The Annotated Echo, Chapter 4: The First bleeder, or, childe echo’s Pilgrimage: tales of an early bloomer who never grew up

“This is where my ghost hangs out. “

—Run to the City

“My Virginity turns twenty-three”

—Show Me Your Facebook Page

I was never a teenager. I turned thirteen, and fourteen, and seventeen, and all the ages that teenagers are supposed to do, but I never did the things that teenagers are supposed to do. I never went to parties, or had a boyfriend, or had sex, or got a job, or learned to drive. All I did during those years was study and think about childhood friends I hadn’t spoken to in a very long time. I had my reasons for avoiding the well-trod path of Sex, Drugs, and Rock ‘n Roll—mostly that I thought I was better than everyone else, and was terribly uncomfortable with the whole idea of adolescence, because I thought it was dumb and cliche and that I was too good for it—but in avoiding these infamous rites I also ended up avoiding other, more practical and useful ones—see: getting a job and learning to drive. Because adolescence is a stupid place, but it’s also the only way to reach adulthood; it’s an island you have to stop at for supplies to take with you to adulthood land, which is a larger and more influential continent, but one where they at least speak the same language. The ultimate effect of my refusal was that I woke up one day at age twenty like somebody who had slept through the last seven years, in a world that I did not recognize.

Perhaps it shouldn’t have mattered, because teenagers are a social construct anyway. A professor of mine once said that teenagers were invented in the 1950s, and before the 1950s there was just childhood and adulthood, and maybe flappers, and that’s it. But it did matter, because refusing to do regular cliche teenage things didn’t save me from having tons of angst in my own special way. Once, I found myself reading Sylvia Plath’s Wikipedia bio, and there was a section that quoted her letters to her mother in her first or second year of college, saying that “the world” was “splitting open at [her] feet like a ripe, juicy watermelon.” (brainpickings.org) I found myself intensely jealous of Sylvia Plath, because the last time I felt that open and powerful, I was about twelve years old. I think there’s a special place in Hell for people who are jealous of Sylvia Plath, but at least when she was nineteen or twenty, she was feeling the correct emotions, the correct degree of openness to the world, at the correct life stage. I, on the other hand, felt at the age of thirteen, that my life was over before it began.

 I usually fail to draw attention to the irony that although I maintain that I never grew up, I actually started puberty early, in the technical sense. Maybe that’s one of the reasons I was so tired of it by the time I was thirteen. I felt humiliated about having visible breasts at the age of nine and starting my period at eleven, and so in some sense I was probably compensating for those uncontrollable incidents by refusing to get a steady job until I was twenty-two and to refuse to have sex until I was even older than that. I would refuse to be type-cast as an early bloomer in adulthood.

When I got my first period at age eleven, I acted like it was a tragedy. It wasn’t that I minded the sight of blood so much or that I didn’t know what it was. It was that I was only eleven, and that I had gotten it before any of my other friends, and that made me feel very lonely and also very sinful, like I had had trespassed upon the territory of growing up. But I shouldn’t have acted so shocked. I had had ample warning from my body for the last two years, and I had known about periods since I was very small; in fact I don’t remember ever not knowing about them. The previous year, my friend Jocelyn and I had given a presentation at the Science Fair to the younger kids to teach them about the Reproductive System, complete with a life-size model of the uterus and fallopian tubes and ovaries. When our Science teacher told the entire fourth grade class that our term assignment would be presentations on different systems of the human body, Jocelyn and I shot up our hands and called emphatically, “Reproductive System. We wanna do the Reproductive System,” before anyone else. 

Jocelyn constructed the model from clay—the uterus was blue, the fallopian tubes were red, and the ovaries were yellow—and I explained to the seven-year-olds and eight-year-olds what each of these things did, and I explained that the word menstruation came from the old Latin word for month, because it happens once a month, concluding my speech with, “and that’s what you probably know as ‘a woman’s period.’”  I looked at the smaller children for some sort of eyebrow action, some moment of recognition, at the reveal that all these things that were going on with all these exotic words like ovum and menses and the colloquial expression “getting your period” were one and the same, and I was surprised that only some of them went, “oh, so that’s how it works,” that half of these little girls had never heard of periods before, that they had never heard of this thing that I had known about since I was three, that had loomed so large in my psyche for the last couple of years that I had nightmares about it sometimes. But as I stood there explaining about the estrogen and progesterone and the uterus lining building up and getting released at the end of each month when it discovered that it was not needed and exiled itself through the vagina, I didn’t once giggle and I didn’t once freeze up, because I was a good student and I wanted to impress the teachers with how mature I could be when discussing things that might make reduce lesser nine-year-olds to a pile of laughter or sweat (even the video resources we had been assigned featured a cartoon sperm and a cartoon egg with eyes drawn on them, winking at each other), and because I wanted to impress the younger children with my knowledge of the mysteries of growing up. 

But although I was okay with puberty in theory, I did not care for it in practice. There had been one incident the previous summer, when I was at a family gathering, sitting at a table with my parents, grandmother, grandfather, and uncle, that haunted me in particular. I was eating cherries and I dropped one, and it fell into my crotch area, spreading its blood-red juice on the pale lavender fabric of my shorts, and my seventy-six-year-old grandmother said, “Oh. That reminds me! I think Samantha will be getting her period soon.” I was silent. I couldn’t yell at her; I was too shocked to even be angry. All I could think about was the fact that she had filled the minds of my grandfather and uncle with the image of blood coming out of my vagina. What kind of a sick perv would do that? I may have mumbled something about how I was only nine-and-a-half, before excusing myself from the table to go wash my shorts and cry. My grandmother then proceeded to email me a memoir about the time she got her first period, in 1932, when she was ten years old, and how her mother had slapped her in the face, and said, “you’re a woman now.” The slap was a Jewish tradition, apparently, but when I first heard the story, I couldn’t help but think it was a punishment. A punishment for premature menstruation, for being a ten-year-old child who trespassed on the territory of womanhood.  I tried to reassure myself that I wouldn’t be ten when I got my first period. I wasn’t even the tallest or the most developed girl in my class, and if my armpits and my groin were exploding with hair that year, well, that wasn’t such a big change anyway, I had always been hairy.

There was one girl in my class who had her period already, even though she had only just turned ten. Her name was Lana Green. Her premature menstrual ability was an object of laughter and shock and gossip all over our fourth grade class, but the fates had compensated her nicely: she was blonde, and she happened to be a professional model who was featured on the cover of a couple of children’s books that year, one of those series about girls and horses; she was one of the most popular girls in school. When her period happened, she had run out of class abruptly to the bathroom and then run back into the class and exclaimed in front of everybody in earshot, in her predictably valley-girl accent, “Oh. My. God. You guys. I just got my period! Oh my god did I say that out loud?” Everyone laughed at her that day, and everyone was uncomfortable, but she remained popular. She herself was not an object of ridicule, only her period and the fact of its premature existence were. 

I could not afford such an early period. I wasn’t popular at all. I was already a strange, spacey, slightly unibrowed girl who sang opera and wore her great-grandmother’s antique necklaces to school and had such hairy arms that one of the boys had asked “are you going to be a dog when you grow up?” in kindergarten. Having an early period would just give everyone another thing to make fun of. But short of praying or starving my hormones into submission, there was nothing I could do to stop it. On July 17th, the summer after fifth grade was over, on a night when I was approximately eleven years and five months old, I was taking one of those blissful late afternoon summer naps and thinking about one of my crushes, and as I drifted through fantasy and in and out of sleep, I felt a pain that was both unfamiliar and dull, and when I got up to go to the bathroom, my white underwear was blotted with pink. Yes, pink. I had dreaded this moment for two years and so the Universe was handling me gently, like it was, well, firing me from my childhood, but not so much firing me as “letting me go.” The thin, dilute quality of the flow made it pink. I guess you could say it was more of a comma than a period. But it was there, and I had never seen anything like it, and I knew exactly what it was, and that there was no turning back from this moment that I had been dreading for the last two years. It was here. When I told my mother, I at first pretended I was okay with it, but later that same evening, I climbed into bed with her like a four-year-old whose pet had just died. “Don’t tell daddy,” I said. Then I went back to the bathroom, and I flushed those lightly stained panties down the toilet, because they were mocking me, and I knew that even if I could wash the blood out of them, I would be reminded of this unhappy night every time I saw them. As the blood flow increased over the next couple of days, it hit me again and again that my girlhood was in decline, and my childhood was gone forever, as decidedly unfindable as my high-cut, floral-printed panties making their journey through the mysterious New York City Sewage System. 

Later that same week, my mom got me what I suppose were hybrids of congratulatory, apology, and get-well-soon presents that suited my hyper-feminine personality: a bunch of hair clips, and—I swear I’m not making this up-- a shirt with a topless mermaid on it; a topless mermaid with rhinestone nipples. It occurred to me that I probably would not be able to wear this shirt to school, and I wondered where on earth she had bought it—a titty bar? What kind of a mother gets her eleven-year-old daughter a gift from a titty bar? Mine, apparently. Even so, I loved the shirt. I loved mermaids. And I knew that she meant well. But after a few more days of womanhood, the color of the hair clips mocked me, being the same shade of burgundy as my discarded uterine lining, as did the small, pointy bosoms of the topless mermaid’s curvy figure, being so like my own small but undeniable tits.  Unable to keep it in any longer, I threw these gifts across my room and moaned the eraser-blunt but entirely sincere lament that had been approaching a crescendo inside me ever since my family members had pointed at my chest two years prior and exclaimed, “ooh, look. Sammy has budding bosoms.” “I’m an overdeveloped freak! I’m an overdeveloped freak! I’M AN OVERDEVELOPED FREAK! WHY, MOM? WHY DO YOU MOCK ME WITH THE CURVY TITS MERMAID AND THE PERIOD-COLORED HAIR CLIPS! HOW CRUEL! I’M AN OVERDEVELOPED FREAK!! THERE IS NOTHING TO CELEBRATE.” 

   At some point during this milestone I went to the window to yell at God. I imagined God as a lean, suit-wearing, brief-case-carrying thirty-something businessman type (basically I thought God was Don Draper, even though the show Mad Men hadn’t been invented yet).  Since most of the adult males in my life were gay or Bohemian, this Madison Avenue Businessman God that I conjured in my mind was the most exotic, mystical image, and the most removed from my world, a more distant and foreboding image of the divine masculine than any white-bearded sage or floating, smoky head could have been.  Only an asshole like Madison Avenue Businessman God would give an eleven-year-old her period. In my mind, I stormed into the glassy, high-rise office of this cold and corporate heaven and demanded to speak with the Manager in all this premature period-distributing. 

“Seriously, God?” I demanded. “Seriously? Is this your idea of a joke? An eleven-year-old girl who can make babies? What is this, olden days or something? Do you want me to have a baby RIGHT NOW, God? Is that what you WANT? Do you WANT me to grow UP right now? I don’t. But you win. Of course, you win.” 

I felt so alone in my body; knowing that none of my friends had gotten their periods yet; I was the only one. And then I had to go TELL them, because that’s what you do, right? You go TELL your friends. 

I had only two really close friends to tell: Jocelyn, who had done the Science Project with me, and Cassie, who was my next-door neighbor and whom I had known since age four, but I had to force myself to tell them. I really, really did not want to tell them, but it would seem like a betrayal if I didn’t, because they both knew I was more developed than they were already and that I would be the first one to bleed out her vagina, and that it would be rude of my not to tell them.  I would call Jocelyn first, I decided. 

Jocelyn was a relatively new friend.  We had gone to the same school since the age of six, and I had always admired her intelligence, but between the ages of six and nine she had openly disliked me, because she thought I was a slut: when I was six, I had kissed a boy named Jeremy on the lips in front of our entire class. Then Jeremy transferred to a different school, and when we were nine, Jocelyn suddenly took a new interest in me, and she invited me to join this new religion that she and her other friend Delaney had invented. The religion was Fairyism, and its main doctrine was that the three of us were actually fairies/aliens from another planet inhabiting temporary humanoid avatars as a sort of social experiment. This made sense to me. 

In the space of two years, my friendship with Jocelyn had blossomed. One time during an idle moment in class, when we were nine years old, Jocelyn was braiding my hair and her hands strayed to the fabric of my shirt, which was especially silky—it was one of my favorite shirts, depicting a detailed urban scene with fire escapes and newspapers and crowds against a silver background—and as she stroked the soft fabric around my shoulders and arms, her hands moved towards the area of my chest; I panicked slightly and had one single thought: maybe she won’t notice—but her hands paused and rested there on my grape-sized but undeniably tangible tits—and my heart sank as I thought, she definitely notices—and she swung her head around to look at my face, and, with a sly smirk, she said “you’re starting.”

“Yes.” I said, but the tone of voice I said it in was more like, you win. You got me. I had never felt less feminine or more clunky than I did at that moment. “Are you?”  I knew she wasn’t. I didn’t have to ask, and I felt slightly cruel when I put my hand up to her chest, all rib and nipple and no squish at all, and said, “no.” But I had had this tiny desperate moment after she noticed, when I hoped that her chest would respond to my question and inject estrogen into the bumps underneath her nipples instantly, the way Cinderella’s thin, ragged frock expands in the space of seconds into her ballgown when her Fairy Godmother taps her with a wand. But no, Jocelyn’s body had betrayed me, and I was alone with my freak breasts and my head that I couldn’t even turn because my four-inches-in-a-year growth spurt was giving me a stiff neck.

Occasionally, Jocelyn would point to other girls’ chests and blurt out, “you’re starting;” ten-year-olds with breast buds seemed to fascinate her, and so I knew that she would want to know about this new development in my crotch area.  In fact, I even she suspected that she would be angry if I didn’t tell her and she somehow found out on her own. So, I took a deep breath, and called her up on the phone, and in a somber voice, I told her. 

 “Oh,” she said. “Wow. This is just…are you…are you sure?”

“Yes.” 

“You’re eleven, right?”

“I’m eleven-and-a-half.” It occurred to me then that I was really only eleven and five months, so technically Jocelyn was right, but at least it was summer. At least it was evening. At least I hadn’t gotten it in school. All of these things were blessings, I reminded myself, as silence filled the phone line, as I waited for Jocelyn to say something. 

“Pads or tampons?” Jocelyn asked. I’m not sure whether she was asking because she wanted to know what to do when she got hers, or because she wanted to know whether I was putting things in my vagina or simply under my vagina, or because she simply could not think of anything else to say.

“Pads.” 

 “Good choice,” she said, her voice uncharacteristically shy and soft. 

  More silence. I knew it was my turn to talk, but what was there to say? That my blood was pink at first and then it got red the next day? That I begged my mom not to tell my dad, because it was a woman’s mystery and too embarrassing for men to even think about? I suppose I could have told her all this, but the truth was that I really did not want to talk about it. I just felt that I was required to. Finally, Jocelyn talked again.

“Ummm…Sammy….?” She said.

“Yeah?”

“Can I tell my mom?” 

“I’d prefer if you didn’t.”

“Oh. But I mean, I’d feel a lot more comfortable with this whole situation if I could tell my mom.”

“Ummmm…I don’t know.”  I’d feel a lot more comfortable? I thought. What does she even mean by that? Is she disgusted with me now? Is it such a burden for her have the knowledge of my blood-streaming vagina that she needs to have her mom carry it with her? 

“Please? Please can I tell my mom?”

“I…I’d really rather keep this between us.”

“Oh. Okay….well…congratulations?”

“Thanks.”

“Okay, bye, now.”

“Bye.”

Well, at least I had gotten it over with. Now I had to tell Cassie. Since Cassie didn’t go to our school, she and Jocelyn had only met once, at my tenth birthday party. They had performed a séance on the Ouija Board Cassie had given me as a birthday gift, during which the two of them asked the spirits of the dead if they guy I was crushing on liked me back. They said yes. I didn’t believe them. 

I decided I would wait to tell Cassie in person. She was a little uptight about discussing such things, even though we showered together and she had no reason to be surprised that I the was first bleeder, she had never uttered the word “period” in the entire course of our friendship; instead she called it “that end of a sentence thing.” Perhaps this because she was superstitious about naming a thing that had so much power, but more likely because she felt like “period” was blunt and cliché, and “that end of a sentence thing” was more avant garde, and Cassie was the sort of person who was determined to be avant garde in every single thing that she did, and what was more avant garde than inventing a euphemism for something that was already a euphemism?  I knew I would have to match her subtlety when I told her. I would have to find the right moment to integrate it into our conversation; I would have to wait till the topic of development and menstruation came up organically, which it would at some point, and then I would just slip it in casually, and she wouldn’t be at all surprised, and she would nod coolly, as if she didn’t care.  

When the subject eventually did come up, she asked me. “Sammy; do you have your period yet?” And I said “yeah. In July it happened.” And she just nodded. And she didn’t beg to tell her mom.  But her face spoke for her, with an expression of envy mingled with disgust mingled with fear mingled with the knowledge that nothing would ever be the same again.  

When I saw Jocelyn a couple of months later, she made me watch a DVD of Cats.  Then she decided that we should dress up in skin-tight ice-skating pants and that I should pretend to be the ladies’ man cat trying to seduce the hot babe cat, whom she would play. Unluckily, I had my period that very day. It must have been my third or fourth period ever.  I don’t remember. I just remember that I had it. As we danced, thigh to thigh, I prayed that my period blood wouldn’t leak through her nice pants and that she wouldn’t notice the slight bulging of the pad I was wearing. 

Later than evening, when we were watching another movie, with her babysitter and her three younger brothers sitting with us, she said to me, softly, but not softly enough,

“Sammy, when you told me you got your period, were you lying?”

“Yes.” I said. “I don’t really have my period.”

“What’s a period?” Asked Jocelyn’s youngest brother. 

“A period is a punctuation mark that comes at the end of the sentence. Sammy was having trouble with her periods. She had this problem where her periods kept turning into commas. So, she went to the doctor, so that she could properly finish her sentences. So now I’m asking her, ‘Sammy, do you have your period yet?’ Ha, hah, hah, get it.” She elbowed me.

“hah. Hah hah hah,” I said, feeling very alone.

So, eleven left me dangling, stranded in womanhood without any friends to accompany me. Just waiting inside a lonely year that I will never get back. It’s hard to explain exactly why this was exactly as upsetting as it was, but looking at the years that followed, my teenage years, and just how badly they went, and how slow I was to latch on to the responsibilities accompanying adulthood, how many milestones I missed afterwards, it was as if I had peaked into the future and understood the cruel irony that although I was the first of all my friends to be able to make babies, I was going to be the last of all my friends to be able to do that thing you do for fun that sometimes makes babies, and that I was going to be the last of my peers to get a job and have a boyfriend and do basically everything else mature, that I was going to be the queen of arrested development, that this blunt marker of maturity was pinned on the most unlikely person. It was as if I knew. As if in all my years of pretending to be a fairy and trying to do telekinesis and playing with ouija boards, and chasing any other elusive occult noumena, the pink stain in my panties was the only omen I ever read correctly. 

When Jocelyn and Cassie got their periods, a year later, they would call me on the phone immediately. Cassie was embarrassed; she stuttered and hemmed and hawed a while before she said, “I did it. I did the end of the sentence thing. My blood was so dark. It was almost…black. I thought I was sick. Umm. Hah. Wow.”  Jocelyn was happy. “When my dad found out, her hugged me, almost with tears in his eyes, saying he couldn’t believe how fast I had grown up.” They were both twelve-and-a-half, which is precisely the normal age for an American girl to get her first period, no earlier, no later. I hated them.

The personal history behind these songs, especially “Nick’s Mom,” has to do with the animus side of Nick. 

My huge failure as a sexual being and a datable New York woman begins between ages fourteen and sixteen with a desire to hold on to my childhood, and get back in touch with my childhood friends and acquaintances and, yes, crushes, of whom Nick was an important one, because I knew him at age twelve, the last time I was a child and the last time I was happy and confident.  My desire to get back in touch with him at sixteen was really a desire to get back in touch with myself. (“If I knew who I was/ then I’d know what to do/ If I knew who to be/ I’d run to me from you”) 

So I decided to get back in touch with a couple of my childhood friends. Of course, I was completely screwed. Because all my childhood friends were teenagers now, and teenagers don’t want to get back in touch with their childhoods; teenagers want to get as far away from their childhoods as possible. There’s the respect that makes calamity of so long a life, when you’re Samantha. 

Anyway, I did get back in touch with him, and gently stalked him, only because we lived in the same neighborhood (that’s kind of an excuse, right?) and ended up making a very good impression on his mom and a very bad impression on him. And my therapists. And my family. 

So I was left with a memory of the girl in the middle of the bulletin board, who looks a lot like I do, whose portrait (courtesty of PicMonkey), is as decayed as a 19thCentury daguerreotype, a girl who was eleven going on twelve and who was kind of obnoxious, especially to Nick back then, and who was too developed for her age, who was sensitive and often fearful, and who had not quite grown into her nose yet, but who was also capable of great joy, who knew what she wanted, or thought she did, even though the things that she wanted were often unhealthy or impossible, at least she wanted them; she grew into a so-called woman who, although she has an ageless jawline and wide cheeks in cute proportion to her nose, has no idea what to want, and who sometimes wonders if people are just pretending to want things, and who has been taught well to be afraid of her feelings. 

A Disney Fangirl Manifesto:

exploring Folklore under the glare of Twentieth Century film

Anyone who has met me knows that Disney movies own a lot of Property in my psyche, so much that I might almost describe them as a kind of early-life religious experience. That, some would argue, is the menace of them, the fact that they work their way into the subconscious of little girls as one of our earliest memories, but what’s done is done, and worse things have happened to people. I was called to this planet within the same stretch of time that encompassed the affectionately named “Disney Renaissance”—the string of successful animated musicals with soundtracks by seasoned Broadway composers that came out between 1989 and 1999--so you could almost say that I and the Disney Heroines of that era were cut from the same cloth.[1]

I would be naïve to skip the section of this essay where I apologize for that, but I’ve had a lot of time to think about it, and I’ve decided that in spite of the bad rap accrued by the Disney Princess phenomenon as a Capitalist venture and a regressively hyper-feminine cultural trend that is both a symptom and a poison, I’m still in love with Disney movies, and I will continue to dress up as slutty Snow White every Halloween and allow Disney references to seep into my songwriting and my busking repertoire.  I know it’s uncool, but I hold the belief that in Disney as in Freudian Psychology (and the two sometimes intersect; see “A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes,” from the 1950 film “Cinderella”), you have to take the good with the bad and then sort out the two.  It’s called thinking. 

The whole point of animation and musical theatre is that they’re not realistic; they’re intended as a form of escape, so anyone who uses them as a way of learning realistic sensibilities and values to live by is doing it wrong. The Disney movie is meant to be shot of escapism to the bloodstream. I, as a self-identified Fairy/Alien Child, knew that I needed to hide from the world until it got nicer or more fun or at least more interesting. As a little girl, I felt that I had one foot solidly in the Solar System and another, essential part of me back in the trippy dreams I experienced on a regular basis. (I decided a while ago that the offensive term for a girl like me, who refuses to identify as a human, is “Ether-trash,” and a person who chooses to identify as a human and who is also an arsehole is called “Geo-trash.”)  I think I was born with escapist tendencies, a certain escapism spark that Disney Movies indulged and fanned into a fire.

            My dad wasn’t allowed to watch Disney Movies when he was a child.  My grandmother, a Classic Fairy Tale Enthusiast, saw the animated versions of Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Peter Pan, and Pinocchio as distortions of the original texts on which they were based. She’s mostly right. For the record, Cinderella is pretty close to the French literary version of the tale that inspired it (although it has precursors in China and Egypt)[2], but almost all of the other Disney adaptations deviate wildly from their source material: Sleeping Beauty, in the Grimms’ Tale, is supposed to sleep for 100 years and then wake up to marry someone young enough to be her great-grandson; in the movie she only sleeps for a couple of hours and marries a guy she already knows, and now the effect of being unconscious for an entire Century, of waking up in a world you don’t recognize anymore, is completely lost. Pinocchio, in Collodi’s 19th Century novel, is a juvenile delinquent arsehole who murders Jimminy Cricket shortly after meeting him; he is unrecognizable as the well-meaning ingenue in the 1940 film, which retains none of Collodi’s humor or irony (although it certainly has delightful moments, and I reference it in my song and video “Wednesday Guy”). Peter Pan is just a terrible movie all around, with a sub-par soundtrack and its only redeeming moment being the scene in which Tinkerbell critically examines her sumptuous ass in the mirror (which has a basis in J.M. Barrie’s Novel, FYI, who was mocking the stereotype of skinny fairies by introducing us to a curvy one).  When you are a serious person and a Folklore scholar/enthusiast, it’s obnoxious that whenever you Google Cinderella, Pinnochio, or Hercules, you have to sift through piles of the Disney incarnation in order to find any other version or any hint at their origins or any alternative versions of their stories. Because that’s all a Disney character is: an incarnation. 

Once you become aware that Disney movies are a retelling of older material (the same way that Stephen Schwartz’s and Winnie Holtzman’s Wicked is a retelling of Gregory Maguire’s Wicked, which is a retelling of L Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz), simply an adaptation in the format of Animated Musical Theatre, and that every telling of Folk Material is, in a sense, a retelling, and every movie based on a book is only an adaptation, not the definitive or only form, you might find their saccharine and reductive fallout easier to digest. You start to see Disney Movies as a form of Twentieth Century entertainment and even wonder if in some way they are part of the folk culture of this particular era, if they serve the same function as the oral tales of old women spinning thread for clothing and trying to entertain each other while they were bored out of their minds sitting in the same decrepit room all day.[3]

            Because before there was T.V. there really were old women spinning thread and telling stories. Although Peter Pan and Pinocchio were based on Literary Fiction by individual authors, many of the most famous movies are based on Folk Tales. However, most of the Folk Tales they were based on were collected by literate Upper Class or Middle Class people like The Brothers Grimm (Snow White, Sleeping Beauty) and Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont (Beauty and the Beast), who used Folk material as an inspiration but significantly altered them from their oral forms[4]. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were committed to their project of interviewing actual illiterate peasant women about the stories they told, but often the Grimms would sanitize them from their original forms. For example, an early version of Rapunzel has the Witch throwing Rapunzel out after the Prince gets her pregnant (shout out to James Lapine for reviving this storyline in Into the Woods) and an early version of Snow White has her biological mother, rather than her Stepmother, plotting to murder her. 

In Nick’s Mom, I blend Snow White references with references to an equally famous, more openly tragic story: that of Ophelia. I am particularly proud of the ways I integrated these stories, because these two iconic heroines have some things in common—both are noblewomen who are exploited and abused as pawns in other people’s endgame, and although only one of them dies, the other enters a state of “Sleeping Death,” and what both are remembered for is providing an aesthetically beautiful and striking image of a dead woman. I milk this for all it’s worth in the video, in which I am dressed like Snow White most of the time, as I poison my own apple and plan my own funeral, but I also get into a tub and surround myself with flowers. The main reason that these two are rarely grouped together is that one is the heroine of a Tragedy and the other is the heroine of a Comedy/Romance. The endings are what separate them, at least genre-wise, but I didn’t let that stop me.  I’ve discovered that the key to being a postmodern, woke individual (I don’t say “woke human” because I’m offended by the word “human”) and stomaching Disney Movies, in all their razzle dazzle and gender heteronormativity, is to imagine them without the Happy Endings. Take away the kissing part in Snow White or, in the Grimms’ Tale, the part where the horny necrophiliac Prince drags her glass coffin back to his palace, and it’s just a tale of murder, a tale that doesn’t reward conventional femininity or necrophilia or accepting presents from creepy strangers. 

To this effect, it is worth pointing out that Snow White is thought to be based on one or two historical figures, both of whom got screwed over very badly and very permanently.  These two women are Margarette von Waldeck and Maria Sophia von Erthal. Margarette von Waldeck, who died at age 21, having been poisoned[5], and Maria Sophia von Erthal, whose stepmother literally had a talking mirror, died in a convent around age 71.[6]

Then there’s Adriana Caselotti, the voice actress of Snow White of Disney Movie fame. 

Although her life was not quite tragic like that of her historical counterparts, she did get screwed over pretty badly by Disney. Caselotti was only eighteen when cast in Disney’s first Full-length Animated film, and if you google her you’ll see that she definitely existed, and that she even bore a passing resemblance to her cartoon counterpart, with a winning smile, curly dark hair and classic cheekbones. But despite the success of the film (or perhaps because of it), she was decidedly a one-hit-wonder. She struggled to find work after that one iconic role. According to an article in The Day in 1993, Walt Disney forbade her from being featured on radio shows when one of them wanted to interview here following the movie’s unexpected success so as not to “spoil the illusion of Snow White.” [7]

She was not credited in the film[8], which, to me, seems very Echonian. (Echonian is the opposite of Narcissistic, or the word for something that reminds you of the Nymph Echo from Greek Mythology). Few things are more Echonian than being the star of an iconic animated film and then not even being mentioned in the credits and being known only by your voice, to the point that nobody even remembers anything else about you and doesn’t want to.[9]

And then there’s me. A Snow White of much lesser scale and much lesser consequence, although people continued talking about my performance for many years, and although whenever I dress up as Snow White for Halloween people say “Oh my God! Look there’s Snow White.”  Although I’m aware that the comparison is more than a little ridiculous, I had a sense as a teenager that my career was already in decline, a sense that once you play Snow White you have nowhere to go but down. A kind of curse, really. I use this as an underlying theme in my video, but I’ll own that the scenes of me drinking in bed while dressed in a Snow White costume and watching videos of myself in my glory days as a child prodigy singer is also a more contemporary pop culture nod to Bojack Horseman. 

Because someday all of us will be the stuff of Folklore. Someday when we are all all dead, Saccharine Disney Movies, Satirical Adult Animation Comedy-dramas, and Obscure Millennials reliving their Pre-Adulting days from the comfort of their phone and refusing to interact with the world at large, someday two hundred years from now, when I and everyone I know is dead, we’ll all be considered quaint and archaic and sad and adorable,  the way we think Charlie Chaplin is adorable now. 

This overall death-conscious outlook on contemporary culture is why I’m able to take Disney with a grain of salt—yes, a lot of the early ones are sexist and morally unnuanced, but that’s not the point. Drawn from the Twentieth Century and its fascination with animation and film and musical as forms, they are the Folklore of our time.  Some Disney Movies fixate on happiness, pageantry, and courtly love but retain some of the darkness of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales collections, which were, by the way, already sanitized. Disney just sanitized them further.[10]

[1]David Crow. “The Disney Renaissance: The Rise and Fall of a Generational Touchstone.” https://www.denofgeek.com/us/movies/disney/51171/the-disney-renaissance-the-rise-fall-of-a-generational-touchstone

[2]Isabel Hernandez. “Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales were Never Meant for Kids.” https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/magazine/2019/09-10/brothers-grimm-fairy-tales/#close

[3]Ibid.

[4]James Deutsch. “The Storied, International Folk History of Beauty and the Beast.” https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/storied-international-folk-history-beauty-and-beast-180962502/

[5]Joanna Gillan. “Exploring the True Origins of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.” https://www.ancient-origins.net/myths-legends/exploring-true-origins-snow-white-and-seven-dwarfs-004150

[6]Ian Harvey. “Long-Lost Gravestone of the ‘Real Snow White’ Surfaces in Germany.”https://www.thevintagenews.com/2019/08/08/snow-white-gravestone/

[7]Bob Thomas. “Singer Hopes to Cash in as Voice of Snow White.” https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=gZVGAAAAIBAJ&sjid=FvgMAAAAIBAJ&pg=1286,587896&dq=i+don-t+want+to+spoil+the+illusion+of+snow+white&hl=en

[9]Alison Cooper. “Did Disney Blacklist the Voice Actress for Snow White?” https://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/disney-blacklist-voice-actress-snow-white.htm

[10]Nick Enoch and Wills Robinson. “Too Grimm for Disney. Original Editions of Classic Fairy Tales offer Darker Side of Brothers Grimm Stories, Including Self-mutilation in Cinderella and Rapunzel getting Pregnant in her Tower.” https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2833782/Even-Grimmer-English-translation-Brothers-Grimm-earliest-edition-fairy-tales-reveals-darker-world-s-loved-children-s-stories-including-Cinderella-Rapunzel.html

Oz is a woman's world:

Frankenstein, the wizard of oz, and the anxiety of creation in 

"Wednesday Guy" is a torch song about a troubled but popular nerdy/artsy guy with daddy issues ("He knows a lot of big words, but he doesn't know any sentences..."). The subtext is that the narrator is attracted to him not in spite of but because of the fact that he is so screwed up.

My nosy friends and fans and associates love to ask me "ooh, that's about a specific person, isn't it?"  I always answer honestly because I'm a lazy liar-- "yes and no; it's about four specific people all smushed into one, like in Frankenstein when you smush together different dead people's body parts and make a monster."

This metaphor inspired me. I decided to make my music video a re-enactment of Mary Shelley's famed Frankenstein story, with me as the misguided doctor who creates a monster and then abandons him and has to deal with the consequences.  Except in the video, I seek to create a boyfriend (a.k.a. sex robot) for myself--in this, I will be creepily both mother and lover to my creation. The Oedipal implications are there, but I also see it as an exploration of power dynamics and the sense in which all relationships--up to and including sexual ones--are about power.  (By pure coincidence, we have now entered the age of the Sex Robot, according to the Media that be.)

I also make a scarecrow and bring him to life as a second attempt to make my own boyfriend, after my corpse-reanimation creation goes awry.  This is an homage to another work of old-timey literature (L. Frank Baum The Wizard of Oz was first published in 1900,  Frankenstein in 1818), but it is also a very personal, primal reference to my first crush:  I watched The Wizard of Oz for the first time when I was four and Ray Bolger's portrayal of the Scarecrow in the 1939 film made me swoon with a totality that my small and soft little girl self could not comprehend.

This memory got me thinking about the Power Dynamics in the Wizard of Oz.  My dad has a theory that the Wizard of Oz, although written by a man, takes place in a Matriarchal Universe. It is a place where females have all the power.  The Wicked Witch comes and goes in a puff of smoke and terrorizes everyone; Glinda the good comes and goes when she pleases in a bubble and transports Dorothy across realms; Dorothy melts the Witch by pouring a bucket of water on her.   By contrast,  the only men we encounter are severely handicapped:  the Scarecrow and the Tin Man are both completely immobilized until Dorothy frees them (and they allegedly lack a heart and a brain); the Lion is psychologically and socially hemmed in by his own cowardice (and thereby cannot conform to the gender or species norms of his community); the Wizard is revealed as a fraud and a con-man with no real power.  Magic and strength belong to the females of the story. Oz is a Woman's World. 

The Scarecrow's journey, as it applies to my video concept, takes on a bit of a new meaning for him.  It occurred to me for the very first time this morning when I was procuring straw (of both the real and fake variety, city girl that I am)  that when Dorothy takes the Scarecrow down from his post, it is the first time he has ever been able to move.  In this sense, she is kind of like a Mother Figure to him , as she gives him the gift of mobility, which, of course, his insensitive creator--the unnamed farmer--never did.   Then, of course, he stumbles around like a toddler for a while, learning to walk.

These comparisons--between mother and lover and creator, between straw man and toddler--also got me thinking in a meta sense about myself as a creator.  I was inspired by a Nathaniel Hawthorne unit in my Literature Class at Hunter College to wonder if there is a kind of wannabe-Scientist subconscious urge present in the mind of a Writer who decides to write about a Scientist. Literary talents such as Shelley and Hawthorne, living after the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, saw Science becoming more powerful: perhaps they felt inferior on some level, as mere writers, and they wrote about science, because, well, those who can't do science will write about science.  Are artists aware of themselves as doing the inferior kind of creation? I'm probably projecting on to them because, for a very long time, I have struggled existentially with my role as a mere singer and a mere writer on a planet where some people can make iPhones and cure diseases.