Pat and I have been buddies since NWSA (National Women’s Studies Assoc.) in 1983 at Ohio State when Pat launched the Party Caucus as antidote to our politically correct sisters who were too ready to judge and censure. I hadn’t seen Pat since NWSA 2001 in Minneapolis and up the north shore at the Scenic Café. When I picked her up in Orlando, we resumed what seemed a continuous flow of words with no ten year gap.
Lisa joined us for lunch at a new sushi place in Baldwin Park. In 1987 after an international women’s conference in Dublin, Lisa, Pat and I rented a car and toured the northern UK. We made slow progress because both Lisa and Pat were snapping pictures, Lisa of landscapes and Pat of formal gardens. We reminisced about our first trip to the Isle of Skye shortly after the Solstice where we’d never seen daylight linger so long, the sun melting so slowly into the misty water almost at midnight.
Pat has been writing memoirs about her Irish Catholic childhood in South Boston and her mother’s fondness for the Jesuits. Pat creates witty scenes full of dialogue for the battles she fought with her mother “The Beak.” We read and critiqued each other’s memoirs and talked about our mothers.
Sunday evening Yvonne and Joan came with wine and snacks. We watched interviews from the Lesbian Nuns tour that I couldn’t watch on my own: Donahue, Sally Jessie Raphael, and an odd one on LA TV. SJR, our first national TV splash, was as awful as I remember, but Donahue was better. Yvonne and Pat had seen the original shows, and both had interviewed me in 1985, Yvonne for the Orlando Sentinel and Pat for Gay Community News in Boston. But it was all new for Joan, who exclaimed about how adept Nancy and I were at answering or deflecting rude intrusive questions, how we turned our answers into feminist messages. Experiencing it with supportive friends now inspires me to get on writing my memoirs.
Carolyn Gage forwarded a new interview with Judith Brown (Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy, 1986) which also inspires me to get going: http://www.religiondispatches.org/books/sexandgender/4845/les
On Tuesday Lisa joined us again for an award-winning lunch on Park Avenue in in Winter Park and then for a tour of Eatonville where we stopped at the Zora Neale Hurston Museum or Arts and Humanities. I told Pat how we launched the first Zora Festival back in 1988, and it’s still going strong: http://www.zorafestival.com/
By the time Pat left it seemed we’d circled the globe several times politically, spiritually, emotionally, intellectually with our memories and ideas.
Next entry in about ten days with news: Home: What does it mean? Email your thoughts to rkeefe66@msn.com or add a comment here.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please add comments here.