Photo by Ali Müftüoğulları on Unsplash

July 14, 2019 / 1 Comment

Paris from Me to You

dream holiday, holiday dreams

This spring six Washingtonian women spent seven days walking the streets of Paris. Our connections to one another were varied. We were mother and daughter, colleagues, strangers, and soul mates navigating narrow sidewalks in pairs. One of us had visited before; the rest were freshly starstruck. No one knew exactly what to expect from this sashay through the City of Lights.

Montmatre Sacré-Cœur Basilica

For the Crows, Montmartre — in Paris’s 18th arrondissement — became an idyllic oasis. Cozy French cafes, stone pathways and ivy-covered facades, painters at easels capturing the view at Sacré-Cœur, Moulin Rouge: every cliche our borrowed neighborhood offered was embraced with open, hungry arms. (And by hungry I do mean invariably stuffing ourselves with the most deliciously sensuous pastries.) In all truth, initial submersion into classic storybook Paris can inch dangerously close to perfection. And with that thought — over le petit déjeuner and an open journal — it occurred to me just how removed from reality an American on Parisian holiday truly is.

the city of our lives?

Once you’ve been there, the look and feel of Paris remains ever close to your heart. Repeat viewings of favorite media and art take on new nostalgic influence, making every sliver of cathedral or carousel décolletage a little bit more personal than it ever was before. You’ve been there. Well, maybe not there there. But you’ve been close enough that if you closed your eyes right now you would breath in the smell of wet pavement and taste macarons on your tongue.

Streets of Paris

If you reached out your hand you’re 90% sure your fingers would graze a familiar crêpe cart or framed Van Gogh. So close is the experience to your everyday senses. How much you want to keep it alive.

Watching a new-to-you French New Wave film after you return from Paris can, however, marry that tourist nostalgia with the truth: your visit to Paris was a one-way trip. Believe it or not, French people actually live in France. They pay taxes, vote, sweep the streets, curate vintage shops, and culture the bread starter you can magically consume even though you’re supposedly gluten intolerant. Even more, actual Parisians fall in love in Paris. They exact revenge, kiss sweet and slow, file for divorce, and none of it is traditional movie fare. Yes, you took a trip with your body that you’d already journeyed with your imagination, but this existential film — with its nobody characters and everyday happenings — helps illuminate how much you’ve romanticized an ideal. It reminds you how little you have to do with Paris and how much less Paris has to do with you.

varda plus clÉo equals clarity

My own illumination, which began in Montmartre over breakfast and journal scribbles, cast a long shadow while viewing Agnès Varda’s 1962 French New Wave staple Cléo from 5 to 7 (‘Cléo de cinq à sept‘) post-return home. In 5 to 7, the Left Bank and Florence “Cléo” Victoire play characters opposite one another — Cléo the emerging singer awaiting medical test results and Paris the friend she leans on for solace. An ominous tarot reading fresh on her mind, Cléo lollygags around her hometown until eventually stumbling upon a soldier.

5PM to 7PM are the hours when lovers meet in Paris. Enter Antoine: the tarot-prophesied, lollygag-susceptible military man on leave. When Cléo encounters Antoine she’s despairing over a not-yet-realized fate. Antoine’s fate, however, is already sealed; his furlough ends that night. Together these two strangers make a deal; he will support her while she finds out her diagnosis if she will bid him farewell at the train station.

And support her he does. They haven’t much time together but, while strolling leisurely toward the elephants occupying both of their rooms, Antoine confides his thoughts on war and women.

Antoine and Cléo, Photo from IMDB

What he describes Cléo recognizes within herself. She is self-centered; like many others, she only offers herself by halves. In less than two hours Antoine provides Cléo a much-needed reflection of the impact she’s leveling against herself and the world. We should never die for nothing; we must learn to give all.

As I watched objective realism crashing into the subjective then butting up against documentary-style flâneusing, that “Paris isn’t yours” feeling I couldn’t seem to shake only increased. Cléo treated Paris the way I treat Bellingham and regarded Antoine’s presence and perspective the way I remember Paris. How could this connection that I walked and breathed and love feel so untethered to reality? Perhaps Cléo asked herself something similar at the train station as she watched the caboose disappear.

I don’t know if, after Antoine and Cléo part, she makes up her mind to fight; fight illness, fight objectification, fight fear. Perhaps tomorrow she will lift her fists in pursuit of a more meaningful life. Meeting playful Antoine, who — even if Cléo does have cancer — might be the worse off of the two, may even encourage Cléo to put down the shattered mirror and embrace a more outwardly-focused existence. I do know that not long before they have to say goodbye Antoine declares that they have plenty of time together. Memories never die.

Paris, tu Me manques

Paris took my wildest expectations and added life. To simply observe the bustle of the streets felt as though I was learning something transformative about myself. In actuality, I was just catching a fresh perspective of who I am in the world and how I hold the world in me. In most Americanized stories set in Paris the protagonist’s life is deeply altered by some event. As the main character in my own story I can honestly say I went to Paris to change but instead returned home wanting to make change.

My next destination?

Meaningful connections vary. Paris is not my mother, daughter, colleague, or soul mate. She’s not quite a stranger, no longer just a story. Certainly not a long-term partner or even a friend. In hindsight, Paris feels more like a once-in-a-lifetime lover, a mirror that points outward at the life you are living, casting questions into the well of purposeful pursuit. A momentary sweetheart that, after touching you powerfully, offers you much to see anew once life returns to normal.

I hope we touch again, France and myself. Until then, I will treasure my sensory memories, hold fictionalized narratives at arms length, and practice honoring our one inspired week together by seeing outward and offering inward. The rest is fate.

Photo by Emily Morter on Unsplash

August 23, 2018 / 1 Comment

Trust Women: An Unknown History

3 shockers I learned from Rebecca todd peters

Last month, while perusing my local brick-and-mortar bookstore, a hot pink hardcover drew me to the New Release section. More specifically, a title latched onto my eyeballs while its subtitle squeezed at my heart. At the time I didn’t know that Trust Women: A Progressive Christian Argument for Reproductive Justice, written by minister, professor, and ethicist Rebecca Todd Peters, was already stirring the proverbial pot; when I found out — two minutes after picking it up and searching Goodreads — I wasn’t terribly surprised.

As someone who has often heard and used the phrase, “I support a woman’s right to choose, but I cannot imagine having an abortion”, I immediately knew this book would challenge me, as well as countless others, in a much-needed way. What I didn’t know, however, was how little I knew* about American women’s reproductive history.

shocker #1. Abortion was first MORALLY criminalized by a group of ENTITLED male physicians

News flash to me! Based on my erstwhile indoctrination into the Pentecostal way, I assumed the church played a central role in regulating abortion. In actuality, the “first wave of abortion legislature” was enacted at the state level between 1821 and 1841, regulating poisonous medications and criminalizing abortion after quickening — the common-law determinate for pregnancy. During this period women were still considered the authority on child-bearing and were exercising fertility control, aided by local doctors.

Prior to 1847, and year the American Medical Association was founded, anyone could claim the title of doctor and set about offering treatments. Healers with little or “inferior” medical training sometimes averted paying patients — often women — from elite physicians bred by European Universities. Without the application of modern medical advancement — e.g., bacteriology — medical treatment outcomes of healers versus doctors were difficult to compare. Nevertheless, college-trained physicians wanted recognition as legitimate doctors. Abortion became a moral authority professional physicians, like Horatio Storer, championed based on a — then — unpopular determination that life begins at conception. Over time, social rhetoric began to adopt the idea that reproductive choices should no longer be controlled by “ignorant, irrational” women but instead be redirected to AMA certified physicians.

shocker #2. abortion rhetoric is mostly bullshit

Women have been responsibly managing their reproductive health for at least 4,000 years. Yeah, abortion isn’t new. Yet, the modern discussion surrounding abortion often tilts toward theory wars, shame, blame, and ostracization. Real women’s stories are rarely heard — to hear them a woman would have to open herself up to all levels of anger, hate, judgement, ridicule, etc — leaving human authenticity replaced by a wall of generalized misinformation.

What we aren’t told:

In 1967:
- The majority of women who had abortions were married with children.
- 94% of abortions resulting in maternal death were women of color.
- 93% of legal abortions performed in NYC hospitals were white women who could afford a private room.
Between 1968 and 1982 approximately 42% of native women and 15% of white women were sterilized.
In 2010 more than 19M US women who needed publicly funded contraceptive services were uninsured.
Hundreds of thousands of fertilized eggs and embryos, harvested for infertility treatments, will be destroyed or kept frozen indefinitely.
Over 10 years of typical contraceptive use the likelihood of becoming pregnant increases to as high as 72%.
Women have abortions for numerous reasons, abortion-as-birth control is rare, and the majority of women who have had an abortion report that they made the correct moral choice for themselves and their preexisting family.

shocker #3. I am not alone in my belief that confronting systemic social problems is the answer to fewer abortions

After most forms of abortion were criminalized in America the procedure was forced underground. During the Depression a truce was struck between abortion providers and law enforcement and so women of all backgrounds continued to seek abortion services performed by physicians. Post-World War II the truce disappeared, law enforcement got involved, and abortion rates dropped from 30,000 to 8,000 by 1964. Consequently, while white, affluent women maintained access and resources to seek safe abortions, working-class women did not. NYC hospitals alone saw 10,000 women, unable to acquire safe abortion services, admitted for complications from illegal abortions in 1967.

I have heard many moral arguments against Roe v. Wade and I know many pro-choicers who agree with plenty of the points made. However, as Peters makes explicitly clear, the problem we are up against isn’t women’s access to abortion, it’s our inability as a society to care for those already born. Everyone has their own opinion about when life begins, but no one can argue that a woman standing in front of you — married or unmarried, poor or rich, healthy or abused, 18 or 40 — is anything less than completely alive. Let’s support her, offer aid to her existing children, manage lawmaking so her spouse isn’t unfairly jailed, provide basic access to healthcare, education, vocational training, and a devoted social network. Let’s stop blaming women for a system they didn’t build.

The 1965 Moynihan Report is a titular example of how blame can be publicly shifted from those responsible onto those caught in a malfunctioning system. Are black single mothers responsible for high rates of poverty in black communities? After a considerable amount of hindsight, it would seem that at least 50% of Americans agree that no, black people are not at fault for the failures of our nation. The same can be said for current healthcare, hunger, and homelessness rates. Our broken system is driving a lemon vehicle toward the same cliff that ran it off the road last time. I dearly hope that today, or tomorrow, or one day in the not too distant future we can begin to assign the blame where it is due and focus on fixing the core issue instead of obsessing over the symptoms.

…the issue of unplanned pregnancies is a public problem rooted in poverty and inequality.” p.40

*I do not claim to be any type of expert on this topic. For far more comprehensive information, read Trust Women and explore its extensive bibliography.

Anne with an E, owned by CBC + Netflix

July 31, 2018 / 2 Comments

Love with an E

A fairly spoiler-free review

While deep in production mode on our first feature Just Like the Men, many of the Talking to Crows crew have chosen unique ways of decompressing–or rather, we are all binge watching different television shows after each day of filming wraps. Cassidy is revisiting a constant comfort, HBO’s Sex and the City, and offering sage observations that we chat about over plates of craft service (apparently I’m a Samantha-Charlotte, who knew?). Laura just wrapped another go-around with our favorite Gilmore Girl wordsmiths. Ashton is living a marvelous Mrs. Maisel life, hunny. I am ALL. ABOUT. QUEER EYE! Yas Queen, the QE reboot is OMG gorg. And Stacy is finally digging into Season 2 of Anne with an E, the CBC + Netflix Original Series — created by Moira Walley-Beckett — based on Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery’s 1908 novel Anne of Green Gables.

Many women in Canada and the States fell in love with the fictional character Anne Shirley as young girls. Others found her as adults. More still are experiencing the precocious orphan for the first time in 2017–18, one-hundred-and-ten years after she was first penned. Whether on the page, on the stage, or embodied by Megan Follows in the 1985 cult-classic television miniseries, each major adaptation maintained the Anne canon: an eleven-year-old orphan girl is accidentally sent to live with elderly siblings Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert who intend to adopt a boy to help on the farm. Set against the backdrop of late 19th century Prince Edward Island’s made-up town Avonlea, Anne must face rejection, adversity, insecurity, and the mismatch of being an intelligent, talkative, awkward girl in a seen-and-not-heard world.

The Anne Canon: Set against the backdrop of late 19th century Prince Edward Island, a young orphan must face rejection, adversity, insecurity, and the mismatch of being an intelligent, talkative, awkward girl in a seen-and-not-heard world.

The most recent installment’s first season, which premiered in March of 2017, is rich with familiar characters and content, including a temper-off with busybody Rachel Lynde, classroom knowledge-spars with Gilbert Blythe, and a raspberry cordial snafu with bosom friend Dianna Barry. Marilla and Matthew maintain their familiar uncertainty of having a child — let alone an Anne-girl — in and around Green Gables, both warming to her in their own distinct and essential way. Anne herself is hot headed, dramatic, loquacious, brass, and as seemingly impervious to humdrum reality as ever. She is also loving. For many, what stood out most about the original Anne was her capacity to find goodness, to create something positive out of the doldrums of an unfair situation, and in doing so was able to apply a learned appreciation for imperfect blessings. Above all, Anne Shirley’s chosen people are unconditionally loved. Such is the message continued and expounded upon by Walley-Beckett.

The Lady of Shalott, No Infringement Intended

Anne Season 2 hit Netflix on July 6, 2018, offering audiences even deeper messages of love, tinged in Lady of Shalott darkness. In the Lord Tennyson 1842 poem, the Lady of Shalott is imprisoned in an island castle, cursed to never gaze directly at the world, but instead is relegated to weave images upon her loom cast from a mirror and the bustling of Camelot’s main thoroughfare. These images are described as “shadows of the world”, implying the lack of direct understanding and sight. In the 1985 CBC miniseries, Anne (Follows) lies in a rickety little boat to play-act the part of the Lady of Shalott, a visual recreation of the same scene from the original publication. As she drifts along, reciting the Tennyson poem stanza by stanza, Mr. Barry’s dingy begins to take on water and Anne is forced to abandon ship until her Lancelot arrives. Though relegated to a “tragical romance” in 1985, the similarities between early Anne themes and the Lady of Shalott’s plight converge in the second season of Anne with an E. Themes of feminism, racism, and homosexuality, handled with intention and love, cast an explicit light on the shadowed, real-world truths omitted from previous Anne narratives, effectively lifting a hundred-years’ curse.

… similarities between early Anne themes and the Lady of Shalott’s plight converge in the second season of Anne with an E.

Upon completing the currently aired seasons I felt overwhelming thankfulness, especially after meeting Bash and Cole and being reintroduced to Miss Stacy and Aunt Josephine in Season 2. None of these characters fell outside of canon for me, as none had ever been fully represented in the Anne universe. That Charlottetown — a major metropolitan city — is only a train ride away, yet somehow every version that came before Walley-Beckett’s Anne managed to have no black or gay people is appalling. I doubt anyone is surprised by the lack of diversity in 1908; however, that more of us in 2018 aren’t reeling back, once again (and again and again and again), to honestly reevaluate our own personal acceptance of white-washing and hetero-normalization in our most beloved stories is devastating. To me. The continued mishandling of accurate historical accounts, even in forms of entertainment, is appalling and devastating to me because it perpetuates a confounded reality. It keeps the social world in shadowed truth and omits stories deserving of attention and love from the creative loom.

Will Anne with an E challenge die-hard Anne of Green Gables lovers? Potentially. As viewers, can we hold original source material preciously in one hand while equally weighing the merit of hindsight that only adaptation offers with the other? Maybe. I hope so. Otherwise I fear majority-society will remain bound to the curse of obscured sight. Spoiler alert: Lancelot isn’t coming to save you. It’s well past time we kill off the pervasive predilection for biased narrative, which only focuses on the “thoroughfare” instead of the complex world. After all, in 2018 the Anne we all know’s unconditional love learned to reach beyond Matthew, Marilla, Dianna, and a marginally radical Miss Stacy to include a closeted schoolmate, a black immigrant, a progressive feminist, and a widow grieving the loss of her wife. What a beautiful, empowering, and canonic example.

“I’m not a bit changed–not really. I’m only just pruned down and branched out. The real ME–back here–is just the same.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

July 13, 2018 / 1 Comment

Summer Summit

i love summer.

and in the summer we climb mountains.

Or I did one time--ohh yes that one time--in 2014.

After midnight on my 29th birthday, I awoke shivering in a tiny tube-tent at Camp Muir, a Mount Rainier base camp. It was beyond Paradise.

Under the moon, we roped up and climbed across the Ridge toward the Cleaver with twenty-plus headlamps lighting our ice-packed path. Just a little bit of high alpine travel and crevasse rescue practice. In the middle of the night. At 10,500 feet elevation. No problem.

One month later, we did it all again and the culmination was even better. For an 11-hour round-trip jaunt — long for the average trek — it was a breeze. Except for the fact that climbing mountains is actually completely impossible.

Me, summit Mount Rainier? Who know what I'd been thinking.

I can’t, I thought at 11,000 feet, as my stomach heaved the squeezable apple sauce I’d just consumed right back up again. Feeling suddenly buoyant, I stole a camelbak, stuck that water tube in my mouth, and re-clipped my crampons. I absolutely couldn’t do it, but I had to.

Hours later and a couple thousand feet farther, I looked to the front of my rope line and then to the back. I leaned into my ice ax, not acknowledging the snow cliff to my left, and found myself explicitly trusting the three climbers I was harnessed to. I had to make sure every single one of my own footfalls was worthy of the trust they had placed in me.

At 14,000-ish feet we hit a morning storm. It cleared, so we didn’t turn back — even though this was our last chance. A couple hundred feet more. Total white out. Could barely see my rope line. Too exhausted to be terrified.

I have to get there, I thought. We have to get there.

Washington State’s Mount Rainier is what mountaineers call a 50/50 mountain; 50% of attempts are successful. Just over half of our original climbing team was successful that sunny June day.

At the top we rested for a short while, took some flattering pictures (see left), ate fruit, re-hydrated, and worried our feet would swell if we took off our boots. Twenty minutes later the peaks had cleared and we were in descent. And you know what?

Going down is TWICE as difficult.

After reaching the top, what is the joy in returning to the bottom? To anticipate the glory stories you’ll tell?

No way.

At the top a climber is too spent, too full of the mountain and their team. Everything has been given, and yet, the body-pounding, joint-fatigue of the journey down remains. With every weary step you move farther away from what you thought was your goal.

I have only met that particular summit once. That one perfect time. But it was reaching base camp again that taught me everything I’d ever need to know about believing I was incapable — physically, emotionally, spiritually, creatively — of finishing what I’d started. Mount Rainier showed me the worst lies I tell myself, about peaks and valleys and destinations, and broke them over her glorious lapidist knee.

I couldn’t do it, but I did it anyway. I hope to feel similarly about my writing one day.

The odds are probably 50/50.

Side note: I no longer eat anything squeezable.

Rochelle Robinson

Lover. Writer. Appreciation aficionado.