feminism — Blog — Tanya Shaffer

On the Occasion Of My Fifty-Seventh Birthday

After Annelyse Gelman, “How to Pray”

It is not the perfect, but the imperfect, who have need of love. It is when we are wounded by our own hands, or by the hands of others, that love should come to cure us – else what use is love at all?

- Oscar Wilde, “An Ideal Husband”

Bless the missteps, the stumbles, the chances lost

Bless the heaviness

The memory of those things brings

Bless friendship abandoned

Love unrequited or forsaken

Opportunity squandered

The gentle Spaniard

With eyes of softest brown

Whose hands you held and lips you kissed

On the Peace March

in Nicaragua, 1990

Then lost at a rally

And never found again

The Dutch friend met in Ghana

Who said if you didn’t write her back this time

She wouldn’t write you again

And why, oh why, did you not?

The number a friend gave you

In your solo performance days

For a major presenter

He was sure would be intrigued by your work

And the prestigious director

who handed you his card

Bless those times you sat by the phone

Those numbers in your hand

Dialed and hung up

And dialed

And hung up again

The Silver Revolution

When I was in preschool, I asked my mom how old she was. Over twenty-one, she said. Intrigued by the mystery, I kept asking, but no matter how many times I repeated the question, that was all the answer I could get. Finally, when I was six, she told me: She was forty years old. I had no idea why this was such a big secret, but I felt very grown-up to be entrusted with it.

Almost three decades later, I was interviewed for the San Francisco Chronicle about my solo show Let My Enemy Live Long!, which was playing at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. The article revealed that I was thirty-three years old. When I showed it to R, a fellow solo performer who was about to launch her own show off-Broadway, she responded with horror, Never tell a reporter your age!

Why not? I started to ask, but her look stopped me cold. Did she really have to tell me about our culture’s obsession with youth and beauty? Obviously a woman in our industry had everything to lose by revealing her age.

Sometimes Lines Are Blurred

As a mother of two boys, one of whom is on the autism spectrum, I experience the stories of the #metoo movement from a multiplicity of perspectives:

As a woman in the world, I’ve had encounters ranging from the frightening (a man locking me in a room with him and pulling out the key) to the sleazy (a professor intimating that he’d sponsor my project if I’d pose nude for his art class) to the merely disgusting (a guy jerking off in front of me in a public park). I’m relieved and cautiously heartened to see the culture finally begin to shift.

As a mom, I take every opportunity to alert my sons – ages 10 and 14 - to sexism and gender discrimination in its many forms – through language, media imagery, externally imposed constructs of masculinity and femininity, etcetera. We’ve discussed consent and the right of each person to decide if, when, and how they want to be touched.

As the mother of a person with autism, however, there’s an aspect of the whole conversation that frightens me. My older son, D, by virtue of his neurological difference, has trouble reading non-verbal social cues. Because of this, I’m terrified that he’ll make some mistake that will get him into trouble.

Off-Leash Writing / Off-Leash Arts