The Rise of the Cult: My Affair with ESP and “The Worst Witch”

My infatuation with psychic powers all started with A Gift of Magic by Lois Duncan. I don’t remember much now about the novel except that it featured Nancy, who was a loner who had ESP, and some sort of boring side plot about dance school. But…ESP (Extrasensory Perception)…wow! I…WANT. Even though Nancy was just some quiet, boring, girl, she could, for example, tell the phone was going to ring and who was on the other end, before it even did. How cool – and not only that, how useful!

Thus began a deep-seated obsession with any female that had psychic powers or special powers.

Kim Gordon and the Art of Cool

Back in the 90’s, before the IPod or the Internet, the way I learned about new music was a) from mix tapes b) 120 minutes on MTV c) Sassy or Rolling Stone magazine or d) much cooler people than myself. I owe d) to my discovery of Kim Gordon and Sonic Youth.

When I was in high school, I was required to take a sport. I was not particularly athletic, so, sophomore year, I joined junior varsity crew for all the wrong reasons: the draw of being on a boat, and given that I went to boarding school, the enticing idea of getting on a bus and driving somewhere 20 minutes away (a lake) to do said sport. While I can’t say much for my crew aptitude (I only did it for one season), my first day, I did meet a girl who joined crew for possibly the very same reasons.

Lorrie Moore: The Everywoman Disguise

I was sixteen when I picked up Lorrie Moore’s Who Will Run the Frog Hospital. At the time, I was still taking school book-list recommendations, and hadn’t figure out that I should read the New York Times Book Review or the New Yorker to discover new writers on my own.

Little did I know, that an author who was considered to be one of the most impressive writers of her generation wrote this novel that I had picked up from the airport. The book jacket had deceived me. Short and flimsy, it was plastered with a People magazine blurb, and the back jacket copy suggested that this was a breezy coming-of-age novel about two teenaged girlfriends living somewhere vague in upstate New York, right outside of Canada.

I Lost it at the Movies: What Judy Benjamin, Frances Lawrence, and Samantha Baker Taught Me

My first introduction to being a woman was through the movies. And the three movies that were most pivotal in shaping who I one day would become, one way or another, had a lot to do with what ran on repeat on HBO and Sunday afternoon TV.

I suppose I could have done worse.  The women featured in “Private Benjamin,” “Gidget,” and “Sixteen Candles,” aside from all being flat-chested (a sign that I must have known well what was coming for me someday), were all charming, multi-facted, and most importantly, striving for something beyond the typical. Although none of these films break any kind of major Hollywood boundaries, these weren’t the girls that took off their glasses, got a makeover, and suddenly turned hot, as in so many of the films I saw as a kid, but the girls that dared to be different and tough — and that was hot.