Life In The Aerie

By Mary Hannington

He said, “I think we should have sex.”

I was there to get my hair done and sex wasn’t really on my mind.

His hands would explore and I’d flick them away.

He was working hard on the elaborate Flock of Seagulls slash my own wacky vision of a hairdo using razors and scissors. This was after running me through a perming process that had my hair all curling to the west (at least if I was facing north that is).

Hair was important to me then and to him too.

Maybe that is why he was aroused, I don’t know...

I had sworn off relationships at the time. I had fallen in love hard and he had set me free. I thought that maybe that was a decision we both should have made, but he made it clear I had little say.

Yes, it was a complicated relationship, but I wasn’t a quitter or someone that believed that age, race or economics should make a difference.

So, I was angry with men.

For years I refused committed relationships with them. In a convoluted way I became a woman, who bucked the trend or what Dr. Phil and so many others would later label us as... beings that needed to be emotionally attached to their lovers.

I wasn’t really.

Attracted, interested, but not needy…

I was sexually open to everything and I mean EVERYTHING. Been on the bottom been on the top with Carol and Ted and Alice. Had a hunky hockey player, who wanted an exclusive relationship and thwack he's iced. He needed me, but I didn’t need him.

It wasn’t all about sex.

I dated lots of men that I never slept with… friends really.

One a male model, who loved to make out with me and looked great on my arm. Only he had no interest in women whatsoever - other than apparently kissing me - and was an out gay man.

Another, like me, a fan of gore and bad porn movies… just someone to see “Brain Damaged” or “Debbie Does Dallas” with.

The men I REALLY loved all ended up wanting different things and it was years before I trusted them or ever thought I needed them at all.

The hair guy was different; we had been out together, but never in connection with the other. Never an attraction there or the blooming of a better friendship… just common friends and hair.

We were alone and he kept trying to seduce me, but with one glass of wine and the aforementioned lack of interest – nothing. Sitting there with conditioner soaking into my hair he nibbles my neck and I say, “Stop!”

Over and over and over… he’d come in for the kill and I’d shove him away. He was persistent and when my hair was dried and done he pressed into me again.

I got pissed “I don’t want to fuck you!” I screamed.

Now all woman, don’t lie you do, have some kind of rape fantasies. Being thrown up against an alley wall by a handsome stranger and being ravished in his strong arms, helpless to do anything about it but give in?

This was NOT that.

I layed down on a bench, flipped up my skirt, I was angry. “You want to screw a woman who doesn’t want to screw you?” I asked, “Go ahead!”

And he did.

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Directed by Max Joseph & Chris Weller, based on an article by Graeme Wood, adapted by Chris Weller and Max Joseph.

One of the more interesting selections at Sundance this year. I would argue that it was meant to stir the pot of anti capital punishment sentiment, but it is a unique look at a solution to a medical need and Weller's animation brings a needed humor to what might have been a more morbid piece.

Programmer's Notes: GOOD, a collaboration of individuals, businesses, and nonprofits pushing the world forward has joined filmmaker Max Joseph, animator Chris Weller, and writer Graeme Wood to create this entertaining video provocation based upon Wood's original article, which can be found on the GOOD website (http://www.good.is/). Wood describes his article's intent to address the disparity between the moral hand-wringing we apply to the inmate-organ-donation question, compared to the lack of much discussion at all of the capital punishment issue itself. We quibble over whether a man has a right (!) to donate (!) his liver, but we are silent about the fact that the reason he is in a position to donate his liver is because he is soon to be a literal victim of human sacrifice by the state. Surely we can find the energy to consider both moral problems.

Posted by M. Hannington at 10:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By Mary Hannington

“These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence, the connections – sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at a great cost, but often magnificent – that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world with out me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life.”

Alice Sebold – The Lovely Bones

Guru tends to obsess about being middle-aged; he talks about it all the time. You know the bald spot, the belly and to be fair I’m the one that added double chin into the mix, but we ALL get them. This stuff is all surface; it’s the lingerie that’s under the clothes that makes you feel beautiful. Still, he has the most wonderful way of reminding me that I’m not just old too, but OLDER.

Closer to death.

He says, “When were you born?”

1960

“You’re going to be fifty this year.”

That’s right I’ll be turning fifty this summer. Yup the big 5-0.

It is a number… another label. I won’t celebrate it.

I don’t celebrate birthdays. It has nothing to do with getting older; I just think it’s dumb. Pony rides and clowns and cakes are all great fun when you are a kid, but adult birthdays especially mine don’t work in this household.

I’m the only one who knows how or is capable of baking a cake. And forget the surprise, I'm too perceptive for those.

Ms. 91’s life and age are celebrated every day. And that is how it should be.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m sure I’ll think about what it has meant to be around for five decades, but I think about that stuff now. Now more than ever I want to be truly happy, more at peace and I have somehow managed to fathom that I’m the ONLY one that can do that.

Duh!

Now more than ever I want to make an impact on the world.

Even if it is in small ways…

I just exchanged cards with the COO of Bridgewater Interiors, an automotive supplier in Detroit that is innovative and has long ago diversified. They have branched out into areas other than automotive and are one of the companies here that are HIRING workers. His kid is going to U of M to study advertising and I said have him call me.

I have worked with advertising agencies for over 15 years, maybe I can help.

That OLD thing again…

Almost exactly a year older than our young President. I have been around the block, done a lot of things, some stupid, some smart, but I have learned and grown. I feel both young and old, on the verge of new things, but wiser in the pursuit of them.

If I can touch this one young person, whose father was once a poor boy from Ghana, Africa, then I have touched the world. His father, Barima (one of those musical African names) is a man with one foot in the third world and one foot firmly on American soil.

We talk about poverty and he reminds me of a story from the Bible. “You can give ten people in a room the same amount of money, some will drink it away and others will buy bars to serve the drinkers and still others will do something altogether different,” he says.

That is human nature…

I want to be one of the ones that does something different.

Like Suzie Salmon in “The Lovely Bone”s I want to have that first kiss that is better than any other kiss and unlike her I want hold the world with me in it. For as long as I can I want to live and love and do those things that make me happy – to create, to share beauty and to help others to find it – I want to live life to the fullest now more than ever.

“At fourteen, my sister sailed away from me into a place I’d never been. In the walls of my sex there was horror and blood, in the walls of hers there were windows.”

Alice Sebold – The Lovely Bones

I have one pack of cigarettes left over from a carton of cigarettes that cost me almost a hundred dollars in New York City (200 little sticks of death) and when I finish that pack it will be my last. I know that they are a self-destructive habit. After a five hour session with Dunaway on this last film I remember sucking one down in almost a single breath.

So hard it is sometimes to deal with this life we turn to those things that destroy it.

Seeking our own murders as Hamlet asks for the cup.

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