The Total Femme

The other night I had an anxiety dream, a real classic. I was in a musical, it was dress rehearsal, and I had completely neglected to learn my lines, my songs, my blocking, the whole nine yards. When it came time for me to sing my song, I looked at the director and said, “I didn’t quite get to it yet,” and she sighed and moved on. The best thing about this dream was that the director was Tex’s boss, who is no fucking joke and for sure would have blown my hair completely off it this had happened in real life.

Here’s to the folks who bust their asses learning their lines and songs and blocking so that we in the audience can sit back and enjoy. Here’s to the directors who bring it all together and keep it going. Here’s to the people back stage who also bring it all together and keep it going, lighting, sound, props, all of you. Here’s to the people back and front of the house, the board members, the volunteers. You make it roll and we are so grateful!

And here’s to Hilltown Theater Anonymous, deets below and on their website, for keeping all of the above and more alive in Western Mass! HTA, you get one pingy-dingy! Thank you for your hard work, your creativity, and your love of being on the boards – beautiful, surprising, delightful!

Hilltown Theatre Anonymous: A Journey of Magic, Community, and Theatre

A Night of Surprise

Hilltown Theatre Anonymous is an annual theatre event in Western Massachusetts. Each year, we come together to tell/re-tell/un-tell one of Shakespeare’s stories through the prism of our Hilltown community.

Our shows are cast and rehearsed in secret, which means that each actor meets one-on-one with their director. 

On the night of the performance, everyone sits in the audience. The actors speak their first lines from their seat in the audience, and then make their way onstage.

https://www.ericaterpeningromeo.com/hilltown-theatre-anonymous

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. Is there someplace online that you particularly adore? Send it my way and I’ll slap it into the Pingy-Dingy lineup! thetotalfemme@gmail.com

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 and pandemic prevent 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.”) And…as I go through life life life, I will post as I am able, Mabel.

This January, when I was first diagnosed with LADA (latent, auto-immune, diabetes, adult-onset) and had just gotten out of the ICU, I mean hours earlier, I was sent to an endocrinologist’s office to get educated in this new hell. In the midst of slapping a continuous glucose monitor on my arm and watching me do a practice shot of insulin and generally introducing me to this new horrific chapter of my life, the endocrinologist muttered, “Of course, the weight will come back.”

            Excuse me? The who, the what?

It’s true that I’d lost weight in the illness that led up to me being admitted to the ICU, but so what if it came back? Wouldn’t that mean I was maybe starting to be healthy again? Later, this endocrinologist stopped working with people with diabetes to focus entirely on working with people around weight loss, so I guess her comment made sense. At least, to her and her line of work.

            To me, it was another blow in a series of blows hard enough to blow this femme way the fuck off course and about drown her in seas where there be many, many monsters. Why did we have to dredge up old struggles around weight and all that entails when I had just been diagnosed with a horrible, life-changing disease? Did that endo really fucking need to go there right then? And yet she did, and people do – make these off-the-cuff remarks that end up burrowing under your skin and nestling right up against your poor, struggling heart.

            Yours may not be a conflicted past relationship with food and body, but don’t we all have wounds from the past that rear up to confront us when we’re just going about our lives, minding our own business? Always such a shock, always so sad and difficult to be catapulted back to something so painful and fucked up. Depending on the depth of the wound, it takes a while to claw yourself back up out of that hole, that deep, haunted place.

            Speaking of haunting, that phrase haunts me, “The weight will come back.” It’s not because I’m worried about gaining a few pounds, it’s more the doctor’s pronouncement on me – me, who she was meeting for the first time smack dab in the middle of extreme crisis. Crisis for me. For her, just another day at the office. But because of the power imbalance, her words – her prophecy – hit me hard. She’s not seeing me, she’s not curious about my unique strengths and weaknesses, what I might accomplish as myself, she’s just seeing a conglomeration of patients past and pronouncing judgement.

            It’s an invisibility, a lack of attention, a brush off. As a queer femme, I already know way too much about those.

            Another time and post for how diabetes is a new kind of closet (it is, and I want to write about it eventually – I fucking hate a damn closet!), now let’s think about the weight of other peoples’ casual assumptions and judgements of us. Haven’t we had to field so many of those, my charmers, my darlings, my delights, my sparkling sprites? They echo, they come up in the middle of the night with our other cackling demons, they sap the strength right out of our spines.

            FUCK THEM!!!

Today, beloveds, turn and give them the finger, give them the boot, give them the ol’ heave ho. You are allowed to have weaknesses, you are allowed to make mistakes, you are allowed to fail and fumble and be frail and foolish. You are also allowed to go about healing in your own particular ways. When those judgements or assumptions surprise and side-swipe you, have compassion for yourself and let them carry themselves on through with the volition of their own shittyness. They can go to hell! Try not to capture them, let them pop like bubbles. Easier said than done, I know, especially in the middle of a hard night.

You’re not alone. You’re not broken. We’re here together, pushing back together, shouting, “Fuck you!” together.

Our own effulgent queer femme power shining through.

Every Monday I offer a Meditation for Queer Femmes, in the spirit of my maternal grandmother, Mimi, who was fabulous, and from whom I inherited her Meditations for Women.

At the Total Femme, my intention has been to post three times a week: Meditations for Queer Femmes on Monday, Pingy-Dingy Wednesday on Wednesday, and Femme Friday on Friday. Lately, I’ve just been concentrating on Mondays. And sometimes weeks go by… I’m here, though. I’m here. Do you have a post you’d like to share? That would be fucking awesome! Contact me at thetotalfemme@gmail.com

Getting dressed the other day, I looked in the bedroom mirror at my been-through-the-wringer-62-year-old body and for the first time in my life, pretty sure, the word that came into my mind was, “Sturdy.”

            I was surprised.

            I’ve said so so so many other, unloving words to and about my body over the years. Over and over. Even after a lot of hard work addressing body image and fatphobia and misogyny and so much all the rest of it, I would still come up with those angry, ugly words at my sweet self in the mirror.

            Sturdy is so beautiful, though. Sturdy is strong and solid and satisfying. Sturdy is brave and beautiful and bodacious. Sturdy is I own it and I am all that and I will prevail. Sturdy is queer and keepin’ on and cute as hell. Sturdy is sexy and super sweet and sinister.

Sturdy is still here.

My brave, my prevailing, my sweet super sweet sexy sinister queer femme sisters, how much have you done, how hard have you worked, how many difficulties and disappointments and down-hearted slopes have you navigatedgottenthroughmanagedfiguredout to get to this very frabjous day?

Sosososososo many, I know.

Oh, look in the mirror.

See what I see.

Tell yourself that different story, the elusive one, the one The Man hates, the one that’s been kept from you and denied you and held out of reach.

Today, it is right here for the enjoying.

Tomorrow, too.

For the rest of your life.

Sturdy.

So sturdy.

We are.

Every Monday I offer a Meditation for Queer Femmes, in the spirit of my maternal grandmother, Mimi, who was fabulous, and from whom I inherited her Meditations for Women.

At the Total Femme, my intention has been to post three times a week: Meditations for Queer Femmes on Monday, Pingy-Dingy Wednesday on Wednesday, and Femme Friday on Friday. Lately, I’ve just been concentrating on Mondays. And sometimes weeks go by… I’m here, though. I’m here. Do you have a post you’d like to share? That would be fucking awesome! Contact me at thetotalfemme@gmail.com