Confessions of a Prairie Bitch Read Online Free PDF

to be a disembodied head. The grown-ups all stared at Bea in horror. She said simply, “Oh, I just never know what to get for children.”
    I thought it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. It was a sculpture of what looked like a beautiful dark-eyed East Indian boy. I eventually named it Mowgli, after The Jungle Book character, and kept it on my dresser and stored hats on it. I still consider it one of the top-ten best gifts I’ve ever received.
    I liked surprises, and my childhood was full of them. I never knew who in the way of friends my parents were going to spring on me next. Some of my parents’ pals were more fun than others, some I just barely tolerated, but I couldn’t say any of them were boring. One of my favorite grown-ups was named Christine, whom I befriended when I was about seven. She was an older lady, but I liked her because she didn’t talk to me like I was stupid. Because I was so small for my age, a lot of adults treated me as if I were younger than I was. But Christine wasn’t one of those. She would look me in the eye and listen to what I was saying. She would ask me sensible questions and pay attention to the answers. If I asked her a question, she didn’t laugh and say, “Oh, how cute!” She just answered it like a regular person. In other words, she was capable of holding a normal, intelligent conversation.
    She met my mother through their shared publicist. My mother was at the height of her Casper and Gumby fame, and Christine had a book that she discussed on the lecture circuit and in a nightclub act. She, like my mother, had become quite famous in the late ’50s and early ’60s. Her name was Christine Jorgensen—the recipient of the world’s first “publicly acknowledged” sex-change operation.
    She had at one time been a soldier named George Jorgensen, who one day realized that certain things were just not what they should be. So he went on a quest for medical assistance with what at that time was thought to be a rare condition. He found his way to the doctors in Denmark who were pioneering this new treatment, and several very experimental surgeries later, she returned to America to live out her new life as a woman, in peace and total anonymity.
    Except it didn’t quite work out that way. The press found out, and the 1950s equivalent of today’s rabid paparazzi met her at the airport, where all hell broke loose. The headlines read: “Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty!” and “Operations Transform Bronx Youth!”
    I didn’t have a clue about Christine’s past, but then one day, my parents came to me and said, “We need to talk to you about Auntie Christine.” I was worried and thought maybe she’d been in an accident or something.
    “It’s just that Auntie Christine is famous, and, well, you might hear about this on the news,” my mother said delicately. (I was surprisingly up on current events for the average second grader. A major news junkie, I never missed Walter Cronkite.)
    My parents seemed to be hemming and hawing, which was unusual. Finally, they said, “Auntie Christine used to be a man.”
    “What?” I said and stared at them. I knew they were nuts, but I thought maybe this time they had finally gone the rest of the way around the bend.
    “She used to be a man,” they replied nervously. “She’s a woman now, of course. Uh…you see, she was born a man, and, well, she had an operation…” The whole explanation tumbled out quickly.
    “Oh.” I mean really, what can you say to a story like that? But then my curiosity was piqued. “So wait, you mean people can change? Men can become women, and women can become men?”
    They looked even more nervous. “Uh…well, yes. But it’s very complicated.”
    “So then, if I wanted to, I could become a guy ?”
    The furious backpedaling began: “Oh, well, technically, yes. Of course, you’d have to be an adult, and, of course, it’s a major medical procedure; several operations, you know, very