Does Nostalgia Makes You Feel All Pensive? Nah. Just thinkin'.

When I was a kid, we were incredibly poor for a while. My mom & dad had split, and my mom, as a single mom, had to quit her nursing training (which at the stage she was at didn't pay the bills) to become a bartender. I'm sure I don't have to tell a lot of folks how little cash comes in when you're a bartender, and how hard it is if you have three kids to take care of, without the help of their dad. (I don't mean this to sound too negative on my dad-- he's a human, and made mistakes like everyone else. His mistakes did cost us, but I've forgiven him a long time ago).

For a very brief time, my mother & I were what one would call homeless. They didn't have that word back then, though. This was in Louisiana, and on the kindness of a woman my mother met, we got some shelter. We were in a tiny shrimping town where there was a long main street with more bars than anything else, a few churches, and a school. I've seen pictures online of the city, and it still looks just about the same, many years later.

The place we ended up living was a gay bar, really a disco. It was a big wooden building painted a hideous shade of lime green with a big shell gravel parking lot in front. Let me tell you, it was not easy being picked up by the school bus in that place, that all the kids knew about. It was kind of on the edge of town-- they would play booray in the day time (a sort of card game big in La) and at night the place was packed with drag queens and party-people. But honestly, it was a pretty normal bar-- I know, cause I got to see a couple of times when we peeked at night. I think, despite what the kids on the school bus thought, it was probably the hippest place in town, and I suspect a lot more than gay folks came there to get their party on.

In the back of the bar there were these living quarters-- it had a living room, kitchen, bathroom and a small bedroom area. It was all closed up, but we could open these two big doors to see the dance floor of the bar. I sometimes tell people of my age that I learned the YMCA before any of you because I learned it the first time around, in the "Studio 54" days of the late 70s early 80s. Yup. I'm cool like that.* I have a short fiction story based on my life there, that you can read here. It's not War & Peace, but it's kind of fun. My mom used to bring me Coca-Colas with lots of maraschino cherries in them.

I think this is partly where my sense of people just being people comes from. One of my mother's friends, Donny, was a bisexual man who liked to dress up as a woman (a drag queen). He was gorgeous, in a tight black velvet pant suit and puffy Dolly Parton-esque blonde wig, long red fingernails, silver jewelry and high heels. Donny used to go sit in truck driver bars in the middle of hicksville La and get truckers to buy him drinks all day. Now that I'm older and know how incredibly dangerous that was for him I'm even more amazed, but he never, as far as I know, was beat up or anything. I don't know if this is a testament to his skill at convincing those truckers he was a woman, or that perhaps more of them were amenable to "difference" than one would think.

They used to let kids into these places as long as you were with a parent. I liked to play pinball and the jukebox and I remember being in one of those bars playing pinball for hours and listening to Tanya Tucker's "Texas"** and New Orleans Ladies on the Jukebox. People used to give me quarters to play songs (back then, you could get a bunch of them from just a quarter). I think cause they felt some sort of strange pity for this little stringy haired kid in a bar and thought somehow a few songs or pinball games would make it better. But really, that was one of the fun parts of my childhood. It's not nearly as weird as you might think. Those bars used to be dark, and smoky, and there were always these jars of translucent, somehow eerily green-glowing pickled quails' eggs on them. Now that I think about it, I'm not sure why all the bars had to have these-- I think it goes back to pub food, and a historical sense that places like that ought to have something like this kind of food.

Donny married a bi woman, and once, when my sister came to town, both of them hit on her. So that's sort of funny, but it's just one of those things. My mother used to call bisexuals "AC/DC" like "alternating and direct current." (Not the band, man. The electrical stuff). I like that idea, actually. Because it's a wiring thing-- it doesn't say one particular kind of electric wiring is superior or inferior; it's just different. Because I think our sexuality is something we're born with, the idea of "wiring" makes sense in a way that a lot of people just don't get. Your walls don't choose to be either/or-- they are wired that way. And you can't convert your AC wiring to DC by telling it to just be different.

The moral of this story is that people, no matter where they live or who they are, mostly just want to live their lives as best as they can. It may not be the same way that you yourself live, but that doesn't mean it's evil, or will corrupt children. I grew up as normal as anyone else-- have a stable marriage and lots of ambition-- living in what pundits call an alternative culture did not change me for the worse. And unlike a lot of people might think, I was a very conservative kid (waited till very late in the game for my first boyfriend, and married the second "serious" boyfriend I ever had).

But man, does it make for some interesting stories. While folks from middle-class suburban upbringing were growing up with birthday parties, clowns, trips to Chuck-e-cheese and stuff, my life was a bit of a soap opera. I'll tell you more about it sometime, if you wanna hear some other good stories. But that's probably enough about me for today.

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*I have a "list" on amazon.com that talks about this a bit more from a funny perspective, called "So You Want to be a Drag Queen Trapped in a Woman's Body." If you go there to see it, vote for me and get me on the top 100 listmania listers.

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**It's sort of funny that I ended up in Texas, and I agree with the lyrics of that song in many ways. When I first met my Texan husband, I always told him he looked like a cowboy (he kinda does.)