Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress Read Online Free PDF Page B

pillows?” I would have thought they were insane.
    What it really boiled down to, I realize now, was the “-ess” in the word “stewardess.” Somehow, my five-year-old brain had grasped the idea that “-ess” was the culmination of all things feminine and highly desirable. It was a suffix that separated the girls from the boys in the best of all possible ways. Princess, goddess, actress, countess. What was there not to love? A flight attendant,
feh
. But a stewardess? “-Ess” made any profession sound glamorous. A laundress, a sorceress, an adulteress. To this day, I’m convinced that, if someone had only been enterprising enough to call female MDs “doctresses” and female scientists “nuclear biologesses,” I would have been equally enthusiastic about becoming those, too.
    No matter. After my classmates and I recited our career litanies about a zillion times each, they began to lose their luster. They didn’t sound like lists of possibilities anymore so much as lists of
chores.
Plus, since we
all
wanted to be everything, it was getting pretty hard to distinguish ourselves from one another, which was the whole point of our ambitions in the first place.
    And so we began not only ratcheting up our visions, but transforming ourselves. “Okay,” we’d say feverishly, before embarking on a routine game of “House” or “Space Ship.” “Pretend I’m a princess, and my name is Melanie, and I have long red hair and green eyes and I’m wearing a silver miniskirt and a fur coat and I have a magic ring that makes people freeze whenever I yell ‘Freeze.’”
    The boys, I happened to notice, didn’t do nearly so much elaborating. They tended to declare that they were Batman or Wilt Chamberlain and that was it. They didn’t feel compelled to give themselves a total makeover in the process. They never said, “Okay, pretend I’m an astronaut, and my name is Chad, and I have brown hair and blue eyes, and I’m wearing a tuxedo shirt …” Well, not the straight little boys, anyway.
    Early on, somehow, we girls came to think of ourselves as malleable, as rough drafts, as “before” pictures, eager for and requiring an “after.”
    Even our own imaginations weren’t enough sometimes to satisfy our aspirations. We soon began staking out starring roles for ourselves in an even more fantastic world.
    As the children of liberals, television for me and my friends was largely contraband. At my house, for example, my brother and I weren’t allowed to watch the news because my parents didn’t want us traumatized by footage from the Vietnam War. At Michelle’s house, we weren’t allowed to watch the
The Flintstones
or
I Dream of Jeannie
because her mother said they were sexist. At the Richmonds’, any situation comedy in which black people were servants was strictly off-limits. At Annie’s house, her teenaged brother Jerome refused to let us watch
The Brady Bunch
because he said it was “a case study in capitalist oppression.”
The whole family is dependent upon one proletariat worker,
he explained,
and what does Alice get for her labor? Nothing. She only gets to date another proletariat, Sam the butcher, who can’t even spend the night with her. It’s the bourgeoisie controlling the means of production.
    Annie’s mother, however, actively encouraged us to watch
The Partridge Family,
because, she said, it taught little girls that women didn’t need men in order to raise a family. My mother, however, objected to
The Partridge Family
solely on the basis of its music.
    By the time everybody finished weighing in, my friends and I were basically left to watch
Romper Room
and, a few years later, the Watergate Hearings—both of which struck us as entertainment for idiots.
    Yet somehow, we managed to sneak in an impressive amount of off-limits viewing. And whenever we did, we scrambled to touch the TV screen as soon as the opening credits for a particular show came on.
    “I call I’m Ginger!” we’d yell,