I Know I Am, But What Are You? by Samantha Bee

Author:Samantha Bee [Bee, Samantha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery Books
Published: 2010-05-11T07:00:00+00:00

may december never come

There’s really nothing creepier than going somewhere with one of your parents and having people think you are together, as a couple. Of lovers. Who do it. With each other. The only way to describe how this makes me feel is to say that it makes my vagina nauseous, if that’s even physically possible.

I mean, okay, I get it, it’s hard to blame anyone for coming to that conclusion. The world can sometimes send mixed messages. Someone sees a young person with an older person who’s not that old, maybe they’re holding hands or linking arms or something, and it’s natural to think the worst. For those of us who had teen parents and there isn’t much of an age difference, it’s actually quite feasible. But when you see the look of disgust that creeps across their faces as your dad says good-bye to you, planting his chappy dad-lips on yours . . . Oh, God. You see? Just writing it down made my vagina throw up.

Recently I took my mother to the site of Woodstock, the site that commemorates The Great Embarrassment of my mother’s life. With ample opportunity to attend the concert—in fact, she was in New York at the time on a rare visit from Canada—my mother spent Woodstock weekend, the event that defined a generation and changed music history, on a cashmere sweater–set shopping expedition with her grandmother. She completely missed her chance to be cool. By the time my mother decided that she, too, was ready to jump on board the hippie train, everyone else had already packed up their water bongs and gone into finance. She could try to hide it all she wanted, but I knew that growing up she preferred the music of the Monkees to the Beatles, and I found it hilarious.

I took hundreds of photos of her looking wistfully across the green field, photos directly intended to fool people into thinking that she had been there and was reliving one of the most special, most uninhibited times of her life. When you look at the photos, you can practically feel her conceiving me in a sweet, patchouli-scented lovemaking session with a mud-spackled stranger. I kept reminding her that at the precise moment “history’s biggest happening,” as TIME magazine called it, was taking place, she was in a Bonwit Teller dressing room about ninety miles away, locked in a battle of wills with her grandmother over whether to get the coral or the turquoise set.

As we argued over her participation in my freshly conceived photo-essay entitled Cardigan Calamity, a car pulled up and a smiling, gray-haired couple got out and the woman wandered over to us.

“Isn’t. This. Something?” said the lady, looking out over the vista. You could tell that she had been there at the actual concert and was remembering something really delicious and life altering.

“It surely is.” My mom sighed dramatically to indicate that she had been there and that it had been transformative for her as well.

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