Roe

Pics or it didn’t happen: 1989

~ MaryG ~ 15 Comments

If you’re GenX like me, about half your life was captured on film only (if at all). Digital cameras were not a thing when we were kids. If you were the third or fourth kid in the family, there may be very few photos of you as a child. This is not the case with me. I am the oldest and my parents were diligent. There are a lot of pics of me as a kid. Later on, I liked taking photos and even took a photography class or two.

Therefore, I’ve got a huge closet full of photo albums, boxes of loose photos, and a folder of black and white negatives in my basement, most of which have not been digitized. These include photos from throughout my life from 1965 through the birth of my second child in 2000. (After that, we went digital.) The photo albums are pretty easy to leaf through as they mostly have the correct year on the spine. And the boxes aren’t too bad because they’re pretty small. Until this weekend, I had ignored the big folder of negatives.

Welp, I finally decided to have a look and it turns out that the negatives are almost entirely from the year 1989–the year I took a photography class at the Museum of Fine Arts School in Boston. There are apps now for scanning negatives with your phone. I used one called FilmBox. It worked OK. There were a few surprises in those negatives. Things I had completely forgotten or only vaguely remembered were jolted back into my mind through the tiny black and white images.

My three best friends from college and me in Boston’s North End. This was about 18 months after we graduated. I had forgotten that we briefly all lived in the same city.
This was an art exhibition opening at the museum where I got my first job: The Institute of Contemporary Art. I had forgotten about those openings and the cheap white wine we always served at them. I typically invited my friends who lived in Boston.
The woman on the right, Teil, was my second boss at the museum. She taught me so much and was such a wonderful person. I think this is the only picture I have of Teil. It’s appropriate that she has a plastic cup of that cheap white wine in her hand.
I had forgotten that my 80s friend Debbie came to visit me in my first studio apartment in the Fenway. Seeing her in front of my turntable, CDs and record albums (in milk crates) reminded me of how people used to look through each others music collections as a way of sort of figuring out what they were like. At that point, I think our musical tastes were diverging, but we both liked Prince.
In that same studio apartment, I had forgotten that my very bad cat Kimba was SO bad that I had to keep the bathroom trashcan above the mirror or he’d spread it all around the apartment. He was very cute, but a real pain in the neck.
I definitely remember going to the massive March on DC for abortion rights in April 1989, but had forgotten I went with two friends from work—Ann and Bridget. Later that year, Bridget and I became roommates in the North End.
We tried. 😢

Two More Weeks

~ MaryG ~ 4 Comments

Two more weeks until Election Day. I can’t believe it’s been FOUR years since Pantsuit Nation got the crushing news that America is way WAY more racist and misogynistic than we thought. (It turns out Black people were already well aware of this and were not terribly surprised that the pussy-grabbing reality TV star won, but it sure was a massive shock to the rest of us.)

So, here we are, after 7 months of COVID-19 lockdown with 220,000+ dead and no end in sight. We all want Trump to lose by a HUGE margin, so that he won’t be able to dispute the results and start a Civil War. We need the Senate too, especially now that the Supreme Court will be so conservative. (Amy Coney Barrett terrifies me even more than Brett “I like beer” Kavanaugh, because I think she’s smart and her worldview was formed in some sort of extreme Catholic sect.)

I’ve already voted, sent postcards to swing state voters, annoyed my social media friends with numerous political posts, and made sure my kids and their friends got registered to vote. I’ve taken action on local legislation that will hopefully protect my state if Roe v Wade gets overturned. I even went to Town Meeting to vote for a Climate Action Resolution. It really feels like there’s nothing left to do but wait and worry.

Sometimes I think it helps to imagine the worst, so you can let it go—like writing a letter that you’ll never send. (Picture the worst.) OK, that just can’t happen.

Postcards to Florida Democrats