Apropos of nothing in particular about lesbian parenting, and everything in general about the world I hope my kids will grow up into, Michelle Obama’s speech from Monday:

• Michelle Obama’s Speech at the Democratic National Convention

and this herstoric speech, from the Contender, last night:

• Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Speech at the Democratic National Convention

both courtesy The New York Times.

The great benefit of the Times version is that it has a running transcript next to it.

Watched both with the kids on the lap this morning. They applauded whenever the crowd did, which was a lot. Little guy for the fun of it. I think his older sister, too.

When she asked who they were, I said, “Really smart women who may be President one day. Like you.”

This week, the lil’ monkey’s preschool is on vacation. As evidenced by the yawning gaps between posts, I find myself with a bit more childcare on my hands. In between our many trips to the zoo, the arboretum, the natural history museum, the botanical garden, the planetarium, and the Museum of Modern Art, our guided tours of the Pacific Coast Stock Exchange, the Google campus, and rehearsals of The Bonesetter’s Daughter at the San Francisco Opera house, our expeditions on a shrimp fishing boat and a local archeological dig, and finally our attendance at talks at the Commonwealth Club, I have occasionally tried to engage them at home so’s to snatch a little time to work.  

(I’d say I was snatching time to watch the Democratic National Convention on CNN, but remember? No live TV! So I’ll have to catch Michelle Obama’s speech on YouTube.) [Later note: who needs YouTube? How 'bout team Obama?]

Fortunately for me, one promising development has been that the girlchild has taken to offering up renditions of her favorite “Beatrix Pottery” volumes to the boychild.  Bless his soul, he’s taking a shine to it.

Continue reading ‘A tale about a tale’

Saturday pancake, Berkeley, CA.

Acclaimed playwright Terry Baum has revived her one-woman play, Immediate Family, and will be performing it through this fall as a fundraiser for the No on Proposition 8 (the CA marriage ban) campaign. She’ll be performing it this Sunday, August 24 at 2pm, at her San Francisco home. Find out where by sending an RSVP to her directly.

Here’s a synopsis:

Virginia, a middle-aged postal worker, visits her comatose lover, Rose, in the hospital.  The tender and often hilarious one-sided conversation reveals the women’s long-term intimacy, their lives outside “normal” society, and the legal barriers which deny Virginia status as a member of Rose’s “immediate family.”  

Immediate Family opened in 1983 to critical acclaim at the National Women’s Theater Festival, and has since been performed in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Israel,  Australia, and New Zealand. It has been translated into French, Dutch, and Hebrew.

Immediate Family may remind some ol’ timers of the case of Sharon Kowalski. I sure as hell will never forget it: just as I was coming out, Sharon Kowalski’s case introduced me to the sobering fact that homophobic laws, in the hands of homophobic people, were the very worst threat to me as a lesbian.  (Remember what I said, a coupla months back, about how hard it was to consider that the law might actually protect us, rather than keep us from each other?  This is what I’m talking about.)  Sharon and her partner Karen Thompson had exchanged commitment rings and named one another as insurance policy beneficiaries (about the most you could do back in the early ’80s.)  In November of 1983, Sharon’s car was hit by a drunk driver; she suffered severe brain injuries and her niece, who was in the car with her, was killed.  But when Sharon’s family learned of their relationship, they cut off Karen’s visitation access to Sharon, thus launching Karen’s eight year-long battle to win first visitation rights, and ultimately custody. The words “Bring Sharon home” mean something to a lot of us still.

Continue reading ‘Immediate Family’

Who’s having more fun: kid, or babysitter? You be the judge.

One of the lil’ monkey’s two childcare-for-voice lessons caregivers cared for her for the last time today. Most likely. She’s a recently graduated high school senior, virtually matriculated college freshman. She’s off to Boston any day now.

They had spent the morning together at a nearby tot lot, playing imaginative games as they often had. The younger brother was along for the ride, having become old enough to be manageable. The three came back to the house, the kids smudge-filled and all smiles. The lil’ peanut went down for a nap, and the two gals, one little and one big, read fairy tales on our couch for a good long while, as they often had. Then it was time for our daughter’s “biggirl” friend to go.

I came out from where I had been working, and asked to take a photograph of the two of them. The lil’ monkey said Nooooooooo. For which reason I don’t know: arbitrary assertion of a right, just to remember that it’s there? Or instinctive concern that the moment would tap into a well of sadness about the fact that her biggirl friend was about leave? I respect both, and didn’t press the matter.

Continue reading ‘Just a moment or two’

I don’t even watch television, but a friend has been saying for months, “Don’t you know about Rachel Maddow?!  You have to!  Brilliant!  Progressive!  Out dyke!  From your home town fer Chrissakes!  On television! Go watch her right this very instant and then report back.”

Sadly, the years of Rachel Maddow’s ascension in broadcasting have more or less paralleled my years either in family crisis or early parenthood or both.  So I’d been a bit tuned out.  Also, we moved the TV from one room to another about a year or two ago, and managed never to really plug it back in again, beyond hooking up the DVD player.  We can’t have the child watching Dottie’s Magic Pockets on my computer here, now can we?

But I succumbed to the peer pressure, checked out Rachel Maddow (pictured at right — see? you think I’m kidding? she’s like, like, like US!), and hot darn was I not disappointed.  She reminded me of my smartest chums, laying into [name the topic] with gusto and good humor and insight and research to back it all up.  Ah, my peeps.

Continue reading ‘We interrupt this parenting blog to crow about a well-placed lesbian television and radio commentator’

This evening the lil’ monkey took umbrage at being interrupted to come to dinner.  She had been spelling her name out over and over, along with sundry other words and non-words.

Baba: Why in the Sam Hill did you just whack Mama?!

Lil’ Monkey: Because I wanted to find some harassing way to get her to let me write some more.

[Note to self: It didn't work when the little girl did it, so it is likely not to work if I do it.  Even if I have the good sense to whack Mama on the hiney instead.]

While the sun will never completely set on Into the Woods — Sondheim’s in our girl’s blood, I say — a new musical is already in the wings, readying itself for rehearsal and production this fall for the beloved’s youth musical theater company: Fiddler on the Roof.

Since we have a fairly aggressive campaign to see to it that the lil’ peanut acquires appropriate dance skillz (what with him being a future white guy and all), it was a natural that we get us the pop-ragga version of “If I Were A Rich Man,” done by Ms. Gwen Stefani and Ms. Eve Jeffers.  Lately it’s been a daily thing, putting this song on and then shaking the collective tailfeathers.  

(And no, the little tykes are not watching the video: I’m not ready to see them working some of the fly girl moves, even if my own facsimilies thereof may well have been what led the beloved to look me up in the first place. I support that kind of galavanting wholeheartedly, but on people other than my kids, and/or I should say rather when my kids are old enough to write convincing five-paragraph essays about debates in contemporary choreography.  Which for the lil’ girlie, at least, is a few years off.)   

Continue reading ‘A well-rounded musical education’