| |  | | | | June 7, 2016 | Letter No. 37 | | | | | | | | | | | | Hello Lennys,
Over Memorial Day weekend, I spent a few days at the beach with a group of women (and one man!) I love and admire so much it almost hurts. We did every cheesy beach thing you can think of: running into the ocean as a group, drinking umbrella drinks in the middle of the day, making s'mores on the grill. We also enjoyed some more idiosyncratic activities: a candlelight memorial for a dead cat, several discussions about Anohni's recent concert, and a pizza night that included vegan, vegetarian, and gluten-free options. I came home exhausted and full of feminist light.
Though I appreciate a weekend of group bonding, I've also had wonderful solo trips — like a glorious trip to the Middle East several years back — which is why I appreciate this week's essay by Lisa Goldberg about traveling alone. She perfectly captures the anxiety, unexpected triumphs, and serendipitous joys of making your way through uncharted territory on your own. And I love that while Lisa is testing her limits, her mother — though worried — came to appreciate the emotional stretch that such journeys can provide.
Robin Thede — head writer of The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore — has some sobering stats in her piece about the dearth of minority and women writers in the entertainment industry. A couple of examples: only 28.7 percent of television writers are women, and only 7 percent of film writers are minorities. (And, it must be noted that the categories "women" and "minorities" are not mutually exclusive.) Happily, Robin brings news of a concrete policy solution that you can help support.
It's been almost three years since the #BlackLivesMatter movement launched in response to George Zimmerman's acquittal for the shooting of Trayvon Martin. Francey Russell traces a related project, one that documents the racialized murders of the past. Constructing memorials and markers for lynchings is a necessary step for us to remember and acknowledge these events, and let them inform our relationship to the present.
Our latest installment of Rumors I Heard About My Body has Jess dropping some Truth and Science about our old friend the pill. It definitely has the word mucus in it, and it's definitely worth a read, if you've got the body parts and the sex life that make the pill an option for you.
Finally, take a virtual vacation with the photographs of Melissa Forde. Melissa's work often appears on her best friend Rihanna's Instagram, but it deserves a stand-alone look. In addition to the many images of RiRi, there are also what feel like meaningful pauses in a nonstop adventurous life: a moment pulling into port, or a shot of an airplane soaring away, having dropped you onto yet another island. (Do they ever get sick of islands?) As Lena puts it, Forde "appreciates and captures both the natural world and the artifice of stardom."
Personally, I'm hungry for more island life — dead-cat rituals and all. Please pass the candle.
xoxoxo,
Mikki, Lenny's editor at large | | | | | | | | | | | | OK Ladies, Now Let's Get Information … On How to Make TV Writers' Rooms More Diverse | | | | By Robin Thede | | |
I'm a black, female late-night comedy writer. Stop laughing, I'm serious. We exist.
We're just super-rare. Like a helpful comment on a YouTube video. According to a recent Complex article, out of 155 writers currently working on the top-ten late-night shows, there are only EIGHT women of color. That's about 5 percent. We MUST do better.
How? The Writers Guild of America, East (WGAE), which is the union that represents TV, film, and some digital-content creators, has proposed a diversity tax credit in New York State that will tangibly increase the number of women and people of color in writing and directing positions. But it's facing opposition, mainly because of ignorance. But more on that in a moment.
First, a little about me. I'm currently a writer and performer on The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore on Comedy Central. For the first season and a half, I held the title of head writer (the first and only black woman in history to have that title, cough). I was also the head writer for this year's White House Correspondents' Dinner (yes, the N-word one).
I've written on about a dozen sitcoms, sketch shows, and award shows for some of today's top comedians (Chris Rock, Kevin Hart, Anthony Anderson, Mike Epps, and Queen Latifah, just to name several). I went to Northwestern University and Second City Chicago. In short, I'm prolific. And humble.
Comedy is a part of my genetic makeup. My father named me after Robin Williams. So it makes sense that my dream, ever since I was a little girl watching Gilda Radner play Roseanne Roseannadanna on SNL, was to work on a late-night comedy/sketch/variety show in New York City. It took me nearly 13 years of working in the business to realize that dream. It took ten years before I sat in a writers' room with another woman. It took four more before I was in a room with more than one woman.
Which brings me to the reason I'm writing this. If you know anything about late-night comedy or if you just read the first few sentences of this article, you know that the world of late night is dominated by writers who are two things: white and male. I'm lucky enough to work on a show that employs 50 percent women and minority writers, but sadly this is an anomaly in the late-night landscape. Most shows have only one female writer (if any) or one writer of color (if any), with Full Frontal with Samantha Bee being a notable exception, which has about half women writers.
And this isn't just an issue in late night. Women writers and writers of color are chronically underrepresented in television and film across the board (Shonda Rhimes can't do it ALL, people. OK, she can, but she shouldn't have to). While scripted shows tend to be slightly more diverse, only 28.7 percent of television writers overall are women, according to a 2016 report published by the Writers Guild. The film industry is even worse, with women writers making up only 16.9 percent. Minority writers make up 13 percent of TV writers and a measly 7 percent of film scribes. If these numbers don't make you angry, they should. They certainly piss me off.
Now, you might be asking: "Robin, why is it so important to hire women and people of color? White men have been making great TV and movies for years." To which I would politely respond: "Are you an idiot?"
This trend of exclusion of women and minorities in the writers' room and behind the camera as directors needs to change. Immediately. Before this past year, with the rise of #OscarsSoWhite and many artist-activists speaking out, not much was being done. But now the WGAE, in conjunction with several other unions, is proposing an amendment to the Empire State Film Production Credit that could change the culture and the business as a whole.
I'm not going to get too far into the weeds of this thing, but here's the basic deets: out of the current $420 million credit for film and TV productions in New York State, the amendment would allot less than 1 percent ($5 million) to be used as a credit for productions that hire qualified women and people of color as writers and directors. The credit allows $50,000 per writer and $75,000 per director.
Before you bristle at the thought of this credit — this is not money paid to the writers or directors. This isn't affirmative action, a quota, or a mandate. This is about providing an incentive for hiring women and people of color as a part of regular hiring practices. Productions don't have to use the credit, it is simply there if they choose to. Writers and directors must be just as qualified as any other candidate and must perform up to the same standards. And: it costs no extra money from the state or taxpayers. The $5 million is simply reallocated from the existing $420 million credit. It's just the right thing to do.
I recently traveled to the New York State legislature in Albany to fight for this amendment. I was proud of the folks who supported it and embarrassed for those who didn't. Members of the New York Senate who oppose the diversity credit tried to tell us that any adjustments to the Empire State Film Production Credit would "open the floodgates for other changes." Um, what? That's like telling the suffragettes that women shouldn't get the right to vote because then the "blacks" will want it too! It's ludicrous, and it's just being stuck on the wrong side of history.
Look at the world around you. Do you see only white men in it? No, you walk by people of all races, religions, genders, and entertainment interests. Why wouldn't you want a writers' room to reflect the world as it actually exists? I would love to see more three-dimensional Black, Latino, Native American and Asian characters who can do more than just say one-liners. I would love to see women who are more than just one-note emotional zombies waiting for a man to tell them how to feel (see: Cecily Strong's genius "One-Dimensional Female Character from a Male-Driven Comedy" on SNL).
And I bet you want to see these types of women on-screen too. Which is why this tax credit matters for people outside the industry: it's not only about us getting jobs. It's about getting TV and movie lovers better, more realistic entertainment that accurately represents their experiences, not just the point of view of some bros in a dingy conference room.
Lest you think that there aren't women and minorities out there who can write as well or direct films as well as their white male counterparts? See: Jenji Kohan's runaway hit Orange Is the New Black, Issa Rae's upcoming show Insecure on HBO, Dee Rees's award-winning Bessie and Pariah, or ABC's entire Thursday-night lineup from Queen Shonda. We are here in huge numbers, creating our own projects and our own opportunities despite a historic legacy of closed doors in the entertainment industry.
Mind you, I don't think lack of diversity in hiring writers and directors is always or even mostly a product of outright racism or sexism (treatment of women and minorities in writers' rooms and on sets, however, is often rooted in latent or even overt racism, but that's a different article). I think it's mainly a problem with the hiring process itself. When there's a position to fill, showrunners and producers (usually white men) ask writers (usually white men) for suggestions, and they recommend their friends (usually white men), and the cycle continues.
If producers want to take advantage of this credit, they would need to reach beyond their usual Harvard-White-Guy circles. They would need to ask literary agents for more diverse candidates, who in turn would need to look for more women and minorities to keep on their rosters as demand for them increased. Pretty soon the level of access that was once unavailable opens up to everyone. And white men will still have plenty of jobs, trust me.
As Papa Pope says on Scandal, black women have to work twice as hard to get half as much. I know this to be true from my own experience and from the experiences of fabulous women and people of color who share their stories with me. I will continue to fight to help them get jobs through my connections in the late-night world, but I'm only one person.
The good news is: you can help right now (and you don't even have to be a member of the Hollywood elite!). The amendment passed the New York State Assembly, but it still needs to pass through the Senate and be signed into law by Governor Cuomo. If you support this legislation, please call or email the governor and the two key senators below by June 16, and if you do, include the amendment number: S-5448A Film & TV Tax Credit Diversity Amendment. I know it requires more than a retweet or just pressing the "like" button, but aren't we all craving a little more sophisticated communication these days? Your small effort can literally make TV and film better and help provide opportunities to countless qualified writers and directors. And it's free!
Governor Andrew Cuomo
518-474-8390
legislative.secretary@exec.ny.gov
Senator John J. Flanagan
Senate Majority Leader
518-455-2071
Flanagan@nysenate.gov
Jeffrey D. Klein
Head of the Independent Democratic Caucus
518-455-3595
jdklein@nysenate.gov
Robin Thede is a writer and performer on The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore. She can be found on twitter @robinthede. | | | | | | | | | | | | Inside Photographer Melissa Forde's Playful, Sensual World | | | | By Lena Dunham | | | I fell in love with Melissa Forde's photographs before I knew she was taking them, via my obsession with her best friend Rihanna's Instagram account. We all know Rihanna's IG is a wonderful place to go if you want to feel like you're wasting your whole life wearing clothes in public. But there's something about many of her photos that feels especially intimate and playful, which is unusual for a massive celebrity account. They are not about pandering to some perceived male gaze but instead about embracing the fun of being young and in your body.
It turns out the photos that really evoked this feeling for me — of female friendship and intimacy, of causing trouble on the run — were taken by Melissa, Rihanna's No. 1 stunner and full-time tour buddy. It's not an exaggeration to say that I stalked Melissa through multiple channels to ask that she share some of her work and the methodology behind it with Lenny readers. My favorite thing about her pictures is their cheerfulness, their sensuality (man, I don't use that word a lot), and the way she appreciates and captures both the natural world and the artifice of stardom. Her work has an authenticity and a spirit that every clothing website aimed at millennial women is trying to capture and just can't. RiRi makes for a pretty delightful muse, but Melissa is already on a rich creative journey all her own.
| (All Photos By Melissa Forde) |
| | | | | | | | | | | | On the Movement for Lynching Memorials | | | | By Francey Russell | | |
In his eulogy for Reverend Clementa Pinckney, one of the nine individuals killed in the Charleston massacre last year, President Obama affirmed that taking down the Confederate flag on South Carolina's state capitol "would be one step in an honest accounting of America's history. A modest but meaningful balm for so many unhealed wounds." The next day, Black activist Bree Newsome scaled the statehouse flagpole to remove the flag herself. By the time she made it to the top, the pole was flanked by cops, who arrested her upon her descent. She was charged with defacing a monument. Newsome later explained her action, saying: "Every day that flag is up there is an endorsement of hate." A month later, the South Carolina House voted to remove the flag, but the charges against Newsome were not dropped.
Confederate-flag enthusiasts claim it is simply a way of honoring the valor of Confederate soldiers, an expression of Southern pride. But in Columbia, as elsewhere in the South, the capitol's flag was not actually a holdover from the end of the Civil War. South Carolina's governor erected the flag in 1962 to protest desegregation and the civil-rights movement. In effect, the Confederate flag was strategically planted as an endorsement of institutional racism precisely when such institutions were being threatened.
"It wouldn't be crazy not to want to go to Alabama, or Mississippi, or Georgia, or America," says Bryan Stevenson, lawyer, professor, and founder of the Equal Justice Institute (EJI), a legal nonprofit based in Montgomery. "I've lived in Alabama for 30 years, and I still feel anxiety and doubt and insecurity living in that state. I am very worried about being victimized and injured and attacked and menaced because I am Black." Stevenson is deeply invested in thinking about how the United States remembers and symbolizes its history of racism. He is one of the country's most active advocates for the construction of memorials to victims of slavery and lynching.
In February of 2015, the EJI published "Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror." The report documents the history of "racial terror lynching" in a dozen Southern states between 1877 and 1950, and notes that "no prominent memorial or monument commemorates the thousands of African Americans who were lynched in America." In a response to the report, the New York Times editorial board argued that America's history of lynching must be integrated into the national conversation about America's past and present. The board endorsed the EJI's call to construct memorials for the victims of racial lynching as an essential part of the work of acknowledgment.
This past December, in Brighton, Alabama, the EJI raised a memorial for William Miller. A white mob lynched Mr. Miller in 1908. He was a coal miner and a union organizer blamed for the bombing of his boss's home (the explosion was in fact set off by whites trying to undermine unionization). The memorial sits near City Hall, recognizing one of the many mostly forgotten and unrecognized victims of lynching and testifying to an American practice and legacy.
At present, there are about a dozen such lynching memorials across the country. But the EJI's aim is to organize a coordinated national effort to ensure not only that all victims are remembered, but also that America as a whole comes to understand its history. The memorials are meant to function as a partial remedy to what Stevenson calls the "complete absence of awareness and understanding — just total ignorance — about the legacies of slavery." The Brighton memorial to William Miller is the EJI's first official lynching marker, and there are six others currently in the works. To do justice to every person who was lynched, the EJI will have to erect nearly 4,000 more.
Memorialization is an American tradition. In her book Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America, American-studies professor Erika Doss describes the memorial mania phenomenon as: "an obsession with issues of memory and history and an urgent desire to express and claim those issues in visibly public contexts." There are national memorials to the first and second World Wars, and to Vietnam and Korean War veterans. There is a Martin Luther King Jr. memorial, and there is the Emancipation Memorial: built in 1876, funded entirely by freed slaves, with its design overseen entirely by white people, the bronze sculpture shows Lincoln standing and gazing down at a Black man crouching at his feet. There is also the Confederate Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery, which commemorates the Confederate soldiers who died fighting in the Civil War.
But there is no national memorial to slavery, and there is no national memorial for victims of lynching. This is truly staggering, and yet there is little collective sense of outrage. It is certainly not part of the national conversation.
"America [is] a post-genocidal nation that has never owned up to this fact or to the narrative of racial difference that we created," says Stevenson. "We were never motivated to address the narrative created through slavery, because we were never ashamed." Shame does not come easy for anyone or any nation. But, Stevenson thinks, "we've done a very poor job in this country confronting our failures. The American psyche is built on success and triumph. We've come to associate apology or acknowledgment of failure with disloyalty." While the 13th Amendment abolished slavery, the country never directly addressed or apologized for the narrative of racial difference that supported it.
The EJI is currently working with town and city councils to build its markers, all of which would be simple, relatively small, and specific to each individual victim. The memorials are small bronze plaques, with the victim's story written in raised gold. Rather than placing such memorials in a special, marked-off area — like the National Mall — these memorials would be integrated into our everyday world. "With the memorials," says Stevenson, "our objective is really to create a different landscape, where every community that experienced a lynching has to own up to that."
In response to increasing public attention on the police treatment and killings of Black people, scholars, academics, and journalists have argued that police brutality needs to be understood through the lens of lynching. In a recent interview in The New Yorker, poet Claudia Rankine said of the spectacle of Mike Brown's death: "The sort of execution-style shooting takes it to this whole other place that starts approaching the language of lynching, and public lynching, and bodies in the street that people are walking around." In a similar vein, philosopher Judith Butler wrote about our "racially saturated field of visibility" in her analysis of the footage of the beating of Rodney King.
For Rankine and Butler, lynching and racism need to be conceived not just as acts or ideas, but as a way of seeing the world and a language for making sense of it. This language is part of what make it possible for trained police officers to see 18-year-old Mike Brown as a "demon," or to make the split-second judgment that 12-year-old Tamir Rice was a threat grave enough to require shooting bullets into his small, child's torso. They make it possible for a grand jury to see no reason to bring such killings to trial.
Consider some of the common reasons given for a lynching, social transgressions so minor and unpredictable as to be practically unavoidable: being obnoxious, acting suspiciously, arguing with or insulting a white man, living with a white woman, race troubles, unpopularity, demanding respect. Consider some of the circumstances that led to someone getting killed: selling loose cigarettes, broken taillight, shoplifting cigarillos, knocking on a door seeking help with car trouble, mental-health crisis, playing with a toy in the park.
For Stevenson, video footage of police killings is crucial for cultivating white people's capacity to see the police as a force of racial oppression forged by postbellum policy. But he also sees a risk. As he points out, "we've accommodated ourselves to seeing violence on screens without being burdened by it."
Just as the killings can be understood as a new form of lynching, so too can the interest in watching be seen as a new version of the documenting and distributing of images of lynching at the beginning of the 20th century. Lynchings have always been spectacles. In response to news stations that played and replayed the police shooting of Walter Scott, professor Britney Cooper wrote in Salon, "Black folks are being treated to an endless replay of this murder on cable news. There is no collective sense that being inundated with video and imagery of these racialized murders of Black men by the police might traumatize and re-traumatize Black people who have yet another body to add to a pile of bodies. Black death has become a cultural spectacle."
By insisting that we remember the history of lynching and let it inform our sense of the present, lynching memorials and other practices of remembrance would cultivate the much-needed collective experience of being burdened by these images. But without such sense of burden and historical understanding, images of racialized murders will not disrupt but will instead simply circulate.
Stevenson often compares America's discomfort with the memory of its mistakes to other countries' efforts to bear witness to their brutal histories. He sees South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission as one model for collective reckoning with the moral failures of the past; he sees Germany's commitment to memorialization as another. "In Germany, swastikas are illegal. There are memorials everywhere. You are almost required to encounter the legacy of the Holocaust."
Memorials intervene in the world. They interrupt movement. They reroute our thoughts and bulldoze our feelings. They change what we remember, what we celebrate, how and what we see. Of course, they can also be seen as cheap gestures facilitating collective self-congratulation and the cessation of real social change. But as Bree Newsome recognized, flags and memorials are not merely symbolic or ornamental; they are fully symbolic, the shared symbols by which we make sense of the past and the present. The Confederate flag functions as one such symbol, and a lynching memorial stands as another. When done well, memorials can function as the basic units for a counter-narrative, for a new way into the world.
Memorials transform the landscape. But the EJI is also working to preserve part of that landscape. Besides the markers, the EJI is also engaged in an archival project of collecting soil from every location where a person was lynched in the state of Alabama. The EJI and volunteers take some earth from these sites and place it in jars labeled with the names of the victims. Both the markers and the soil-collection project acknowledge that the past is buried in us. It's shaped this land, sits on the surface of the earth, and runs deep in the ground.
Memorials guarantee nothing in terms of our shared future, and they will never eradicate the tendency to careen toward forgetfulness with respect to the past. But they have the power to trouble that tendency and disrupt our habits. With these markers, the past arches up to meet us, and in the same moment we are confronted with a new understanding of the present and a new sense of ourselves. But only if we are willing, only if we shift some of the burden, and change the way we bear it.
Francey Russell writes about art and film and is a PhD candidate in philosophy. | | | | | | | | | | | | Debunking the Pill Hysteria | | | | By Jessica Grose | | | |
Welcome to Rumors I Heard About My Body, a recurring feature in which we answer questions about women's health in partnership with Planned Parenthood.
Q: If I go on the pill, what will happen? How do I decide which kind of pill is right for me?
A: Fifty-plus years after the birth-control pill hit the US market, there's still a lot of misinformation out there about oral contraception, its effectiveness, and its drawbacks. There are also a lot of unfortunately hysterical headlines about what the pill does to women's minds and bodies. More on those in a minute.
Now, the basics. If taken as directed, the pill is 99 percent effective. That's known as "perfect use." With "typical use" (i.e., not quite so perfect), it's about 91 percent effective. Those are pretty good odds. "There are two different types of pills available," says Dr. Raegan McDonald-Mosley, chief medical officer of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. "And within those two categories there are lots of different choices." The first type is a combination pill that contains the hormones progestin and estrogen. The other is a progestin-only pill, also known as the minipill. Both types are safe and effective for the majority of women, and in many countries (and now Oregon and California), women can get the pill over the counter without a prescription.
Most people who are on the pill take the combination pill, which works in a few ways. The progestin thickens cervical mucus, so sperm can't move into the fallopian tubes. The estrogen suppresses ovulation, so the egg is not released. Suppressing ovulation is what really makes this pill work (no egg, no fetus), according to Dr. McDonald-Mosley. The other mechanism is secondary, but both function together to make a very effective form of birth control.
This pill comes in several different formulations. Some are designed to mimic the menstrual cycle, which means there is a week of placebo pills (i.e., pills with no hormones in them) or a week of no pills at all, so that you bleed as you would if you weren't taking the pill. There are other formulas that allow you to limit your period to just three or four times a year. "It's not medically necessary to have a once-a-month menstrual cycle," Dr. McDonald-Mosley explains.
Wait, there's more! Some combination pills are "monophasic," which means each active pill has the same amount of hormones, while some pills are "multiphasic," which means the amount of hormones in each individual pill varies throughout the month. Discuss with your medical professional which pill might be right for you, because differently formulated pills interact with each of our unique bodies idiosyncratically.
The progestin-only pill does mainly one thing: it thickens the cervical mucus, though it may also inhibit ovulation. Maintaining the level of progestin necessary to thicken the mucus is why it's much more important to take the minipill at the same time every day — and why they are potentially less effective. If you're not vigilant about this kind of thing (or if you travel a lot), the minipill might not be right for you. Progestin-only pills tend to be recommended for those who are breast-feeding, have a history of blood clots, or are taking other medications that may interact poorly with the combination pill.
Which brings me to side effects. Like all medications, both prescription and over-the-counter birth-control pills have some downsides. They may increase your blood pressure, your cholesterol, and your risk of blood clots. The blood-clot thing is the one that inspires those fearmongering headlines about birth control potentially murdering you. While it's true birth control does increase the risk of blood clots, the overall risk is still incredibly small, even for women on the pill. Though it's worth noting that the risk is higher for women over 35, women who smoke, and women who have conditions like hypertension.
And the pill has many known health benefits, from a decreased risk of endometrial and ovarian cancer to a reduction in menstrual pain. Still, if an increased risk of blood clotting is something that concerns you, there are other birth-control options available (nonhormonal IUDs, condoms, diaphragms).
One last rumor to debunk. Despite irresponsible tabloid headlines, there's no real evidence that the pill decreases your ability to conceive, no matter how long you take it before stopping. So if you want to have kids someday, just not today, knock back that Arundelle* with abandon.
(*Not a real pill brand name. But it sounds like one, right?)
Jessica Grose is Lenny's editor in chief. | | | | | | | | | | | | Traveling with Myself | | | | By Lisa Goldberg | | |
"You're going where? By yourself?" my mother asked, like I had just set out along the Oregon Trail with nothing but a bag of beef jerky and a slingshot.
It was 2006. I was 25 and headed to Belize. Alone. Solitude wasn't necessarily my first choice, but I was single and couldn't coordinate vacation time with friends. Belize wasn't my first choice, either — more of a destination compromise, due to the vacation's last-minute conception and a minuscule budget. Of my vacation Venn diagram, Central America occupied the common space: international, inexpensive, and a little unexpected. Then, Belize was slightly more obscure than Costa Rica and Panama, had less of a known reputation for violence than Nicaragua and El Salvador, and had cheaper flights than Honduras and Guatemala. While I dreamed of Kenya or Japan, my wallet wouldn't allow me to leave the hemisphere, so Belize it was.
I was still monumentally excited, but my mom clearly didn't share the enthusiasm. In my mind it would be swaying hammocks and coconut drinks, and in hers it was fist-size insects and watery graves. To her credit, she never explicitly told me I couldn't go, or even that I shouldn't — she just made it abundantly clear that I would be abducted if I did.
"You're just very young and inexperienced," she said. "And a girl traveling alone? That's just … that's …" she trailed off, unable to verbalize whatever doomsday scenario was playing out in her head.
And on this, I have to concede. Slightly. Yes, navigating the world in a female body can be dangerous, but that's just as true in the jungles of Central America as it is in the fraternity houses of the United States. And of course there are some parts of the world where women can be particularly vulnerable due to antiquated societal norms and it's better to travel in a group. Belize was nothing that some pepper spray and an ear for my gut couldn't handle.
"I'll be fine!" I huffed, irritated by how much of a total bummer she was being.
What did she expect me to do? Stay home? Visit her? Go to a Sandals?! I wanted adventure! I wanted culture! I wanted affairs with foreign men! And I just couldn't stomach the idea of censoring my own life's experiences based on the absence of a companion. It felt so hopelessly Victorian.
So, despite my mother's protests, I booked a flight—
—Which I promptly missed. OK, so maybe there were some things I still needed to learn.
Lesson 1: Even when your connection is domestic, if your final destination is international, you have to arrive two hours ahead.
Then, once I landed I got food poisoning. Lesson 2: Not drinking the water doesn't work if you're still eating the raw vegetables washed with that water.
Finally, I realized I had switched ATM cards with a friend back in LA, and my bank account had been frozen. Maybe iPhones and Square have changed it, but in 2006 the jungles of Central America were cash only. Lesson 3: Don't be a bonehead.
Luckily, I had $400 in traveler's cheques, which I was able to survive the week on, thanks to my lingering nausea and inability to eat. Lesson 4: Sometimes, listen to your mom.
I wanted to call her immediately, but I didn't. Partially because I didn't want her to worry, partially because I didn't want to prove her right, but mostly because in my delirium I heard a voice. It had the unmistakable mix of glass-ceiling-shattering strength and calming velvety smoothness of feminist patron saint Murphy Brown. In my hour of need, she came to me in a smart blazer and said, "Come on, girl. You got this." And because she's a no-nonsense pragmatist, Murphy also pointed out that the pay-phone instructions were in Spanish, so regardless I was shit out of luck.
Once my fever dream broke, the trip did not get better. On the way back from a tour of Actun Tunichil Muknal, a Mayan cave filled with human sacrificial remains, our truck broke down. Because this particular deserted dirt road was crawling with banditos, a unit of Belize Army commandos arrived frighteningly quickly, and I rode back sandwiched between their AK-47s. Later, in a flurry of enthusiasm over some hot springs, I fell and gashed my toe open. The best medical treatment available was provided by a disgruntled Vietnam vet living at my hostel, who thought I "probably wouldn't" contract gangrene. And finally, there was the discarded American yellow school bus I took to the coast. En route I got my period, bled through my shorts, and was told by the only other nonnative aboard, a wild-eyed and leather-skinned old hippie woman, about that time last week when she had been held up at machete-point.
But I wouldn't relent.
Hobbling and puking my way through the country, I summoned the determination of Scarlett O'Hara when she pulled that withered carrot from the charred remains of Tara. I steeled myself, and I did what I came to do: see Mayan ruins and kiss dudes with accents, goddammit. And you know what? In every picture from that trip I am utterly beaming. Not because I was having such a great time, but because I was free. I would not be conquered, and that self-reliance liberated me. I emerged from the jungle knowing that for the rest of my life, I would need only to look to myself for salvation.
I also realized that traveling alone was an activity to seek out for its own merits — like a midnight trip to Yogurtland or adopting a rescue cat. The experience was abstractly luxurious and soul-nourishing, and I couldn't wait to do it again.
The next time I headed out on my own was a simple road trip. I was invited to two weddings on consecutive weekends, one in Monterey, California, then another in Boston. By this time, I was dating the man who would become my husband, and traveling had become a coupled affair. He could only get away from work long enough to fly to Monterey, so I renewed my Triple A membership and went alone.
"Well, at least you're staying in the country this time," my mom had said, her death grip of worry loosening ever so slightly.
Admittedly, she's never had the desire to travel alone. She says it just never really occurred to her. She draws the line at eating dinner out by herself (though for some reason lunch is fine). I chalk most of this up to nurture and not nature, because as a person she's joyful and open. But for her, growing up in an immigrant community in Philadelphia, the world was much smaller — the edges of exploration reaching just 90 miles northwest to the Jersey shore town of Asbury Park. As a teenager she wanted to go away to college, but my grandparents insisted she live at home and commute, the gentle bud of her own gestating curiosity crushed by a mix of Armenian frugality and generational sexism.
"Just driving all that way by yourself seems kind of lonely," my mother lamented.
But for me this was the chief attraction. Solitary companionship can be a blessed relief from the compromises of inter-human relationships. On this trip I could listen to whatever I wanted, and I cheekily picked Steve Martin's The Pleasure of My Company as my audio book. Then, when Northern California's winding, piney terrain became just trippy enough, I turned on Pink Floyd. I may have also sang along to The Little Mermaid soundtrack, but in the absence of a witness to corroborate, we'll never know for sure.
I stopped as many times as I wanted for the bathroom, which was five times more than a reasonable person would have rolled their eyes at. And I would pull over just to stare at the ocean, very aware of its poignant melancholy and my own depth for appreciating it. So deep. Whereas in Belize I thrilled in the existential freedom of self-reliance, here I basked in the literal freedom of doing whatever the fuck I wanted. I sat outside Berkeley's library and eavesdropped on the students with no one around to judge me; in Boston I read the Declaration of Independence to myself at Faneuil Hall without embarrassment, then took the T out to Braintree and spent six hours touring John Adams's house without feeling rushed. There were no other itineraries to satisfy and no one to negotiate with.
But if you're still stuck at the concept of loneliness, the truth is that when traveling by yourself, you never need be alone. The world opens itself to single travelers in a way it doesn't when you're with someone else, and you meet people you otherwise wouldn't. Tours are done in groups, and in yours there will be chatty Canadians who want to go for beers afterward. Happy older couples whose conversations are as well-worn as their Merrell clogs will gladly invite you to join them for dinner. And if you've always wanted to take a French lover, just walk into a bar.
I'm certainly not the most well-traveled solitary journeywoman out there. At this very moment there are readers laughing at my podunk road trips and bougie weekend getaways. They climb Machu Picchu alone or explore Angkor Wat by themselves, while I go to Victoria, British Columbia, or Joshua Tree. But the idea of these solo trips isn't to be the most swashbuckling lady out there, it's to show up to your own life, reconnect with yourself as a single entity, and know that you never have to sacrifice an experience because there isn't someone else there to share it with.
As my travel stories have become less about marooning in a developing country and more about dinner at Chez Panisse, my mom has gotten more comfortable with it. Even when I told her about the surprise coed nudity I was thrown into at a hippie retreat's hot springs, she gave only the slightest titter, then conceded, "The shock value has kind of worn off."
But I grew, too. As I shed the self-centeredness of my 20s, I began to appreciate her benevolence. So many friends had families, and mothers especially, who held them tethered to their own orbit, either with emotional blackmail or actual responsibilities. My mom did not. If my moving across the country to California upset her, as the prospect of seeing your child biyearly certainly would, she never even hinted at it. Hell, she bought my plane ticket. She allowed my adventurousness to blossom and watched it at a distance with a bemusement that turned to interest, that eventually turned to awe.
"You're still thinking of driving back to LA from Albuquerque?" she asked me a few months ago.
"Yeah. I'm gonna stop in the Grand Canyon and Sedona along the way."
I had actually been worried about this one. The Grand Canyon was someplace I knew she wanted to go, a family trip she constantly talked of but one that had never materialized. I didn't want her to be mad that I would see it without her. I waited. "Hmm," she chirped. "That's pretty … cool."
As I hiked into the canyon, touching its inner belly where the different colored layers of sediment were stitched together, I thought of covered wagons. It's something I do whenever I'm face to face with the American Western landscape. All I can think is, How did they do it? How, with their bonnets and hard tack and lack of Google Maps, did those pioneers ever make it? Right up to the canyon's rim in some places, the outlying woods are pretty dense, so surely some unlucky early caravan came upon it by accident. Just stumbled onto the Grand Canyon trying to get to California. And the obstacle of that giant chasm of Earth really makes you feel like a wimp for being proud of just going by yourself — in a car with the help of an iPhone.
Then I thought of my mom. I saw a family struggling to set their camera timer so they could all be in the shot and capture the majesty of this background. I offered to take their picture, and then they offered to take mine. Since I don't do selfies, it's the only one from the whole trip that I'm in. I'm wearing a floppy hat and I'm smiling, but for the first time I wished I wasn't alone. I wished my mom were there. I don't think I would have had a better time — she asks a lot of questions, and that annoys me to an extent that I am ashamed of — but I missed her. The infinite vista unfolding before me made me sad. She has bad knees and probably won't be able to manage terrain like this much longer. What if she never gets to see it?
A few weeks ago, I was in Ojai by myself on a quick getaway when my phone rang. It was my mom.
"You'll never guess what I just bought," she said. "Season tickets to the Pennsylvania Ballet."
"Oh, cool," I said. "You finally convinced Daddy to take you?"
"No," she said. "I just bought single tickets. I'm going by myself."
I smiled. It was a start.
Lisa Goldberg is a writer living in Los Angeles. She has been on the producing teams of such films as Bridesmaids, This Is 40, and Funny People. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | The email newsletter where there's no such thing as too much information.
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