Monday, June 04, 2007

Jenny Boylan Speech Excerpt




Here's an excerpt from a Jenny Boylan speech; feel the heartache, agony, love, caring and humanity:
"...Or how about this: I'm in my late twenties and I have finally fallen in love with an amazing woman named Grace. My whole long life, I have been praying and praying that someone would fall in love with me, because if someone falls in love with me, I will finally get outside of myself, I will finally be cured of this crazy thing I have. And to my amazement, Grace is in love with me. We drove all the way from Louisville Kentucky to Washington DC one day, and we kissed at every stop light on the way. And I feel transformed and healed, and when I get back to my own apartment in Baltimore, I go to the closet and I gather everything up in a big plastic bag. The wigs. The clothes. The bobby pins. The copies of Allure and Vogue and the balloons that I filled with tap water for breast forms and the shoes in size twelve I had to send away for to Lee's Mardi Gras Boutique, and the heavy pancake makeup and the purple eyeliner and the clip on earrings. And into the trash they went, and I went outside and put the bag by the curb and I stood there beneath the full moon, and I thought, yes, yes, yes, at last I am free! I'll never need to be a woman again!
Does this sound familiar?

Well, this last story probably won't sound familiar to most of you, but it happened to me. Fourteen years after I threw that bag of stuff out in the trash, I was waking up in Neenah Wisconsin, with the body I'd always prayed for. In one hand I clasped a little Demerol drip, so that whenever I felt the slightest bit uncomfortable, I went DING, and all my problems went away. I spent a week or two in bed, high as a kite, saying, I'm So Happy! And I'm trying to be entertaining to the people that surrounded me, starting to tell a joke and then falling asleep in the middle of the punchline.
But get this: at my side on that occasion were three people: including Grace, the woman I'd married all those years ago, the woman to whom I'm still married, the woman who at one point said, this is not what I wanted out of a marraiage, I feel totally gypped out of my husband, it's just not fair, but who at another point said, I would never turn my back on the person I love, ever. And so Grace sat by my side and held my hand. And I said to her, Sing me a song?


And she sang me this song:
(singing)
Do you think I could leave you crying?When there's room on my horse for two? Come up here Jack, quit your crying.We'll mend up your horse with glue.When we grow up we'll be soldiers, And our horses will not be toys.Maybe then we'll remember, When we were two little boys.
And next to Grace was my friend Rick Russo, a writer from Maine, and my closest friend. And next to Rick, was the cartoonist Timothy Kreider, who, after Grace and Rick headed back to the east coast, hung out with me day after day, watching Buster keaton movies and reading me, from cover to cover, The Princess Bride.


I can tell you that I never had a girlhood. I never had the experience of my father sitting next to me, reading his daughter a good night story. I never had that, and I never will. But when I was forty one, I had Tim Kreider, my dear friend, read me the Princess Bride, chapter after chapter. Hello My name is Inidgo Montoya. (get crowd to say the next two lines, in unison.) You keel my father. Prepare to die.


Okay. So those are some of my stories. What we need now, in the years to come, are some of yours. Each of us embodies our gender difference in a different way, and what we all need are more stories, more opportunities to learn from each other exactly how many different ways there are to live this life... "

1 comment:

Kazootie said...

Ohmygod! I just read your "About me." I am astonished! You are 64? You certainly don't look it!