes, it’s the only thing Ava will eat her grilled cheese on—while Clark Kent waved a copy of the Poughkeepsie Journal at me with large pictures of my face and Wonder Woman’s on it. “ ‘Wonder’ Blunder? Jab at Poughkeepsie About Comic Icon’s New Look Draws Notice,” blared the headline. The article inside noted: “Comments about Wonder Woman’s makeover have residents wondering why Poughkeepsie was the apparent target of a fashion publicist.” I’ll tell you why: it was a slow news day in upstate New York!

  I know people say there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but in the moment it can feel pretty bad. After all, I’d been a good sport with the New York Post, and the piece turned out to be quite a bit of fun. But for me, it quickly turned to sour apples when I saw myself on the cover of the Poughkeepsie Journal. It had been years since I’d thought about Wonder Woman. Yet while others were talking about the recession, depression,
national debt, and fear and violence, I was talking about hot pants. That was my big contribution to a cover story. What is my life coming to? I wondered. To be honest, the whole thing made me feel kind of chippy.

  Luckily, sometimes what seems at first like an annoyance, a setback, or a really huge mistake can actually be part of something much larger. I’ve told you many times that I do not believe in coincidences. I do believe every moment is engineered by our soul and the Divine. In fact, some experiences, both good and bad, are meant to teach us what we need to know at a certain time. Look at it this way: Our soul and the Divine are conductors in the rock opera of our lives, and though I didn’t know it at the time, the summer of 2010 would be, for me, a song with a great motherfucking hook. Can you believe that Cutrone’s cutting comments (there I go with the alliteration again) about Poughkeepsie would lead to an invitation to visit Eleanor Roosevelt’s estate? Or that, once there, I’d receive a crash course in human rights and the urgent need for us all to accept and embrace our Universal Motherhood, which would change my whole outlook on life just as I was starting to think about this book?

  See, you just never know what’s around the corner. The Poughkeepsie Journal article inspired a woman named Barbara Henszey to e-mail my dear friend Kenny Zimmerman—one of my tribal elders and a fashion legend—for help getting in touch with me. Just days after the article appeared, Kenny forwarded me this e-mail: