Hey, I've been "tagged!" With a "meme!" I guess that means it's almost 2005!
Seriously, I'm very grateful to Ladyred of Postcards from Guyville, for giving me something to write about, to wit: I am to name and explicate five things people probably don't know about me. Of course, since I am a writer of memoir and have been blogging about my damn self for the past year and three quarters, I can't imagine there's much about me that I haven't already bored you with, but let's try it anyway.
1. I almost posed for Playboy magazine. Yep. You read that correctly. Playboy. (And here is where I will again remind you that sexually inappropriate comments to this blog will be deleted. Unless they're mine.)
The circumstances: It was 1994, I was 24 years old, and I was part of a performance poetry collective called Pussy Poets (I told my mom we were called "The Word Girls"). "Pussy Poets" was a challenging name, back in 1993 and 1994, in the pre-Vagina Monologues, pre-Spice Girls days, when "grrrl power" was just starting to stand on its Mary Jane'd little feet, and we were attracting quite a bit of media attention for it -- Interview magazine, PAPER magazine, book agents, etc. I was letting all of this unearned celebrity go directly to my head, often starting conversations with unprompted revelations like, "I feel like my career is, like, taking over my life."
Then Playboy called. They were interested in maybe doing a paragraph-long mention of Pussy Poets in their back pages. Were we interested? I had no idea if anybody else in the group was or not, because I WAS. As a matter of fact, I thought I might even be interested in posing for them. I got one of my fellow Pussy Poets to shoot some tasteful black-and-white lingerie shots of me (in her roommate, Lauren Graham's bed, to which Lauren later objected), wrote up a "manifesto" to go with my pictorial about why it was totally feminist of me to pose nude (I believe I may have even used the word "empowering" -- go me!), and sent it to the editor with whom I was now having a nice little flirty phone exchange. I also included my chapbook of poems, Girlbaum, including such early masterpieces as "The Slut of Pascack Valley High," and "Kiss Off, Dickweed!", suggesting to the editor that these, too, could be placed alongside naked photos of myself. Then I started fretting to people about how posing for Playboy would or wouldn't affect my career.
What I failed to understand was that Playboy was not interested in poetry, feminism, grrrl power, or me. Playboy was interested in presenting pictures of young, dewy, dazed-looking blond women in gauzy stockings with their legs slightly spread for men to jerk off to. Period. Playboy was not looking for a strident, angry Jewess with a dykey haircut to share her politically motivated poetry alongside "empowering" naked photos. The flirty editor called my answering machine and broke the news. "'You cocksucking, cunting bag of fuck,'" he said, quoting my poem, "Kiss Off, Dickweed!", then chuckled. "Listen, Janice, I'm afraid the answer is no."
Of course, I told everybody that I had ultimately decided against doing a Playboy pictorial because I felt it wasn't right for me at that point in my career. Which it wasn't, though I wouldn't know that for a few more years.
2. I am a junkie for stories about high-altitude mountaineering disasters. I know this is in poor taste to mention, what with the current missing/presumed dead climbers on Mt. Hood and in China, but it's true. Into Thin Air is one of my favorite books ever, and it is my go-to read when things get personally difficult for me; I also enjoy Ed Viesturs' saga of climbing the world's 14 highest peaks without supplimental oxygen, No Shortcuts to the Top. My latest Everest fix was the Discovery Channel's Everest: Beyond the Limit, which ended with a spectacular display of blackened, frostbitten flesh, and has reignited the controversy over climbers' responsibility to each other in the Death Zone. As an avid armchair alpinist, I'll venture to say that I certainly understand summit fever, but, for me, the thrill of rescuing a climber from death would be just as fulfilling as summitting. I'd be prouder to say, "I helped save someone from the side of Everest," than to say, "I reached the top."
3. I read Page Six everyday. It's one of the first pages I read in the morning, right after my email and my blog, and right before the weather on NY1. I don't even know why I do it. It's kind of everything to which I object. I honestly dread that one day I'm going to open it, and it's going to say that one of the young starlets has died of heart failure -- Nicole Ritchie or Lindsay Lohan -- and I'm going to know that I was part of the machine that killed her.
4. I hold four extremely longstanding grudges. One from 1996, two from 1999, and one from 2001. So there's a decade-old argument that I can restart in my head, with total clarity of detail, at any moment, and feel just as angry and righteous as I did back then. I still hope each of the individual grudgees will fall down an open sewer and drown. (Note: This number does not include more recent grudges, which I still consider active complaints, and minor squabbles with people from a million years ago that I can still recall that pissed me off.)
5. My first book is dedicated to my shrink, Judith. The dedication to my forthcoming book, a book about Samantha, reads, "To her, of course." The reader is meant to think that I mean the book is dedicated to Samantha. I don't. The second book is also dedicated to Judith. Of course.
So okay, that's me -- now's the part where I tag people. And that means you. If you're reading this, you've been memed. Now its all about youyou.
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