| OK, so here I have some excerpts from "Body Alterations" - if you're going to plagiarize me, at least give a little credit in lieu of royalties... |
| Then there�s the bright green lumberjack shirt I bought my freshman year for $4.50 at a thrift store. My mother was so horrified by the whole concept that she had an ongoing plot to get rid of it. I wore it so often that one summer at Rehoboth Beach, one of my friends found me because he saw me wearing it. I was at the other end of the beach and we never would have seen each other if it hadn�t been for that shirt.
OK, so back to the flannel pants. One day it dawned on me that if these pants I loved so much were so warm that maybe I should try wearing them to class on a chilly morning. Well, during my senior year (the first one), I had Kinesiology for Dancers three days a week at 8AM. Ugh. I actually made it on time for every class, due in no small part to the fact that I lived a one-minute walk from the dance building. One morning, upon waking at 7:52, I decided this was the perfect day to experiment (especially since I didn�t appear to have much choice otherwise). I brushed my teeth, put on a hat and sweatshirt, and ran out the door. Now, it was the dead of winter and the University of Maryland, for reasons unknown to me, is a pretty windy campus. I think it has something to do with the McKeldin Mall Wind Tunnel: a tree-lined mall with McKeldin Library at one end and Administration at the other and a fountain in the center The ferocious winter winds generated in the area are forced up and down the Mall so hard that my friend Patrick (at about 5�11� and 120 lbs) was forced to lean into the wind at a forty-five degree angle just to be able to move forward. Only once did I witness the wind die during this and I was afforded one of the most artful faceplants ever. The point is that this very wind is what blew up my pants leg at 7:58 AM on an overcast winter day with a windchill factor hovering near zero. I let out quite a yell and made it to the dance department in precisely 20 seconds. My friend Andrea, also in flannel pants, looked at me and said �I love these things! Aren�t they just SO WARM?� Hers were cuffed. |
| The Fashion Plate... |
| On the way home, we spotted a homo-identified car. For all the straight people, that means there was some kind of rainbow sticker on the car. We all got incredibly excited, because as young, freshly-out happy homos, we wanted to make sure all other homos in the world knew we were there and we wanted to meet them. I can�t explain this any other way, but nothing brightens up your day more than seeing that little rainbow or pink triangle and realizing one of your Lavender Brothers or Sapphic Sisters is out there with you.
So, we got excited and said �Hey Martha, speed up so we can wave.� The Little Red Sports Car of Hair Trauma Infamy leaped forward, little engine whining away. The two women in the car exchanged perplexed looks, as all they could see was a flash of red encasing three screaming, terrified queers. After several attempts, Martha managed to pace them and we waved madly while the two women tried vainly to ignore us. What we were trying to do, in our college-activist-we�re-here-queer-and-proud kind of way, was say �Look at us! We�re gay, too, isn�t that cool? Tenile suddenly cried �They need a sign!� and grabbed my Freedom Rings dangling from my neck and thrust them out the window. I really wish she had let me take them off first. So the women finally saw what we were doing and smiled and waved back at us. Beaming, we continued on our merry way. See? I told you it would make our day! |
| Riding in Cars with Homos... |
| It looked so good, we decided to re-dye my hair blue when the color started to fade. Since we wanted the color to last longer, I made the brilliant decision to keep the dye in my hair for even longer before rinsing. Heaven forbid we look into a more permanent form of dye itself. So we doubled the amount of setting time and I had to spend an extra 20 minutes scrubbing the resultant blue crust from my hair. Unbeknownst to me, during the rinse cycle, enough blue dye ran down my forehead to settle into my eyebrows. Ricarda was too busy standing at the edge of the shower going �Nope, keep scrubbing,� to notice what was going on. It wasn�t until the toweling off that I looked in the mirror and realized I had Technicolor eyebrows. Now, I look back and think, with everything else I did to myself, why was I worried about having blue eyebrows? For some reason, it just didn�t seem right at the time (but the blue hair did) and I discovered that if I scrubbed the brows in question firmly enough, I managed to do nothing more than give my sinuses a ferocious tweak, so I gave up. |
| He wore Bluuuuuuue Vel-vet! |
| Everything was fine and dandy until the first time something touched my ear. I just about went through the ceiling, and that was just toweling off after a shower and having my hair brush up against the new wound. The sensation went through my ear, rattled my brain and shot down my spine. Better yet, everyone kept reaching out to touch it saying, �Did that hurt?� Well, only when you bang on it with your clumsy paws making me dance around the room in tears, you evil cow. The woman who used to cut my hair actually took the end of her comb and tapped on it with the requisite �Did that hurt?� I didn�t really mean to scream like a howler monkey, but reflexive pain response took over. The best part is that you don�t have to avoid sleeping on the opposite side of the piercing for three months. It�s more like a year. Cartilage takes nearly that long to heal and preserve the hole, an interesting and necessary tidbit they neglect to tell you when you have this procedure done. |
| Why I haven't Pierced My Ear Cartilage Again... |