Open Up And Say … Ahh!

Boys that looked like girls: a warning, that’s
what churchy all-beige mothers in Baton Rouge
cautioned us about … the gateway to sin. Listen,
my mother was the one who threw away her Alice
Cooper record … you know, the one with the white
panties as the record sleeve? She claimed, after giving
birth to me, that doing so was a precaution, though it wasn’t
for God, it was to keep things simple; to please her own mother
who thought it unfitting for motherhood. Too much makeup and
too scary, she fussed as if her daughter wasn’t grown. Still, my mother
had strangeness of her own. She gushed over Boy George and admired the
beauty of Annie Lennox; in her own way, she was drawn to the androgyny of
new wave. A voyeur of experiences; she wanted to smell but not touch a life