The Authentic Life: blogher '13

My plan for the conference was simple. I would casually bump into a literary agent who would immediately recognize me and sign me up on the spot. It would be exactly like those old black and white movies where the film director, innocently sipping his coffee, is suddenly struck by the beauty of the young waitress framed in soft-focus and shouts “Kid, where have you been all of my life?” but with less sexual tension and more color. I had business cards imprinted with my website address. I was prepared.

The target market for the conference was women, which didn’t faze me because A) aside from lesbians, we tend to like the same things B) The gaggle of literary agents would all ask “Who’s that man?” and most importantly C) My shy bladder could escape to the quiet solitude of the men’s restroom alone.

Here is something you should know if you are one of the few men at a women’s conference. You have the uneasy sense that there is something stuck between your teeth, but that thing is not in your teeth, it’s approximately two feet below. I might have been more comfortable in drag, but Paul always told me that I would make an ugly woman. I wasn’t willing to take that risk.

You should also know that these women are serious about promoting their blogs. In fact they become their blogs.

“I’m Mommy needs Xanax. What’s your platform?” A disheveled woman in her late forties asked me.

I searched my business card as if it might have the answer written on it.

“You must have a platform. Without it you’re nothing,” she said impatiently.

“I was chosen as a ‘voice of the year’,” I replied, confident that this would trump the lack of a platform.

“Oh, you wrote that piece about the beige coat!” She perked up.

“No, someone else wrote that. I wrote about the two lesbians.”

“Doesn't ring a bell, but that one about the beige coat, yeah that one was really good.”

“Thank you,” I replied and considered asking her for a Xanax, just to smooth out the edges.

During the question and answer period women confidently stepped up to the microphone and asked the only question that seemed to matter.

“Hi, Mommy needs Vodka here,” a young perky woman introduced herself and took a quick curtsy while the other women whispered “That’s her!”

“How do I market my platform?” she asked the speaker.

One by one, Martinis and Minivans, Mama Loves Moonshine, Margarita Mommies, Mommy is Moody and Mental Mama all probed the speaker for insight into their brands. If one thing was certain, they all had a platform, even if it was a rickety thing propped up with liquor and broken dreams.

I retreated to the men’s restroom and met Tyrone, a maintenance worker leaning against the sink and staring into his reflection.

“Tough day?” I asked

“Man, you have no idea. All these women. They a mess!” he replied

Just then, we heard a woman, I can only assume it was Mommy Needs to Pee, shout into the bathroom “Anybody in here?” Tyrone’s eyes grew big as an army of women stormed the men’s room.

“Sorry, line's too long in the ladies room,” Mommy’s Gonna’ Bust a Gut shouted as I quickly zipped up my fly. Tyrone ran.

By the end of the day it was clear that without a platform I was never going to attract an agent. Somewhat dejected I joined thousands of women in a large hotel ballroom with a small illuminated stage on one end and endless rows of seats. There was a buzz and excitement in the air. Queen Latifah would soon appear to host the reception and recognize the “Voices of the Year.”

Time dragged on. The Queen was M.I.A. and the excitement was beginning to morph into disappointment and frustration. Women were tweeting using the hash tag #WhereTheBitchAt? I searched the room for exits, having witnessed firsthand the stampede effect of impatient women.

Suddenly the lights grew dim and music filled the room. Queen Latifah sauntered onto the stage, dabbing her mouth with a napkin and shouting something about Chicago’s best pizza. The room exploded into applause and screams. And that is when it struck me. If I were to dress in drag, this is exactly how I would do it; all big hair, flawless skin and swagger. I’d take my sweet ass time eating pizza while people waited for me. My stage name would be Billoncé.

And then I was on my feet applauding.

There in the dark, women stood on the platform and weaved stories of despair, happiness, laughter, love and joy that joined together forming a chorus of life discovered through words. There in the dark we were all the same-no big hair, make up or any other trappings. There in the dark, I found my light, my platform “The only way out is in.” Into that place where we all connect, singing of that thing that makes us human, authentic.

Finally the Queen asked all of the “Voices of the Year” winners to join the stage with her. Here was my chance to be noticed. As I walked onto the stage Outlaw Mama grabbed my hand and whispered into my ear “You should be up front” and pushed me into the spotlight. There amid all of the flashing camera lights and applause, Queen Latifah glanced over her shoulder in my direction. And it was exactly like one of those old black and white movies where the glamorous actress notices the young undiscovered writer, arches her beautiful eyebrow and mouths the words meant only for his eyes.

“What the fuck is that man doing all up on my platform?”

She sat down next to me and reached her arm across the table. I mistook this extension of her hand as a welcome and so I turned to smile and introduce myself. “I’m just plugging in ma’ phone,” she said dismissively and turned the plug over several different ways while squinting and pursing her lips looking for all the world like a monkey trying to figure out how to fit a square peg into a round hole.

Her short grey hair was permed into tight curls and her eye-glasses rested on the end of her nose. She wore a denim jacket. There may have been a button pinned to her lapel. She was the type of person who would wear a button--flair--that might say something like “World’s greatest grandma’” or “If you can read this button, back off!” That type of thing.

“So, you’re publishing something?” she asked without looking up. She was reflecting on my question to the leader of the seminar regarding publication and how to attract an agent.

“Yes, a short memoir,” I said.

“M-hmm, and what’s it about?”

I paused. It wasn’t like I didn’t know what it was about. I had labored for months on it. I could have recited it word for word, but telling the world’s greatest grandma’ that your memoir is a story about how your lesbian aunt and her psychic girlfriend took you to your first gay bar when you were eighteen years old fell short of grandma’ material. But I told her anyway.

“And your mother never knew?” She asked, looking up briefly and sucking the wind through her teeth as if a popcorn kernel was stuck there.

“I told her,” I said. It sounded defensive.

“M-hmm,” she said tilting her head back and looking down her nose-tip glasses.

“This woman up front, now she’s got a story!” She said pointing to a woman in the front row. And she did, too. Her grandfather travelled the west in the early 1900’s taking pictures during the day and developing them at night, turning them into post cards. She planned on retracing his footsteps, visiting all of those places he had been.

“Well, it’s more of an idea than it is a story, she hasn’t written anything…” I said and then the old woman shoved a picture into my hand.

“That’s my grandfather, my mother and that’s me,” she pointed with her wrinkled finger at an old black and white photograph. She turned it over and pointed out her website and explained that she would be writing a story about her Greek ancestry and her mother’s recipes.

“Kind of like my Big Fat Greek Wedding. But none of us were fat,” she said.

I reached into my pocket, pulled out my card and gave it to her. On the right hand side was a picture of me. She held up the card next to my face and looked from me to my card and back again, smiling enigmatically. I knew what she wanted to say, that this picture looked better than the person sitting in front of her.

But if you stretched back the borders of the picture you would see a handsome man sitting next to me, the tilted evening summer sun painting everything the golden color of a memory and Nubble lighthouse just up the road sitting on a rocky outcropping in the cold Atlantic ocean . If you could rotate the picture you would see five young adults laughing, one of them holding the camera and telling their fathers to smile.

No one could ever look as good or as happy as that person in time.

The old lady waved the young woman from the front row down and began to tell her how much alike their stories were. For the life of me I could not understand how my “Big fat Greek Wedding” was anything like Postcards from the Wild West. But it did not matter; she could see herself in that picture just as surely as she could not see herself in the picture of an eighteen year old boy sitting in a bar on the edge of some Colorado town.

We wished each other luck and parted ways, returning to our time machines hurtling down the roads to our past. The young woman from the front row sleeping under the open sky with nothing but a big yellow moon, crying coyotes and her grandfather’s voice to keep her company, the old lady, young again, baking sweet walnut sugar cookies with her mother’s ghost and a young, uncertain boy sitting on a bar stool listening to his Aunt Sheila tell him that he was beautiful just the way God made him.

Once in a while, we'll pick up a postcard and jot a few lines on the back, letting you know we made it here or how beautiful it is, but we can never be certain who might receive our postcards from the past or if you can even understand the handwriting. Sometimes you might recognize a piece of yourself in one of those pictures or hope to visit a place that we have been and you might tape it to the refrigerator in your mind so that it sticks with you for a while. When that happens it’s like electricity. Because each of us is really just searching for a connection that lets us know that we are not alone, that we are alive. And when that happens?

I hope you’ll write back.