Women's Voices for Change

Duplicity Breaks The Age Barrier

The reviews have been stunning.   The lead roles are played by actors who are stunning.  The twists and turns of the plot are, well, stunning.  But all of that is nothing compared to the phenomenal moment when we go into the dark and duplicitous techno-cryptic, cutting edge and gritty intelligence/ counterintelligence den manned by men and one…wait a minute, can it be?  Mature Woman.

It's St. Pat's Day, Meredith Vieira. Give us a break!

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

by Laura Baudo Sillerman

Meredith Vieira—give us a break!

 Okay, it may come down to there are two kinds of women in the world:  those who are into St. Patrick’s Day and those who aren’t.  But some of us are pretty firmly on the fence—not exactly outfitted in emerald today, but not loathe to wear a touch of lime either.

Frankly, I don’t think it’s about puce or pints of Guinness.  It’s about those Red Hat ladies.

 When Meredith Vieira hosted the Today Show from Dublin this morning, she appeared in progressively more ridiculous get-ups in each segment.  She wore, among other things, a shamrock emblem on her cheek, an Irish flag as a cape, green antennae, a big fuzzy green top hat and enough goo-gahs around her neck to sink the Blarney Stone into the Irish Sea.  There may have been more.  I couldn’t go on watching.

It made me think of the women who believe in wearing red hats and making certain everyone within six miles knows you are still interested in martinis, or newly converted to margaritas or dedicated to sporting stilettos and a boa to the supermarket or whatever their code of  conspicuousness dictates.

What ever happened to dignity?  Whatever happened to having fun without being foolish?

When did maturity come to mean mugging?  Clownishness?  Buffoonista? 

Sorry.  Maybe the wind has been more to my dorsal side than my back lately. Perhaps I’m having a little trouble getting into the playful Erin Go Bragh (oh, please spare me from the go bra-less comment) spirit, but you notice Matt  Lauer was nowhere near the festivities.  Because it’s unseemly for a news host to be outfitted like the I Love Lucy costumer returned for the occasion. 

Like it or not, Meredith Vieira represents the most powerful economic segment of American society—the mature woman.  The sparkle-in-the-eye,  spark-with-subtlety, sense-of-proportion-person-who-is-confident-enough-in-her-sense-of humor-not-to-need an-arrow-through-her-head mature woman.  Like it or not, Meredith, you are one of our faces to the world.  Wild Irish holiday or not, the role calls for a little maturity.

Gloria Steinem is 75?! Outrageous!

By Laura Sillerman

Naturally one would weep at a birthday party for a icon who calls upon everyone there to be outrageous.

Weep people did last night, at one of many celebrations of Gloria Steinem’s 75th birthday at the home of her dear friend Marlo Thomas.  Steinem was as funny as inspiring as when she told students at Smith College's commencement:

In my generation, we were asked by the Smith vocational office how many words we could type a minute, a question that was never asked of then all-male students at Harvard or Princeton. Female-only typing was rationalized by supposedly greater female verbal skills, attention to detail, smaller fingers, goodness knows what, but the public imagination just didn’t include male typists, certainly not Ivy League-educated ones. Now computers have come along, and ‘typing’ is ‘keyboarding’. Suddenly, voila!—men can type! Gives you faith in men’s ability to change, doesn’t it?

 

This post is an invitation to be a fly on the wall of last night's party. But first, it is also to alert you that you are also probably about to throw a party of your own.

The site Ms. Foundation has created in honor of Gloria turning 75 has all the instructions. It calls upon all women to have an outrageous party, and it includes a party kit.

But wait, there’s more.  Here’s what Gloria wants from us:

“Because I have reached the outrageous age of 75, I feel I can call upon people to do an outrageous act every day for 75 days.”  One very demure woman asked, “would a subtle upheaval do?”  The answer came back: “No!  Outrageous is what is called for.”

• Another woman who has a regular gig on CNN (and who is married to a minister) decided she would wear her Wonder Woman T-shirt under her proper business attire and then unbutton her blouse to display it on the air. 
• A conventionally dressed older woman said she’d be showing her tattoo regularly. 
• A stunning singer stood and led everyone in chanting the name Gloria over and over in different keys at different tempos.  She then sang over the chant about the glory of Gloria. 

There was weeping.

During the toasts a young woman stood and said that she didn’t know where she would be without Gloria’s example.  She said that knowing about the battles carried out by Gloria and the other leaders of the women’s movement was the only way she could have possibly believed — in herself, in the possibility of a career, in the respect she now realizes all people are owed. People wept.

Another woman stood and said that though she knew Gloria hates to be called an icon, she had to tell her she had been an icon around her house when she was growing up--- the bad kind!  Her father (famous—but names are being omitted to protect the guilty here) would say things like, “you’re going to grow up to be like that Gloria Steinem!” as if it was the worst damnation he could imagine.*

People laughed till they wept.

Someone told this story: In the first building where Ms. had their offices someone went to the elevator operator and asked “Is it true that this is the building where Gertrude Stein works?”

Marlo Thomas spoke about the time Gloria asked her to go to Detroit to speak to welfare mothers.  Marlo protested that they would hate her, she was not on welfare, she was not a mother.  She represented everything those women would resent.  Gloria said, “trust me.  They’ll love you.”  Marlo Thomas went and what happened was they loved each other.  She wasn’t a welfare mother, but they were all women and she said it was a transformative moment for her and her commitment to women’s rights.

The weeping went on.

A ten-minute video shown at the event outlined the trajectory of a woman’s life and the arc of Steinem's. It told the story of what was once an improbable belief, in a movement that would insist on worldwide equality for all people and what would become part of the standard for human rights.  It showed women who are no longer here.   It showed marching and laughter and cajoling and, most of all, deep connection. 

There was a palpable connection among the women who were present at the creation of the outrageous notion that there should be equal opportunity, equal protection and equal pay for women and therefore for all quadrants in society. It connects us all.  The video also showed Gloria looking exquisite when she was young — as she sat there still looking exquisite, in a long black dress and cowgirl boots, when she no longer is.

It showed us ourselves.  For we are nothing if not the repositories of the history that has taken place in our lifetimes. It was enough to make you weep.

The occasion of this birthday should make us all want to go out and do something outrageous.  I hope everyone reading this does just that.  In celebration of the life of one very purposeful woman and the sense of purpose and possibility she’s added to each of ours.

*(He likely meant both Steinem as undercover Playboy Bunny in the photo on the right, and as the 1972 radical feminist, left -- Ed.)

Poetry Friday: Rumi on Welcoming Spring

 What does a 13th Century Persian/Afghanistani poet/philosopher mystic have to say to women who weren’t born yesterday?  One has only to come to the end of a mid-March week after the clocks were sprung an hour ahead and the light was struggling to imitate spring to understand.

We all get stagnant at times.  We are all in danger of believing what’s in the jug is the only water around.  Perhaps today’s Poetry Friday offering from the great old man himself might remind us otherwise.

-- Laura Sillerman

Come!  Take a pickaxe
And break apart
Your stony self.
The heart’s matrix
is glutted with rubies.
Springs of laughter
are buried in your breast.
Unstop the wine jar
Batter down the door
to the treasury
of nonexistence.
The water in your jug
is brakish and low.
Smash the jug
and come to the river!

At 50, As She Ever Was: Happy Birthday, Barbie.

by Laura Baudo Sillerman

Barbara Millicent Roberts was born on March 9, 1959.  Icon and controversial celebrity, and better known as Barbie, she has been the subject of countess books, magazine articles, Ph.D. dissertations, moms meetings and public harangues—not to mention the inspiration for hundreds of millions of dollars of cosmetic and more radical surgeries.

She has also been beloved and cherished by millions of girls worldwide.

Barbie began in Germany and given America’s confused emotions about the land that inspired her, it is no wonder that we’ve been nothing if not conflicted about her from the beginning. 

Her Wikipedia entry is a good introduction, before you get to  that fascinating "unauthorized biography" by  M.G. Lord, Forever Barbie.  Published in 1994, this dusty volume set out to present the good, the bad and the very ugly sides of Barbie as toy, best friend and fetish.  Fifteen years later, it remains a solid piece of investigative work, born of Lord's desire to decode the hidden meaning behind what became one of our country’s most enduringly passionate romances.

The fact of this much paper being expended on what is really a triumph of marketing is, however, barely the point.

The fact is that for most women of certain ages, Barbie is something we have in common.  And the deeper fact is that at the time when she came into being and for a long part of her lifetime, Barbie was a triumph of emotion over implication—because women were supposed to be about what set them apart from one another.  What’s even more complicated is that Barbie herself was the prime example of that.

Tall (5 feet 9 inches if we extrapolate the scale on which she was built), slender (if you can call as much as 35 pounds underweight, slender) and dressed to kill, for much of her life Barbie could have been about leaving the other girls in the dust. 

Still, when girlfriends got together to play with her, Barbie became not a killer, but a gentle joiner—the friend who let you try on her clothes and was certain to take out her best shoes to lend you as well.  Just recently I mentioned Barbie’s birthday to a group of 30-somethings and they melted into coos of, “Oh, I loved my Barbies” and “I spent hours and hours playing Barbie with my friends.”  and the predictable “I still have my Barbies and all her clothes!”  It’s never only one Barbie—it’s several and there were outfits, cars, houses and tiny lose-able pets and bits that somehow didn’t get lost.

(And, let us not forget, she introduced us to the concept of the less dominant male counterpart.  Ken is barely a footnote.)

So what is the meaning behind Barbie turning 50?  Well, in a country where (at least until recently) we have thought the more disposable the better, she was treasured and kept and even if she lived under the bed for a few months, she almost always was rescued to be retained for a foreseeable lifetime.  Barbie didn’t get traded in, you see.  She may have become outgrown, but not out-sourced.  Only Barbie could fulfill her role in the lives of now several generations of girls and women.

This pretty much makes her her someone like us. Someone who aged, but didn’t lose her value. 

So happy birthday Barbie—you sweet mixed-up, career-minded, superficial and oh-so-deep manifestation of this cock-eyed business of living in the western world.  Who knows what you really meant or if you really hold any deeper meaning at all?  You’ve done a good job of staying on top and keeping it in perspective.  You may be a little plastic, but there’s something about you we love. 

Poetry Friday: Sophie Cabot Black

 Sophie Cabot Black is a poet, mother, administrator and treasure on the American landscape.  As a teacher and decoder of life’s mysteries, she offers the key to poetry’s powers and  the power of her poetry’s unstudied grace.  Here she whispers as she drives and we hear the unmistakable voice of one who considers the world with its inhabitants in mind.

BIRTHDAY

The tree becomes a sign I pass
Of how it has gone on; branches that hold
Up the first stars like waiting candles

Against the coming night. I have learned
To live with less and less 
While the child in the backseat sleeps

Believing she is already home.
Out of her hand falls one shoe,
Her mouth stained with whatever kind
Of paradise she has wished for,

And something I had in mind
Darts across the road, a small animal  
Moving perfectly between tires
As I look back to see nothing changed.

Save Guys and Dolls!

by Laura Baudo Sillerman

For the record, as someone close to both The Producers and Young Frankenstein on Broadway, I have felt both anointment and annihilation from the keyboard of Ben Brantley.  What follows is not meant to question his judgment and does acknowledge his elegance as a sayer of what he thinks.  No journalist today writes with more conviction or background about her or his subject.

Nevertheless, it seems to me that in yesterday’s New York Times, Brantley misses the point of Des McAnuff’s stunning production of Guys and Dolls which opened at the Nederlander Theater last night.  The juxtaposition of video behind the period set says it all.

We have moved beyond these stories, we are here and now, looking back and if what is happening on stage is a little staged and a lot like actors as archetypes, so much the better—because bygone eras deserve the archetypal treatment.

An Open Letter to President Obama, for Washington's Birthday: What can I Do Now?

  One of our board members who would rather remain anonymous than feel self serving has suggested that the anniversary of George Washington’s birth is a good day for circulating this letter to our 44th president.

Dear President Obama,

I am hoping this message will find its way to you or your staff somehow.  I am hoping also that the concept of the “collective unconscious” is what is prompts me to write it; or perhaps such an unconscious, or consciousness, is its goal.

Its message is actually a simple question:  why haven’t you asked more of us?  Why haven’t you told us specifically what you think we can do to help?   We were galvanized, inspired and electrified by the unselfishness you represented to us, by the sense of one nation and the promise of national goals, separate from individual agendas or selfish concerns.  We need you to give us our chores. AmericaServes is a good start, but not enough: Think of the "victory gardens" during World War II, or even the Underground Railroad.

Can we set up tutoring centers in each town in America, staffing them with townspeople qualified in certain subjects at certain levels?  Should we promise to keep them open from 3 to 10 p.m every weekday and for certain hours of the weekends, in accordance with the good practices you will outline for us on a website?

Should we set about providing services for the elderly, cleaning rain gutters, washing windows, shopping for groceries?

Do we need to be collecting all the nickels in all the houses in America for a specific reason?  And do you need to tell us on what day to deliver them and to where?

Is there a use for all the unused balls of yarn in all the knitters’ yarn baskets?  What about the half-used pads of paper in so many homes?  Stamps that are sitting in boxes?  Muscle power going untapped?

My friends and I talk about how we ache to take part in some national goal—and about how we want you to call upon us to make the effort.  We’re not so naïve as to think you don’t have enough to think about without adding this to the list, but we are so hopeful as to believe that your country wants to serve in its own interest as much as we have tapped you to serve it.

Can we rise to a specific task you assign us?  You’ve said it yourself.  Yes we can.

Man on Wire. Or: Movie as Metaphor

by Laura Sillerman


If you are a bit weary of trying to piece together how we got into this economic mess, I recommend viewing “Man on Wire” released in theaters in summer of 2008 and now available on DVD.

It is the story of Philippe Petite, the high wire artist who cunningly, brazenly, crazily, enlisted others to realize his compulsion to, in 1974, sit, stand, dance, lie on a wire strung between the highest points of the World Trade Center towers.

It is a story of devotion, seduction, friendship, obsession, miracles, missions, and mostly it is a metaphor for what it means to be alive on this earth.

No, the metaphor isn’t the obvious one: we are all on the high wire strung between birth and death, not knowing when we are going to dance on air and when we are going to plunge, though I’m certain the experience of seeing this film keys into that curiosity we all have about the perils of simply being alive. 

It is about the wonder that we walk around in our own skins believing we truly can relate to one another enough to make friends, find lovers, marry, have hope about the futures of our children and grandchildren and care about the welfare of others.

It’s about the miracle of mattering to each other.  And the truth:  even walking a mile in Monsieur Petite’s shoes would never help most of us to understand him nor help him to understand the groundlings among us.

Early on in the film, the mature Philippe faces the camera with his eyes focused on some distant high point and explains that when he saw the photo of the proposed towers years before they were built, he said to himself, “They are being built for me.”

Riveted though you very well may be (I certainly was) to the subsequent story of all the high – really high—jinx of the young tight rope walker and the truly suspenseful outlining of his trajectory to the towers.  Touched as you will be by the story of those who literally supported him as he realized this impossible dream.  Bemused as one is by the cast of both shady and light characters surrounding the caper, one can’t help but ask the question, “What planet is this man from?”

The answer is of course ours.  And therein is the answer to the question all of us is probably going to ask at least once today.  What was he/she thinking?  What was my husband thinking when he forgot to do A,B or C.  What was my friend thinking when she said D, E or F?  What was my colleague thinking when she suggested I should do X, Y or Z?  What were those bankers thinking?  The answer is: they were thinking what I would never think because, among other things, though I am the same species as Philippe Petite, my brain would never cause me to think that I would like to walk anywhere besides terra firma.

Man on Wire is nominated for an Academy Award in the Documentary Feature category.  I recommend you see it before the Awards are announced.  It reminds us that just as most of us would never go into Notre Dame Cathedral with an eye toward frolicking high above the Ile de la Cite, it’s possible to care that someone did.

We are all separate on this earth, as unique as fingerprints or snowflakes, and still we love one another and love the same movies, try to forgive or fix things and try to get along.  We stare in disbelief at a young man a quarter mile above Manhattan’s streets on towers that hate brought down 27 years later and still we try to understand one another.

That’s miracle enough for today and reason enough to, grounded or not, go on.

Voices We Love: A Valentine to the Wise.

  by Laura Sillerman

This is a mash note to all the women who know how tell aging like it is-- not as a trial, but as a trail to glory.  They make our hearts beat fast to the rhythm of truth.

 

You'll notice that our great national heroes are US Airways pilot Sully Sullenberger (58) and flight attendants Donna Dent (51), Sheila Dail (57) and Doreen Welsh (58). Admit it, when you get on a plane these days, you feel worried if the crew members don't look as though they're receiving bulletins from the AARP.
-- Gail Collins