Eat Romaine! Romaine Patterson's official website

I can still remember the first time I met Romaine Patterson.  I was a freshman in high school, and I was competing in my first big speech meet in Powell, WY as an extemporaneous speaker.  Speech meets are pretty awesome places in Wyoming if you like teenage fringe culture: we had everything from bona fide conservative Young Republicans in their blue jackets, red power ties, and Maalox in their briefcases to punkers to to hippies to a Humor competitor who always wore a three-piece suit made of silver duct tape.  He had a duct tape fedora and wingtips, too.  Did I mention that?

Anyhow, I was on a real, live college campus, hanging around in the student union in between rounds in my event and pretending I was so cool, lounging on the couches and drinking my first honest-to-God Italian creme soda from the coffee kiosk.  (It was raspberry.  Oh yeah.)   Never mind the fact that I only weighed about eighty-five pounds and looked like a twelve-year old; I was at college, and it felt like heaven.  I was sitting about ten feet away from my coach/theater director Mr. "J" when two rambunctious girls, an orator and a poetry person, came trampling breathlessly into the lounge.

"Mr. J Mr. J, Mr. J, Mr. J!" one of the girls shrieked.  "You'll never guess what We! Just! saw!"  My coach's eyes bugged out in alarm.    
"What?!"  He asked.  Judging from the look on his face, I think he was expecting something that would require several fire trucks and at least one ambulance.  The two girls turned to each other and gaped, their eyes bulging.  
"LLLLESBIANS!" They gasped in unison.  Mr. J just about choked on his own amusement. Then the "lesbian" in question walked through the door in a black leather jacket,  and that was the first time I met Romaine Patterson.

 I always liked Romaine in high school, and we knew each other slightly.  When I introduced myself to her that afternoon, she quipped, "Hi, my name is Romaine.  Yes, like the lettuce," she continued with a mock eye roll and a grin. And with that she eternally won my approval. 

In any case, Romaine was always a talented actor and personality in high school, and it seems that part of her character has served her well.  Since Operation Angel Action, she's worked pretty tirelessly on the political activism scene, she wrote a book, and she has a job on Sirius satellite radio as a talk show host. 

She has a dedicated website that gives a lot of good information about her activism work, her take on Shepard's murder, and her life.  If you're interested, check out Eat Romaine  for information.  You'll discover that she's been up to a lot. 

Oh, but let me give you a quick heads-up...  Romaine's a pretty open lady-- meaning, there's a link to a store on the left-hand side for her favorite "love aids"  which is probably SFW but might garner you some pretty funny looks from your boss.  You've been duly warned.

http://www.eatromaine.com/

Lost in Translation

You'd think that, as a literature major, I wouldn't be as resistant to symbols and abstraction as I am. I live in the realm of abstraction; it's a comfortable place, they know me here. I'm getting a degree in it, even. I'm so used to dealing with the realm of the metaphor and story, actually, that it can be really hard to turn that part of my brain off sometimes. "Will you just sit back and enjoy the movie?" my husband occasionally smirks at me. (Other times, he's worse than me. We laugh it off.)

It's not really myth or symbol itself that bothers me. It's seeing that process of myth-making firsthand that's been so disorienting. When a deceased person passes from a living, imperfect being to a myth, to me it almost feels like an annihilation of the individual who once lived but now can't speak for themselves. And yet, I'm a medievalist, for crying out loud, I've read saint's lives.  Sanctification, many times, is a process of forgetting; when the imperfections that made them a mere person are gone, then someone writes a text to exemplify their holiness. And that's how you make a saint in the early Middle Ages: forgetting, coupled with a narrative. No wonder that some of my favorite holy people are often the tenacious ones, the royal pain in the asses who spoke for themselves or left a record of their frailties: Perpetua, Augustine, Boniface, Leoba; Thomas á Beckett; Julian; John Donne. 

Abstraction anxiety?

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And a lot of it is my feeling that the media is portraying Matthew Shepard as a saint. And making him as a martyr. And I don't think he was. I don't think he was that pure.

-- Sherry Johnson, in TLP (2001): 64

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Although thinking of what has happened to Matt as a translation to sainthood is admittedly anachronistic, the process that Sherry dislikes above is nevertheless a good fit: forgetting, coupled with a story, makes Matt something more than human and less than human at the same time. He's a symbol or a myth. When that happens in a story like TLP, where's the real person? To where, and as what, does he get translated to?  And I also wonder: where does that very human impulse to translate the flesh and blood of a real person to symbol come from? Sherry Johnson fears that impulse, I would say, for all the wrong reasons; she merely believes that Matt isn't a good candidate based on the slander and hearsay she's picked up around town. I'm just as hesitant, but I'm more concerned about the ethics of making a man into a myth in the first place. Is it fair to the deceased? Or, is it what they would want?

Down the Rabbit-Hole: Jackrabbit's Story, Part 3

You know, I'm not really sure where the next place I should go with this should be. There was a pretty long hiatus between the insanity of the first weeks, the arraignment of Henderson and McKinney, and then the news reports, but that doesn't mean that time was calm. Someone in our program died in a wreck in Telephone Canyon, which was extremely tough for some of the upper classmen. I went home for Thanksgiving for the first time since I had started college and all hell broke loose. It seems like everyone except me and my parents were drinking like fish, and we all spent most of our time yelling at each other.   I retreated into my books instead, reading Wise Blood and The Violent Bear it Away, and I marveled at how O'Connor's spiritually distorted, disjointed world looked a lot like the one I was living in.  Over winter break I tore into more Nabokov and tried my hand at some Faulkner.  Quentin Compson hit just a little too close to home, so I put The Sound and the Fury away for a little longer, until I took modern literature with Dr. Loffreda. 

That spring hit us with a dizzying salvo of personal tragedies. Russell Henderson's trial and plea bargain had to compete with a suicide jumper from the 12th floor of White Hall and one of the more ridiculous bomb threats ever concocted. The Columbine shooting was that spring as well, and some of my fellow band students from the Littleton area were devastated. I have a vague memory of Henderson's sentencing sometime around the suicide and just before the Columbine shooting, but it's not very clear to me at all.