I tried to dress as Laurie Strode, Jamie Lee Curtis’ character from Halloween, one year and no one got it. I put on clogs and knee socks, a long, dumpy denim skirt, did my hair in the flattened-out feathered style with a barrette on one side, wore a button-down shirt, and carried some books. To be particularly clever, I had included an abnormal psychology book, because I thought it hinted that Laurie herself would have been interested in the deviant mind—and that it added some foreshadowing to my ensemble. I put on the final touch—some subtle yet frosted lipstick—and I imagined the other girls, in their boring, store-bought costumes, coming up to me: “You’re that girl from Halloween! What a great idea!”
I was in college and it was an all-girl party in our all-girl dorm, which meant we were spared the sexy witch, sexy devil, and sexy nurse costumes. Our RA was Raggedy Ann, and one girl was a police officer. There were scary costumes: warty witches and mummies, and Frankenstein’s Monster with a Bride of Frankenstein, with impressively high hair and voltage wires in her head. Since it was a Catholic college, and nuns lived in our dorm, I was most curious to see whether or not anyone would dress as a nun, or whether the actual nuns would dress as something other than nuns. No, and no. We played music (probably something by Bon Jovi), drank non-alcoholic punch, and lay in wait for the real party, at the boy’s college, later that night.
All night people tried to guess my costume: A hippie? A psychology professor? A preppie? A guidance counselor? An ex-nun? Someone from the 70s? (OK, getting closer…) A nerd? And, my personal favorite, from later on at the boys’ party: “An ugly girl?” Did these people not watch horror movies? Did they not see my hair, and the title of the book in my hand? The knee socks….the CLOGS, for goodness’ sake! I tried to think of what I could have done to have made it all clearer, and drew a blank.
People at the party had no shortage of ideas: hatchet in the head? Gunshot wound? Carry a wanted poster of Michael Myers, warning of his escape from the institution? A shirt with “Laurie Strode” on it, or a shirt with the name of the film on it? Bring with you a guy dressed like Michael Myers and have him follow you around all night? And, probably the same guy who guessed “ugly girl,” had this to offer: “Who’s Laurie Strode?” These suggestions were not only stupid but insulting. First, Laurie was not shot, nor did she get a hatchet in the head. And to have to resort to a shirt with her name on it….It just didn’t seem fair. Anyone could just dress up as Michael Myers and everyone would get it immediately, but here I was trying to be the actual main character of the film: dorky, awkward, ultimately brave survivor Laurie, and I kept having to explain it, over and over.
Why did I connect so much with Laurie? Well, all of the above, but Jamie Lee Curtis does such a good job making Laurie a complex girl in a genre that usually doesn’t allow for much female complexity. For one, she’s a high school girl who lives in home that seems to contain no adults, and her world is adult-free, save for cops, psychiatrists, and male psychopaths (check out the scene where she comes home and sits on her bed after seeing the van—there’s something so creepy about her isolation, when it’s just her and the breeze coming through her filmy curtains.) There are no adult women in this film. Laurie is a babysitter, the grownup, and although she tries to fit in with her pot-smoking, boy-crazy friends, she is too serious and too responsible to be young, though she is naïve about men. Unlike her friend Annie, there is no way Laurie is going to do laundry in her underwear or get drunk and have sex with her boyfriend in a stranger’s bed. Laurie’s both mom and little girl, and somehow just can’t enter that adolescent world. Annie ends up leaving the child she’s babysitting with Laurie, but we all know how that worked out.
At that party, watching the drinking and flirting around me, I started to feel like Laurie Strode—too old, but also too young to be a part of it all. And, I’ll admit it, still indignant that no one understood my costume. A guy in a gorilla suit showed up and we tried to guess who it was. One of my friends threw up outside the townhouse and then sat in it, leaving a red stain on the butt of her white angel costume, which actually made her costume more interesting: menstruating angel. The clogs started to hurt my feet, so I took them off, and I ended up losing my abnormal psychology book. The next year I dressed as a porcelain doll, in a black velvet bathrobe with lace at the collar and a red ribbon, white makeup and ribbons in my hair. When no one got that one, either, though, it didn’t matter quite as much.
*This post is dedicated to my good friend Chris Breu--enjoy Halloween :)
Friday, October 30, 2009
Thursday, October 22, 2009
The Third Kim
One of the college stories I most enjoy telling people is the time that I was tried by my college’s judicial board for voodoo. The problem is, it wasn’t really for voodoo, and it wasn’t just me. And the image that most sticks with me from that day is my philosophy professor--the same one who taught me about Kant and Descartes and Nietszche--intently looking up the skirt of a Barbie doll while a group of nuns, faculty, and other students looked on.
I went to an all-women’s Catholic college that, like my girls’ Catholic high school, went co-ed right around the time I left. When I was there, nuns lived in the first floor of our dorm, right below us. They had their own TV room from which one of my friends once purloined a box of chocolates and a TV Guide. Boys were not allowed up in the rooms except for about two hours a day and had to be signed in and out.
The atmosphere did not seem that oppressive to me, mostly because I had heard horror stories from friends at other colleges about their roommates' constantly stoned boyfriends spending the night and taking food from the fridge and just generally smelling up the place. I never had to step over drunk people or clean up vomit or sleep in the lounge while a roommate hosted her boyfriend in the room, and since for most of college I didn’t have a serious boyfriend anyhow, I really had no need to host anyone, either.
Mostly the single girls in my dorm competed for the same half dozen decent-looking guys at a nearby college known for its flight program and for alcoholism. It should tell you something that the one boy I really liked from that school was from Manhattan and really wanted to go to art school, but his father wanted him to be a pilot. He left after one semester. The college, like ours, was small, so the six passable young men were valuable commodities and the subject of many rifts and arguments among my group of friends.
This is how we met Kim, who was a commuter and lived in an apartment downtown with her grandmother. She came with us to parties at the boys’ college, and she became especially close to a couple of my friends—I can’t say I ever knew her well. However, she was hard to forget. Even though big hair and stage makeup were the rage at the time (see my own photo), Kim had bigger hair and wore more makeup than anyone else we knew: blue and white eye shadow up to the brow, black liquid liner, frosty pink lipstick, pancake foundation. Although Kim hung out with us, she was often the topic of conversation, mostly because boys liked her, and also because of the makeup. It was rumored that she never took it off—that she slept in her makeup each night after spraying her entire face with Aqua Net—and then, upon waking, applied another layer right on top of it, as one might add new coats when painting a room. I, who could barely draw a straight line with pencil eyeliner, secretly admired her precision and discipline.
Somehow (and I don’t remember all the details) one of my friends found out that one of the boys she liked had made an overture to Kim, and the talk started to get vicious. She had had an abortion, it was rumored (and at a Catholic college, this was especially taboo). Worse, the abortion hadn’t “taken” and she’d been hospitalized. In retrospect, I’m sure that none of this was true, but it didn’t matter. We would meet in one of our rooms and share the latest Kim gossip, and the next day, she’d come over and visit and it was as if nothing had happened, nothing had been said—just sly glances exchanged when she would speak, or eye rolls behind her back.
One night someone had the idea that Kim should pay for what she had done (even though exactly what she had done remained, in truth, unclear.) We took a doll that a little girl had left in our lounge, and stuck pins in her and wrote horrible things about Kim on her legs and body. Then, giggling nervously, we left the doll outside of the room of the girl Kim had been visiting in our dorm.
We didn’t see her again until we sat at the table at the judicial board. Our sentence was twofold: an official written apology and mandatory group counseling with a counselor who ended up trying to be our friend and sharing stories about her own college pranks. I remember a few words from the report: “We are concerned about the deterioration of your friendships” which even then I knew was wrong. This was not even about friendship—it was about enjoying being cruel to another person just because we could. And all around me at that table were sympathetic eyes who just wanted to give our fresh-faced, non-commuter selves another chance.
I went to an all-women’s Catholic college that, like my girls’ Catholic high school, went co-ed right around the time I left. When I was there, nuns lived in the first floor of our dorm, right below us. They had their own TV room from which one of my friends once purloined a box of chocolates and a TV Guide. Boys were not allowed up in the rooms except for about two hours a day and had to be signed in and out.
The atmosphere did not seem that oppressive to me, mostly because I had heard horror stories from friends at other colleges about their roommates' constantly stoned boyfriends spending the night and taking food from the fridge and just generally smelling up the place. I never had to step over drunk people or clean up vomit or sleep in the lounge while a roommate hosted her boyfriend in the room, and since for most of college I didn’t have a serious boyfriend anyhow, I really had no need to host anyone, either.
Mostly the single girls in my dorm competed for the same half dozen decent-looking guys at a nearby college known for its flight program and for alcoholism. It should tell you something that the one boy I really liked from that school was from Manhattan and really wanted to go to art school, but his father wanted him to be a pilot. He left after one semester. The college, like ours, was small, so the six passable young men were valuable commodities and the subject of many rifts and arguments among my group of friends.
This is how we met Kim, who was a commuter and lived in an apartment downtown with her grandmother. She came with us to parties at the boys’ college, and she became especially close to a couple of my friends—I can’t say I ever knew her well. However, she was hard to forget. Even though big hair and stage makeup were the rage at the time (see my own photo), Kim had bigger hair and wore more makeup than anyone else we knew: blue and white eye shadow up to the brow, black liquid liner, frosty pink lipstick, pancake foundation. Although Kim hung out with us, she was often the topic of conversation, mostly because boys liked her, and also because of the makeup. It was rumored that she never took it off—that she slept in her makeup each night after spraying her entire face with Aqua Net—and then, upon waking, applied another layer right on top of it, as one might add new coats when painting a room. I, who could barely draw a straight line with pencil eyeliner, secretly admired her precision and discipline.
Somehow (and I don’t remember all the details) one of my friends found out that one of the boys she liked had made an overture to Kim, and the talk started to get vicious. She had had an abortion, it was rumored (and at a Catholic college, this was especially taboo). Worse, the abortion hadn’t “taken” and she’d been hospitalized. In retrospect, I’m sure that none of this was true, but it didn’t matter. We would meet in one of our rooms and share the latest Kim gossip, and the next day, she’d come over and visit and it was as if nothing had happened, nothing had been said—just sly glances exchanged when she would speak, or eye rolls behind her back.
One night someone had the idea that Kim should pay for what she had done (even though exactly what she had done remained, in truth, unclear.) We took a doll that a little girl had left in our lounge, and stuck pins in her and wrote horrible things about Kim on her legs and body. Then, giggling nervously, we left the doll outside of the room of the girl Kim had been visiting in our dorm.
We didn’t see her again until we sat at the table at the judicial board. Our sentence was twofold: an official written apology and mandatory group counseling with a counselor who ended up trying to be our friend and sharing stories about her own college pranks. I remember a few words from the report: “We are concerned about the deterioration of your friendships” which even then I knew was wrong. This was not even about friendship—it was about enjoying being cruel to another person just because we could. And all around me at that table were sympathetic eyes who just wanted to give our fresh-faced, non-commuter selves another chance.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Copycat Raccoon Girl
Recently I read that a new version of the film “Single White Female” was coming out, starring one of the Gossip Girl actresses (the dark-haired one) and someone who sort of looks like Megan Fox but is not Megan Fox. I remember seeing the first film when a twenty-something grad student, and the whole point of it seemed to be to make people enjoy watching Jennifer Jason Leigh, who played a young woman obsessed with imitating and then taking over the life of her roommate, get her comeuppance for being a solitary loser and she-stalker.
There are lots of movie plots like this: lonely misfit wants the life of seemingly successful and perfect woman. Yet there is something particularly troubling about those films with the “copycat” angle. In much of popular culture, the copycat is bland, impotent, and weak—we think of copycat killers this way, even if their crimes are as brutal as the ones committed by murderers they imitate. Yet the urge to imitate someone one perceives as more powerful, more successful, more liked, is a powerful one in the life of a young girl—and it doesn’t mean she’s bound to end up chasing her roommate in the basement of a New York apartment with an ice pick.
When I was in fifth grade, I spent nearly a year as a copycat. I didn’t just copy one person, though, at first. One day a girl named Stephanie got a great feathered haircut, and when I went to get my own hair cut, I asked for the same style. Someone in my class got new blue and white Nikes, and I got blue and white ones, too. All small things. Then I made a new friend named Kimber. Kimber was part of a group of six or so girls who were really involved in school—Kimber’s friend Kristen was the lead in the school’s production of Annie, and Allison was in gymnastics, and Suzanne played soccer. Kimber had straight brown hair and braces and wasn’t especially pretty or outgoing, but she always seemed quietly confident and was good at everything she tried. But what made Kimber stand out was her absolute love of raccoons. She knew everything about them: that they didn’t make saliva, that they were nocturnal, that they had sharp claws. She did every science project or report for English about raccoons and had a bedful of raccoon stuffed animals and a bookcase filled with raccoon stories. Whenever we talked about animals in science class, the teacher would say, “And Kimber, what kind of habitat do raccoons live in?” or “Kimber, are raccoons and possums related?”
This expertise on raccoons gave Kimber a place, an identity. I wanted that, too. Maybe I felt at the time that it was somehow the raccoon itself that gave Kimber her power, but it never occurred to me to choose horses, or dogs, or Gila monsters. It had to be raccoons. I became the copycat raccoon girl. I wrote an English report on raccoons and a children’s book called “Kim’s Raccoon,” about a brunette fifth grader named Kim who had a pet raccoon that she raised from a baby, that I sent to Harper and Row publishers (because they had published Little House in the Prairie, I thought they liked books about girls and nature. They sent me a personal letter instead of the usual rejection, which I still have.) My school friends must have thought this odd, but no one said anything until the science fair incident.
The fifth grade science fair in Andover was one of those events where parental involvement was both expected and intense. The problem was that my parents did not believe that parents should do these projects for their children, and here I was competing against kids whose parents not only helped them, but purchased expensive electrical equipment and terrariums and special fluorescent lights in the effort to produce a winning entry. I had no chance. My contribution was a poster of the life cycle of the raccoon, a poor, crudely drawn shadow of Kimber’s project about raccoon habitats, which contained her own wildlife photography and a den made of mud and sticks. When my friends, including Kimber, saw my poster, the looks on their faces were a mixture of discomfort and pity, and somehow even I knew that this had to stop.
Through it all, I never wanted Kimber out of the picture, and I never wanted to have her life. I wanted the sense of purpose that her raccoon love gave her, that air of expertise and confidence of knowing more than others about one subject. I still fight the urge to copy others: I want to write with the sophistication and intelligence of my friend Elizabeth, or to know as much about music as my husband, or to be as physically fit as my friend Debbie, but I can be inspired by them without feeling compelled to imitate. What I want to see is a movie where the copycat somehow moves beyond it and ends up even better off than the person she copied in the first place.
There are lots of movie plots like this: lonely misfit wants the life of seemingly successful and perfect woman. Yet there is something particularly troubling about those films with the “copycat” angle. In much of popular culture, the copycat is bland, impotent, and weak—we think of copycat killers this way, even if their crimes are as brutal as the ones committed by murderers they imitate. Yet the urge to imitate someone one perceives as more powerful, more successful, more liked, is a powerful one in the life of a young girl—and it doesn’t mean she’s bound to end up chasing her roommate in the basement of a New York apartment with an ice pick.
When I was in fifth grade, I spent nearly a year as a copycat. I didn’t just copy one person, though, at first. One day a girl named Stephanie got a great feathered haircut, and when I went to get my own hair cut, I asked for the same style. Someone in my class got new blue and white Nikes, and I got blue and white ones, too. All small things. Then I made a new friend named Kimber. Kimber was part of a group of six or so girls who were really involved in school—Kimber’s friend Kristen was the lead in the school’s production of Annie, and Allison was in gymnastics, and Suzanne played soccer. Kimber had straight brown hair and braces and wasn’t especially pretty or outgoing, but she always seemed quietly confident and was good at everything she tried. But what made Kimber stand out was her absolute love of raccoons. She knew everything about them: that they didn’t make saliva, that they were nocturnal, that they had sharp claws. She did every science project or report for English about raccoons and had a bedful of raccoon stuffed animals and a bookcase filled with raccoon stories. Whenever we talked about animals in science class, the teacher would say, “And Kimber, what kind of habitat do raccoons live in?” or “Kimber, are raccoons and possums related?”
This expertise on raccoons gave Kimber a place, an identity. I wanted that, too. Maybe I felt at the time that it was somehow the raccoon itself that gave Kimber her power, but it never occurred to me to choose horses, or dogs, or Gila monsters. It had to be raccoons. I became the copycat raccoon girl. I wrote an English report on raccoons and a children’s book called “Kim’s Raccoon,” about a brunette fifth grader named Kim who had a pet raccoon that she raised from a baby, that I sent to Harper and Row publishers (because they had published Little House in the Prairie, I thought they liked books about girls and nature. They sent me a personal letter instead of the usual rejection, which I still have.) My school friends must have thought this odd, but no one said anything until the science fair incident.
The fifth grade science fair in Andover was one of those events where parental involvement was both expected and intense. The problem was that my parents did not believe that parents should do these projects for their children, and here I was competing against kids whose parents not only helped them, but purchased expensive electrical equipment and terrariums and special fluorescent lights in the effort to produce a winning entry. I had no chance. My contribution was a poster of the life cycle of the raccoon, a poor, crudely drawn shadow of Kimber’s project about raccoon habitats, which contained her own wildlife photography and a den made of mud and sticks. When my friends, including Kimber, saw my poster, the looks on their faces were a mixture of discomfort and pity, and somehow even I knew that this had to stop.
Through it all, I never wanted Kimber out of the picture, and I never wanted to have her life. I wanted the sense of purpose that her raccoon love gave her, that air of expertise and confidence of knowing more than others about one subject. I still fight the urge to copy others: I want to write with the sophistication and intelligence of my friend Elizabeth, or to know as much about music as my husband, or to be as physically fit as my friend Debbie, but I can be inspired by them without feeling compelled to imitate. What I want to see is a movie where the copycat somehow moves beyond it and ends up even better off than the person she copied in the first place.
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Kim
I never wore my uniform to the restaurant, but she did, striding up to the double doors of the pancake house wearing a leather jacket with her apron in hand. I admired her confidence; I mean, what if she had to stop and change a flat, or saw someone she knew at the gas station on the way? These things didn’t seem to bother Kim. She didn’t worry over small mistakes in the orders, or when the cook, a cute boy I had gone to high school with—a physics whiz who dropped out of engineering school and ended up full-time at the restaurant--grumbled over unclear orders and our slow responses.
I was working at the pancake house near Concord, a good 45 minutes from home, to pick up some extra hours in the summer after college. I was saving for graduate school, for the English program I would start that January, and I didn’t have much else to do but work. Some days I would work at the pancake house near home, some days in Hooksett when they were short of help. On my first day in Hooksett I walked into a completely empty restaurant and worried that I had made a mistake. Why had they called me in when I was so clearly not needed? Kim came out to the front, menu in hand, disappointed to see that I was not a customer. At the Gilford restaurant, it was common practice for girls who were not needed to go home so the ones with seniority could make some money.
“I can leave,” I said to them both.
Kim and the cook exchanged looks.
“You drove all that way, “Brett said. “Why don’t you just wait and see if it picks up?”
Kim nodded. “It will be good to have another girl to talk to.”
Kim was easy to be around. At first I thought she was older than her 23 years, because she had already had small smoker’s lines around her eyes and always had a suspicious squint in her eyes, but in the pictures I saw of her on the news she still looked in her early 30s at age 42. After I realized she wouldn’t resent me for being there, we got to talking. Kim was saving up for nursing school. She already lived on her own, in her own apartment, while I lived with my parents until I would drive to Illinois for graduate school. I felt young and awkward next to her, and even her flirting with Brett was quick and sharp, like that of a sitcom waitress.
Kim and I had one thing in common: we were done with the past, with high school and college and New Hampshire. We would eat deep-fried potato nuggets on those slow days and talk about what was coming next in our lives, when we would be done with pancake waitressing and finally get to be respected and have careers. Kim wasn’t squeamish, she revealed, when I told her I could never be a nurse because I couldn't stand needles or vomit or blood. She didn’t like writing that much, she told me, when I told her I wanted to study English. We made jokes about customers, even though we were nice to their faces. While we poured drinks in the waitress station, Kim would say she needed a smoke, and then pop some potato nuggets off a plate into her mouth, singing a song from the public service announcements about healthy eating that aired during Saturday morning cartoons in the 1970s (“Here munch this, here munch that/ Soon you’re not just bored, you’re fat”). She would laugh at me when I would change out of my uniform into a skirt and heels at the end of our shift, after counting what was probably less than $20 in tips for six or seven hours’ work, but she never suggested I go home so she could make more money.
A couple of times that summer and fall Kim came up to our Gilford restaurant to work, and I was always happy to see her, and I have thought of her from time to time, though we never hung out outside of work, and we didn’t keep in touch. But when I found out she had been murdered last Saturday, stabbed in her bed by four adolescent boys who chose her home because it was remote, and who also seriously injured her 11-year old daughter—a girl who had just watched her mother die--there was only one thought that brought comfort: Kim had stayed in New Hampshire, had gotten married, lived in a nice house in the country, and had a daughter. And she had become a nurse, after all. I picture her wearing her uniform to work, moving through the sliding glass doors of the hospital , calmly dealing with whatever came her way.
I was working at the pancake house near Concord, a good 45 minutes from home, to pick up some extra hours in the summer after college. I was saving for graduate school, for the English program I would start that January, and I didn’t have much else to do but work. Some days I would work at the pancake house near home, some days in Hooksett when they were short of help. On my first day in Hooksett I walked into a completely empty restaurant and worried that I had made a mistake. Why had they called me in when I was so clearly not needed? Kim came out to the front, menu in hand, disappointed to see that I was not a customer. At the Gilford restaurant, it was common practice for girls who were not needed to go home so the ones with seniority could make some money.
“I can leave,” I said to them both.
Kim and the cook exchanged looks.
“You drove all that way, “Brett said. “Why don’t you just wait and see if it picks up?”
Kim nodded. “It will be good to have another girl to talk to.”
Kim was easy to be around. At first I thought she was older than her 23 years, because she had already had small smoker’s lines around her eyes and always had a suspicious squint in her eyes, but in the pictures I saw of her on the news she still looked in her early 30s at age 42. After I realized she wouldn’t resent me for being there, we got to talking. Kim was saving up for nursing school. She already lived on her own, in her own apartment, while I lived with my parents until I would drive to Illinois for graduate school. I felt young and awkward next to her, and even her flirting with Brett was quick and sharp, like that of a sitcom waitress.
Kim and I had one thing in common: we were done with the past, with high school and college and New Hampshire. We would eat deep-fried potato nuggets on those slow days and talk about what was coming next in our lives, when we would be done with pancake waitressing and finally get to be respected and have careers. Kim wasn’t squeamish, she revealed, when I told her I could never be a nurse because I couldn't stand needles or vomit or blood. She didn’t like writing that much, she told me, when I told her I wanted to study English. We made jokes about customers, even though we were nice to their faces. While we poured drinks in the waitress station, Kim would say she needed a smoke, and then pop some potato nuggets off a plate into her mouth, singing a song from the public service announcements about healthy eating that aired during Saturday morning cartoons in the 1970s (“Here munch this, here munch that/ Soon you’re not just bored, you’re fat”). She would laugh at me when I would change out of my uniform into a skirt and heels at the end of our shift, after counting what was probably less than $20 in tips for six or seven hours’ work, but she never suggested I go home so she could make more money.
A couple of times that summer and fall Kim came up to our Gilford restaurant to work, and I was always happy to see her, and I have thought of her from time to time, though we never hung out outside of work, and we didn’t keep in touch. But when I found out she had been murdered last Saturday, stabbed in her bed by four adolescent boys who chose her home because it was remote, and who also seriously injured her 11-year old daughter—a girl who had just watched her mother die--there was only one thought that brought comfort: Kim had stayed in New Hampshire, had gotten married, lived in a nice house in the country, and had a daughter. And she had become a nurse, after all. I picture her wearing her uniform to work, moving through the sliding glass doors of the hospital , calmly dealing with whatever came her way.
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