You and me both, kid.

When I was nineteen, David Bowie was all the rage, and I longed to be cool enough to do androgyny the way Ziggy Stardust could. My stepfather had a life-size poster of Bowie-as-Ziggy on the inside door of the spare room's closet. My hero wore platform shoes and a silver jumpsuit, glitter eyeshadow. I could never: thirty years too late, six inches too short, and more than a few pounds too heavy. If I had it to do all over again--and was given a choice in the matter--I'd have been a long, tall teenage boy in girls' jeans and too-tight t-shirts, just like nearly everyone of my college friends. Chain smoking, touchy-feely.

I wanted to wear eye-liner when I was in high school, and sometimes my friend Candi would make me up. But my glasses got in the way of my curled eyelashes. Sometimes I'd put on my grandmother's Avon lipstick and kiss the bathroom mirror. She caught me by the mauve smeared toilet paper squares in the trash can, and I learned from then on to flush all evidence.

I won't believe that most boys don't dabble in cosmetics and football player crushes. I won't believe that our daddies didn't kiss when they were sixteen and on fire. At least they thought about it. And I'm here to tell you I did it.



*I have no idea what this is--a poem? an essay? a rumination? the beginning of someone's biography? Either way, I like the voice here, and the honesty, even in the parts that are made up.