Horny for My Creativity: Honoring Gilda

If it wasn't for the downside, having cancer would be the best thing and everyone would want it.

Here's a test. Who said that?

Gilda Radner. She also said the thing that I'm using in this post's title. If you don't know that quote, well, who are you? Look it up.

If you are of a certain age, you might know who Gilda Radner was. She was that skinny, bushy-haired lady who was more freaking hilarious than anyone else in SNL's heyday. She died when she was only 42 of ovarian cancer. In her honor, this organization called Gilda's Club was born; it provided support services for cancer survivors. She talked openly about the difficult aspects of cancer, such as impacts on sexuality, at a time when many cancer patients were hiding their bald heads in shame inside their homes, afraid that people would "know." Gilda's Clubs exist all over the country. And now, there are a handful of them that are changing their names because young people don't know who Gilda Radner was, because she, you know, had the audacity to DIE before they were even born, and of course the number one thing that cancer centers need to be is "relevant" for the youth. Under this new plan, all of the clubs will eventually change to an extremely boring "Cancer Support Community" moniker.

This is such an overwhelming load of bullshit.

I will say little more about the cancer aspect of this tragic name change. First, let me just put out there that I don't think Susan Komen is a well-known historical figure, and there's a damn large cancer organization named after HER. But no matter. Let me mention that cancer is not supposed to be "on trend" and that people who run these institutions should realize that if someone who was born after Gilda Radner died has cancer, that person is crazy young to have cancer and has bigger problems than not knowing who the namesake is outside his support group's building.

But I've got an even bigger beef here. What does this mean, that we as adults who have some sense of history need to get all worked up over the idea that "kids today" will think we're lame? Are we going to start renaming all the streets and towns and schools all across the U.S. Clinton, Bush, and Obama, just so we don't fall into the Dead Presidents trap?

Names are important. Naming can be a meaningful, even a spiritual, act. Have you ever read N. Scott Momaday's The Names? No, of course not. Well, you should. If only so you could spend your days wishing you could meet someone who actually spoke like this, until one day you had the opportunity to do so when he was speaking at the Planetarium in Chicago during some eclipse, and you were offered one of your all-time favorite Chicago memories: "The names at first are those of animals and of birds, of objects that have one definition in the eye, another in the hand, of forms and features on the rim of the world, or of sounds that carry on the bright wind and in the void. They are old and original in the mind, like the beat of rain on the river, and intrinsic in the native tongue, failing even as those who bear them turn once in the memory, go on, and are gone forever."

And that's what I'm going to talk about here--names, and Chicago. I have to believe that Chicago's Gilda's Club will always remain such, even though that looks really unlikely. It would be great if we could be the lone holdout here. We are very proud of our Second City comedic culture, and I don't see us agreeing to dis Gilda when so many people, male and female, who grew up here still remember their mad crushes on the woman. But there's also the simple fact that we LOVE our names in Chicago.

Now in New York, maybe you're cool with saying you're going somewhere that's at first and ninth, or however New Yorkers talk. Pretty much anyone with a map could figure out what you mean. But here? Please. We have one of the most logical, well-planned grid systems in the country and maybe the world. And then we went all Chicago-style on it, and NAMED everything, making it impossible for the uninitiated to traverse.

So when I talk about where I grew up, I say Austin and Madison. The west side of the city has sub-neighborhoods with nicknames like K-town, neighborhoods that are almost entirely black today but filled with streets with random white ethnic names like Karlov, Kolin, Keeler, Kostner, Kilpatrick. Who the hell are those dudes? Does anyone know? It's doubtful. We also have this fairly obnoxious tradition here of giving "honorary street names" to just about everyone and his brother. They are these little brown signs that are attached to the regular green street signs, and they usually represent single blocks. Sometimes you see these names and you just wonder, really? Was that just somebody's uncle who always sat on the bench over there or what?

But that is part of what makes Chicago awesome. We are serious about our names. There are all kinds of people who will look at you blankly if you ask where Macy's is. Some people will refuse to answer out of stubbornness or hostility. If you don't know what I'm talking about, well, then you're not from here. And my kids don't even bother to call it the Sears Tower because they still call it the "Serious Tower."

We have this complicated highway system, right? But do we talk about 90/94, 290, etc., like every single other place on earth? Hell no! We drive down the Edens, the Kennedy, the Dan Ryan, and we don't drive on the Eisenhower because it's actually just the "Ike." And you know what? I actually know who all those people are. Over time when I was a child, I asked my parents, and they told me. And I know my dead Presidents and my Polish war heroes and my esteemed black authors as well.

We are attached to names in this town. I remember when they decided to change the El lines to color names. I'm sure the Millennials out there only know the red, blue, green, brown, and orange lines (and now the pink line--worst color for a train line, and there's that yellow line that runs for like a block in the north suburbs). But me? I still sometimes call the trains the Howard, Dan Ryan, Congress, Douglass, Lake, Midway, or Ravenswood.

When I was in grade school, the local middle school was Hawthorne. By the time I went into 7th grade, it had been changed to Percy Julian. I remember this, because there was a lot of conversation about it, and here was why the name was changed: We lived in a very diverse community and people thought there were too many schools named after white people. So the name was changed, and a bunch of kids learned about a black scientist they might not have heard of before who was a pioneer in using plants such as soy for medical advancements. He's often known as the guy who invented peanut butter, but that's not actually true. He did, however, at one point say this: "I have had one goal in my life, that of playing some role in making life a little easier for the persons who come after me."

See what happens when you name things after people who have been forgotten? Kids might actually, you know, learn to remember them.

After all, who gets to decide who's relevant? Does death put you in the irrelevant category? Is there some kind of "canon" of people who get to have shit named after them? Personally, I'm glad that I live in a place that has schools with names like Brooks, Chavez, Payton, Robinson, and Washington (not George, but Harold). I like how some of the more random names force us to learn something we didn't know before--like who the hell "Lou" Jones is. I ride the Rock Island line, a commuter rail that brings me from the far south side of the city to within a block of my office downtown. A few years ago, they finally built a station by Comiskey (OK, here's one instance where I admit that the new name can be apt, because that place really is "The Cell"). This station is called 35th Street/"Lou" Jones. The automated voice sounds hilarious saying this. Now, who is this Lou dude?

It's not a dude at all. Lovana Jones was a state senator serving the south side of Chicago for almost 20 years. She was known for her grass-roots political style and her work with poor children. She died in 2006 and they decided to name this station after her in 2009. I didn't know anything about her until then. She sounds like a pretty neat lady. I'm sure she would have gotten a kick out of hearing the voice coo "LOOOOOOOOO Jones" every time some kid got off the train to get to class at IIT.

And so, because I like names and honoring them and the people who built the legacy behind them, I hope that Chicago has the good sense to keep its Gilda's Club for as long as it possibly can. When she died, I remember people nodding wisely and saying "oh well you know she SMOKED," as everyone seems to like to blame women for their own cancer deaths, even though the SNL cast at that time might have collectively had the worst personal habits on the planet and yet, you know, they are almost all STILL ALIVE (John Belushi obviously being a major exception). Now we know that she most likely had a genetic predisposition to cancer (BRCA gene) and that if this was well-understood at the time, she might have lived. I remember the conversation around the circumstances of her death only a very little bit, however. What I remember very well was this:

There was this really skinny Jewish lady with hairy armpits and enormous bushy hair who was able to literally bring you to your knees with how freaking funny she was, and even the people she was famous for making fun of actually loved her for it, and eventually sent condolences to her family signed "Baba Wawa."

It was that lady who built the legacy that became Gilda's Club, and we should remember her for it. We should use this, actually, as an opportunity to tell those kids who are terrified when they walk through the Club door because they don't know whether they will live or what will happen or what it will be like, that having cancer does not mean that you are not still that person you were before your diagnosis. Once there was this lady who was hilarious and insightful and everyone loved her, and she had cancer, and no, she didn't make it, which isn't fair but is a reality that you need to learn to live with, and she said this:


I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. Delicious Ambiguity.

The Writing Life

People often ask me what those closest to me--especially my husband--think about all this stuff that I put out there on the Interwebs. In some ways this whole blogging thing is easier for me to get by with, because I started doing it for a seemingly untouchable reason: I found out I had cancer at a young age and I didn't want to have to talk to people about it, so I started writing about it. And then...well, all of this happened.

I started writing about other things, pontificating in that random Katy way that is too long and usually only circuitous at the end, when somehow it all comes back together. I know that soon I will no longer be able to write about my kids here, because they will be too old and self-conscious and they will hate me for it. On the other hand, on the very first day of that other blog, I said that my goal was to live long enough for my kids to hate me for some reason other than dying, so...there's that.

I also write about marriage, and sex, and past relationships in my blogs, and I know that many spouses would have a hard time with this. Gabe has never had qualms with what I say here, at least not that he has admitted. One time I did ask his "permission" to publish a post, in that I showed it to him before I hit "publish." It was when I wrote a post about how hard cancer is on a marriage. I asked him if he had a problem with it, and he said: It's your blog. It's your life that you're writing about. I'm just glad to be a part of it.

Aww, right?

Now look. Sometimes I see him rolling his eyes as he reads. A few times he has said, Really, Kate?, slightly aghast at the inappropriate shit that I reveal. Most of the time, though, he laughs, and very rarely is he surprised at what he reads.

That's because I am a storyteller. I have told him many of these stories before, unconcerned with how he would react if the story included some other man or another facet of my life that a husband might not want to know about. Gabe seems convinced, in fact, that I ALWAYS tell him stories that involve some other guy, because apparently those are the only ones that he bothers to remember. But the point is, he's here, he's my co-pilot, right? So, I tell him stuff.

Just not always right away.

Years after we met, after Lenny was born, we suddenly found ourselves in a situation where we were actually around each other a lot. We got married a year and a half after our first date and Lenny was born less than a year and a half after that. When we met, we were both working full time and I was in grad school. We were busy 20- somethings. Then, we had this kid, and we both took paternity leave. And we had all this time together, learning how to deal with a newborn when neither of us had ever even held one before, and, well, we started telling each other stories. We learned things about each other that we had never bothered to learn in the three previous years. I'm the talker here (shocking, I know) so I told more stories than he did.

What I'm trying to say is, life is an interesting story, and if you are interested in writing, it's probably because life interests you enough to remember what it was like. I write so I can remember my life. But to get it right, I often tell the story to someone first.

Gabe is not a writer. He tells stories differently. Sometimes, they take years to come out. For example, after Augie was born, I went to the department store to buy shoes (also shocking, I know). I decided to buy Gabe some shoes and was embarrassed to admit that I didn't know my husband's shoe size. Seven years together, married with two kids, and I had no clue what size shoe he wore. I called him to ask, and when he said 11.5, I was surprised. "But honey, you're only 5'9"! What's up with those big feet? And those gorilla arms and hands!"

I was teasing him, right? And then he starts telling me about how when he was 13 and 14 and he was living with whoever would take him in, he was hungry. He survived on butter sandwiches or something and his growth was stunted. His feet kept growing, his arms got longer, but he didn't get taller. Some doctor at some point told him he should have been 6'1".

I stood there in the store, not quite knowing what to do with this information that had never been divulged to me in the past seven years by the person closest to me, and I said the only thing that could have been said: "Well, damn, honey, I could have used a tall man in my house! 11.5 it is!"

And life went on. We continue to tell each other stories, but I have had the opportunity since then to hear more of them, in part because I have learned to ask very specific questions until the stories come out. Yesterday, I asked Gabe if he had ever gotten into fights as a kid. There was some reason this came up, but that is escaping me now. He gave some examples of getting picked on in grade school and high school, talked about how he used his tae kwon do to get him out of situations, said he never understood the point of fighting, especially since he has such a hard head that when kids would punch him in the head, he would just stand there and say, look, you could do that all day and it won't do a damn thing to me. And then he said this:

Then there was the time that I got suspended from kindergarten.

Excuse me?

The story goes like this. Apparently there were older kids used as "crossing guards" to stop the younger kids from running near the school. Gabe was tearing around running anyway, the older kid told him to stop, and he didn't listen. So the older kid caught him in a bear hug and Gabe began pummeling him with little five year old fists, kicking him and screaming "IT'S A FREE COUNTRY!"

So he got temporarily kicked out of kindergarten for beating up the crossing guard.

I can honestly say, I'm glad to be a part of it all too. If you like to write, you need to surround yourself with people who can provide some good material.

Here we are, 30 years ago, at age seven. Who would have guessed?

37 is the New 37

Recently, I received a terrifying invitation.

It was a facebook invitation to join a page dedicated to my as yet unplanned but still upcoming 20th high school reunion.

Everyone on the site is all, oh shit, has it been 20 years? But we aren’t that old! We look so young! Hey remember when…

And I’m thinking to myself, yeah, I remember. I mean, I had a great time in high school. I’ve never wanted to go back, and I’m a little bitter that I’m experiencing puberty NOW when I was already done with it before I even entered the 9th grade, but I’ll get a kick out of the reunion. In general, though, I’ve always been one to be happy to move on to the next stage.

So I think to myself…yeah, I can believe it’s been 20 years. A whole lot of shit has happened. If it hadn’t been 20 years, I would have to wonder how I would have had time to go to college, build a career for myself, put myself through grad school while working full time, engage in a bunch of real estate transactions, fall deeply in love and break up and have a variety of relationships, eventually get married, bring a few human beings into the world, build friendships that lasted through life changes and long distances, fight cancer, reinvent myself for the umpteenth time, and etc. and on and on.

I mean, if that had all happened in, say, five years—then I would be impressed.

So it seems like 20. It especially seems like 20 since things are so different now than they were when I was a teenager. I’ve written a post about the nostalgia that we all seem to feel for our pre-digital youth with the snail mail and the non-virtual sex and the carbs and everything. What I think about now, with my new-found perspective, is how parenting has changed.

For most of high school, it was just my mom and me at our house. My parents split up when I was 15 and my brother was already away at college. My mom worked and was going to college, since she didn’t go when she was 18 like everyone seems to assume everyone does even though of course that’s just one of those upper middle class assumptions. And maybe some of my notions of what it means to parent a teenager are just distorted through the lens of how it was for us, but here are a few examples of things that seem unlikely to happen today or be accepted today. The fact that I’m writing this should hopefully cement me as a cranky old lady way beyond my years. It’s what I’ve always wanted, after all. There’s just this old lady inside of me, going crazy for the chance to come out. I might not make it to an age where she gets to do her thing, so I’m going to get a jumpstart right here.

Here’s what I learned about being a parent of a teenager from my upbringing as one in the late 80s and early 90s. May I have the strength to bring some of this wisdom back into the rotation:

1. The generation gap was real. It was an actual THING. I was not friends with my mother. That was something that happened earlier than it might have if we hadn’t been on our own together, but in general, that friendship was an understood privilege of adulthood, not childhood. She was still the dictator of my universe. I got away with some stuff, for sure, and I know that I tried her patience and probably gave her a few mini-strokes along the way, but the bottom line is she wasn’t trying to be my peer. I understood that this was a great thing about growing up—not being embarrassed, not giving a shit what people thought of you. Teenagers are supposed to care about that, not adults. My mom would tell any kid off, no matter where or what was happening, give me shit in front of my friends, refuse to let me do things that I thought were totally reasonable, and demand that I respect people older than me. I never sat down around older people, including her, and she was only 42 when I moved out of the house. I never joked with friends about how hopelessly old and uncool people’s parents were, because we never expected nor wanted our parents to be cool. They were, you know, PARENTS. If they asked “lame” questions about school or friends you didn’t really consider it lame at all, because those were the kinds of things they were supposed to ask you. They weren’t supposed to be RELEVANT, they were supposed to be above caring about being relevant. They were supposed to be those older people who loved you even when they weren’t required to through any familial bond. And so today, when I talk to teenagers, I talk about whatever the hell I want and I don’t care how lame it sounds, because I literally DO NOT CARE. I am 37 and I can say and do what I want because I EARNED it, kids. And there’s a reason I married a man just two months older than I am. I LIKE people my age and I’m not trying to be younger, or older, anymore.

2. Your parents might not have your back. And the reason might be because you didn't deserve for them to have your back. I am always amazed when I read these articles about parents who make excuses when their kids get caught doing some stupid hijinks. In my house? Please. I went to parties where kids’ parents knew what was going on, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t terrified of being busted. Because I knew people in my neighborhood who went to JAIL for possession or being underage or what have you. Now I see 15 year olds openly wandering around in the daylight in my neighborhood drinking and they don’t even fear getting caught. My mom would have been all, ok, good luck with that. That’s your ass. So that’s how I came to be that 22 year old girl who got all vigilante on the white suburban kids who would go buy drugs on the west side and then shoot up in their cars in MY alley because they didn’t want to be too conspicuous in an all-black neighborhood. There I was, managing an apartment building as my second job, a building that happened to be next door to a Catholic school whose population consisted entirely of kids from west side neighborhoods with horrible schools, and I would see these teenagers bringing their heroin into that scene. And I would get right up in their faces, banging on the car doors, telling them if they needed to do that shit they weren’t going to do it in MY neighborhood, they were going to have to bring that back to their daddy’s basement where they belonged. I didn’t look any older than them, but something had shifted in those few intervening years. I had to learn to be that girl somehow.

3. Parents, mothers especially, really did have eyes in the backs of their heads. I just assumed that my mom would know things she could not possibly know and therefore I was kind of a Pavlovian dog about certain behaviors. My mom decreed that I could not be alone in my room with a boy if the door was closed, for example. And then, when she was a single woman with a busy life and even dating, she would just…leave. I would be home alone in the house. Sometimes, she would say ok bye I’ll be back in a few hours, and my boyfriend at the time would look at me like a terrified Lottery winner, wondering, wait, what did she say? And then we would go to my bedroom and CLOSE THE DOOR even though we had the whole house to ourselves because I had been TRAINED about what that meant. And when I was 13 and didn’t go to the pool with my girlfriend but wandered around the neighborhood late at night instead? And had a run-in with some older guys that I never told my mom about? Well, she somehow found out I wasn’t where I said I would be, and then, as I said, IT WAS MY ASS. That doesn’t mean I didn’t say I was going to do one thing and then do another when I was a teenager, but I had to learn to do it RIGHT. Those ditching skills were earned, baby.

4. You might have to go elsewhere for sympathy. When a boy I had been dating for a month or something broke up with me in the middle of the hallway in the 9th grade, I was just devastated and convinced the world was ending for about an hour that night. I cried and my mom told me it was all right. Then I got deeper into my angst and said I would never have another boyfriend ever again and do you know what she did? She pointed at me and laughed. The woman POINTED. She was doing this knee-slapping thing , cracking up, telling me I was ridiculous. I was so stunned I forgot to keep crying. Then a week later some other kid asked me out.

5. You had to get around on your own. We did not grow up with car pools or play dates. If our friends lived too far away, we just didn’t see them until we were old enough to get there ourselves, via el, bus, car, or our own two feet. Here’s an example. That kid I referenced in #4 who asked me out eventually became my boyfriend. On that first date, when I was 14 and he was 15, we were both too young to drive. Well, he had a cast on his leg from his hip to his foot due to a football injury. And yet he walked the mile and a half to my house, came in, and nervously began talking to my mother. She asked when he would have me home and made other obligatory small talk with that murderous look in her eyes that parents of teenage girls are required to have in such situations. Then, we walked the mile and a half to the movie theater, he walked me home, and then he walked back to his house. Our crappy family car was sitting plainly in the driveway in back of our house, but it never even occurred to my mom to offer us a ride…and HE ONLY HAD ONE WORKING LEG.

6. You didn’t over-share. Correction—I didn’t really tell my mom ANYTHING. I knew that I COULD tell her things, but I chose not to do it. Hell, I didn’t tell my best friend a lot of things. That’s why we kept journals. It was fun to have secrets, or to do things that only those people you did them with knew about, or to have several separate lives all at once. In fact, your mom (and your friends, for that matter) didn’t find out much about what was going on in your teen life until 20 years later when you found out you had breast cancer and you started writing a blog and sharing a bunch of personal stories. By then, neither of you cared nor judged the other.

7. Your interests did not coincide with your parents’ interests, and theirs’ always trumped. So I wanted to learn to ride a horse, or go to summer camp. My mom wasn’t feeling it, so it didn’t happen. I had to go to the park with other families because my parents thought the park was boring. We went to see a movie as a family maybe once or twice a year, at the most, and it was usually something like The Empire Strikes Back, because they would enjoy it. Afterwards we went to the bookstore because that’s what they wanted to do. We watched the Muppet Show because they thought it was funny. Our parents had hobbies and habits and we didn’t interrupt them, unless there was bodily injury involved. Even then, we might be ignored. When I was 19, I burned my arm with an iron so badly it was just shy of third-degree. Always stoic, I simply gritted my teeth through the excruciating pain, walked into the kitchen of my mom’s apartment, and told her I had burned myself. She kind of ignored me. Then I said, no really. I REALLY burned myself. And she said… “I am baking a pie.” Even she doesn’t understand that one, not to this day (see her comment here). But my brother drove me to the ER. He’s also the one who went with me for my practice drives when I was on my learner’s permit. Both of us went on errands the second our 16th birthday hit and we could relieve my mom of her driving duties. I was involved in a crazy amount of extracurricular activities in high school, and I was in charge of figuring out how to balance all of them and how to get there.

8. You would have to fix it yourself. In a way, we were all much more on our own than kids are today. In another way, I suppose we weren’t. But I remember feeling that my problems were MY problems, and I never wanted to burden others with them. I didn’t ask for help. I looked out for myself. I know I could have told my mom anything, and she would have helped me. But if that was the case, what was the point of growing up? I was eager to do it, and to do it my way.

9. You had no idea what you wanted to be when you grew up, and no one really expected you to know. So you changed majors, had shitty jobs, built a career in a field you didn’t know existed when you were in high school. You wanted to be a judge, until you realized you would have to be a lawyer first. You wanted to be a writer, but you weren’t ambitious enough. You didn’t know if you wanted to be married or have children or where you would live or how you would support yourself. You didn’t know, because you weren’t grown up yet. So you bounced around, and somehow it all came together.

10. And, of course, the music was better. Wait, no, maybe it wasn’t. I had those parents who loved contemporary music, and yeah we had mixtapes and those were the BOMB, (even my mom was jealous of that), but I won’t lie: my kids would know nothing of Ke$ha if it weren’t for me. Life’s too short not to dance in your living room when you think no one’s watching.

A lot has changed in 20 years, but a lot has stayed the same. There are still adults wondering how in the hell kids today are going to turn out normal, and kids who turn out just fine no matter how it was when they were young. Here’s to hoping we’re all still around when our kids have their 20 year high school reunions, so we can say I told you so.

(These photos are of three generations of young women from my family: me at age 15, in a photobooth at Rock N Roll McDonald’s with a random sailor, my mom posing for her high school graduation picture, and my grandmother when she was in her early twenties).