Author: Helen Boyd

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April 10

30 years ago today, I received my first Holy Communion.

24 years ago today, when I was 14, I saw my first rock concert. (Adam Ant with INXS opening, at St. John’s University, thanks to my brother Joe.)

I remember the one because I remember the other: I was given a charm (for a charm bracelet) commemorating the first event, & happened to still have it when the 2nd happened. For whatever reason, the date just sticks in my head, even now.

I don’t know what happened on any of the other April 10ths that I’ve lived through, though.

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DO #6?

Or maybe it’s #7 – I’ve lost track. But we are back from DO, just this second! It’ll take me a bit to catch up with email, and of course we leave again on Wednesday for IFGE… so some things I may not get to until we return from IFGE on the 15th, but still… we’re back. With cats. It’s fantastic.

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All Cat, All the Time

auroraFearsome Beastie, we call her. We’re at Dark Odyssey starting today, the hotel version of the event we were at when we met Miss Aurora. She wasn’t doing a whole lot of this that day, but a whole lot of other DO campers were doing something close; I’m sure some would envy the length of her tongue, no?

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Just a Shy Young Woman

In an interesting review of the book College Girls: Bluestockings, Sex Kittens, and Co-Eds, Then and Now that appeared in the April 2007 Atlantic Monthly, reviewer Caitlin Flanagan paraphrases the author, Lynn Peril:

She arrived (at the University of Wisconsin, 25 years ago) with a butch haircut, a suitcase full of punk clothes mail-ordered from New York, and a ‘tough-chick persona.’ I suspected that she was romanticizing her past, but then she shows us her freshman ID card, and she really was a fright.

Ugh.

But then in the next paragraph:

Underneath, though, she was as timid as any 18-year-old girl plucked from home and set down on the campus of a huge university. Too shy to raise her hand in class, or even to order a pizza over the telephone, she was so rattled by a boy who flirted with her on the first day of French II that she promptly dropped the class.

Which strikes me as about right. The review is overall good but it’s the quoted bits that Peril wrote about herself that have my interest piqued; it’s not often I read something about women in college with shaved heads and punk wardrobes that mirrors my own experience at all.