Enlightened Venus

It is October 11th 2009. It is the day of the Chicago Marathon, light rain and a gray sky. My marriage will shatter in less than 3 months but I don’t know that as I leave work early to take the El to Second City for orientation in my level A improv class. The class I have forgotten to take since I moved to Chicago in 1988.

I step off the El at Sedgewick and am moved and invigorated by the runners. The physical commitment and drive to push themselves for this day is huge and foreign to me. My world has been very small for a few years, work, errands and insomnia consuming most waking hours. I am a worrier and a low stakes perfectionist so I have mapped the route at home and made sure to leave plenty of room for error.

Mark W. Anderson, my husband of eight years has been antsy to leave Continue reading “Dread”

In the summer of 1993, two of my friends took me out for a bachelorette night a month before my wedding.  The night ended in the early morning at an all-night bakery in the North End section of Boston.  The street was so quiet when we walked into the bakery that I could hear a conversation of a few men on the sidewalk a few buildings down from us.  “Look at the one with the long hair” one said, clearly meaning me.  “She’s got a fat ass!” said another. I went cold, leaned back and looked down the street.  “She heard you!”  My friends hustled me inside the bakery. When we got into the car shortly after, I burst into tears.  I had just lost 30 lbs for the wedding and it seemed like those men made the whole endeavor pointless.  It’s no surprise that since then, I’ve thought of many blistering comebacks. Many. Blistering. Comebacks.  But thinking of after-the-fact comebacks gives only fleeting satisfaction.  After all, comebacks don’t address the most important question: why did I care so much? Continue reading “Delicious! Eloisa James and Women’s Bodies”

In July, 2000, l lived with my husband and four year old son in a condo building that was once a factory.  Each unit had big windows and thick floors and consisted of two bedrooms and one bath. My neighbors were friendly and came from diverse backgrounds.  One of my neighbors in particular was a striking white woman. She was fashionably thin with long straight blonde hair and perfect make-up. She always wore pristine business suits and carried a briefcase.  Clearly, she was a real estate agent. I would often see her at the end of the day when I was coming home from work and she was leaving, probably to meet with clients for evening appointments. I’d always say “Hi” to her when our paths crossed – and they crossed frequently.  Our parking spaces were next to each other and our units were kiddy-corner across the hall from each other. She had a coveted corner unit that had only one shared wall, located in her living room. My neighbor was shy. She’d softly respond to my greetings and barely looked me in the eye.  She rarely said anything else; in fact, I didn’t even know her name. In spite of her shyness, she seemed nice. She lived alone and I wondered how a shy person could be successful enough in the real estate business to support her condo, her great clothes, and her sports car, but it wasn’t my business, so I didn’t dwell on it too much. Continue reading “The Dominatrix Next Door”

In the 1980’s, my great-aunt was member of a Harlequin-of-the-month book club.  She passed the books  to my mother who then gave them to teen-aged me.  I devoured them.  They were my palate cleanser between school-required summer reading books like Vanity Fair and Great Expectations.  They were my respite when forced to study for an impossible history class taught by a bitter man or to wrestle with geometry.  But since books are not read in a vacuum, I couldn’t help but to compare the stories with my own life.  When in high school, I was occupied with trying to understand boys, figuring out whether to have sex and contemplating how I looked wearing Elizabeth Arden opalescent lip gloss.  Harlequin books had a take on all of that.   In the 1980’s, when sex education was non-existent for me, Harlequin morality was a big influence.  Bottom-line lesson I learned from Harlequin books:  don’t put out until you find someone who sets you aflame with his mere touch.  But equally as impressive upon me was what I was learning in Catholic catechism:  when you kiss a boy, you will feel nothing, but he is on fire and it’s on you to tamp that down.   I did not have the emotional tools to make sense of that, so I stumbled through and around a number of boys.  Continue reading “Life Meets Romance Novels”