***The Wonder Woman theme song plays***

On hot summer nights, ignoring the persistent stings of mosquitos, Melissa and I sit crouched on either side of the suburban chain link that separates us. Her mom is kind of weird about me ever since the time I got lice at tumbling tots and she was afraid I might spread it to Melissa. Her house is the kind of house with plastic on the furniture and not a stray Barbie accessory in sight. Usually we climb across the fence to play but due to daylight savings time ruining everything we’re not allowed to leave our side after dark.

My costume is a creation of mom’s fashions: a navy blue halter top with the words “Wonder Woman” stitched in the top. This is not my true identity. Actually, my true identity is “Wonder Girl.” I know this because one day during my ballet class Linda Carter will be out and about in the Tallahassee Mall and just happen to stop in on the second grade young ladies class and see me and see how incredibly fabulous I am—not just my dancing but my entire personality (I think actually she will have heard about me and that’s how she knows to stop by), and then she’ll tell me that I am just perfect to play Wonder Girl on her television show.

That’s how I’ll get famous, but more importantly, that’s how I get to meet Linda Carter and learn to use the magic lasso and read people’s minds and eat every flavor of ice cream. Like that one episode where Wonder Woman’s sister Drusilla visited from Amazon Island and she had never had ice cream so she ate a cone of every flavor. Only women live on Amazon Island. They don’t know any men. How do they make more women? I think they must have very advanced technologies. I think it has something to do with that Jean Nate commercial where the woman is riding the horse in a race and pulls off her helmet and her long hair flies behind her and you just know at that moment that she doesn’t need anyone but herself. Not that Wonder Woman is as simple as a perfume commercial. She is a very complex woman and my relationship to her television show is very personal. That’s why I was so covert when I asked the lady who weighs me and takes my temperature at the doctor’s office, “Can I ask you a personal question; do you watch Wonder Woman?” It is a very serious issue and she is a very serious woman with serious work to do. So while at first it was hard to understand why Wonder Woman would want to leave the paradise of Amazon Island, you could see later that the United States needed her and so did Major Steve Trevor, although she could never reveal her true identity because it might make him feel threatened by her power. You were supposed to think she had a crush on him, but probably she was just being kind.

So Melissa and I sit crouched in the humid north Florida red clay thinly disguised by a layer of dirt that threatens to undo our tide-clean costumes. This is one of our favorite scenarios: the one where Wonder Woman has been kidnapped by the aliens who steal people’s brains and store them in neon-glowing eggs in a special vault, meanwhile replacing the brains with nothing so the people are just turned into helpless zombies. The aliens have somehow managed to surprise wonder woman’s magic powers: the lasso, the invisible plane, the bullet proof wristbands…how did they do it? I thought she was invincible! But anyway, they’ve managed to capture her and now Wonder Woman is in prison, here, in my backyard, and in the adjacent yard, just across the chain link, sits the hero, Major Steve Trevor. We are secretly communicating by a walkie-talkie device that Wonder Woman has cleverly imbedded in her bustier—probably hidden somewhere amidst all that cleavage, which is, by the way, part of the reason my true identity is wonder girl not wonder woman. Because I just don’t possess cleavage like that quite frankly:

Steve: Wonder Woman, can you hear me?
WW: Yes, Steve, don’t worry, I’ll find a way out
Steve: No, stay put, I’m already arranging to have “my men” sent for. Just sit tight and they’ll be coming soon.
WW: Well, if I can just get this (grunting) panel off (more grunting) then I think I can make it out.
Steve: Be careful they don’t hear you, don’t put yourself in danger… WW: Gotta go, someone is coming!

And it’s my mom that is coming. I hear her voice calling across the back yard for me in a sing-song manner that confuses the calling of the cats with the calling of the children and no wonder I am confused. But I recover, Wonder Woman and Steve sign out, and we all head back inside toward a promise of future liberation.

“On Butch Women”

[Author’s note: “On Butch Women” is born out of my interest in lesbian history, especially butch and femme identities. During the McCarthy era, in particular, lesbians frequented bars that were most often owned and controlled by Mafia. In an attempted negotiation with the police, the Mafia would pay them off so they wouldn’t harass and arrest the bars’ patrons. This was not always successful. I have read and watched so much about this history that it seems to have become a part of my own experience, although, I suppose it already was, as a part of the history of queer community. I often wonder what those brave women who struggled through that period of intense persecution think, when they encounter younger gay and lesbian generations.]

In every crease
of every fold
of every turn
around her softened breasts,
she sculpts a wall of love.
Weaving yards of cotton blend through decades of history
passing through identities as seamlessly as the material passes through her hand
worn smooth by endless practice.

Later, at the bar, her stance is a monument to “tough.”
She owns the room, we might say, despite the tittering and oblivious younger women who are dancing around her to the relentless
mm—ss mm—ss mm—ss mm—ss mm—ss mm—ss
of a musical language she does not know.
She owns the room because she built it.
She began construction some fifty years ago, in bars much smaller than this, with lighting much dimmer, and tolerance from the outside much, much less present.

If there had been tolerance, any at all, she wouldn’t have known.
Not when the police came to smack their shiny black sticks across the backs and heads of tranny boys and butches like her.
Not throughout the long nights she spent on the cement-cold floor of a jail cell.
Certainly not when the city’s finest were doing their best to tear down her wall.

They used to call them Bulldaggers—the Butch dykes.
But that was 50 years ago.
Then came second wave feminism, and the androgynous imperative
and the butches seemed to shrink back into a quiet place
under attack for conforming to heterosexual models.
Then came Act Up, and mainstream drag queens, and queer theory
and now butch and femme are hip
with images of Cindy Crawford shaving K.D. Lang as evidence of lesbian chic.

These memories are locked behind her eyes
Throbbing to the pulse of a music much different than the long, slow-motion embraces she once danced to with meticulously dressed femmes.
She scans the bar, surveying the future, and that’s when she catches me looking.

For one split second—only as long as I dare—I look back.
I want to lock in on those memories
I want to say so many things to her
I want her to tell me her stories—all of them.
I want to tell her that it’s not true, boys do cry, and we’re not all as oblivious as we may seem.
I want to tell her of my desire for butch: the way it makes my legs melt deliciously beneath me. But I am a child, and she overwhelms me, intimidates me.

I smile momentarily, and sip my beer.
When I look back, she is staring off into the distance again, and I am forgotten.
But she is not.

“Cracks in My Future”

When I was in fifth grade I married Robby Lernetz in my driveway even though I really had a huge crush on Arnold Shank. There was a lot of pressure from the other neighborhood kids. But ultimately, I was happy getting married to Robby, even though I was a little nervous about kissing him at the end of the ceremony. Now maybe that happiness was learned through a million wedding commercials, or maybe I really did like boys, and maybe in a less stringent world, I would have been just as happy getting married to Darla from across the street. After all, she did once insist on showing me her privates.

But Darla and I were only friends, whereas Robby and I were going together, and so it seemed “natural” that we should get married. Plus, Robby wanted to “do it” with me. He wrote me a long letter discussing this business of “doing it.” It was explicit—how did a third grader know so much? Oh, did I mention he was two years younger than me? Anyway, when my mother found the letter, she looked sideways at me and said, “well, it’s your body.” Of course she didn’t really mean that. Everyone knows our bodies don’t actually belong to us until we turn 16, 18, 21, or never, depending on your geographical location and religious entanglements. Being a good Catholic girl, I was pretty much counting on eternal guilt associated with anything I decided to with my body, and that would definitely have included “doing it” with Robby Lerner, so we didn’t. We didn’t even come close. We didn’t even touch tongues. The truth was that I had already touched tongues with someone two years before. Linda Burk and I touched tongues in my backyard so that we could be blood sisters. Funny, the big mock wedding and “doing it” discussion and ensuing parental confrontation that surrounded Bobby, and yet Linda and I were allowed to spend the night together all the time. Nothing to worry about there, I guess. But Robby and I did at least touch lips at our mock wedding. It was a lovely, if not spontaneous, ceremony: Darla and Ann were the flower girls, and to their credit, they were very supportive that I was getting married, seeing as how there were more girls than boys in the neighborhood so the competition was always tough. I held flowers fresh-picked from the backyard as I walked awkwardly up the driveway. Robby waited on the spot where the three cracks met, and formed a sort of arrow, which at that moment was clearly pointing me toward an assumed destiny.

“Domination Barbie” (an extended monologue)

Barbie reinvents herself as a postmodern feminist

Music Cue: “Material Girl” by Madonna plays, as Barbie enters, with coiffed blonde hair, wearing a tiara that says “Diva,” long, black satin gloves, a pink feather boa, a floor length pink sparkling gown, and black combat-style boots. She waves to the audience, picks up her basket filled with Barbie souvenirs, and tosses them out to the audience like party favors. The music fades as she stops center and places the basket on the floor next to her.

Hi. I’m Barbie. I just want to say, first, that it’s very exciting to be appearing at such an avante-garde performance event. You know, my usual public appearances are so, oh, “tame.” And it just gets tiring after a while, really, that no one gives me credit for being interested in provocative and intellectual art. They just assume that I’m happy attending premieres of Titanic and Bounce—Oh, I wish Gweneth Paltrow would bounce, alright, right off the top of a very tall building… And Leonardo di Caprio really makes me want to puke. He reminds me so much of Ken, and I know it’s bad politics and bad publicity to talk trash about your ex, but the both of them were just never interested in moving beyond their pretty boy images. There for a while, I thought Ken was showing some promise: he was considering a role in an independent film, sort of a misunderstood poet in the midwest, trying to revitalize dadaism during the disco-crazed 1970’s. But, he decided to renew his contract with Mattel. Me, I’m trying to branch out. This gig is part of a little tour of performance art festivals I’m doing. And I’m working on my own performance piece, as well, a little something I hope to eventually collaborate on with Midge. And I’d love to hit the indie film circuit, Cannes, maybe Sundance… I’ve sent a piece out to Salon magazine, sort of a juxtaposition of postmodern feminist perspectives on body image, you know, Naomi Wolf and Camille Paglia, people like that. I’ve got a lot of reparative work to do, and I know it. But I’ve got dreams, big dreams of revolution.

It’s hard work being Barbie these days. And it’s a trap I’ve built for myself. There’s a lot of competition out there, and I’m only getting older. And I’ve heard the jokes about “divorcee Barbie” and “Post-menopausal Barbie.” Ha. Ha. If all you’ve ever been is a Barbie there’s not much self-worth or social validation in being anything else. But I’ve got to try, you know. I can’t just give it all up because I’m tired. Midge won’t make it on her own. And I don’t want you to feel sorry for me or anything. Oh, god, you are, aren’t you? You’re all just sitting there staring at me like I’m this old washed up barfly. You’re thinking, “What is she doing, trying to be a performance artist? She doesn’t even know who she is anymore.” This is so embarrassing. I just wanted to share a little piece of my life with you, to show you it’s not so dreamy sometimes.

People say, “Barbie is such a boring, functionless toy, really, what can you do with a Barbie? Now a fire truck—there’s a toy. Trucks can go round and round and do cool stuff, and save people’s lives, and all you can do with Barbie is take her clothes off, put them back on, take her clothes off, put them back on… We should be encouraging girls to play with fire trucks and fire trucks only.” Goodness forbid that anyone might find something redeeming about me. I think all the pressure is on the feminists.

She points to an audience member

Imagine the pressure, if you were a feminist, and you secretly liked me, liked playing with me! Well, you couldn’t just stand up and say it! No matter how much you might explain afterwards, I mean, be willing to criticize the bad things about me—and there are a few, I’ll give you that—you’d be mocked. Why, even if you were willing to admit that I’m an unrealistic role model for girls, even with all of my cute new color coordinated career outfits, and that I present all sorts of incorrect standards of beauty, like of course my ridiculous measurements, but also my shining blonde whiteness, and the token people of color I allow into my world, and the compulsory heterosexuality that my relationship with Ken mandates, and my excessive material possessions—even after all of that, you’ve still openly admitted that you like Barbie!

Big pause while she surveys the audience and crosses her arms—highly satisfied with herself.

Have I surprised you? Did you think that Barbie could be self-critical? Oh, I’ve thought a lot about myself. The truth is, I am a feminist. Well, mostly in my fantasy life. So many of my public performances require otherwise. But I am a feminist, although, not in the usual ways, not in the “correct” ways. I like to play Barbie’s just like a lot of other girls. Perhaps this surprises you? That I play with myself? Oh, I love to play with myself. I love myself. I do. I like to surround myself with little replicas of me—and my friends—and play games with us…like this is one of my favorites…

She reaches into her basket and pulls out a Barbie doll and a Ken doll. They are dressed in each others’ clothes.

Do you remember the Barbie town house? You know, the one that was open on the front, with three floors, and an elevator you could put me inside of, pulling the string to transport me to different floors. Well, in this game I would be getting ready on my third floor bedroom for my date with Ken. Then I run downstairs and hop into my dream convertible to go and pick him up…

Barbie kneels on the floor and positions the dolls on her lap, animating then throughout the following dialogue.

Ding-dong.
Barbie: (at the door) “Hello, Ken.”
Ken: “Hello, Barbie.”
Barbie: “Wow Ken, you sure do look like a fox.”
Ken: “Oh, stop it Barbie, you’re the fox. I was just telling Midge the other day.”
Barbie: “Hey, Ken, are you ready to go on a dream date? I’ve got the dream convertible corvette waiting outside. . .”
Ken: “Wow, Barbie that sounds cool. Let’s go.”

She makes “car noises” (vroom, vroom) as though they were driving down a road, moving them from side to side as though the car were racing. Suddenly, the car screeches to a halt.

Ken: “Barbie, why are you stopping here, we’re only half-way to the movie theatre?”
Barbie: (turning to face ken) “Because, Ken, I want to do it.”
Ken: (gasping) “But Barbie, I’m not ready. . .”
Barbie: (persisting) “Too bad, Ken, you’re gonna do it and you’re gonna like it!
Ken: (resisting) “No, Barbie, don’t make me…Oh my gosh, what’s that?”
Barbie: (pushing him down) “Bend over boyfriend…Come on, take one for the team…”

There is more various bad porn adlibbing, and then Barbie suddenly stops her game. She has gotten carried away, and now realizes that the audience is there. There is a self-conscious pause, and she laughs as she looks up at the audience.

Oh! Nice girls don’t play domination Barbie!

She recovers and tells the audience in a confidential manner:

The best think about this game is that I get to play all the parts. Some days I can be Barbie, some days I can be Ken, some days I can be Midge, watching… But then other days, there are my public performances to attend to. Thank goodness for fantasy!

5. Excerpt from “Skinny Isn’t Sexy”:

Ms. Brown, our p.e. instructor here at Our Lady of Many Sorrows catholic school sees that I’ve been knocked down and starts jogging in my direction, trumpeting “What in GOD’S green earth just happened?”  Ms. Brown jogs in the weighted manner of all physical education instructors, which is to say, it’s more of a suggestion of jogging.  Her arms and legs move as though she’s jogging, but in fact, she isn’t moving at a pace any faster than that of walking.

            “This is FLAG football, people, not TACKLE!” she barks, and her face gets red, both from the effort of her short jog as well as the sharp punctuation of specific words in her sentences, which is something she frequently does while speaking.

            “Sorry, Ms. Brown,” says the asshole who knocked me over, “I meant to grab the flag, but it’s just that she’s so skinny that it doesn’t take much to push her over.”

Maybe I could just lie here for the rest of the day.  Then I’ll miss science, religion, math, and social studies, as well as further teasing about my sports incapabilities.  Or, maybe I could pretend like I sprained my ankle, and then I could spend the afternoon in the health clinic, staring at posters on the wall with a thermometer hanging from my mouth.  I particularly despise the poster about eating disorders, with a picture of the really skinny girl who’s only wearing her underwear, except that you can’t see her face, because the photo is taken from behind so all you see is her hunched over form and protruding spinal column. 

Ms. Brown looks at me with thinly veiled scorn, and of course she wouldn’t say it outright, but it’s obvious that skinny, wimpy girls shouldn’t be playing sports or else we’ll only get knocked down—we’re clearly best suited for modeling disease on posters.  Just because Ms. Brown has to enforce the rules, didn’t mean she agrees with them, and she has little empathy for non-athletic students.