An at-home dad who blogs (eventually) about Alison Bechdel.

  Alison Bechdel (L) & Me (R) 
  Originally uploaded by Garrett2.

Sometime in late 1993 my roommate wandered up the hill after work with another purchase from one of the neighborhood book stores. This time he pulled from his bag a copy of the 1994 edition of the Dykes to Watch Out For calendar, which went up on his bedroom door next to the kitchen.

Before I launch into an account of meeting one of my cultural heroes, you'll have to wade through a few preliminary paragraphs. Those who have managed to put up with me (and my looping, discursive approach to anecdote) all these years might recall that I had managed to carry with me to the San Francisco Bay Area of the late-1980's and early-to-mid-1990's what might be characterized as a vaguely embarrassed Midwestern embrace of the varied cultures of many lands and peoples; I say "vaguely embarrassed" because even growing up with the advantages afforded by the slightly liberal college small town in downstate Illinois where I was raised, I think I knew only one openly Jewish person when I was a kid, let alone someone who let fly with their figurative rainbow flag. So to end up in my mid-twenties living in an apartment in the Castro where I might find myself rubbing shoulders at a party with, say, an openly gay ex-Mormon whose lover's summer job had been to dance in shows at Disneyland, with said lover proposing that we all go out sometime next week to see this one musical revue in the neighborhood where these guys all dress up as the Andrews Sisters?  I would grow giddy with this sense of vague embarrassment.

To parse this out a little bit, this wasn't the easy sort of embarrassment necessarily born of of naivete (though I was blessed with a portion of that, as well; I will now admit that it was only through the kindly intervention of a table-mate at my first meal away at college that I did not eat the corn husk on my tamale). And I don't think I was vaguely embarrassed by something intrinsic to living in a moderately gay neighborhood and enjoying the occasional round of a heavy-set men in WAC uniforms harmonizing to "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree." I think I was embarrassed because I was having such a good time floating around on the entertaining periphery of a culture to which I didn't really belong and which I could leave as needed.

(Note that I was beset with this same sense of alienation or whatever you might call it for the flimsiest cultural forays -- say, whenever I wandered down to the Mission to get myself a bottle of Mexican Pepsi or when I headed out to Clement Street to jostle with the Russian immigrant women outside the Chinese grocery stores; it was like the entire world was an independent record store that might kick you out any time and you could still go to Sam Goody or something and that would just have to be OK. But I've come to suspect that this feeling can pretty much be correllated to the simple fact that I was in my twenties; you become dimly aware that half the fun of being young and happy consists of finding reasons to be vaguely mopey and introspective. And no doubt casting the world as a metaphorical record store encapsulates the sensibilities of one's twenties as neatly as anything else. And questions of whiteness and maleness and social privelege have been around since the dawn of interdisciplinary studies and nothing in this modest account is going to add much to resolving that conversation.)

So: The Dykes to Watch Out For calendar led inevitably to the purchase (often by my  better-paid roommate) of the collections of DTWOF comics, which I consumed voraciously. (My enjoyment tempered, of course, by the thorny issues of cultural appropriation noted above!) And then I eventually found a (better-educated) girlfriend who eventually got a job teaching at a university in a midwestern town that is somewhat bigger and somewhat more liberal than the one in which I was raised; and when we eventually had a kid about four and a half years back, we made the decision that it made sense to have me stay home to raise the kid.

When we started raising our daughter, I was full of all sorts of idealism about the social construction of gender, convinced that our relationship to the mainstream culture was going to be tightly controlled, and that I would spend my days reclaiming domesticity in the name of reconstructing equitable social roles and producing flavorful vegetarian cuisine.

I still have all that idealism, of course. I just don't get much chance to practice it. My daughter refuses a substantial portion of my flavorful vegetarian cuisine and, despite our feeble efforts at embargo, she has pretty much managed to stew herself in the ambient culture of Michigan and the free-wheeling capitalist world writ large. But I have managed to raise a child who shares my affection for serial comics, Alison Bechdel's work among them (though daughter L. finds DTWOF a little wordy at this point); and when Bechdel (whose stock in trade includes all sorts of characters who have made compromises or accomodations in spite of their best intentions) introduced a character who eventually became a blogging stay-home dad -- well, let's just say my love for the strip continues to burn with its somewhat sheepish gem-like flame.

So when I heard that Alison Bechdel was coming to town as part of the tour in support of her memoir Fun Home, I made the appropriate evening childcare arrangements with wife B., fixed a quick dinner (squash soup with quinoa for the grown-ups, cheese pizza for the kid) and walked up to campus to catch her lecture.

Guess what? It turns out that lesbians turn out in pretty heavy numbers for this kind of event. The old giddy sense was back. (Though perhaps for different reasons -- when I was talking with my wife after I got home, she asked if I felt funny as the straight guy in the room; I said I felt funny because I was the old guy in the room.) But all that didn't stop me from enjoying the lecture! The readings she gave from her memoir were moving, natch, and her explanation of the technical production of each panel of the book suggested that each drawing was something like the product of Joseph Cornell crossed with the lexicographers at the OED. I can't recommend the book enough. And Bechdel handled the questions about her memoir with intelligent grace. After a round of applause, it was announced that she would be in the lobby to sign books and meet people.

So now we get to the part where I get to meet the author.

The line wrapped around the periphery of the lobby, and I waited a bit to get toward the end of the line. If one were to draw a cartoon of the line in which I was standing, you might perhaps show us in silhouette -- I would be the figure with those squiggly spidey-sense marks above his head denoting a certain unsettled emotional state. This unsettled state wasn't helped by the fact that the person directly in front of me in line turned out to be a childhood friend of Bechdel's and I felt strangely intrusive in the moment. And then when I got my chance to step up to the table, someone with an air of a tenured faculty member about her stepped up to the table to make her goodbyes.

But at last I plopped my copy of Fun Home on the table for inscription and Bechdel took at look at the dust jacket and said, "Whoa, what's wrong with your copy?"

I looked down at the book and noticed a smear across the front panel.

"Uh, that would be from my sweaty palms," I said.

She graciously passed over that and inscribed the book to our family as I blathered on (concisely, I hope) about coming to see her that evening as something of a representative of the at-home dad bloggers out there.  I then rather haltingly asked her if getting her to pose with me for a picture would be entirely too dorky. (I believe that's the word I used: dorky. Flaubert's got nothing on me, baby.)

"No, of course not," she said, getting up from behind the table. I handed my camera to the woman in line behind me.

I then asked Alison Bechdel if it would be too dorky if I held up the sign I had made for the picture.

"The sign?" she asked. I showed her the placard you see me holding in the photo above.

"That's great!" she said. "Of course!"

So we stood there together for three photos while the conscientous woman behind the lens tried to adjust for glare and legibility. Bechdel requested a copy of the photo and asked if I was planning to blog about this.

And now I have.

Comments

[frog]

Dude, you're a much better fan than I am. I was at home, crashed out on the couch.

AWESOME photo!

[Emilin]

I so wish I had been there. I was, instead, also on the couch, although my own, not frog's.

[karl]

Dude, that is an awesome post. Nothing like meeting one of your heros. Especially, when you're the only 'old guy'-'true blogging dad' in the audience.
Now, I'll have to check out DTWOF.

[Brooke]

Well, I'm glad somebody went.

You are totally hilarious and so midwestern.

[Emilin]

Dude, AB blogged about you! You're not only totally cool, now you're famous!

[alison b.]

DUDE!
Now I'm feeling vaguely embarrassed too. Joseph Cornell crossed with the lexicographers at the OED, I like that! It was lovely to meet you. Thanks so much for coming to my thing.