| | | Plus a Type A mom writes about her slacker kids, and more in this week's Lenny. | | | | | | | | | |  | | | | May 9, 2017 | Letter No. 85 | | | | | | | | | | | | Dear Lennys,
This week, Rachel McKibbens (poet, mother, upcoming Lenny IRL tour member) tweeted: "So much rage in my body, I need a twin to hold it all." This was on the day that a bunch of Republicans who never have to worry about health care for themselves or their families voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Their version of this cruel bill could allow insurers to charge tens of thousands of dollars more to provide coverage to pregnant women and rape victims. Seeing coverage for millions of Americans potentially stripped away, and realizing our bodies were yet again political battle zones, I bet most of us fully understood Rachel's need for a rage twin.
Meanwhile, I had another bump in my personal road to health. At the Met Ball, I wore a massive gingham gown like some endometriosis-battling Scarlett O'Hara. Then, I went straight from a women's room full of supermodels and wearable art to the hospital. I was there for four days — shout out to my nurses Teri, Madeline, Gracie, Ruth, and Jackie — then went home to recover at my parents' place. I arrived just in time for my mother to get bronchitis and for us to become bedridden rage twins together (though "twins" isn't quite right, since she's always in elegant matching pajamas and I am clad in old Joe Boxers with holes everywhere that matters).
Last night, as I lay on the couch next to my mom counting the charms on her bracelet like I was three again and not almost 31, I reflected on the parts of us that are alike. Our hands: long, unwieldy fingers and ridged nails. Our freckles the color of paprika. Our disgust with being told what to do (it's an above-average level of disgust. In this way, we are eternally teenage, and it's part of why I've often driven my body into the ground as it begged for mercy. Cuz YOU won't stop me, well-meaning friend!).
But in the hospital, I really truly felt like her daughter when I realized that, even alone in a bed with an IV listening to the moans of strangers, I know how to advocate for myself.
I can demand what I need to get healthy, be it apple juice or a second opinion, and it's this sense of self-determination and self-preservation that has allowed me to demand a diagnosis. This self-advocacy has allowed me to doggedly pursue wellness even when it felt impossible and my questions went unanswered.
But it's not just my mother's fire that kept me from accepting vague diagnoses or constant pain. It was also the confidence that comes with knowing you can afford your medical care. Whether I was covered under my parents' plan, a student plan, or my union benefits (thank you, Writers Guild of America, you're the booomb), good health care has allowed me to conquer physical and mental illness and continue to work, to express myself, to enjoy life even when it had all the makings of a bleak month or year. I am fucking lucky.
Luck, in the form of health coverage — that's a huge roadblock sitting in the way of so many American women conquering their lives. This Mother's Day, I want to take both the abstract gifts my mother gave me (maddening persistence) and the concrete ones (health care, always) and use them to fight for the women who are currently perilously close to being left to suffer alone.
Illness takes so much from people even when they have every resource in the book. Let's make sure the voices of these women are never taken away. You may be one of them, and I want you to know that your fellow Lennys have your back.
If you want to help fight against the passage of this unjust and willfully savage bill in the Senate, you can donate to ActBlue, which will give money to Democrats running against House Republicans who voted for TrumpCare. And you can always give to NARAL and Planned Parenthood Action Fund, which have been fighting against the American Health Care Act in all its sinister iterations and will continue to fight for us all.
To health, my loves,
Lena | | | | | | | | | | | | My Money Is Green | | | | By Gabourey Sidibe | | |
I needed new eyeglasses. My friend has a really cute pair of frames from Chanel that I'd been coveting, so I decided to try to buy a pair for myself at the Chanel store near my apartment in Chicago, where I live while shooting the show Empire.
On my way to the store, another friend called. Taraji said she was stuck on set and asked if I would pick up a pair of sandals for her. No problem. I grabbed a cab and in a few minutes walked into the nearly empty shop.
I was looking pretty cute. My wig was long and wavy, I was wearing new ankle boots and my prescription Balenciaga shades, and I had a vintage Chanel purse on my shoulder, over my winter coat with a fur hood. I looked as though I were in a Mary J. Blige video. Just how I like to look! The glasses display was near the door, so I walked right over. A saleswoman and I locked eyes immediately. I said "Hello" before she did. She greeted me, but the look on her face told me that she thought I was lost.
"Can I take a look at your eyeglasses?" I asked.
"We don't have any," she answered. "We only have shades. There's a store across the street that sells eyeglasses."
"Across the street?" I asked, confused.
"Yes. In the building across the street on the fifth floor." She gave me the name of a discount frames dealer. I had been at her display for less than a minute, and she was literally directing me to another store.
"But … I want Chanel frames," I said. She told me the name of the other store again and exactly how to get there and let me know that they had lots of different frames, including Chanel. I'd love to pretend she was being polite, and I'm sure she would love to pretend she was polite, but she was actually condescending. Explaining to me how exactly I should get across the street and out of her sight line, as if I were in kindergarten. I was trying to purchase glasses, and she was trying to get the interaction with me over as soon as possible. Just to be sure of what was happening, I made her tell me to leave, in her pretend-polite way, three times.
I knew what she was doing. She had decided after a single look at me that I wasn't there to spend any money. Even though I was carrying a Chanel bag, she decided I wasn't a Chanel customer and so, not worth her time and energy.
This actually happens to me a lot. My whole life. Both before and after I became a recognizable actress. It happened to me in St. Maarten on vacation after shooting a film, when I went to a Dior counter to look at lip gloss and the saleswoman literally took a gloss out of my hand and put it back down in the display case. It used to happen to me at my neighborhood beauty-supply store in New York, where I was relentlessly followed around whenever my mom sent me to pick up shampoo and Q-tips. Even when I was a teenager, I knew it was because of my skin color but also because of the environment. I lived in the hood. Being suspected of stealing is just par for the course. Also, I definitely went through a mini-klepto phase when I was around fifteen, so some of that suspicion was warranted. But I grew out of it, and if I weighed the times I was suspected of stealing versus the time I actually stole something, it would be about 99 percent to 1 percent.
No matter how dressed up I get, I'm never going to be able to dress up my skin color to look like what certain people perceive to be an actual customer. Depending on the store, I either look like a thief or a waste of time. There doesn't seem to be a middle ground between no attention and too much attention.
I still had to get Taraji's sandals, so I asked where to find them. The saleswoman seemed annoyed but walked me further into the store. As we passed through, other employees who were of color noticed me. All of a sudden, the woman who had pointed me out of the store let me know that even though they didn't have eyeglasses, the shades they carried actually doubled as eyeglass frames, so I should take a look at the shades I'd come to look at in the first place. Just like that, I went from being an inconvenience to a customer.
I bought two pairs of glasses and two pairs of sandals. Unfortunately, I'm used to people giving me bad service. Honestly, if I walked out of every store where someone was rude to me, I'd never have anything nice. So yes. I spent my hard-earned money on the things I wanted from Chanel, and I'm certain that saleswoman got a commission for finally helping me.
I made sure to give her my email so I could fill out a customer-service survey later. But now that I have the survey, I'm not sure how honest I want to be while filling it out. If I'm honest about my experience, am I being a bad person? Do I get to complain about terrible service when it's really all I've ever known anyway? Do I get to jeopardize someone's job and livelihood just because I suspect that she treated me like I was a nuisance based on my appearance?
I know logically that I have every right to complain, especially since I spent so much money, but I'm struggling with the idea that I should be nice about it instead. I should extend a courtesy to this stranger who treated me like a beggar. This stranger who even though it is her job to be helpful to me was only so after someone else told her who I am. Only after I proved that I had money.
Should I worry about what a bad review would do to her career? No. But the fact is that I do. There is something in me, pushing me, forcing me to consider this woman's feelings when she hadn't considered mine at all. I wonder what part of me is convinced that I actually am a nuisance if I fill out this customer survey, honestly. Is it just that I'm a black woman and so I've been trained from birth to put all others first and to just be grateful yet apologetic for any space that I take up in this world? Especially any space that I take up in a Chanel store.
To be fair, I don't know why that saleswoman didn't want to help me. I suspect it's because I'm black, but it could also be because I'm fat. Maybe my whole life, every time I thought someone was being racist, they were actually mistreating me because I'm fat. That sucks too. That's not OK. I've felt unwelcome in many stores throughout my life, but I just kind of deal with it. As a successful adult, sometimes I walk out of the store in a huff, without getting what I want, denying them my hard-earned money. Other times I spend my money in an unfriendly store as if to say "Fuck you! I'll buy this whole damn store!"
Either way, they win and I lose. Maybe I still feel like this treatment is owed to me from my teenage kleptomaniac phase. Maybe I can't out-success my guilt … I swear to God. This is why I only shop online!
But now as I sit staring at what seems like the hundredth customer-service survey I've accepted but not completed, it occurs to me: does it matter whether my waist is wide or if my skin is black as long as my money is green?
Gabourey Sidibe is a film and television actress, director, and cat enthusiast whose memoir This Is Just My Face: Try Not to Stare was released on May 1, 2017. | | | | | | | | | | | | Learning to Love the "Caj" | | | | By Kirsten Greenidge | | |
"Can you start your reading at 7:15?"
"I don't think I have my book."
"I think you do."
"7:20."
"No."
"Fine."
"Did you … do not … do not cut your eyes at me."
My daughter smiles. Half Mona Lisa, half a little, well, evil. Then she laughs.
"7:15."
The smile disappears.
"OKAY."
It is a long drive to school. This reading should have been done the night before. If I were speaking in person with other parents, I would be embarrassed it had not been completed the night before. I am sure one or two other mothers and several teachers would explain why it is important it be completed the night before to my face. As if only I have ever, ever had this conversation ever in the history of homework. I swear the next time I bring up homework and another parent pipes up with, "Oh, my son loves to read" to my face, I might pipe up with, "Yes, we are happily and deliberately raising our kids to be illiterate, thank you very much, we are very proud."
The truth is, I do not understand this "caj" approach to the fourth grade. I was not remotely caj. I loved sharpened pencils. And practicing dictation. (Remember dictation?) And every purpley, warm, inky worksheet that got churned out of the mimeograph machine until it caught fire and the school switched to Xerox. My kids like sharpened pencils, too. But I would have been horrified to quip that lunch was my favorite part of the school day when asked — which is what my kids say. This answer comes with sly smiles and, I am sure, rushes of adrenaline: "Ask again. We'll say P.E."
The caj approach extends to our house as well. It's not that they're messy, it's that … no, no, they are. They are messy. I am a girl whose dorm-issued wastebasket was the only one clean enough to hold the punch in for parties because I cleaned it regularly — they are messy, and I am in utter awe of how this came to be.
To be clear, they have the ability to be very sweet, are quite bright, and bits of my type-A side poke through in them here and there. When my son was born, we got my daughter a pink tutu, all tulle and tiny white flower buds, because she'd been moving around the apartment like a tiny ballerina.
"Ooooooo, K----, you look beautiful."
"Yep," my husband quipped, "You look good."
K twirled and curtsied.
"Wonderful."
K stopped.
"Yeah. But. I need lessons."
Mic dropped, she walked her two-year-old self away from us as if to say: I see your pink tulle and I raise you tap, ballet, jazz, and lyrical for the next five hundred Saturdays of your life, bitches, how 'bout dat?
The girl is not lazy.
And yet.
I can't find a sharpened pencil in here to save my life and there's the schoolwork thing, which really I blame on Obama's mother, if I am being honest with myself. When I create my charts and stand in craft stores selecting stickers for those charts, or when I devise elaborate "work at home" plans in my head that I don't execute but think of sternly executing THIS time in my head, I think of Barack Obama's mother and how she'd make him do his work and how he became president and perhaps there is a sticker for that?
And I also probably, if I am being honest with myself, think of my own mother, who, like Barack Obama's mother, made me do my work. Not just homework, extra work. And it was around the same time that I was obsessively sharpening Ticonderogas and mimeographs that my mother and I had one of our worst fights ever. It was so bad, I couldn't even tell you where my sister Kerri was during it, and I know she was there, because she, like me, had her math book out. Blue for second grade (mine) and red for kindergarten (my sister's). I hated the kids on the covers, thinking they were so smart, knowing the answers, raising their hands: jerks. My mother had another thing coming if she thought I was doing one page of that book in summer: it was my job to let her know it.
First I thrashed my arms. That didn't work, my mother didn't seem to care. Quite the opposite: I think I saw her laugh, then quickly cover her mouth. So next I tried my legs. No laugh, but she didn't budge, either. We were doing those books no matter what. Still no sign of my sister, so I decided to roll around on the floor. This was a little fun, but I couldn't show it, that book was never getting opened, my mother was wrong. I rolled again. This was a mistake. My sister was smart to stay hidden.
"Other kids might … you can't afford … you're too smart to … I don't care what …"
I threw in an "I hate you" here and there, but my mother just kept going.
"… you can all you want, I don't care … finish that … yes you will … get up off the ground …"
I don't like to think of Barack Obama rolling around on the ground with a math book, but I think our mothers shared something in common. Each morning, at 7:14, I have the sinking feeling that if the three of us were at a playground somewhere, I might sheepishly and foolishly be defending my choice to deliberately raise nonreading children who would not appreciate a good mimeograph sniff even if it were presented on a silver platter.
On some level I should be proud of the caj in my children, because it's born out of feeling as if they belong, as if where they are is where they are meant to be. As an educator, I truly appreciate all learning styles, and I know my grandparents and great-grandparents — people who felt education of all kinds was crucial to racial uplift and equality — would be proud. My kids are fortunate enough to be alive where there is even the glimmer of caj in terms of their relationship to the world around them, even when it is still often co-opted and complicated by all the isms that ever were.
But for the love of Pete, we lose socks — how? When they come back with shoes? It makes no sense — and also not-the-cheap-kind water bottles. My daughter has, several times this winter, come home without her winter coat. This is Boston. In winter. Did I mention my wastebasket in college? Spotless.
I thought much was lost, until events miraculous and unfathomable, otherwise known as parent-teacher conferences. A time when my husband and I tentatively sit waiting for the moment when we explain our childhoods in inappropriate ways and also reveal we only went to some of the prenatal classes we were supposed to go to, because we thought it was a one-week class but it was really a six-week class and yes, we're sorry, but we are good people, really.
Instead.
Recently, we were introduced to children who are "completely different than at home." Careful. Studious. CLEAN. I think these children would, if this were the '80s, even enjoy a nice ripply mimeograph or three. My husband and I were confused. There aren't enough sharpened pencils in our house for any of this to be true. I resisted the urge to text "WTF" to him multiple times throughout the rest of the day. Confounding: I have packages of stickers that only ended up on walls.
But. I come to realize that those generations — the possibly more stately ones I never met, and the ones who I can still hear yelling at my seven-year-old thrashing self — are nestled within both my children. What I need to appreciate is that they will be ready, in their own way, when 7:15 arrives.
Kirsten Greenidge is an Obie Award–winning playwright and the author of Baltimore, Milk Like Sugar, and The Luck of the Irish. | | | | | | | | | | | | Lessons From My Baba's Cookbook | | | | By Meaghan Clark | | |
I've been told I laugh like my baba. I wouldn't know — when I was three years old, she had a stroke and never regained the ability to speak. My memories of her remain severed, limited to a space within a dark hospital room where she lay tethered to feeding tubes.
Instead of discovering my baba in my youth, I learned about her through the spiral-bound paperback pages of St. George Women's Auxiliary Cookbook. Devoid of images or punctuation, the 126-page cookbook was bound in 1987 and features recipes from members and friends of the Saint George Serbian Orthodox Church Women's Auxiliary of Oakland, of which my baba was a member.
Before she was Baba, Desanka Midzor arrived in the United States on October 20, 1931, from Buljarica, Yugoslavia (now Montenegro). She was eight years old and didn't speak a word of English.
It was clear, even in her youth, that she had ambitions. A newspaper clipping from June 1937 reveals a letter Daisy (a nickname Desanka picked up in grade school) wrote to police in which she described her uncle's robbery during a European business trip, which she had witnessed. "The men, after beating him severely," Miss Midzor wrote, "forced him to sign the traveler's checks, took other negotiable papers and then disappeared ..." In school, she participated in clubs like the Masquers, the school drama club, and she joined a sorority her freshman year at the University of Nevada, though she never graduated.
The Reno Evening Gazette announced the engagement of my baba and djedo, detailing the Riverside Hotel–hosted engagement celebration that featured pastel-colored figurines. They married in 1947.
Daisy ran the household. Despite having what some women today may consider a repressive role, she remained progressive in her ideals and decision-making. Once her children were grown, she set about finding a job outside the home and started working the phones at her friend's hair salon. She was thrilled to earn wages independent of her husband and used the money to fuel her fashion addiction, attend movies, and even hire a decorator.
There were always boundaries between daughter and mother ("She didn't know how to be a loving mother," says my mother), but it was more a product of my baba's own upbringing than anything else; my mother's cousins, raised just a few blocks away, were a tight-knit bunch — a bond, I think, my mother was always slightly jealous of (as a result, she took a very different approach and raised me just as much like a friend as like a daughter). Still, my baba always encouraged my mother to remain independent and think freely; though it wasn't discussed outright, it was expected that my mother would work.
My baba wasn't a celebrity or socialite, but in our small Serbian circle she had a reputation. "Her oven was always on," my mother says. When it came time to clear out my mother's childhood home, we discovered heaps of scrap paper filled with recipes in Baba's slanted, nearly illegible cursive. I kept only those that didn't crumble in my fingers; they are the remaining relics of my baba's years in the kitchen … in essence, her legacy. "Cooking was one of her highest priorities … her self-esteem and her pride," says Abbey Massie, who grew up next door and still serves my baba's almond torte every year at Christmas.
The recipe my baba shares in this Serbian cookbook captures the life she created, a life behind the stovetop feeding my djedo, mother, and uncle. On page 77 of St. George Women's Auxiliary Cookbook, Daisy Alexich's name appears alongside a recipe for sour cream coffee cake. Over the years, her name appeared in print a handful of times: everything from a New York passenger list chronicling her arrival to Ellis Island when she was eight, to her days volunteering with her sorority, Tri Delt. But it's her contribution to this cookbook that has given me just a small taste of the woman whose laugh I inherited.
| (Image courtesy of the author) |
Created as "a tribute to our Serbian heritage," St. George Women's Auxiliary Cookbook was compiled in the church's 60th year as a way to preserve traditional Serbian recipes like cevapcici (grilled sausages), rostule (fried, diamond-shaped pastry), and palachinki (dessert crepe), alongside more contemporary stuff. Dishes like a brza (fast) torte include just four ingredients, while the recipe for "rice and milk" is devoid of ingredients altogether; some dishes are more complicated, like Proja (Serbian corn bread), which includes the serving suggestion: "Yugoslavs serve this corn bread, made with cottage cheese and sour cream, as an accompaniment to the stuffed cabbage dish, Sarma." There's cevapcici, which make a perfect hors d'oeuvre, or even "potatoes baba used to make."
The cookbook includes everything from how best to use leftovers and remove stains from washables, to dates to remember (everything from Dr. King's birthday to Yom Kippur, Halloween, and Mother's Day), to a quick recap of the Nativity. It truly includes everything a modern woman might need to run her home.
| (Image courtesy of the author) |
Sour Cream Coffee Cake by Daisy Alexich
1 cube butter, room temperature
1 1/4 c. sugar
1 c. cake flour
2 eggs, well beaten
1 tsp. vanilla
1 tsp. baking powder
1/4 tsp. salt
1 pt. sour cream
1/2 tsp. soda
Cream butter and sugar till light and fluffy. Add eggs and vanilla and beat till smooth. Mix in sour cream. Sift cake flour and measure; then sift again with baking powder, soda and salt. Stir in dry ingredients, mixing till smooth.
Topping:
2 Tbsp. sugar
1 tsp. cinnamon
1 Tbsp. melted butter
1/2 c. walnuts, chopped
1/4 tsp. nutmeg
Mix above ingredients and sprinkle on top of cake. Bake at 350 for about 45 minutes. (I usually put this in an 8-inch square pan, buttered and floured, or you can use a 9-inch square pan.)
Some recipe notes: I haven't changed the recipe as it appears in the cookbook, though I'd suggest using a nine-inch pan and doubling the topping recipe. Cooking times may vary depending on ovens. In addition:
1 pt. sour cream = 16 oz. sour cream.
½ tsp. soda = ½ tsp. baking soda.
Can substitute walnuts for pecans, or another favorite nut.
Sift an additional ¼ cup cake flour to dust pan.
Meaghan Clark is a journalist based in San Francisco who loves to eat. Her work has appeared in Extra Crispy, Paste magazine, Good, Ozy, and Refinery29. Catch what she's eating on Twitter at @meaghanclark. | | | | | | | | | | | | Clothes My Mother Bought Me | | | | By Amy Kurzweil | | | |
Once I stopped growing — 5'4" (or close enough), size 4–6 (depending), foot size 7 (wide), 34C — it became clear how I measured up: an inch, maybe two, shy of my mother from head-to-waist, hip-to-toe, fingertip-to-tip. If I'd known just how important a role these dimensions would play in my sartorial future, I would have hung from my feet every night, eaten more vegetables, been more diligent about those bust exercises the girls in Judy Blume novels are always doing. But whatever I did or didn't do, I did not keep growing.
At seventeen years old, my body settled into its shape, bulges and curves morphing here and there but always in different places than my mother's, our aesthetic ambitions seeking different heights. Only sometimes, if I'm lucky, there will be a dress, a sweater, maybe even a shoe that we can both wear, and when my mother grows tired of this item or she is feeling generous, I'll inherit the relic for my own wardrobe, which is, of course, full of clothes my mother bought me.
My mother is both beautiful and glamorous. Blonde, blue eyes ever-ringed in mascara, she is, in my mind, always wearing lipstick in shades like Kiss Me Coral and Ravish Me Red, filling cars en route to parties with organic hairspray. It's she who taught me to consider measurements like the ratio of hair height to nose size. My mother told me that pursuing glamour is both fun and easy, unlike, for example, getting a Ph.D. or raising two children. When I was small, we would collaborate in the craft of my cuteness, but as a teenager, I resisted my mother's glamour. Somebody — was it television? — taught me real beauty was effortless. It seemed my mother wanted me to try too hard.
A hint of this dynamic surfaced early: second grade, picture day. I was wearing the outfit my mother had bought me for my cousin's bar mitzvah. A black lace mini-skirt paired with a black flower-printed blazer, gold buttons, and shoulder pads. My mother used to plait my long brown hair in braids after my bath so in the morning, once the braids were undone, my mane would be crimped and voluminous. I was missing teeth, but I looked, as my friends accused me of while we waited in line by the playground, "like a teenager." At home, I had enjoyed the thrill of that velvet collar and those gleaming buttons, but as soon as my friends at school surveyed my opulence, it was like I'd arrived on a basketball court in heels. I felt I was sporting glamour I had not earned. This was not Hollywood, or New York City. This was Brookline, Massachusetts, puritanical home to our country's academics and engineers. I longed suddenly for utilitarian pockets and no-frills snaps. With my buttons and my lace, who did I think I was?
This indictment — that I was trying to be something I was not — haunted closets and mirrors and fitting rooms for much of my childhood, as if my mother didn't have to accommodate enough of my textile neuroses already. Anything the slightest bit itchy sent me into fits. There was my "cinch everything" phase: a compulsion for headbands and belts. I felt my body might disintegrate if not held together with buckles or bands.
It's not that I did not want to be given clothing, but I was categorically opposed to the wools and suedes and A-lines my mother pulled from the racks. I remember the flannels and five-pocket corduroys I'd finger lovingly as my mother led me through Jacobson's Children's Shop to the dressing rooms, each with our respective armful of clothes for me.
"I think you don't want to look good," my mother once accused me. Teenaged and test-driving my woman's body, I was probably avoiding a striped and studded two-piece we'd bought from a real grown-up shop on the streets of New York: '90s mod bell-bottom suit pants and a black tank top, faux-suede collar ruffled and studded with silver eyelets. Or perhaps this was later, on a visit home from college, freshman-fifteened and refusing to wear lipstick, batting away the hairspray. I had an aversion to ornamentation. It wasn't that I didn't want to look good. I wanted to look good just exactly as I was.
Now, at 30, I see the concept of natural beauty is both flimsy and shallow. Where do self and self-image part? I've always felt that life should be about more than the pursuit of beauty. Now I wonder if the pursuit of beauty is about more than I know.
I don't hunger for clothes, but I think I've come to understand them, how they really take on the value we imbue them with, be this money or memory. I'm reminded of the first outfit of my mother's I ever wore. It was a red felt overall dress and jacket, embroidered with colored thread, adorned with gold buttons. The ensemble had made it over from Germany. It was my mother's as a little girl, and even though it was decidedly itchy, I am a poised and regal six-year-old in the Polaroids where I wear it. My head is held high, my neck stretched with the strain of performance. I wear the same half-smile as in the pictures of me in ballet recitals. I don't believe I actually wore the dress out of the house but just put it on for pictures.
Did I feel, in those stiff arms, the weight of the war? Did I see, in the twirl of the skirt, my family's salvation? This red dress made it to America — unlike the red coat of Schindler's unlucky girl, from that movie my mother never let me watch. It strikes me now as strange that the only items I've ever heard about my family bringing over on the boat are luxury goods — this little dress and an entire dining set of fine china. I assume other, more practical things were salvaged. Underwear? Socks? But no one ever mentioned those.
The red dress is worn now by a doll. My father once purchased my mother and me My Twinn dolls, customizable to look "just like you," which mine did not. But my mother was rather doll-like as a child, and the picture of her, two or three years old, poised on her bicycle at the Displaced Persons camp in Bensheim, looks to me like the My Twinn sitting below on her dresser-top. The doll will keep the dress uncreased, until someone comes along to wear it again.
Meanwhile, I've worn through most of the clothes my mother bought me: like the leather jacket from Ann Taylor Loft, now ripped in the lining and fraying at the sleeves; or the Ralph Lauren jean jacket or the trench coat from Banana Republic, both stained with pens. (I wear them anyway.) I shop now in thrift stores, because I never could shake my grandmother's aversion to "waste," and after a childhood of new things, I'm interested in what's old and forgotten.
When I'm feeling brave, my thrift store of choice is my mother's closet. I may never pull off bedazzled jeans, but together we find the items from her past that might decorate my future. Like the black and tan checked wool jacket from an Italian designer, decidedly oversize, or the hot-pink lace mini-dress, which is really too much color for me (I'm a New Yorker now), but some days, anything is possible. I even started wearing her tortoiseshell glasses from the '70s, too big, of course, but oversize is a trend, we agreed. I still don't know why certain things catch my eye, how they speak to that ever-shifting me-ness. Perhaps one day I'll grow fully into my mother's glamour, but for now, I'll make do with inheriting her gratitude, her respect for the objects of our lives, these second skins that tell us where we've been and where we're going next.
Amy Kurzweil is the author of Flying Couch, a graphic memoir about her grandmother, her mother, and herself. Amy's comics appear in The New Yorker, and her writing has been published in the Awl, the Toast, Shenandoah, Hobart, and elsewhere. Amy teaches writing and comics at Parsons School of Design and at the Fashion Institute of Technology. She lives in Brooklyn. | | | | | | | | | | | | Why I Tell Stories About Cannibals and Murderers | | | | By Erin Lee Carr | | |
Gypsy and her mama, Dee Dee, shared a pink mess of a room. Walls and bedspread: bright pink, clashing just enough to make your eyes sting. Plastic bags full of shirts, sweatshirts, and wigs wait along the walls. Gypsy's wigs. To the right of the bed, there's a collage around a photo of a pretty curly-haired girl with her infant daughter. The blankets were piled up on the bed, on top of Dee Dee. Dee Dee couldn't get out of bed. Her neck and back were slashed with a knife. Gypsy was nowhere to be found.
That particular crime-scene photo haunted my dreams for over a year as I made a film documenting the young girl who had her mother killed in the dead of night. I wake up most mornings with faint traces of blood in my mouth. When I'm dreaming about Dee Dee, I grind my teeth. My therapist keeps asking me why I am drawn to this type of work. I try to think back.
My fascination with the macabre started early. In high school, I could be found in my dimly lit bedroom devouring classics like In Cold Blood and Helter Skelter (while I was not mainlining Buffy the Vampire Slayer). I couldn't look away. I went to an all-girls Catholic high school, and I remember feeling bereft of excitement. I didn't smoke or chug 40s, but I did have an odd online habit that involved reading serial-killer origin stories late into the night. I wanted to figure out what defined evil, and whether a bad seed could be detected before he or she acted out in a violent, deadly way. Questioning these things made me feel less generic, (though I was completely generic).
It wasn't uncommon. According to a 2010 study, "Captured by True Crime: Why Are Women Drawn to Tales of Rape, Murder, and Serial Killers?," women make up the majority of the true-crime audience for nonfiction. The study paints a fairly dark but unsurprising picture. As to why so many women gravitate toward these stories, "the answer may lie in fear of crime, as much research has shown that women fear becoming the victims of a crime more so than do men." The authors also write that "by understanding why an individual decides to kill, a woman can learn the warning signs to watch for in a jealous lover or stranger." I always felt I was doing research in preparation for something, but I didn't know exactly what. I knew that I wanted to know what to do just in case something ever happened to me. A man gets very close to you on the street, his eyes staring into you, seeing what you will do next. What do you do? You quickly dial a number, you put your keys in between your knuckles. A game plan: we all need one, and I had the false illusion that I had control. But evil comes in all forms.
I started investigating the Dee Dee Blanchard case in August 2015, two months after her untimely passing. It wasn't a typical case of matricide; it was something much more sinister. It was discovered after her death that Dee Dee had forced her then-eight-year-old daughter to pretend to be wheelchair-bound and mentally disabled to garner disability benefits from the government. It was shocking, but the question of why remained so much more interesting. How could someone do this to her child? I didn't start with the crime scene. The circumstances of a death can tell only so much about the life that preceded it. And at first glance, there wasn't much motive for anyone to end Dee Dee's life.
Dee Dee Pitre met Rod Blanchard in 1990. After a few dates at the local bowling alley in their neighborhood of Lafourche Parish, Louisiana, they decided to go steady. Dee Dee soon became pregnant with a little girl, and she and Rod were married briefly. Rod was seventeen at the time and afraid of raising a child with this woman he barely knew. He left Dee Dee six months into her pregnancy. It was then, her friends and family say, that Dee Dee decided it would be this little girl and her versus the world. She was forced to move back into her folks' house, and on July 27, 1991, Dee Dee's daughter was born, small but healthy. She named her Gypsy Rose. But family members were quickly inundated with detailed medical calls from Dee Dee. Gypsy was having trouble breathing and needed a breathing monitor. Gypsy couldn't see and needed expensive, prescription-strength glasses. The illnesses escalated. On Gypsy's eighth birthday, she skinned her knee. After a trip to the hospital, Dee Dee informed her family that Gypsy couldn't walk properly and needed a wheelchair.
The family had had enough. Dee Dee had been acting erratically toward her stepmother, who was bedridden from some unknown disease. It was time for her to go. Dee Dee moved her little family in the middle of the night to a different part of Louisiana. The family would not hear from her again. When Hurricane Katrina decimated the state, Dee Dee spied an opportunity. Neighboring states reached out to the shelters, saying they had ample room for displaced Louisianians. Dee Dee took the offer and started the application process for a Habitat for Humanity house. It would be the perfect crime: Dee Dee would con money from charity organizations and keep asking Gypsy's dad for child support to make sure the bills were paid while she didn't work. The perks turned out to be pretty fantastic: free trips to Disney World, an invitation to meet the cast and crew of the Harry Potter franchise, the list went on.
I pitched the story to HBO Documentary Films prior to filming, and they told me to keep on it. No one had ever heard a tale like it. It was an unproven story the mainstream press, besides Michelle Dean in BuzzFeed, had missed. I showed Sara, our supervising producer, an image of the mother and daughter holding each other on the couch. There was enough there to investigate. I had a somewhat-proven track record in the crime space with my first film, Thought Crimes: the Case of the Cannibal Cop. I made contact and filmed with Gypsy's dad and stepmom. They showed me pictures of the bespectacled little girl in a purple wheelchair, most often smiling ear to ear in her pictures. I was captivated.
In May 2016, Gypsy's lawyer, Mike Stanfield, agreed to let me speak with her, with no cameras to test out how it felt. He would remain next to us, providing the cautious counsel you'd expect for a client facing life in prison for the murder of her mother.
The inmate visitation room at the Greene County Jail is small, painted light blue, and split in two by a pane of glass at its center. I waited for Gypsy to appear on the other side of this bulletproof glass. I looked down at my notebook, a reporter's notebook, one of my recently departed dad's. He bought in bulk, and his wife, my stepmom, gave a couple away to his nearest and dearest to write their own stories on. I naturally thought I should have three.
I questioned the likelihood of success. An in-person, written interview like this would certainly help with getting a video interview, but nothing was certain. I thought back to my first visits to a jail cell at a federal facility in lower Manhattan. I was there to meet Gilberto Valle, a cop convicted of conspiracy to kidnap, murder, and eat women he knew. I called my dad after every visit. It was quite odd. Any other parent I knew would be horrified, but there was my dad, rooting me on.
My dad, a journalist by trade, taught us that no story was out of reach. When I chose to pursue documentary, he told me I would be unstoppable. I don't know how many young women were told that, but I never questioned it. I would go after a story, even if it made me feel uncomfortable. I remember walking out of the prison where I had met Gil and calling my dad. He picked up after the second ring. "Hey, dolly, how did it go? What was he like?" I paused and said, "Well, it was definitely very weird, but I don't think he is who they made him out to be." Gil was meek and polite in our early interactions. My dad told me to be careful but encouraged me to keep visiting the prison.
My extended family felt differently. At my dad's wake, an uncle asked me, "Do you think you can do anything a little lighter?" I laughed in response and shook my head. "I don't think so." Crime stories captivated me, and so here I was, seeking them out, as a documentary filmmaker, woman, and just plain curious person. I had the luxury of making films about things I personally found interesting. How many people can say that? After my first movie, I didn't go back to the security of a full-time gig. I set out to find my next crime.
When I uncovered the Gypsy story, I knew I had found work for the next couple of years of my life. She came in and eyed me nervously. Mike introduced us. She said, "Hi, Miss Erin," in a timid, high-pitched voice. I noticed glitter on her face. She told me she'd created the effect by pressing a greeting card onto her skin. She wanted to look nice for our chat, ever the well-mannered Southern girl. I started small: "Have you ever seen a documentary before?" She looked down, searching through her memory. "No, I don't think I have." I told Gypsy her story would make a great one. And we were off.
Erin Lee Carr is a writer and director. Mommy Dead and Dearest will air on HBO the day after Mother's Day, May 15, 2017. Her forthcoming memoir All That Is Left Behind will be printed in 2017 for Ballantine, an imprint of Random House. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | The email newsletter where there's no such thing as too much information.
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