My sympathy for women and gays began with my birth. My mother, Rose, was disappointed that she birthed a male child—as documented by my birth certificate. My first photograph showed me as a three-year-old child in the driveway dressed in a skirt..

Rose used terms of endearment that had a feminine flavor. Etymologically, the “ie” suffix for boy’s names gave the feeling that the boy was childish, less male, or even nongender. My first picture in the local newspaper identifies me as Dickie Kagan, a helpless child on a tricycle who was kidnapped.

I am now only piecing together the meaning and significance of her most common term of endearment—Dicksala. I am not sure of its origin, but I have long daydreamed about its influence. The suffix “sala” is based on the Hebrew and Yiddish way to emphasize the femineity of a name. “Sala” is also a derivative of the name “Sarah.”  From my study of the Holocaust, I learned that “Sarah” was the name Nazis used for all Jewish females. This discovery increased my sense of identifying with my feminine side.

 

I have spent time daydreaming about my birth name vs. my nickname. It has led me down a path that I have been bequeathed a second nature.  I have turned this feeling into searching for my dual identity.

In high school, I learned to dance with a male friend. In my parent’s living room, we listened to music while holding each other—sharing the male and female roles. The New Yorker dance supplied the excitement and pleasures of twirling, balancing, and embracing. Consequently, I became an excellent dancing partner at parties who understood both the male and female roles. Unfortunately, perhaps, I never adapted to the modern individualism of dancing as a form of gymnastics.

Rejection of the binary male-female division fosters identity with women, gays, lesbians, and trans people. My students, both male and female, have often celebrated me as a father figure. Often there was a family-like relationship. Several times I roomed with a former student in her apartment in Taiwan. During those times, I cleaned the house and helped with food preparations. Years later, my daughter stayed with her. My former student told my daughter that I was a great roommate.

In my research, I have had empathy for abused women, especially for prostitutes.  For instance, I discovered that Thai prostitutes fled from their oppressive families in rural areas to the city where they formed a bond with other prostitutes in the brothels. Here, they lived with other women, learning skills like sewing or knitting between their pecuniary employments. They often became literate which led to confidence and freedom to engage in other occupations.

While teaching about the Japanese comfort women during WW2 who were kidnapped into prostitution for the military, I organized specific activities to promote understanding and consciousness of their plight. After the war, Comfort Women published poetry and stories about their dehumanization. These memoirs expressed exceptional aesthetic sense and strategies for self-preservation. We read them aloud. I felt that this pedagogy was an excellent substitute for a historical narrative, as well as a means to promote empathy and sensitivity.  I tried to teach my students to learn from these heroic achievements to survive with honor and health. The moral: out of the darkness, there can be light.

In my sparse subbing as a Japanese language instructor, I was required to teach a story about two foreigners—male and female—who learned to live and speak in Japan. The narrative was full of dialogue, as would be expected in a language class. The problem is that the pronunciation of the same word, or composition of the sentence changes according to the male or female speaker. For instance, after WW2, American soldiers and government officials learned Japanese from their female language teachers. Behind their backs, the Japanese would laugh because they sounded like women. So, I invited a female Japanese speaker to teach the students how women would read female dialogues.  I read the male and she read the female dialogues with differing tones and added expressions.

Below is an autobiography I wrote in a woman’s voice–as best I could.  It has received critical comments: ” you did not write this, a women is the author, you got help from a woman, your plagiarized.

Gina's graduate student stipend was not really enough to live on. Certainly not well.
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As with cooking, I did not learn to do laundry from my mother. She had household help for much of her life. I learned to iron (a task she NEVER learned) in the costume shop at camp in 1967. That was useful. We had a service that washed the sheets, but we had to make our beds and we had inspection every day. We did “hospital corners” for a neat look, so a quarter could bounce off the bed (if this sounds like the military, camp was very regulated in those days). I still make the beds that way, and though in Newton my cleaning lady does the sheets and towels, I do them in our Vineyard house, including after company leaves (that is true in Newton as well; I only have cleaning help every other week and don’t like a messy house).

I first did my own laundry when I went to college in 1970 – as my mother-in-law would say, “a college load”, mostly mixed, but at least I knew to separate the darks from the light. There were machines in the basement of our dorms, but we needed quarters to use them. That was true of every building I lived in until we owned a condo or house, so I’ve never used a laundromat and had the convenience of being inside my own building, though with more units than machines, there was often a wait or someone would remove your clothing if you didn’t get down there fast enough and you’d find your wet stuff in a heap somewhere.

These days, with all the athletic fabrics, where the colors don’t run and then dry very quickly, I have trouble getting a dark load together, and trouble convincing my husband that dark sweatshirts and jeans still need to be washed separately. But I really don’t want my undergarments to get tinted blue. It is an ongoing struggle; (no, he does not do laundry unless he is by himself on the Vineyard for a few weeks. Then he really does a college load).

It can take a while to move laundry from the washer to the dryer, as some fabrics don’t go in the dryer and need to hang dry. Those I need to ferret out as I move things into the dryer. Dan wears a lot of Icebreaker athletic gear, which is made of merino wool and cannot go through the dryer. We try to have a system where he leaves it hanging on the side of the hamper separately, but does not always remember and I don’t always notice when I start the load, so it sometimes goes through the dryer and shrinks a bit…oh well! Can’t get it right 100% of the time. But I give it the old college try!

 

 

Let me begin by saying that I have not widely shared this story; perhaps I’ve told a handful of people, total, in my entire life. So it is with more than a little trepidation that I share this here, but it fits the prompt perfectly. I thought long and hard before I chose to write about it. This is not a chapter in my life I dwell on or choose to revisit often. I remind every reader that I was a naïve 18 year old at the time, feeling her way in the world; just dumb enough to think she knew much, when in fact, she knew very little. Be kind in your judgement as you read this.

I was assistant stage-managing my first show at Brandeis, a Main Stage production of two new one-act plays, with my junior friend Cindy, who was also a mentor to me. I called the first show from the lectern off stage left; “The 50 Year Game of Gin Rummy”. It had a two-person cast – a “lights-up, lights-down show”; easy to call. The other play, “Nocturnes” was very complicated with tons of cues. Cindy called that one from the booth high in the back of the theater. We each were on headsets and could hear one another, as could the people running the lights.

May 1, 1971 was the tech rehearsal, when all the lights, with their levels and exact placements are set, cues are run, any wagons that have to come on or off the stage were pulled (this was long before anything was electrified). Every cue was set and rehearsed. It made for a long day. The rehearsal ended around 11pm and I was exhausted.

We call Spingold Theater the “cupcake building”. It is round with three theaters, rehearsal space and a dance studio in the center of the circle; classroom, costume shop, Green Room, dressing rooms on the floor below and scene shop on the lowest level (accessible from the lowest, parking lot level, with a large elevator to bring the set pieces up to the theaters). Since the theaters are back to back, it is not a thoughtful design, as the noise from one production (if it is loud) bleeds through the walls to the other theater back in the day when there might be multiple shows running at once (due to budget constraints, this no longer happens). But running around the circumference of the theater to find where you want to be, or how to get to the lower level can be confusing to the uninitiated. There is a narrow corridor from stage left out to the outside perimeter, but you need to know THAT door, and THAT corridor, otherwise you will get lost.

And that is how I found myself, quite late that night, face to face with a curly-headed stranger. Like Alice through the Looking Glass, he had opened an unmarked door and found himself in a narrow corridor that led him backstage. He had no idea how to get out. I was tired and cranky.

For those of you who have never met me in person, I am 5′ tall and at that time, weighed 90 pounds. I remember that I wore a too-tight Harvard tee-shirt my parents bought me when they were in the Boston area a few years earlier for my brother’s 1969 Brandeis graduation (of course I didn’t wear a bra, this was 1971 after all), and brown, hip-hugger jeans. Nothing out of the ordinary for a long day at the theater. He wore sandals, blue jeans and a suede, fringed jacket, sort of hip-looking for the time. We passed in very close proximity in that tight corridor. He stopped to ask me a few questions, but started on a sour note: “How old are you?” (Fighting words for me.) My rejoinder, said quickly, in one breath: “I’m 18, I know I look like I’m 12, but I’m 18.” Startled, he asked, “What do you say when people tell you that you look like you are 12?” ” I tell them to go fuck themselves.”

OK, we were not off to a “great” start. His eyes grew wide. I didn’t care. I was SO tired of that question. Clearly, I had piqued his curiosity, which honestly, was not my intention, though now I can see how my response was provocative (but that is how I spoke at that time in my life – I did like the shock value). He regrouped, then asked if I could show him how to get out of the theater. I told him I had to gather my things, but would be ready in a few moments, so we were off. It wasn’t difficult if you knew how to do it. He chatted with me on the way out. What did I want to do, etc. I told him I was a Theater major, hoping to be an actress.

He had a little red sports car parked in front of the theater. One didn’t see many of those on campus. He enjoyed seeing my reaction. As he opened the car door for me (!), he pulled out his business card: it was embossed in gold and red lettering and said his name: Jason Warner, and had the name of a well-known studio: Warner Brothers Seven Arts. I was sort of dumb-founded. If one could see a thought-bubble over my head, the words would read, “I’ve been discovered”. But I said nothing to him. As if he could read those thoughts he said, “That’s right, I’m Jack Warner’s son. I’m in the Boston area visiting friends, thought I’d check out Brandeis. I think you have potential”.

I carried that card in my wallet until I was pickpocketed on the subway while visiting a friend in New York City my senior year. But I remember it clearly. While trying to find the logo for this story, this is the logo that I found for the company at that time:

I assure you, the logo on his card did not resemble this. Too bad we didn’t have smart phones in 1971. Then I could have googled him and his phony logo. But I couldn’t 52 years ago.

What did he mean by his interest? He didn’t know anything about me, he hadn’t seen me do a scene, heard me perform a monologue. WTF? He invited me into his little sports car. I hesitated. He could see I didn’t trust him and he was right. I sat in the passenger seat with the door open, my leg out the door, my foot planted on the ground. He wanted to get to know me better, but claimed to understood my hesitancy. “What do I know about you, besides that business card?” “Is there someplace on campus we can go and talk? I want to talk about your career?”

Oh, this guy was good; he kept this young girl intrigued.

My mind raced. Where would I be safe at this hour? What was open with people around. The Student Union was brand new, having just opened the previous November. It was open 24 hours a day and always had a guard at the front desk. I thought we could go to the front lounge there, where the guard could keep a watchful eye on me, so I suggested we drive around the campus to the Union and I got fully into his car. My heard sank as he drove right past the Union and parked in a dimly lit little lot behind the library, out of the way. Now I was on high-alert. But his banter wasn’t threatening and I parried each comment. I tried to stay calm and present.

He told me he could get me on “Laugh-In” right away (it was a hugely successful show at the time). I brushed that offer away. “I’m an artist, I don’t want to be on some vulgar TV show!” That flummoxed him. He’d just offered me the moon (which I don’t think was even produced by Warner Bros. but who knew that in the moment). We continued to talk about my ambitions (such as they were). Somehow, I mentioned that I had posed nude for a senior studio art major. He said he’d pay a lot of money for that painting. I told him it wasn’t for sale. It was hanging in a gallery on campus, part of the student’s senior portfolio (and the pose was twisting and back-facing, showing little of me besides legs, back and shoulders).

It must have been close to midnight when he told me had blue balls. I didn’t know what that was. I didn’t have much experience in the world and did not plan to increase mine now! He unzipped his fly and proceeded to whack off in front of me. I was horrified, but tried to stay calm. When he finished, he gave me a kiss and a snuggle, then asked if he could see me to my dorm. Even now, I can feel my heart beating wildly in fear and desperation. (Why didn’t I leap out of the car and make a run for it? Don’t you think that crossed through my mind; but I reasoned that he’d run after me and then he wouldn’t be as relatively gentle as he had been, I feared. Running would likely trigger some huge, negative reaction. No, better to placate as much as possible until I could get to safety with other friends on campus.)

Dear lord, I thought, how am I going to get rid of this guy? My roommate hadn’t slept in our dorm in days, but I fervently prayed that tonight would be different. We drove the short distance around the perimeter road to my dorm, Deroy, and he followed me up the stairs to the second floor. And there, talking on the pay phone at the end of the hall, was Carol, my roommate. I don’t think I’ve been so happy to see anyone in my life!

“There she is! That’s my roommate. Good night, Jason”. He kissed me goodnight on the cheek and walked out of life. I never heard from him again. Perhaps he figured that I wasn’t as easy a mark as he’d hoped. I was not overly-awed by his bravado.

********************************************************************************************************************

My senior year, Dan and I bought a black and white TV for my dorm room, as we were all but living together (though he graduated the previous year; he lived with his parents in nearby Newton and came over most nights after dinner). I had the news on before dinner one night and was half paying attention when an ominous story came on. A young woman in Cambridge had been raped. She’d given a description of her attacker to the police and the sketch from the police artist was shown on TV: a curly-haired white guy with a round face and even features. He looked suspiciously like Jason Warner. I started trembling. I paused for a moment, then picked up the phone in the suite and called the Cambridge police.

“I just saw the story on TV of the Cambridge woman who was raped, along with the police sketch of the rapist. I had a run-in with a man who looked very similar about three years ago out in Waltham on the Brandeis campus. I could identify him in a heartbeat.” The person on the other end of the line asked if I’d been sexually assaulted. “Not exactly” I replied. “I had a narrow escape. He had masturbated in front of me; perhaps he is escalating”. The person thanked me, but said it was not likely to be the same person after so many years (having watched years of the “Law and Order” franchises, I now beg to differ, but nevermind). So that was it and I forever closed the door on “Jason Warner” until choosing to share this predator with you now.

I had a close call that day, no real harm done except perhaps to my psyche. And a lesson learned about being taken in by strangers. Don’t engage, right from the start, no matter what the person says. Be polite, smile, walk away.