The crying game...

My last post reminds me how Charlotte's Web clobbered me as a child. I couldn't even finish Black Beauty. The death of innocent animals always wrecks me. Even when I was small, I hated to cry, hated the way it made me feel. I never had the sense of release I've heard about from other women. I was always left drained and exhausted, tossed and bruised like a reluctant survivor.

For the past few days, I've cried and it's been okay. Cutter Bob was a wonderful cat and he deserves my grief. And like other tears of real sorrow, these slide down my cheeks easily and hotly. I don't begrudge a one of them, but they bring me no ease. I'll be sad for a while.

For a long time, as an adult, my tears were usually about anger rather than sorrow. Shouting and yelling was considered unbecoming in a young woman, whereas dissolving like a wet Kleenex was considered okay. The cultural paradigm of that was, of course, utterly self-defeating. My weeping was interpreted as the reaction of a fearful spoiled child, rather than a rightfully angry woman. Knowing that only made me cry harder, and feel more terrible.

I grew up during a time when women were expected to cry, snivel, and cower. Not too longer ago, while confined to bed, I watched a ghastly movie made sometime in the very late 60's or early 70's. When I say it was about a hippie commune versus a vicious motorcycle gang, you know all you need to know. Of course there was a scene where the commune was invaded, and the cyclists chased all the hippie chicks as they worked in the garden. What struck me was that the women simply trembled before these greaseballs; they begged, and wept rather than glancing around for a good-sized rock. But then, that's what girls were supposed to do.

But in Two Lane Blacktop, made in 1971, Laurie Bird gives an uber-realistic performance of what hippie chicks were more likely to be. She's rude, frontal, mouthy, funny, impulsive and doesn't make nice. It's a minty fresh portrayal in a non-mainstream film, so women mostly continued to sob, flinch, and grovel until the nineties when they started to slug guys in the chops--not much of an improvement.

Sometime, though, maybe thanks to Laurie Bird, I had the freeing thought, Why cry? Why should I have to snivel? I wondered. Why couldn't I snarl back in the face of intimidation? And from there, I began getting angry.

From there, I started to live out loud.