Hooray for Pubic Health*!
I sometimes joke that I got into sex education through the back door. No, not that back door, silly…
Secret Ingredients
My grandmother was typically a pretty poor cook. But then she’d knock out a Thanksgiving feast of such perfection that it might have gotten the European invaders to agree not to rip off the Natives. (No, I mean REALLY agree. And keep it.) WTF??? My mom, on the other hand, was usually a great cook. Not so much in the lean years. […]
Lesbianism – It Ain’t for Sissies Part 2
So there I was, entering high school, and along with all the other anxieties (‘Will anyone like me?’ ‘Can I pass geometry?’) was the worry that I might be a lesbian. My mom had as much as told me I was after she caught me and a girlfriend kissing. The gross tongue-stabbling I got from my first date pretty much […]
Lesbianism – It Ain’t for Sissies
Before I get into the heart of this post, I must comment on what it’s like to type the word “ain’t.” I use it occasionally in vernacular speech, if I want to sound blue-collar-cool, or make some kind of point. But I wonder if I’ve ever actually written it before. If I have, I must have been on my second […]
Food and Drink and Love and Sex and…Health???
So far, this blog is chronicling how I came to be interested in the topics of food, sex, love, relationship, health and nature – enough to link them in my book in progress, Licking the Spoon. My first food was breast milk, the best food for an infant, only I don’t remember it. What I do remember was the sexy […]
Who Needed “Girls Gone Wild?”
When I was 10, I learned a new word: Lesbian. My mom called me one. And it was not meant the way kids call each other “gay” today, even though that isn’t nice either. She was genuinely worried…
Innocence Lost and Found Part 3
In Innocence Lost and Found Part 1 and Part 2, I began describing the year I spent in a small New Jersey town when I was eight: Cool Walter who claimed me with his kiss in the woods behind the baseball diamond. My upwardly mobile and disappointingly racist mom. Jealous Melinda, rich Nancy. African-American Cassandra being treated like a contagious […]
Innocence Lost and Found Part 2
If you haven’t already, I suggest you go back and read Part I of Innocence Lost and Found, in which I began describing the third-grade year I spent in an idyllic New Jersey town. Only, it wasn’t so idyllic…
Innocence Lost and Found
When I was eight, I did a brief stint in prison. By “prison” I mean a small town in New Jersey. Don’t get me wrong; there were some lovely things about that town. It was the pastoral small town of times gone by, with only two main streets, a lake in the middle, and the kind of safety that permitted […]
Pretty Girls, Phallic Symbols and the Mysterious Human Brain
I don’t know why, but I wrote my first poem when I was six. It was an ode to female beauty that started, “Her face was the color of peaches and cream, with strawberry juice in between.” Not exactly subtle, huh. Born already of stories about blushing princesses and sleeping beauties that so shape the young lives of women. I […]
