Shape Shifters

The summer I was nineteen, I made what I refer to as my pilgrimage to Mecca. My family had moved to England as Dad's job had sent him to Surrey. I opted to stay behind to finish high school in the states. But once May came, I flew across the pond to rejoin my family. I had no intention of letting what might possibly be my one opportunity to see the real Strawberry Fields pass me by. Especially when you consider that the island of Great Britain is smaller than most American states.

Liverpool was instantly more congenial than Surrey. With a few extremely friendly exchanges, I quickly made a few friends and found my way to Beaconsfield Road (or Lane, I don't remember now) There, nestled in ivy covered stone walls sat a small square brick nursery school/kindergarten building with equally boxy windows. Children between the ages of three to five years of age ran about with abandon, laughing gleefully. Behind the school, about ten feet from the nearest classroom window, there was a small dogwood tree, the perfect sort for a toddler to learn how to climb trees on. "Let me take you down" echoed in my ears as I imagined a small John Lennon helping a schoolmate out of this blossoming plaything. Suddenly, the song made complete sense to me.

But something was out of place: an eyesore. As I walked back around to the front of the school, back up onto the driveway, I took a better look at the statue of John Lennon that had been placed there. It had been posed in such a way as to make him look like a cross between Neil Armstrong landing on the moon, and Superman holding the American flag on the north pole. (circa the sixties tv show) This was the product John Lennon, not the man.

I stared at this bronzed misrepresentation of the man who taught me the Aristotelian art of catharsis through writing with his deceptively simple displays of exquisitely human pain such as "Crippled Inside", "A day in the life", and "Mother".

He stood, legs apart, clad only in tight jeans, boots, and an open leather jacket. His abs and chest looked like he'd been working out on a six day split with a personal trainer for at least a year. I know of no Qi Gong exercises or macrobiotic recipe capable of that. His hair was perfectly feathered, almost mocking the fact that Yoko always cut his hair. The most nauseating detail was the fact that this icon, MY icon's nipples were bronzed. Picture Allen Ginsburg's nipples bronzed
or Bob Dylan's nipples bronzed. Who among us really wants to see those who's intellects we admire quite so revealed? Not me.

As I look back now on that moment spent amidst a throng of Asian photo snapping tourists, I hear another Lennon's lyrics defining that moment for me in my head. "Not was he was but what he should have been" is a line from the Julian Lennon song, "Rebel King."

There in lies the essence of shape shifting: we are all simultaneously our authentic selves, and the self we hope we are projecting out to the world. It is thought that a healthy person might be solely their authentic self at all times. But is that necessarily what is best for us? Isn't shifting our display of who we are to suit a certain perspective necessary at times?

When I first started dancing, I didn't see the point of picking a stage name. I like my first name so why not just be myself? A few weeks later as I was wrestling with the notion of the champagne hustle, I introduced myself to a man who worked for First Boston bank.

"My project manager has a daughter named Gabriella. His name is Paul Clark. What's your last name?" Without having any idea what a boundary was, I immediately felt one was crossed, and excused myself to go come up with a stage name I could live with.

In that moment, I saw the benefit of shape shifting; disguising myself as something other than Paul Clark's daughter so as to achieve some sense of individuality that would not adversely effect my dad's reputation. As I evolved as a dancer and became a traveling feature, I truly saw the difference between the woman as consumable product and the lonely girl who isolated herself in her hotel room. Kayleigh was who they wanted and who I gave them. Gabriella belonged to no one but me ... or at least that was how it was supposed to go down. The dancing world does not play fair, so there was much reparation to be done each time I quit.

The year I started dancing, I also began looking for more information on what it means to be Strega. There wasn't alot of specifically Italian information. There still isn't much compared to how much info is available on Celtic Wicca.

I found a class on Witchcraft at the Arsenic & Old Lace book store in Cambridge. There was a class that was meant to teach us how to make clouds disappear and grass grow. I skipped that class on purpose. My inner Connecticut Yankee cynic just wasn't ready for allegory yet. But as I grew as a witch, I did eventually begin to see the benefit of perspective on how we view every aspect of our lives. It isn't that the cloud disappears, it's that it has shifted, thus our perspective of what is directly before us changes. So shape shifting is all a matter of perspective.

There are all sorts of folktales about Vampires and Werewolves and Shape shifters. Our teacher, Andres Corben Arthen swore to us that these creatures are all very real. How queer, I thought at the time. I was so puzzled by how these things could exist, but they do. It's just a matter of perspective.

My sister has coined the term N-SSEV in describing DJ, my ex-husband. N-SSEV stand for Narcissistic Soul Sucking Energy Vampire. My sister is not only brilliant, she's completely on target. I think we can all agree that we've each dated, if not married one of these, at least once in our lives. They come in male and female form. As do Werewolves, ravagers of unsuspecting victims in the night. We see them in the newspaper the next morning charged with rape or another type of assault.

But who are the shape shifters? The Gospel According to Aradia recalls a spell in which a young woman transforms herself into a dog so as to get past the watchful eyes of her parents and seek out her secret lover. Who are the young girls becoming dogs and slipping out bedroom windows? It's all a matter of perspective. She's slinking out of the house stealthfully, in the same manner a pointer might stalk a hare. Toe,heel, toe heel ... carefully not allowing a single floor board to creek. Listening for stirring parents, smelling the air for any sudden changes such as Dad shifting his seat to light up a cigar. She's shape shifting into a dog via stealth. Allegory, folks. Nothing is literal here. But it's all done out of necessity. We shape shift into the perfect obedient daughters to get what we want. We then shape shift into the seductresses our lovers long for when Mom, Dad, the Church, and society, are not looking.

Celebrities or those who are sought out as something they are not, such as strippers, are shape shifters when they turn on that part of themselves that is the product for the stage and for the cameras. They enforce their boundaries when they step off stage and the cameras are off and they retreat back to their personal lives. This doesn't always go as planned. If you're not aware of how necessary this is and don't consciously make the transition, your personal life can pay the price for you being consumed as a product. Once you've been consumed, it's hell trying to reconstruct yourself. In re-piecing myself back together, I often thought about my greatest literary influence and whether he was aware of the art of shape shifting.

"Not what he was but what he should have been"

Mmm ... maybe not.

Shape shifting may not be what others call it, but we all do it to some degree. We put on more palatable versions of ourselves to get along with co-workers we may not see eye to eye with. We definitely do it say, at a bar, during election season. (if we know what's good for us)

There is magic about all around us if that is how we choose to view our surroundings. Being dyslexic, listening to my literary influences was a hell of a lot easier than reading them when I was younger. People like John Lennon showed me by their example what was possible. So I started to write.

People like Julian Lennon, who's writing style is cryptic and nothing at all like my own, taught me what artistic enforcement of personal boundaries looks like. So I took the lessons and sat with them. I looked at how I could take from them a sense of personal reserve that worked for me.

In Jungian dream analysis, the most repeated answer to many of my questions was the following: "Can you sit with this feeling? Can you sit with it and face it? Because if you face it, your perspective on it will shift and in a few days, this feeling will look like something else entirely."

I may have skipped out on making clouds disappear, but I didn't miss out on the objective of the lesson. Real magic is all about perspective. Only you have the power to alter what that perspective ultimately looks like.

I heard a rumor that Strawberry Fields might have to close. If the statue goes, that's fine with me. But if the children aren't there everyday laughing and playing ... what will passers by take away from what they see when they look at the sight of the song's inspiration? They'll see the ultimate meaning of the song's lyrics: the death of innocence. Or maybe what they see will be determined by their personal perspectives. Maybe Strawberry Fields will have shape shifted into something else entirely. Something cryptic and safe ... innocent.

Listen!

I started dancing back in 1989 at The Naked Eye in the remnants of the Boston Combat Zone. The club was still run by burlesque rules: no black shoes on the front stage, and girls made money for the club by doing "the champagne hustle."

The champagne hustle was, in essence the solicitation of our company in exchange for exorbitantly overpriced cocktails. A "single" was nine dollars, of which we got four in commission, a "double" was eighteen, (we got eight) and a "triple" was twenty seven of which we got twelve. The holy grail was when a customer bought you a bottle a champagne. Moet was one hundred dollars, (we got twenty) Mumms was one hundred and fifty, (we got forty) and DP was three hundred, (we got sixty).


I had become a dancer after getting accepted to Boston College. I expected to make tuition by dancing, not soliciting drinks. Soliciting drinks meant listening to these men who, for three hundred dollars, had all sorts of expectations I was not prepared nor obligated to live up to. Hence the term the champagne hustle. It should be noted that I never made it to B.C. I got hustled too.


I eventually figured out that as long as I listened to these men and let them be the ones who were onstage, figuratively, performing as it were for me via conversation, they were more inclined to spend their money. I still however felt the burden of their expectations and was really squirmy about the whole procedure.


Lady Jane was a feature performer. She had been a dancer for years and had the whole thing down pat. She gave me a few pointers that were meant to make listening to my customers a bit more palatable.


"Just listen to the last few words of each sentence so you know whether to answer 'yes' or 'no' to whatever they're talking about. Then you can zone out the rest of the time and it doesn't get to feeling so heavy."


I tried that, but it felt inauthentic to me. My customers felt it too. Although I did get more bottles of champagne, the type of men who bought them for me were no where near as interesting to talk to as they had been previously. It was all very disheartening.


Six years later, as I was about to begin my Saturn Return, I began Jungian dream analysis and enrolled at the Swedish Massage Institute at the same time. After some negative experiences as a dancer, it became imperative that I find a new career and find a way to change my opinion of human contact. Massage school was exactly what I needed. I learned to release somatized emotions, face my absolute darkest fears, and got over the fear I had accumulated of being touched. I also learned a new technique that was meant to be used when dealing with survivors of physical trauma, called Reflective Listening.



Reflective Listening is the repetition of what the client says to you in such a way as to keep the focus on the client and make the session entirely about them. The idea is that you do not involve yourself in their experience of emotional release of their somatized memory at all. I have to admit, I wasn't very good at this at first, but I got better at it with time and rumination. I thought back to those lonely men in the Boston Combat Zone and I realized how badly they needed to be heard. It's easy to see the women as the only victims in the world of strip tease, but the men who seek comfort from a dancer are socially dysfunctional in their own way as well. We seek out one another: women may work on their daddy issues while the men work through some Oedipal issues of their own. Reflective listening taught me that the path to God is found through the constant work we must all do to improve the quality of our relationships. Once again, I don't know how good I actually am at this, but I think it's the goal we're all supposed to shoot for.



A few years after graduation, my husband at the time and I were attending his first premier party. (DJ is an actor/comedian) We walked in and I was introduced to the director of the show (VH1's Sledgehammer) as well as various other important people connected with VH1 and Viacom. I immediately knew what to do. I went into champagne hustle mode, but with a twist. I had learned to be a better listener this time. I wasn't out for commissions on drinks. I was out to pimp my man.

On the drive home, DJ commented, "I think I did pretty good. I might have gotten a commercial out of that party." ( No party full of actors is ever just a party. It's always work.)


"Really," I replied, "I got you three."


I explained with astonishment that I had had an epiphany: that all those years as a dancer may not have been in vain after all. When combined with the skills I had learned in massage school, I had developed what looked to be a highly useful skill. Shockingly, DJ did not respond positively. He was jealous! I couldn't understand why! I was trying to explain that this was a business skill. Yes, he was an artist but he had to be two different people if he was to be a success; and artist on camera and on stage and a businessman at social events. There is a reason we are not together anymore. DJ loved being with an intelligent woman so long as I was working in his service and not upstaging him. I wasn't trying to upstage him. I was trying to teach him a useful skill. If you can't hack an equal, I don't know what to tell you buddy.

He also always subjected me to the double standard and passed judgement on me for having been a dancer. Funny how a man's porn stash doesn't make him less of a man but any skills a woman learns as a stripper are instantly discounted.

What really burned me here was the fact that DJ was not allowing me the opportunity to give back all the lessons on improvisation that he imparted to me. Back in West Palm Beach, when we were all still theater majors at Palm Beach Community College, DJ and Michael and Ron and Dean and all the other members of the Comedy Squad, would tell each other stories at parties. Rolling Rock bottles would litter the floor as I lay with my head in DJ's lap listening to the guys, listening and absorbing. They had learned how to weave tales of sad and lonely childhoods into side stitching mirth filled madness. Alchemy is telling tales of woe and spinning them into gold. Mike and DJ had a knack for that. As members of the Squad and then Lost Footage and the Swarm, I often referred to them as the Lennon & McCartney of improv comedy. I had learned so much from listening to them as well as adapting the imperative skill of listening that improv entails into my observation and writing skills. Why couldn't he, just for a moment, be the student and not the teacher?

Going half time, KSU is probably going to take me another four years. After that, I see plenty of book signing parties and publishing house events in my future. I hope for DJ's sake he learned something from my epiphany. But if not, I have every intention of putting it to good use in the future.

NIAF essay I

I am scheduled to graduate Phi Theta Kappa from Lakeland Community College in August 2010. I am planning to attend Kent State University in the fall. I am double majoring in English and Creative Writing and minoring in Italian studies. I plan to write about my Strega lineage in the form of creative non-fiction in order to keep Stregheria alive in Italian-American culture. I want to write prose that continues the popular trend of modern witchcraft literature, and dispel some of the negative connotations the Strega tradition has suffered from over the years. Kent's Honors college would afford me the opportunity to study in Italy for at least one semester. Studying in Italy would enhance both my research and language skills.
I began writing as a child. My first published work was in a 1977 issue of a Catholic newsletter. It was about the marriage between the sun and the moon and how sad they were because they could only see each other once a month during the third quarter. In 1993 I won the Marshall B. Woods literary award for a one act-play about Stregheria entitled “Ave Maria.” In 1995, the Ensemble Studio Theater in Manhattan performed a staged reading of my full length play, “Venus Rising.” Although I was experiencing some success as a writer, I realized to progress further I needed to pursue higher education. In addition, as my definition of what it means to be both Strega and first generation Italian-American has developed, my urge to share this knowledge as a storyteller has also blossomed.
My professional plans include setting the record straight about what Stregheria is and is not. There have been some books published recently that do not accurately reflect Italian pagan traditions. I hope to learn the skills necessary to combat this misinformation by telling my story through prose. I also have plans for a one-woman show on my experiences as a first-generation Italian-American. My mom was born in Split, Yugoslavia during World War II. (My grandfather worked with the occupation force stationed there.) As a result of growing up in that environment, she doesn't fit the stereotype of the excessively affectionate Italian mother. She did not speak English fluently until I was about four. She has since graduated from Harvard and is an anthropologist. Watching her get taken advantage of when I was a child and then juggle college in a foreign language has solidified her role as my idol. I want to pay tribute to her in both performance and prose. I would also like to contribute my personal narrative to the Italian-American story. I have noticed that third and fourth generation Italian-Americans lose touch with their ethnic identity and thus themselves. Without self knowledge, we are not whole. We become shadows of ourselves, stereotypes, and tacky ones at that.

NIAF essay II

As a Strega descendant, the question of how my relationship to my heritage differs from that of my ancestors can be answered very simply, by borrowing from a Greek. It’s an Archimedean Spiral, a series of 360 degree turns that have landed me, ultimately right back, not in my ancestors' precise belief system, but in their understanding of the annual cycles and the connection between human lives and the natural world.
My mother was an art student in Rome when she met an fell in love with an American Air Force private. I was born a year later. She met the man I would come to know as my father years later at a foreign student picnic hosted by Yale University. He was an astronomy major at Yale while mom was studying anthropology at Wesleyan. My childhood was an array of mom's myths by day and corroboration of those myths while stargazing with my dad at night.
My career as a massage therapist put me in touch with an ability to channel the dead. I had always spoken to my Biz Nonna Adele (who died during WW II) as a child, but I was never clear at such a young age whom exactly I was talking to. Through massage, I began to understand the magnitude of my strong sense of connection to my ancestors. I then began seeing my clients' lives in my hands. I incorporated Reflective Listening into my practice and helped the clients resolve their own childhood issues or relationships with relatives who had passed on.
Today I am married to a hunter. We plant soy beans for the deer together every summer. I can stand in a field of wheat and tell you exactly when the summer solstice will arrive without looking at a calender. It's when the corn and wheat are exactly the same height. I trace this ability to my ancestors' agrarian rituals.
The Ohio countryside may not be quite as mountainous as Umbria, but the vineyards here remind me very much of my grandparents' home in Castleviscardo. So does the taste of fresh wild boar. It's my evolution into this lifestyle that are the turns of my Archimedean Spiral; seer, healer, stargazer, storyteller, hunter and chanter of Italian poetry.
The game pole in my Nonno's garden routinely had wild game hanging from it. Rabbits and chickens would be chilled in la cantina, the caves below the house. Large game was hung to cure for three to nine days, depending on the weather. The game pole in my own back yard is brimming with deer from October to February.
My great grandmother was not a licensed massage therapist, but she was a healer and a seer. My grandfather worked for the Ministry of Interior. So I have no work skills in common with him. But like my ancestors, I still skin squirrels and rabbits each September; eat and can only locally grown vegetables; and say a decade of Hail Mary's to La Madonna Negra eight times a year. Our family lives in harmony with the wheel of the year, both in Italy and here in the states.

Guns and Politics

This past weekend, I played secretary for Mike while he taught a Carry Concealed Weapon (CCW) permit class. I was the only Democrat in the room and as such, played the role of professional observationalist.

Upon our arrival at the gun club, we noticed a sign out front that said, "No Shooting of high powered rifles until further notice" The gun club is nestled in Ohio,'s winery country and the gunfire was frightening the migrant workers in the grape orchards. We found out that a ceasefire during the winery's growing season had been written into the gun club's by-laws. Some anti-immigrant slander got thrown around which quickly got changed into anti-illegal immigrant banter, when I mentioned that many Mexicans come here to escape the deadly drug wars in their homeland. Their fear of the gunfire may be due to it's triggering of deadly memories. The gun club is designed with bullet trajectory in mind so noise is all they have to be afraid of. No one handling a firearm responsibly is ever going to send a bullet off into grape country.

As the students began filing in, there was small talk about what each person would be shooting that day. I heard warm stories about relics passed down from grandfather to grandson that came with decades worth of instruction on care and responsible gun ownership. This small talk identified two things to me: one was the firearms' right to it's own history and sentimental value, the other was the aspect of mentoring a younger generation in responsible gun ownership.

One young man who had inherited a handgun from his grandfather talked about it the way some other twenty something might talk about his father's restored 1969 GTO. They had cleaned the gun together and shot it together. His grandfather had taught him all about the history of that gun's particular model and he could rattle it off verbatim. I was reminded of Model T Ford's as he mentioned the year in which the grip on that particular model gun was changed.

He exchanged stories on being taught how to behave around a firearm. These stories felt particularly poignant to me as the media only covers gunshot stories from the perspective of irresponsible handling that leads to an accidental death.

Another couple used to shoot every weekend, but hadn't for the past twelve years. Their weekends are now tied up with a 1971 Mercury Comet, which they proudly showed me a picture of. This class was a way for them to get back into the gun culture.

As the day wore on I mentioned that I was a Democrat and that I voted for the Brady bill. My opinion of firearms evolved after I moved from New York City to Ohio. In New York, deer don't run in front of your car. There are no wild boar rooting through your garbage and no black bear sightings. It is generally believed that the police can handle any altercations that come up, especially after Giuliani's iron-fisted police state approach to government. "We don't live in the wild west anymore." is a popularly over heard argument against guns in left wing circles. But out here in Ohio, remnants of the wild west do still exist. If a deer is hit and is suffering on the side of the road, generally the Police are called and the officer shoots the deer, thus ending it's prolonged suffering. Often times, the deer is then picked up by a local butcher who then donates the meat to a local food bank or church soup kitchen. But in Ashtabula county for example, the economic crisis has the county so poor, it's Sheriff's department is only running one cruiser. Ashtabula county is the crystal meth lab capital of the country. You better believe there is illegal gun activity going on. With one cruiser for the whole county, and equally cut back township police departments, the citizens are arming themselves as a means of safety against the drug addicts.

As the class began winding to a close, I passed out the test and the room fell quiet. As the tests were handed in, I looked at the scores while Mike was grading them. Nobody got below a B+. These were people who had been raised around firearms. They had a healthy respect for their lethal nature. You never touch a firearm you are unfamiliar with. You never carry a loaded firearm unless you are ready to use it. You never point the firearm in an unsafe direction, (meaning at a person). A firearm being carried safely should be carried with it's barrel pointing down toward the ground.

People began whispering to one another and I heard some more political sentiments. The word "nigger" got tossed around. I am always suprised at how acceptable that term is to some people. Only one person seemed to believe they were arming themselves against the Apocalypse, which seemed to be, in her opinion, when the Democrats eventually took over. I found that fairly amusing, seeing as we're barely ever in office long enough to do anything. Generally speaking however, gun ownership was being undertaken for logical reasons. There is a questioniare that students fill out that comes back to me as I am writing their names on their certificates. "Personal protection" is the number one reason the students want to carry a concealed weapon. Ashtabula county is probably the best example of why people are arming themselves. But as I looked at the addresses of all the students, I noticed that no one lived near Cleveland or Columbus. No one lived in an area with a high population density. I wondered if population density affects our mentality and our personal definitions of what safety is.

The National Institute of Mental Health reports that one in seventeen Americans suffer from a serious mental illness. Having bi-polar disorder, I will never be able to legally own and carry a gun. I'm ok with that. But I have noticed that gunowners that suffer from anxiety induced insomnia or who may be battling drug addiction are extremely reluctant to confront their maladies for fear of losing their guns. How safe and responsible are guns in the hands of people who are legal gun owners but whose lives may being undergoing some sort of crisis?


Prior to the class, Mike hung a photo of Obama on the gun club's bulletin board with a caption beneath it that read, "firearms salesman of the year". A couple of people pointed to the photo and said he was the reason they felt they needed to carry a concealed weapon. That puzzled me, since the ammunition companies are known for cutting back production of ammo during Democratic presidencies in order to keep the bias afloat. I wondered, in that moment where these folks were getting their information and if they were checking their information's sources. I wondered if I was double checking my own sources, or if I was falling for my own party's banter.

I wanted to write this because the partisanship in America has gotten way out of hand. I wanted to impart to the class, (and I did) that even among my most avidly left wing friends, none of them believed that a ban on hand guns would be an ethical move. I wanted to show this room full of Republicans that Democrats are not all left wing extremists, that some of us can actually be in agreement on some issues. But I think my words fell short. They didn't want to hear me so long as what I had to say failed to fall in with their beliefs. But I'm guilty of that as well. I'll defend my party vehemently in the face of any attack on it.

As everyone left for the day and I helped Mike clean up and close up the gun club, people helped move the tables back to where they belonged and everyone gave me back their pencil. They were polite and helpful. I almost wanted to believe they were more polite than most New Yorkers. But to say that would be falling for yet another untrue and unwarranted stereotype. New Yorkers are not as rude as they are made out to be, just as gun owners are not a bunch of Clint Eastwood wannabes.

Maybe some day we'll meet in the middle. Isn't that generally where the truth can be found?

Groupie Sluts

Last Thursday I was in health class and we were talking about nutrition. We were at the end of the lecture when it happened. One of those new age junkies piped up and name dropped some author she'd just read. Some Doctor had some amazing solution to my wheat allergy AND bi-polar disorder all wrapped up in one book, and the kicker (as is always the case with new age hippy chick thinking) is that it can all be done WITH NO DRUGS.

It had been a long time since I had run into one of these chicks. As a massage therapist, I was constantly surrounded by them. They were like locusts. I attended of few seminars after I graduated from the Swedish Institute to make me that much more employable. The massage seminar circuit is a bastion for these women.

"Have you taken Bruno Chickly's class? I've taken all three of them. You HAVE to study with him. It'll change your whole approach to your private practice."

But these women attended so many seminars; at least one a month that I couldn't see when they ever had time to devote to their own lives. They seemed enamored with a different doctor every week. This felt familiar to me, this undying apostolic adoration for men they barely knew. And then I remembered my pre-massage therapy lifestyle and the kind of woman I was then, as well as the company I kept.

"I got back stage last night and look, Ronnie James Dio signed my tits!"

These are the kinds of conversations I would hear nightly in the dressing room when I was a dancer. We modern day priestesses in our temples of Venus never saw ourselves as the embodiment of the Goddess we all were. Rather we worshipped the boys who wore just as much spandex and hairspray (this was 1989) as we did. All the strippers and escorts would talk shop and share notes on Rick Savage and Joe Elliot, Don Dokken and Vince Niel. They knew who's album was coming out before it made the papers. They knew who had the biggest ... well you get the idea. They followed their idols apostolically.

Susan and Peggy and I exchanged phone number's and e-mail addresses back in health class, Susan went on with her outpouring lust for Dr. Mark Hyman. I tried to picture her not in her L.L. Bean winter jacket and Born winter slippers but with covered grays and big hair and in a red spandex mini-dress. Different monologue, but same demeanor and same intention.

She was undeterred when I tried somewhat unsuccessfully to get a word in edgewise and point out that yes, in fact I had tried,every other new age healing modality I could think of to heal my broken brain. I tried Jungian Dream analysis. I tried Craniosacral therapy. I tried Somato-Emotional Release Therapy. I tried Veganism. I tried a Macrobiotic diet. I tried Qi Gong. It tried Yoga. And guess what happened? Nothing. Guess what actually ended up working? DRUGS! GOOD OLD FASHIONED ALL AMERICAN DRUGS!!!!!!!

Unflapped, she went on to point out that I hadn't tried Mark Hyman. This crunchy granola hippy chick would not be out crunched. And at that moment I had the identical epiphany with Susan that I had had back when I was a dancer: I didn't care about out crunching her, just like I didn't give a shit about getting back stage at a Motorhead concert.

There are groupie sluts everywhere. We can choose to follow the false idols pop culture hands us or we can look at them as archetypes: pick up points to emulate and leave the rest. I'm going to stick with the Doctor who lives in my neighborhood. I'll fire his ass the second I don't see eye to eye with him. And the radio station in my car will continue to flip around depending on whether I feel like Terri Gross's apostle or Jimi Hendrix's. It depends on my mood and it depends on the day.