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A Day to Remember
July, 1978
The ERA MARCH, Washington Mall, Washington, DC
More than 100,000 women wearing white – the connection to the women who fought for the Vote – marched in favor of Congress granting an extension on the time given to pass the Equal Rights Amendment.
When the vote was taken that year theygranted an additional three years.
I was there that day marching with a group under the flag of the Coalition of Women’s Arts Organizations.
It was an exciting, energizing, and hopeful gathering on a very hot and humid Summer day in Washington. We were part of women’s history.
Those days were filled with challenges. The memories of the times and the people are vivid for me
and being a part of the 1970s Women’s Movement changed my life.
Pushing Boundaries is my personal story of those days – –
I will be telling PUSHING BOUNDARIES:
2 PM Thursday September 10 at the International Storytelling Center, Jonesborough, TN
7:30 PM Wednesday, September 16, Friendship Heights Village Com. Ctr., Chevy Chase, MD
I hope women will come to hear this story and to remember their own.
The Power of Looking Back.
Thinking about and working on The Hello Girls, the show I will present at the Capital Fringe.
A Bit About WWI Times.
Starting the day of working on my Capital Fringe Show, The Hello Girls, listening to a popular boy-girl song from WWI ERA – to get my heart, mind and imagination geared into the right time zone. Pete Wendling recorded this for the player-piano in 1917 – the country was charged with patriotic spirit as America entered the Great War, the “boys” wanted to to go “over there”, my grandmother – Louise Cobb Diggle, wrote from New York City that the air was filled with music and calls for people to buy War Bonds, but she had no idea that in 9 months her two brothers would be “over there” in France and that only one would come home. Recently I saw a small dance card from an entertainment on a troop ship on the Atlantic on the way to France – For Me and My Gal was listed on the music program. March 6, 1918 The First 33 – of the Hello Girls, left NYC behind. Proudly wearing their new dark blue Army Signal Corps uniforms they boarded a troop ship along with several thousand Doughboys and sailed to France.
Ode to Family Photos
When my husband Jim and I started dating I don’t remember his talking about his interest in documenting family history. It came to light steadily over the years and we have the legacy to prove it…. photos, home movies, videos, and audio tapes. I am now gathering them from storage boxes, closets and drawers to be sure they are all together in one place. Its our treasure.When we met in Baltimore where Jim was a student at Johns Hopkins University Medical School he casually took pictures with one of his father’s range-finder cameras. Developing the black and white film was expensive so we don’t have many photos of those days – but the ones we do capture the moment. I could never take pictures with that camera. It baffled me. My speed was a Brownie box camera. Jim learned to take pictures from his father who was one of those camera-smitten amateur photographers of the 1930s in California, land of the movies. Jim helped his father take creative 16mm movies of the family. We have copies of those movies – scripts written by Jim’s mother and performed by his brothers and sisters – with sound. Jim often told me about them but I did not understand how priceless and precious they were until I saw them I remember the first time I saw the movies I had heard so much about. One special evening in 1969 when we were at his parents house in Madera, CA for Christmas Jim’s father brought out the big movie projector. It was a small crowd that evening – Jim’s mother and father, Jim and me and our three kids. Hal showed the family movies and a selection of Castle WWII films. In 1984 video cameras were large, heavy, clunky and expensive. We did not own one — yet. Jim was so determined to interview my father on film on his 70th birthday that he searched out a video rental in Charlotte, NC. That’s how we have over an hour of my dad and me on camera going back over old stories and hearing new ones and some good jokes. Not to be left out my mother insisted we interview her as well. And, am I glad. A dozen years ago Jim’s oldest brother Harold transferred those movies to DVD for each of his siblings. They are wonderful – except that he backed the films with the theme from Chariots of Fire. I challenge anyone to watch them without crying as those kids of long ago cavort in the snow at Bass Lake and act out their mother’s scripts in their Fresno living room. We all should be so lucky as to have our childhoods captured on film so that we can revisit them over and over. With the advent of digital cameras photography became more immediate and much easier so I took up photography as well. Family albums became part of my art form. Today I never leave the house without a small camera tucked in my purse. And, Jim often brought out his newest video camera to capture a bit of the life around him – delighted as they became smaller and more convenient to use – a great contrast to the earlier heavyweight cameras he lugged for his father. Jim and I enjoyed and shared a passion for documenting everyday life. Jim got it from his father. I inherited it from my Aunt Katherine who kept photograph albums of all the family. Today our grown children document their families and we all share stories. Nothing as grand as the first crop of California 16mm movies but its all quite fine – – and it tells our family story – – for our grandchildren’s children. What’s my point? To encourage you to take out your camera if you are not doing that already. You will be glad you did. |
An Eye-Opener
Thumbing through some old journals I stumbled across an entry in one that brought back the memory of something I thought I would never forget ….. But I had.
In 1999 I booked gigs in North Carolina for my first on-my-own storytelling road trip. I was performing at Meredith College in Raleigh and at the Museum of the New South in Charlotte for an event sponsored by the Mecklenburg County Women’s Commission. I was so excited about telling, Flesh on Old Bones, my stories about my North Carolina women that I did not think about the dreaded eight hour drive ahead.
Saturday afternoon before I was to leave on Sunday, I was moving fast around the house to get ready for the road trip. I stepped out onto the deck to ask my husband, Jim, who was working in the yard, a question. He answered and when I whirled around to go back into the house I tripped on the doorway. I splatted forward and met the kitchen floor full on my face. I felt my glasses dig into my cheekbone on the right side.
Jim heard the commotion and rushed in. “Stay still until I check you out.” His doctor-self always jumped to the rescue. He did his checking and then he helped me to a near-by couch.
“Ellouise, this eye is going to look bad. It is already swelling. I will ice it for you.”
I reached up and when I touched my forehead and the area around the right eye it was tender.
“Jim, what will I do. I have to drive to North Carolina tomorrow.”
He was crushing ice in the kitchen.
“We will see. Just keep you head down for right now.”
” I have to go.”
His doctor’s voice answered, “We will see, Ellouise.”
By next day my face was swollen and the right side was now a deep magenta. I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror.
“Jim, ” I called out. “I look like I have been beaten up. How can I tell stories to people?”
Please look at this, my eyelid is so swollen I can’t see out of my right eye.”
Jim carefully lifted my eyelid. Then he reached in the medicine chest and brought out the band-aid box. “This might work.” He taped my eyelid up so that I could see out of the right eye.”
“Ellouise, I don’t think you can drive to NC like this ….
plus the way you look you are going to scare people.”
“I am going.” And, I did. Changing the band-aids frequently and wondering how I was going to get along.
First stop was Meredith college where those folks were ever so delicately, so painfully polite they never mentioned my face. Only the young guy who wired me up with a lapel mic said anything –
“what happened to you, Lady.”
After that I told my hour program of stories feeling like a gold fish in a bowl as I stood in an amphitheater looking up into about 100 young faces who looked to me like they were wondering “what happened to you, lady.”
When I called Jim that evening he was encouraging,
“Jim, they act like they don’t believe me when I tell them I fell.”
“ Honey I was pretty sure they wouldn’t.
“Sounds like your eye is all right. You are doing a good job. Keep it up.”
“That felt good but I would have felt better if there had been a strong warm hug to go along with it.
Next day, still using the band-aids to hold up the eye-lid so that I could see to drive, I drove on to Charlotte, to perform for the women’s commission event. A woman met me at the museum to help me set up. She gasped when she saw me. Then she explained that the issue they were working on for this year was Domestic Violence. We both agreed I looked like they had brought me in as a poster for the issue. I was embarrassed and felt a bit dumb, that I had not made the connection between my face and their issue work.
I swallowed hard and explained how I had tripped in the kitchen.
“Well, tell them that when you start your program. Some of the women will believe you – some won’t.”
At least that would be better than ignoring what a sight I looked like as I had done at Meredith.
Oops. I had forgotten about my mother.
She lived in Charlotte, where I was born and raised. Part of my trip was a visit with her. Yes, she was coming to the performance – with my Aunt. Sure enough, they came all dressed up and a little early.
When I saw them come in I hurried to the back of the room to greet them. They both gasped. Mama seemed to have lost her voice but my Aunt Katherine was never without words,
“Good lord a mighty Ellouise, what happened to you, girl”. And I told them the thumbnail version of the story.
Mama had gotten her words back,” well, I knew Jim didn’t do that.” I hugged her..
The woman who spoke after my stories was a survivor of Domestic Violence who now spoke to groups to educate the public. When she was called to the microphone she paused and waited a moment before she said –
“I used to look like that,” she looked over at me “but it wasn’t because I fell in my kitchen – like she did. It was because my husband hit me.”
They liked my stories that night – they laughed and listened and they told me so afterwards.
But there is no question that the story that was the “eye-opener” was the survivor’s story.
Viva Better Said Than Done
http://March 2014 I had a chance to revisit this teen-age story, The Sock Hop, for a performance with Better Said Than Done storytellers at the Auld Shebeen. www.bettersaidthandone.com
You can count on Better Said Than Done to fill the room with lively audiences who are ready to enjoy storytelling. Tellers love that – – which makes for a really good show. I look forward to being on their stage again in 2015.