Out and About
SheFlexx June 2021
Tammy Ortery, 59, is a great example of the spirit of SheFlexx. Dance like no one’s watching is one of our mottoes - even if in her case, millions are.
SheFlexx Respects
Anneliese Bruner and her great-grandmother, Mary E. Jones Parrish. Over 25 years ago, Bruner’s father pressed an old red book into her hands. It was a book written by Parrish, now believed to contain the first and possibly only comprehensive first-person account of the massacre that occurred on Black Wall Street in Tulsa in 1921. The Nation Must Awake: My Witness to the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 has recently been re-issued with an afterword from Bruner. And still, she rises.
Celebrity Justine Bateman, whose book Face: One Square Foot of Skin, takes on the “imagined reality that older women’s faces are something to be fixed.” She calls plastic surgery a “ponzi scheme” and encourages to women to “walk out in the the world with an attitude that says: Fuck you, I look great.” As the teenagers say…Period.
Sian-Pierre Regis, who is behind Duty Free, a film which chronicles Regis and his mom, Rebecca Danigelis, pursuing her bucket list: hip-hop classes, cow-milking, sky diving and more. The idea was born when Danigelis informed Regis that after fifty years as a housekeeper, she’d been furloughed from her job. Watch trailer (free) and film ($12) here. Mother of invention indeed.
Lesbi-honest
Happy Pride! Happy Pride! Happy Pride!
Things are opening up in more ways than one. Various studies are showing more adults - including older adults - identifying as queer. One study in England honed in on folks over 65 and showed the percent identifying as lesbian, gay or bisexual has increased for the first time. Similarly, more adults in the U.S. are identifying as LGBTQI+ and among young adults globally, nearly 1 in 5 say they’re not straight.
So perhaps you’re thinking…if that’s the case then what’s happened to all the lesbian bars? In the 80’s there were over 200 nationwide, and now just 20 struggle to hang on. Researchers say it is a combo of economic factors - rising rents; systemic barriers for women entrepreneurs; limited disposable income among women - combined with social changes like more acceptance of queer folk in mainstream spaces and the surge in the use of dating apps. Then mix in a pandemic. In response, filmmakers Elina Street and Erica Rose have just released a documentary, the Lesbian Bar Project which chronicles the decline of these institutions, and also serves as a call to action to support the lesbian bars that remain. We must protect these gathering spots, filmmaker Rose argues, as “they serve as community centers and spaces for intergenerational dialogue.”
RV Ready to Get Outside?
Y’all know from the May SheFlexx how much I loved Nomadland. Well, this amazing Flexxer - Michelle Fishburne - did a real-life impression of Fern-if-Fern-were-a-journalist, minus the jobs like temping at Amazon and (I hope) the bucket scene. Just before the pandemic hit, Fishburne was laid off from her high-powered PR & event planning job. In short order, no one was having events anymore and 86 personalized cover letters later, still no job. When the lease on her home ran out, she moved into her RV and eventually hit the road in it, traveling all around the U.S. to find out “Who We Are Now.” From September of 2020 to March of 2021, she covered 12,000 miles. She’d stop in towns and find people to interview, then they’d suggest other people. And so on and so on, like the shampoo commercial. She always asked the same question: What was your 2020 supposed to be like, and what did it end up being like through to the present? Read some of the American stories she gathered, and hear from her directly on a just-released Midlife Mixtape podcast.
Between many countries abroad struggling with COVID, and lingering reluctance to fly, rental RVs - and even plain old rental cars - are darn hard to come by. Here are some tips for how to manage. (Yours truly managed to snag a campervan rental by calling repeatedly and jumping on a cancellation. Along with two other Flexxers, I will be exploring Montana at the end of June. I’ll post highlights from the trip on social media).
Open for Buzzness
There’s been a lot of press about the plight of bees in the past few years. A side effect of “Save the bees” campaigns has been a surge in beekeeping. Trouble is it’s not honeybees that particularly need attention, it’s native bees. There’s a difference. Honeybees - the kind beekeepers use - get all the airtime, but there are over 4,000 different kinds of native bees in the U.S. alone. These extraordinary critters are threatened because of a decline in plant diversity, along with the impact of pesticides and other pollution. And honey bees are often part of the problem when they outcompete the native bees for scarce nectar.
Here in North America, women are already leading the effort to protect native bees. The first nationwide study of native bees is just getting underway, led by Dr. Hollis Woodard at UC Riverside. Another leader is Becky Irwin at North Carolina State. The work will rely in part on citizen-researchers which means we could help. I think you’d look lovely with some bees on your face. Wait, you look lovely anyway, but you know what I mean. Let’s save some bees!
SheFlexx Recs
Watch A Great Ride, a 30 minute documentary about lesbians getting older in community and with great joie de vivre.
Get Buzzy as a citizen-researcher with the national save native bees effort. You can email nationalnativebees@gmail.com to see opportunities in your area. (I will do this as well and will share what I find on social media.)
Plant your own pollinator/wildlife garden, with tips from the National Wildlife Foundation. (Sidebar: stay away from the schlocky “bee hotels” that are being sold all over right now. There are ways to do it right, but do your research first.)