Saturday, January 19, 2013

Dowager Duchesses and Heaven

Queenie told me that she doesn't want to live if she can't dance. Now, I was trying to be nice, so I said, "Well, I never could dance, so that can't be my reason to live." I didn't want to tell her that we both look like spastics on the dance floor, but she didn't miss a beat before she said, "I didn't say I dance well; I just said I need to dance."

How I've always admired her courage to simply be the biggest and brightest she could be. Sometimes, when I feel embarrassed about what she's doing in public, I join her and we have soooo much fun. But we do, at times, hurt people's feelings and I feel bad for weeks afterward. I wish feeling so free didn't come with such a bad backlash.

Queenie has always been so responsible and has always worked so sincerely and so hard, I figure she deserves to take time off to twirl and titter like a little girl. I'm always grateful when she takes time to twirl and titter with me. I have many women of wit and wisdom in my life about whom I feel the same immense gratitude. Unfortunately, many of them get on each others nerves when I'm included, so I seldom have a hen house of happy hens, all laying their unique eggs together. I'm sure that, if I did, I could whip up some amazing omelets.

What is it with we women of a certain generation? We seem to have these Dowager Duchess complexes where we simply can't agree on anything. Each of us feels that our way is the proper way, and that we are each "She who will be obeyed." Queenie has never been like this with me (except when she's in professional mode), but she certainly draws her share of these women into her aura.

If I gave myself a funeral that I wanted to be fun, I would have to have different funerals for different friends. Forget about adding family. Everyone would want to reinvent me in their own image of what is considered "socially acceptable," what a sister/mother/aunt/cousin/sibling is "supposed" to be. Except for my wonderful mate who knows and loves me as I really am, in all my many hypo-manic manifestations.

What I'd really like is if we all wrote to our friends with what we would say about them if they died tonight. It could all be kept private and burned, along with our earthly bodies, when we are cremated and our sacred ashes drifted toward the sky. Or they could be buried with our bodies, and used to aerate the soil by feeding the worms. Instead of a funeral, everybody could simply party us into paradise, or wherever it is that wise-cracking women and other people who say "shit" and "damn" go.