Category: Big thoughts

Dollywood

Posted on by Leigh Ann

In June 2024, my mom and I booked a trip to Dollywood to celebrate New Year’s Eve. This is the ongoing story of my journey from total Dolly-ignorance to…well, I don’t know where this story will end up.

Part 1: Soul

You have to understand where I’m coming from.
The Gods of my childhood were Aretha Franklin and Stevie Wonder. There were none above. They were the pinnacle, and Motown was their Olympus. My hometown Philly had it’s own Olympus, Philadelphia International Records, and it’s own Gods, Gamble & Huff & Bell. My earliest and happiest childhood memories all have Motown and TSOP playing in the background. Sinatra was there too, which, if we’re talking about lush arrangements and the finest session players in the world, it’s really not much of a departure.

When I was 5, my mom married a musician. He played drums, and while they were married, he went back to college, ultimately becoming an orchestral percussionist. There was a lot of jazz, and a lot of percussion-heavy classical music in the house. In my soul, these genres – Jazz, Classical, R&B, Soul, and even Disco – blend seamlessly.

I didn’t – I do not – listen to country music.
It makes my skin crawl.
There. I said it.
For one thing: I can not stand the violin, or fiddle, or whatever you want to call it. As part of a full arrangement: fine, okay, I’ll allow it. On it’s own, it’s shrill, whiny, and likely to trigger a migraine. But not all country music features the fiddle, so that can’t be the whole story.

I lean too heavily on the quote, attributed to Duke Ellington, “There are simply two kinds of music, good music and the other kind.” In my mind, “the other kind” is a lot of jam bands, people who can’t play their instruments, and country. All country. Occasionally I would hear someone absolutely tear it up on the banjo, and think, “Hm. That’s not bad!” but never enough for me to actually run to the record store.

But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned to be less judgy.
I don’t yuck other’s yums. And I have learned to identify my own biases.


Part 2: Ignorance

Honestly, I think I made it to the age of 50 without knowing more than one Dolly Parton song. I knew “9 to 5” and that was it. Okay, yes, I knew Whitney’s version of, “I Will Always Love You” but I didn’t know that it was a Dolly Parton song for at least another 20 years.

Now, looking back, I’m curious how this is possible. How could I have lived through the entire decade of the 1970s and not know anything about Dolly Parton except for boob jokes?

My ignorance of all things Dolly has something to do with where America finds itself, politically, today. I find great significance in the fact that I was born in 1971, exactly one year and twenty-one days before Roe v. Wade was decided. I was born into a culture war. Trying to explain why I grew up believing that “country music” = “right-wing” sounds very second-wave and reductive now, but until recently I believed that if you listened to country music, you must agree with Phyllis Schlafly, Ronald Regan, and Jessie Helms. Now I know this isn’t true and has never been true. Still, I’m not pulling this association from thin air. How many photos have you see of Regan on a horse dressed like a cowboy? Politicians and activists on the right claimed country culture as their own. So even if, as a child, I had been curious about the music itself, it carried the taint of regressive politics, hate mongering, and willful ignorance.

I guess I have Lil Naz X and Beyoncé to thank for opening my eyes.

The Woman of Willendorf: why I’m fine with being fat, and why Google sucks.

Posted on by Leigh Ann

I went to a fancy, expensive, private, 4-year art college, so I’ve sat through many Art History lectures. One lesson I remember more than any other. The professor clicked to a slide of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water. Because we were all educated and pretentious young women, the class immediately spouted off The Thing everyone says about Frank Lloyd Wright in general, and Falling Water in particular: Wright seamlessly integrated his buildings into the surrounding natural landscape.

The professor paused. Silence stretched. We looked at the slide. Finally she said, “Did he?”

That was my $500 per credit hour, “The Emperor Has No Clothes” moment. Just because everyone repeats the same factoid doesn’t make it true. It may contain a kernel of truth, or not.  Maybe it was a popular fact, but now disproven. Maybe it was never true, but since history is written by the victors, it’s the only version we know.

How many times have you Googled something, and found nothing but hundreds of links to exactly the same, not exactly correct, information? It happens to me so frequently now that I’m hoping the next giant killer gets here soon with a better search engine. My most recent example: “The Venus of Willendorf.” Let’s start with her name. “Venus” is a gross anachronism, by tens of thousands of years. But she’s been saddled with that inaccuracy since she was dug up in 1908, and corrections to her name made in the past 40 years haven’t made a dent in search results.

It’s not the name that bothers me. It’s that One Thing we all know about the sculpture: she’s a fertility goddess, obviously, because of her “exaggerated” breasts, stomach, and hips. Clearly, the sculpture is about pregnancy and birth. Just Google it! You’ll see! Hundreds of identical hits, all telling you the same thing.

Please insert dramatic pause, while I leave the slide on the screen.

Is she pregnant? Are her breasts, stomach, and hips exaggerated? Because, my mirror says otherwise.

I’ve been a “small fat” for most of my life. There was a period in my 30s, when I “ate right and exercised” and was not plus size for the first and only time. I am the shape I am. I have always been this shape, although menopause has added more weight to my stomach. For the brief time that I was skinny, I still had large breasts and thighs. I could walk into any store and buy any clothing I wanted, but still: my breasts and thighs were several sizes larger than my waist. I was skinny, but somehow I was still shaped wrong. Maybe I wasn’t doing enough cardio. Too much cardio? More Pilates? More Yoga? Less weight training? I was inundated with advice for how to make my body right.

Trying to be ever-thinner and the right shape made me absolutely miserable. Eventually, suicidal ideation got me to a good therapist, and now, while I can’t say I love my body, I’m not trying to force it to become something it can never be. Recently, looking at my stomach, my breasts, my thighs, I had the thought, “I look like the Venus of Willendorf.” I don’t really. He hips are bigger, my legs are longer. I have feet and a face. But the overall shape, especially the shape of her breasts and stomach, mirror my own. In that moment I realized: I have always existed. My body. This shape. It isn’t new, and it’s not a result of GMO foods or a sedentary lifestyle. It simply is what some women look like, and have always looked like, for as long as humans have existed.

This realization sent me down the “Venus of Willendorf” rabbit hole. Reading link after link about her obvious pregnancy, I got kinda pissed. She simply does not look pregnant. I’ve seen pregnant bodies, and that’s not what they look like. On the other hand, she is exactly what I look like, and I have never carried a baby to term or given birth. The Woman of Willendorf was a crone, not a mother. Sure. She may have also been a mother, we can never know. But she looks more like a post-menopausal woman than a young woman at the peak of her fecundity. In order to accept that she is some sort of idealized fertility goddess, we need to agree that the sculptor accurately shaped the pendulous breasts, larger stomach, and wide hips common to older women, but decided to skip the front-protruding baby belly often seen on pregnant people. I’ll admit to not being a pregnancy expert, and (thanks to a quick Google!) I now know that all pregnant bellies look different. Some can be low and wide, as depicted in the sculpture. I can’t say, definitively, that she is not a fertility talisman. I can say, definitively, that I didn’t look like her until after 50, and now I do.

In this new world of Ozempic, which is more or less the same fat-phobic world I have always lived in, but with a twist, I’m seeing my body pathologized in a new way. Now, it’s not my fault that I’m fat. It isn’t my lack of willpower, or my affection for cheese. It’s a disease, for which I can take a drug! Which, leads to the inevitable question, why am I *not* taking this drug? I am a rich, white, fat woman with health insurance and a skinny Primary Care Physician. How hard do you think it would be for me to get Ozempic, if I told my doctor I was concerned about diabetes? Would I even need to go that far? I could simply point to my BMI, for which there are a whole list of medical billing codes. Even with a shortage of the drug, I’ll bet I could be injecting my first dose the day after tomorrow.

I don’t blame any fat person for making that choice. It is easier to buy clothing when you’re thin. You don’t need to worry about random chairs, and you can endure the cheap seats in the back of the plane. It is easier to get hired when you’re thin. You can eliminate one source of bias from your life. It’s a rational choice, but it’s not my choice.

My age, my wealth, my marital status, all afford me the privilege to be fat. I don’t need to interview for a job, and I hope never to have to date again. If it weren’t for the unrelenting cultural pressure and systemic biases favoring thinness, I could just exist within this shape and not give it another thought. Unfortunately, as I think of posting this essay, I wonder if I’m opening myself up to abuse. Fat is a neutral adjective, like tall or brunette, but it is also a slur. I am aware every day that I am fat, and that some people judge me critically because of my weight. It helps when I remember that there is really nothing wrong with me. Bodies have always come in all shapes and sizes, and my particular shape and size has always existed.

Why blog, why now?

Posted on by Leigh Ann

It’s July of 2023, and I am ready to quit social media. Again.

I quit FaceBook in 2019, because I was spending too much time arguing with total strangers. I didn’t like the obsessed, furious person I became when I was on the site. Moreover, I didn’t like the effect FaceBook had on our culture. Social Media in general, and FaceBook specifically, manipulated our emotions and our elections. Me, leaving, wouldn’t solve any of the larger issues, but it might make me less angry and anxious. Ultimately, deciding to leave was hard, but leaving was easy. I don’t miss it at all.

At about that same time, I started spending more time on Instagram. Yeah, yeah, I know: same-same. At least Instagram made it a little harder to argue with total strangers, and once I learned to curate my feed, I really enjoyed scrolling through pictures of yarn, cats, and more yarn. A common criticism of Instagram is that it shows a distorted version of the world, to which our own real-messy lives suffer by comparison. I never had that problem. If an account made me feel icky, I unfollowed. I filled my feed with fat activists, Black artists, and regular people sharing their creative pursuits. All that is great, and I expect that I’ll miss it, if and when I manage to delete my account.

My problem with Instagram is, “the algorithm.” If I could actually see the actual accounts that I actually follow, I might stick around and continue to give Zuck more eyeballs. But no. I see ads. So many ads. And I’m constantly inundated with what I’ll inaccurately call “bots.” Fake accounts follow me every day, which I have to remove and block. I’m tagged in ads for obviously fake companies. I get DMs asking me to represent some product, which again, is obviously fake. All of this is annoying, but then, Instagram tagged ME as a bot, which was really the last straw. I was put into “Instagram Jail” for two weeks, for reasons I’ll never know, without any recourse. One maker I know had the same thing happen to them. Because they relied on Instagram for their business, their solution was to pay to upgrade their account. Which, I’m sorry, is this a protection racket? Is Meta copying their business plans off 1940’s mobsters?

There are theories, of course, as to why I was put in jail. Too many hashtags? Not enough hashtags? Maybe my comments were too similar to each other? Maybe it’s because I like to use emojis? So many theories, no actual information. Which, of course, is the entire Instagram game: trying to figure out “the algorithm.” Post on Tuesdays at 10:am Pacific for best engagement, but don’t post too regularly, because the algorithm doesn’t like that, and it will throttle your posts.

I came to realize this all sounds like an abusive relationship: constantly trying to guess what’s going to make the algorithm happy, and walking on eggshells trying not to make the algorithm angry. I have had enough of that in my life, and I’ll be damned if I’ll stick around for more.

So here we are. Blogging. I’ve never blogged, but I’ve thought about it over the years. I want a place to compile my Beans & Rice research. I want a place to track my knit and crochet projects. If anyone else wants to see these things, I want to be able to share them.