99: I Enjoy Being A Girl, Sort Of

Ira Glass

So a new girl transfers into Rebecca's high school, an all-girls school. And it took a little while for everybody to figure her out because she transferred in from public school. Actually, from one of the best public schools in the city. But still, in their eyes---

Ira Glass

Ghetto hoochie mama. I have to admit I did not know exactly what she meant by that. So helpfully, Rebecca searched her brain for another phrase to explain it.

Ira Glass

Fact is, there are so many ways of being a teenage girl, and you can switch from one to another Like one friend of Rebecca's who started high school with blond hair, blue eyes.

Ira Glass

Now senior year, that girl is a Clueless girl. Clueless. Meaning she acts and dresses like the characters in the movie and the TV show Clueless. Stacked shoes, polyester bellbottoms, retro '70s style.

It's hard to imagine many boys changing style this quickly, this willfully, this many times. It is very, very girl. Transforming yourself head to toe every year because you can. And because you're expected to be that obsessed with how you look.

Ira Glass

Well, today on our program, enjoying being a girl, sort of, and sort of not.

Act One, Fatty Suit. David Sedaris explains how one girl sidestepped her father's wish that she be thin and pretty and focus on getting a man through a technique that was almost like a kind of industrial sabotage.

Act Two, How to Be a Man. Writer Sarah Miller attends a class in New York City that teaches women how to walk and talk and act like men.

Act Three, Strength in Numbers. Six women, a van, a 12 hour drive to Mississippi that starts in the middle of the night and ends in a casino in a cotton field.

Act Four, Taking Sisterhood One Step further. A happily married polygamist wife explains how having eight women married to one man is the ultimate feminist lifestyle. From WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass, stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One, Fatty Suit. David Sedaris has this parable of the pressures on modern women and how one woman, his sister, responded.

David Sedaris

My father called me late one recent Sunday evening, excited with the news that my sister, Amy, was scheduled to appear in a magazine article on young, New York women.

Can you imagine, he asked. My God, put a camera in front of that girl and she'll shine like a diamond! Between the single men and the job opportunities, her phone is going to be ringing right off the hook!

My father has always placed a great deal of importance on his daughter's physical beauty. It is to him, their greatest asset, and he monitors their appearance with an almost freakish intensity. Because it was always assumed that we would go to college, my brother and I were free to grow as plump and ugly as we liked. I might wander freely through the house drinking pancake batter from a plastic bucket, but the moment one of my sisters overspilled her bikini, our father was right there to mix his metaphors.

Jesus, Flossy, what are we running here, a dairy farm? Look at you, you're the size of a tank. Two few more pounds and you won't be able to cross state lines without a trucking license.

Three of my sisters responded to this pressure by losing themselves, however briefly, to drugs and alcohol. The one exception is my sister, Amy, who for as long as I can remember has chosen to lose herself in others.

For Amy, school was dedicated solely to the study or her teachers. She meticulously charted the reputation of their shoes and blouses and was quick to pinpoint their mannerisms. Practicing alone in the basement, she would pace before her king-sized blackboard in full costume.

Her imaginary classroom was a forum where the teachers ignored the lesson plan, preferring instead to discuss their elaborate home lives, which most often involved the bedridden mother forced to take oxygen through a tank. My sister turned that same eye on the adults my parents knew from the neighborhood and country club. Choosing from her box of wigs and castoff dresses, she would prepare herself a false cocktail and sat at the rec room bar, mastering their slurred inflections.

She was great as Flow Wagner and Eleanor Kelleher. But vocally, her best impersonation was of Penny Midland, a stylish, 50-year-old woman who work part-time at an art gallery my parents used to visit on a regular basis. Wearing a white page boy wig and one of my mother's better caftans, Amy began calling my father at the office.

Lou, Penny Midland here. How the hell are you? An awkward conversationalist, our father would fidget before saying, Penny. Well, what do you know? Gosh it's good be hear your voice.

The first few times she called, Amy discussed gallery business. But little by little, she began complaining about her husband, a Westinghouse executive named Van.

I want out, she'd say. It isn't that I don't care for him as a friend, but at this point in my life I don't know that I can stay married to a man who, well, a man who likes boys. I don't know how else to say it. The man likes boys and that's the way it is.

Our father offered comfort with such standard noncommittal phrases as, "I guess it takes two to tango," or "You hang in there, baby."

Oh, Lou, it just feels so good to talk to someone who really understands.

I walked into the kitchen late one afternoon and came upon my 12-year-old sister propositioning her father.

I was thinking that maybe you and I could get together some time, just for laughs. Unless we felt like taking it to another level.

Amy studied her reflection in the oven door, brushing the white bangs away from her forehead with her heavily jeweled fingers.

All I'm saying is that I find you to be a very attractive man. Is that a crime?

This was what my mother meant when she accused people of playing a dangerous game. Were my father to accept Penny's offer, Amy would have known him as a philanderer and wondered who else he might have slept with. Everything he'd ever said would be called into question and scanned for possible sexual content. Was that really a business trip, or had he snuck off to Myrtle Beach with one of the Stravidies twins?

It is to his credit that our father was such a gentleman. Stammering that he was very flattered to be asked, he let Penny down as gently as possible. He offered to set her up with some available bachelors he knew from his office at IBM and told my sister to take care of herself. Adding that she was a very special woman who deserved to be happy.

It was years before Amy admitted what she had done. They were relatively uneventful years for our family and I imagine, a very confusing period of time for poor Penny Midland, who was frequently visited at the art gallery by my father and any number of his divorced business associates.

Here's the gal I was telling you about, he'd say to Bob Sweetie or Tommy Lattermore. I think the two of you would make a dynamite couple. I swear to God. Maybe some night this week the two of you could slip away and maybe have a few drinks. Give it a try why don't you?

The passage of time has not altered my father's obsessive attention to my sister's weight and appearance. And because of that, most of them keep their distance, checking in only by phone.

Is it just my imagination, he'll ask, or has your voice gotten fatter? You sound chubby to me. Is everything OK?

Because she has maintained her beautiful skin and youthful figure, Amy is my father's greatest treasure. She is by far, the most attractive member of our family. Yet she spent most of her life admiring skin diseases and praying for a hump.

It's not fair that I can't grow a beard she'll say, gluing a pebble-sized wort to the side of her nose. Compliments are genuinely lost on her. She can't see any benefit to being herself and is constantly searching for what she considers a flattering disguise.

She's got all the neck braces and false teeth a person could want, and recently spent a good deal of money on a customized fatty suit she enjoys wearing beneath sweat pants as tight and uninviting as sausage casings.

She couldn't afford the matching top and is reduced to waddling the streets much like two women fused together in some sort of a cruel experiment. From the waist up, she's slim and fit, chugging forward on legs the size of tree trunks and followed by a wide, dimpled bottom so thick she could sit on a knitting needle and never feel a thing.

She wore it home last Christmas where our startled, heartbroken father met us at the airport. He managed to silence his disapproval on the short ride to the house, but the moment Amy stepped into the bathroom he turned to me shouting, what the hell has happened to her? Jesus Christ Almighty, this is tearing me apart. I'm in real pain here.

What?

Your sister, that's what. The girl's ass is the size of a beanbag chair. I thought you were supposed to be keeping an eye on her?

I begged him to lower his voice. Please dad, don't mention it in front of her. Amy's very sensitive about her-- you know.

Her what? Go ahead and say it. Her big fat ass. That's what she's ashamed of, and she should be. Christ Almighty, they could land choppers on ass like that.

Oh, dad.

Don't try to defend her, wise guy. She's a single woman and the clock is ticking away. How is she supposed to find a husband with an ass like that?

Well, I said, a lot of men like that.

He looked at me with great pity and shook his head. What you don't know could fill a book.

My father composed himself when Amy re-entered the room, but the moment she opened the freezer door he acted as though she were tossing a lit match into the gas tank of his Porsche.

What in God's name are you doing? Look at you, you're killing yourself.

Amy hugged a quart of ice cream to her chest and searched the drawers for a shovel-sized spoon.

Your problem is that you're bored, my father said. You're bored and lonely and you're eating garbage to feel some kind of stinking void. I know what you're going through and believe me, you can lick this.

First of all, Amy said, I'm not bored. And besides that, all I've eaten today are a stack of pancakes, four donuts, a danish at the airport, and a couple of really small brownies on the plane. She kept it up until our father, his voice cracking with pain, offered to find her some professional help.

I'm begging you to reach out before it's too late. We can do this together. There are programs and camps that specialize in this kind of thing. But first, you have to admit that you have a problem.

When Amy rejected his offer, he attempted to set an example. Settling down to Christmas dinner, he pretended to be satisfied with nothing but a sliver of white meat accompanied by a single spear of broccoli. His athletic regime became theatric. That felt great, he'd say, finishing a round of sit-ups. Now I'll do some squat thrusts, a couple dozen pushups, and it's off for a satisfying run. Anyone want to join me? Amy?

She kept to her fatty suit until her legs were chafed and pimpled. It was on the morning of our return flight when she revealed her joke and our father, bracing himself against the countertop, wept with the light. Ha-ha he laughed as though he were reading the words off a page, the way he's always done. Ha-ha-ha, you really had me going. Ha-ha. I knew you'd never let yourself go.

The fatty suit only reinvigorated him for the photo shoot he called about with such enthusiasm. She had me fooled for a minute there, but even with a fat ass, you can't disguise the fact that she's a beautiful person and that's what really matters. Do you happen to know if they're going to be hiring a professional hairstylist, someone who really knows what they're doing? I sure as hell hope so because her hair is awfully thin and someone needs to talk her into losing those bangs.

There's a lot I don't tell my father when he calls asking after Amy. He wouldn't understand that she has no interest in getting married and was in fact, quite happy to break up with her live-in boyfriend.

He was a pleasant, hardworking fellow, whom she replaced with a dwarf rabbit named Tattletale. Tattletale enjoys chewing electrical cords, and as a result my sister's phone is often out of order. But it doesn't seem to bother her that available men can't get through.

The last time she was asked out by a successful bachelor she paused for a few moments before saying, thanks for asking, but I'm really just not into white guys right now.

This alone would have given my father an aneurysm. The clock is ticking, he says. If she waits much longer she'll be alone for the rest of her life.

This seems to suit Amy just fine. For the time being, she seems perfectly content with her rabbit and an imaginary boyfriend she has named Ricky. We'll be walking the streets of her West Village neighborhood, running errands, when she'll turn to me saying, Ricky gave me a bumper pool table for our one-month anniversary. I came home this afternoon and there it was parked beside the baby grand electric organ he gave me for President's Day.

I didn't know you played pool, I'll say. When did you start? How did you learn?

Oh, a few months ago. Ricky taught me how to play on our last flight to Korea.

You didn't tell me he was Korean?

Oh, she'll say, he's not. He just has a lot of friends there, so we go to Korea a lot. She carries on like this and after a while, Ricky seems not only real, but very likable.

Hey, my father will ask, what do you know about this Ricky person? Amy seems to think he's really something.

What exactly has she told you? It's always best to ask what he's already heard. For all I know, Amy could have claimed that Ricky was a Navy SEAL, or the chief surgeon at a hospital specializing in diseases of the kidney or pancreas.

When my father called asking about the photo shoot, I feigned ignorance. I didn't tell him that at the scheduled time, my sister arrived at the studio with unwashed hair and took her place beside a half dozen women carefully dressed in flattering outfits. She waited while the others had their hair styled into the current fashion. One by one, their brows were trained while makeup artists made the most of their lips and cheek bones.

When called fourth to the styling table, Amy said only, I want to look like someone has beaten me up really, really bad. The makeup artist did a fine job. The black eyes and purple jaw were accentuated by a series of scratch marks on her forehead. Puss yellow pools surround her blistered nose and her swollen lips were fenced with mean rows of brackish stitches.

Amy was enchanted with her new look. Following the photo shoot, she wore her bruises to the dry cleaner and grocery store. Most people nervously looked away. But on the rare occasion someone asked what had happened, my sister smiled as brightly as possible saying, I'm in love. Can you believe it? I'm finally, totally in love. And you know what? It feels great.

Ira Glass

David Sedaris is the author most recently of, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, and editor of the collection, Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules: An Anthology of Outstanding Stories. This story was originally written for Vogue magazine, which then rejected it without explanation. One Vogue employee speculated that perhaps it did not conform enough with Vogue's notions of feminine beauty.

David's sister Amy is among other things, a star of the TV show and someday to be released movie, Strangers with Candy.

[MUSIC- "I'M A WOMAN" BY PEGGY LEE]

Ira Glass

Act Two, How To Be a Man. Well, one of the problems in doing a show like we're doing this week, a show made of different stories that seem to go together because they were all about, at some level, different ways of being a woman or a girl, is that you find yourself treading around all these broad generalizations about men and women that actually none of us really believe. But we figured, we came this far with this theme, we might as well head down the river into the heart of darkness of gender cliches. And playing the Martin Sheen role in our little gender apocalypse now will be Sarah Miller.

Sarah Miller for a while, had the odd job of being a woman who wrote a sex column for men in a men's magazine, Details. That job seemed to consist mostly of correcting guys gross misperceptions about women. We sent her to a class we heard about in New York City run by a woman named Diane Tore. A class that tries to teach women how to dress and walk and talk like men. So it's kind of a reverse on her regular job.

Sarah Miller put on a loose fitting flannel shirt and tried to imagine transforming herself not just into any man, but into the kind of man who does not have a kind of ambiguous mix of traditionally male and female traits. She would become a guy's guy.

Sarah Miller

I have to admit the idea of the workshop made me anxious. Just before I went I told a friend that I was afraid I already seemed like a guy. I'm tall, I'm loud, I swear a lot. I told them I was afraid that Diane would say something to me like, God, you're a natural. And I would take this to mean, you are naturally coarse and masculine. And naturally, not at all pretty.

I shouldn't have worried. It turns out there's a whole world of gestures and attitudes between me in a flannel shirt and me being mistaken for a man. There's the proper way to walk, for example. Diane demonstrated.

Sarah Miller

Then we gave it a try. I thought slumping was the quickest route to maleness, but when I looked around I saw the other stood ramrod straight. We examined each other for clues.

Sarah Miller

Smiling was the one thing none of us could seem to cut out. Diane had to remind us again and again. So as it became clear to me that I was not going to leave as a convincing man, I manufactured a goal for myself. I was here, I decided, to learn arrogance.

Sarah Miller

An ACE bandage, my sisters, is the first tool you need on your path to gender liberation. Mine was double wide. It kept snapping out of my hands as I wrapped it around my chest.

Sarah Miller

This was the actual song we were listening to as we wrapped our chest down. Diane had brought along a tape called "Frat Rock" to enhance that double X chromosome vibe we were all striving for.

[MUSIC PLAYING - BAD COMPANY - CAN'T GET ENOUGH OF YOUR LOVE]

Sarah Miller

My clothes, two big Levi's, a plaid flannel shirt, a Princeton t-shirt with Hebrew letters, all would have hung nicely on a guy's broad shoulders and slim hips. But I looked a little lumpy. My breasts had not disappeared so much as retreated under extreme duress to the middle of my chest. Two sad, misplaced lumps uncertain of their meaning. My whiskers were good, but my eyes-- Diane pointed this out about all of us-- retained the hopeful sweetness of femininity. And if I resembled anything, it was only some strange hybrid of a lumberjack, lady from Lady and the Tramp, and Marie Antoinette.

I made up a new identity. Now my name was Dan Rosen. I was a Brown dropout who worked at St. Mark's Bookshop. I stacked the [UNINTELLIGIBLE] readers. I bought Paul Auster novels on discount. My parents lived in Mt. Kisco and were lame. Brown was lame. I was lame.

Sarah Miller

As Dan I sat down for my eating lesson and I noticed that none of us were really winning any surprises in the realness department. Two of the girls had long hair tied back in ponytails. When you looked at them you had a split second to decide if they were women dressed up as men or the Allman Brothers, and it wasn't a tough call.

One of them asked Diane how we should be sitting.

Sarah Miller

We could sit and eat with our legs as wide as we wanted, but we were not men. One of the Allman Brothers spent the meal nibbling her way through about half a piece of pita bread. Eating it with the slow deliberation of one not at peace with food. The other Allman Brother looked a little bit like a guy, but she had this way of nodding and saying, uh hmm when she listened and it gave her away.

Only Diane, dressed up as her alter ego, Dan King, looked like a guy. It was the eyes more than anything else. Her's were cool, detached. They assumed rather than asked. We were all too eager and naive looking. I said that we looked like little does tenderly eating grass and everyone laughed.

When we finished eating, the place was a mess. Food, napkins, and take-out containers everywhere. No one wanted clean up. We sat in our men's clothes, staring at everything, not moving. I knew what we were thinking.

Sarah Miller

My highest hope for the workshop once I realized I was in very little danger of actually resembling a man, was that I would have some great insight into the mystery of what makes men men and women women. But I think there's no mystery left. The train of gender is too familiar, full of places we visited way too many times.

Men are detached, unapologetic, unafraid to take up space. Women are conciliatory and self-effacing. Men gulp, women sip. I'm not sure there's anything Diane or anyone could say that would really surprise any of us.

I did have one moment in the workshop where I was walking across the floor, shoulders hunched, lips in a scowl, where I felt what it must be like to Dan Rosen. College dropout, keeper of the magazine section. Is this it, I thought? Is this what it feels like to be a guy?

But I realized that what I felt-- useless, defensive, underachieving, bored, tragically adolescent-- was not about feeling like a guy, but about remembering what it felt like to be in my early 20s. What it felt like to be a failure. And I don't need to be in drag to tap into that.

As our graduation ceremony for the workshop, we wanted to go to a men's club to watch strippers. But it was a Sunday night in Giuliani's New York and we couldn't find a single one open. I was secretly relieved when we ended up at a restaurant in the West Village. Right there in the booth I surreptitiously unwrapped my chest. I ordered a Diet Coke and a salad.

Ira Glass

Sarah Miller. These days she writes a column for Men's Health magazine. Her novel, Inside the Mind of Gideon Rayburn, is coming out this March.

Coming up, polygamy as feminist lifestyle. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life, I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, invite a variety of writers and reporters and everyday people to come in and speak on that theme. Today on our program, I Enjoy Being a Girl, Sort Of.

In this second half of our program, we turned the stories of individual women and girls to stories of groups of women and girls. We have arrived at Act Three, Strength in Numbers.

This is the story about one group of women. And I have to say that every woman working on this show at some point during this last week has expressed a little envy for the women in this group. And I think maybe the best way to start their story is with their road trip. Barbara, Jewel, Lynn, Tiny, Valerie, and Rosetta decided to leave the husbands and kids and grandkids behind and hit the road.

Ira Glass

The Hens. Most of them have known each other since they were teenagers, growing up in Inglewood on Chicago's south side. A couple joined the group when they were working with other hands at the switchboard at The Palmer House, a fancy Chicago Hotel. Nine women. And every March they take a big trip together or they throw a party. Like the dinner dance they threw for themselves and their families where everybody wore white and gold. Everybody.

This March, they took a tape recorder and drove from Chicago to a casino in Mississippi and back in three days. They visited a stray Hen who works down at the casino, Sally.

Three of the Hens-- Jewel, Tiny, and Lynn came into the studio to talk about trip and explain what the Hens are all about.

Ira Glass

Act Four, Taking Sisterhood One Step Further.

If you ask Elizabeth Joseph, it was the only reasonable choice to marry a man who was already married to five women. She met her husband when she was a senior in college.

Ira Glass

Elizabeth Joseph is as an attorney and now public affairs director of a radio station in Utah. We offer her story as part of our show as another example in the continuum of how to be a woman or a girl. She says that because she was in a polygamist marriage, she could do things like go off to law school and finish school and not have to worry who was taking care of the kids or her husband. There were other wives around for that.

In short, she says, polygamy is the ultimate feminist lifestyle.

Ira Glass

Elizabeth Joseph in Utah.

Ira Glass

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[FUNDING CREDITS]

Ira Glass

WBEZ management oversight from Mr. Torey Malatia who says that from now on he wants to be called-

Ira Glass

Or perhaps you would prefer--

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of this American life.

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