Drag Queen Puzzle Pieces

I dreamed last night that I packing up to leave my office at the University of Washington because I’d run out of grant money. That actually happened in 2007. I thought I was all packed and then found a bunch of cabinets full of things yet to be packed. I realized I had a plane to catch to go home to Seattle. I walked around the university campus and it was actually the campus of Indiana University. The University of Washington is in Seattle. Indiana University is in, you know, Indiana.

I walked around campus trying to get someone to help my move my remaining boxes before I was due to get to the airport. A couple of men offered to help me. I finally realized that I could not be in Seattle and Indiana at the same time. And how was I going to transport all of my office stuff back home and still make my plane. And then for some reason, the men and I walked into a building. The building exploded right as we walked up to the doorway, but some how we survived. Then I woke up.

In the dream, my assumptions about where I was, what I was doing, and how I was going to do whatever it was I was doing, exploded right in front of me. We live our lives according to assumptions. Those assumptions can be challenged in gentle but persistent ways. They can also be thrown on their head.

Until May 24, 2012, I assumed that I would not get cancer in my 40’s. I assumed as a woman from a long line of long lived women on my mother’s side that I would live a long life. I assumed that I would be alive long enough to raise my daughter and to retire in my 60’s or 70’s. (Note to hubby: Early 70’s, tops, and working part time.)

Then the assumption of health that supported all of my future life plans crumbled. I have worked to pick up the pieces, make new pieces, and reworked the foundational assumptions I have about my life. And all along, I have worked to be true to the person that I was before and not define myself only by fear and insecurity.

The early part of this process focused on physical reconstruction of pieces. Surgeons have subtracted and added in many iterations. When I was home following my mastectomy in August 2012, I was looking on Ebay for clothes. I had lost a considerable amount of weight and I do nearly all of my clothes shopping online. I came across this photo.

The mannequin pieces do not fit together and the arms are placed on the wrong sides of the body. It makes the whole figure off. The large hands in particular reminded me of how drag performers can look. They have many feminine physical characteristics through make-up, body padding, binding, falsies, and good acting skills. But there are almost always clues. Things that don’t look quite right. Some drag performers take advantage of this to comedic effect. Grady West, who developed the character, Dina Martina, is a 50 something year old man with a pot belly and hairy back. He wears over the top feminine glitzy costumes that are several sizes too small and his dresses don’t zip up all of the way. Dina’s make-up makes Tammy Faye Baker look like a model for Pond’s cleansing cream. He uses the mismatched puzzle pieces to great advantage and his shows are hilarious.

Other drag performers aspire for “realness”, to be able to pass as a real woman. I was introduced to this concept when I saw the excellent documentary, Paris is Burning, which was filmed during the mid- to late-80’s in New York City. It was about the “Drag Ball Culture” in the city. (Remember “voguing”? It started there, not with Madonna.) I was fascinated by the communities that were built by the men in this culture. Most of them had been rejected by their families and by society, as a whole. But they made their own families with “drag mothers” and familial living situations. I thought the way that the men found a way to pick up the pieces and make news pieces to construct their own families was inspiring.

I know that there was a short time after my mastectomy when I was worried about “passing” for a real woman. But mostly, I have been trying to reconstruct the pieces of my mental life and to dance to the changing rhythm of my daily life.

Life has pieces that change. Life has pieces that need to be replaced. Life has pieces that are lost and cannot be replaced. But my life is whole and I belong here.