The Total Femme

50 years ago this past week, my chunky little 7-year old butt was sitting on Maria Soda’s scratchy living room wall-to-wall while we watched Neil Armstrong boing-boing on the moon. Later Maria would drop me like a hot potato when she entered 5^th grade, and I would begin trying to understand why certain black kids were calling me  “honky” when I  was bussed to a junior high where other kids hadn’t had the experience of going to integrated grade schools the way I had. But for the moment, Maria and I were tight, I hadn’t had much education on the history and fallout of systemic racism, and what was happening on the tv was weird and exciting.

Gil Scott-Heron, you get one pingy-dingy! Thank you for going up against all the hype and hoopla surrounding that long ago moon landing then and now.

I’m a typewriter whompin’, card catalogue lovin’ white girl from back in the day, and I yearn for a time before the covers of trade paperbacks were all squidgy, so you can imagine that I don’t actually understand what a pingback is. I do know that it can in some way be part of spreading the love, and since that’s what I’m all about at The Total Femme… every Wednesday, I pay homage to the laughter, love, and inspiration to be had elsewhere online.

At the Total Femme, my intention is to post three times a week: Meditations for Queer Femmes on Monday, Pingy-Dingy Wednesday on Wednesday and Femme Friday on Friday. Rather than play catch-up in a stressful fashion on those weeks when life prevents posting, I have decided to just move gaily forward: if I miss a Monday, the next post will be on Wednesday, and so on. Thank you, little bottle of antibiotics for inspiring me in this! (“…if it’s almost time for the next dose, skip the missed dose and continue your regular dosing schedule. Don’t take a double dose to make up for a missed one.”)