#3: Hippies Don't Wear Lipliner

And other revelations from a college education ...

My dad was born in Orlando, Florida, as was his dad, and his dad’s dad. I was born there too (well, close by anyway). 

We’re what they call “old Orlando,” not the post-Disney transplants or snowbirds seeking refuge from the bitter winters of New England. Dad was born in 1937.

My mom was born in El Paso, Texas in 1938, a year after dad. She lived in El Paso until she graduated high school and left for Southern Methodist University in Dallas. She graduated college with a teaching degree, which was pretty typical for women in the 1950s and 1960s. After a stint teaching on Army-bases and traveling abroad, mom took a job in Orlando, Florida. She moved into an apartment that was serendipitously across the street from my dad. 

One day she needed an excuse to introduce herself to the hot guy across the street, my dad (yuck!), so she knocked on his door and asked to borrow a hammer. The rest they say, is history.  Mom is 84, dad passed in 2006, when he was 68. They were married for 42 years.

Mom and dad, circa 1965

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Given my roots in Florida and Texas, to say I had a southern upbringing would be an understatement. Southern hospitality, cotillions, and cheerleading (lots of cheerleading) were par for the course. A southern upbringing that started on the heels of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 also meant lingering race problems from the era of Jim Crow. With the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act (1965), and the Fair Housing Act (1968), all de jure, or lawful, segregation, discriminatory employment, and housing practices had been wiped from the books. Exactly 100 years after the 14th Amendment was ratified and provided equal protection of the laws for everyone, and more specifically for former slaves, systemic racism had been formally excised from the American legal system, “systemic” meaning “authorized and/or promoted by” the legal system, e.g. the law. 

The colloquial understanding of “systemic racism” has certainly changed and evolved since the achievements of the Civil Rights Movement in America (1950s - 1960s) (hence the importance of defining terms). With the advent of critical race theory in the 1970s by Dr. Derek Bell, And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice, the term “systemic racism” or “structural racism” took on a new meaning when used in the context of the antiracist (not non-racist) and social justice movements, also byproducts of critical race theory (CRT). 

Today, systemic, or structural, racism no longer refers to discriminatory legislation or the legal system per se (the issues addressed in the Civil Rights Movement), but to the entire American system, beginning with the founding documents – including The Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution – which are necessarily fraudulent and useless because, per CRT, they were created for the sole purpose of discriminating against blacks in America. As a result, racism cannot be fixed through any form of civil government, such as elections and the democratic process of lawmaking.  

Critical race theory espouses that racism is ordinary, not aberrational or incidental, and, as such, is so fully baked into the “American system” that it cannot be removed absent dismantling it or “burning it all down” as the founders and leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement suggest.  

It’s like trying to get the sugar out of the cake once you’ve baked it …. yeah, not happening.

What will replace it has not yet been identified, but I’m assuming the lessons from Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot will provide some guidance on what not to do.

But, I digress.

Back to mom, dad, and my upbringing.  

I was raised in a middle-class Christian home, attended the First Baptist Church of Orlando, went to public schools, was a competitive cheerleader (yes, I went to actual competitions), and was a power tumbler. I was also insatiably curious about “all the things” and stuck my foot in my mouth on more than one occasion - race and sexuality not excluded.  Out of the mouths of babes …   

8th Grade, circa 1986

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I was also a bus kid.

In 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education ruled that the federal courts could use mandatory busing as a tool to increase racial integration in public schools. 

Although the High Court ruled segregation in public schools unconstitutional in 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education, integration wasn’t happening (for many reasons) and busing was a proposed solution. It was an abysmal failure (again, for many reasons) but my siblings and I, nonetheless, were bussed to a mostly black middle school. The ratio was 75% black to 25% white. 

We lived in an affluent white neighborhood and were bussed across town, passing many middle schools along the way. No one in our subdivision joined the “white flight” or the “white exodus,” we just hopped on the bus and went to school. We didn’t know any differently, so it wasn’t really a big deal.  

Going to a racially integrated school with diverse teachers was a unique opportunity for southern white kids. And, it had a profound impact on me as a middle schooler and as an adult when I worked for an African American Emeritus Professor of Law for nearly 8 years after college (and before law school). As fate would have it, I was the only white person in his law office and associated non-profit: the National Intellectual Property Law Institute, a former think-tank in DC. My “minority” status in the office served as a “fork-in-the-road” moment for me: 

» Would I assimilate, or would I separate? 

Tuck this into your back pocket for now … we’ll pull it out in a future essay where I explore the truth of my upbringing in a culture that was racist in some ways, yet quite progressive in others. 

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A sine qua non of a southern girl’s upbringing was aspiring to pledge the “right” sorority in college. Many high school prom queens were heading to school for an MRS degree, and being in the “right” sorority was key for making connections with the frat boys, aka potential husband material. I wasn’t interested in any of that scene as I was gunning for an M.D. and had tunnel vision.

Notably, this created some internal and external friction on the homefront:  If I went to a regular college, it would be unheard of to decline Greek life. But if I didn’t go to a regular college, where would I go?

Enter the United States Air Force Academy (USAFA), Colorado Springs, Colorado.

To make a long story short, I learned about the Academy haphazardly, but once I got the idea of attending in my head, there was no going back. Aside from medicine, I was pretty into space and astronaut “stuff” too. Having watched numerous shuttle launches from my backyard, including one from the VIP section at Cape Canaveral, I had dual interests competing for my attention. 

USAFA, then, was my destiny.

I could skip all of the sorority stuff, but still attend med school and pilot school and become …. drum roll … a flight surgeon! And it would all be paid for by Uncle Sam. Bam!

I entered the U.S. Air Force Academy on June 27, 1991 as part of the Class of 1995. I was 17 and totally unprepared for what lay ahead. 

Fast forward a year and I was outta there. But to where? That was the question.

In spring 1992, my dad took a job in Erie, Pennsylvania. I was the last of 4 kids, so my parents were empty nesters and decided to sell the family home and head north. A soft landing and a fresh start were quite appealing, so off to Erie I went. I took the fall of 1992 off from school to get settled, make (and spend) some money, before starting classes in January 1993 at Penn State Erie: The Behrend College. I was far from the south now …  

I was in English Composition with Dr. John Champagne.

I’ve written about Dr. Champagne before on LinkedIn, but suffice it to say, he quickly became the most important person in my life. He was openly gay (very uncommon in 1992), he was brilliant, and he taught me how to find and use my voice.  

I took every class he taught, including Critical Theory, Postmodernism, and Feminist Thought. We read The Communist Manifesto, Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, and Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault. 

We read deconstructionist Jacques Derrida, and radical feminists Andrea Dworkin (specialist in pornography and sexual politics), and bell hooks (writer on race, feminism, and class). Catharine MacKinnon (legal scholar who coined the term “sexual harrasment”) and Germaine Greer (liberation, not equality, feminist who argues that women’s liberation comes from asserting differences from men, not sameness with men). The list goes on.

Note: Critical race theory didn’t make it’s mainstream debut until 1989, so it wasn’t part of any curriculum outside of law schools when I was an undergrad (CRT is an outgrowth of Critical Legal Studies, which is an outgrowth of Critical Theory). 

When I’d go home for holidays, I’d regale my family with feminist chants and oratory on the power of epistemology and my liberation from authority beyond myself. They listened, or at least tried to listen.

Secretly, I was kinda pumped that I could experiment with a life disconnected from the Christian values of my childhood and live “my” truth, not my “parents’” truth, but “my” truth. 

And, I did. 

With abandon.

I usually don’t do anything halfway, and pursuing critical theory and its progeny was no different. Instead of considering it as one of many ideas to explore, I embraced it as a comprehensive worldview and retooled my decision-making process in alignment with its teachings. I was “all in” …

In fact, I was so “in” that I decided to join my fellow students who marched, protested, and held signs with rainbows, gender symbols,  and the peace sign. I went to gay bars and counterculture coffee shops, I hit the avant garde theater to see Equus and bought some Doc Martens.

I tied a colorful string braid into my hair and pierced my ears 8 times, including a cartilage ring at the top of my left ear. I tried the nose ring, but I have a very small nose and it got gooky when I applied my foundation. You can take the girl out of the south, but you can’t take the south out of the girl. 

Despite my pseudo-grunge outfits, I still used a hair dryer, curling iron (before the butch cut), and put on a full face of Clinque. I’m not sure if I was trying to stay connected to my inner southerner, or if I was applying a mask for self-protection as I stepped out of the safety of what I’d always known to be true and believed to be right. One cannot believe in God and Karl Marx at the same time. There was an internecine war raging between my head and my heart and it wasn’t going to abate anytime soon. 

At some point, I realized I was a misfit. 

I no longer fit in with the preppy crowd (my homies), but I didn’t fit in with the women’s libbers (my buddies). One of my roommates, a brilliant student who studied and wrote poetry like a boss, told me one winter afternoon over a cup of hot coffee and a burning incense stick …

Kel, hippies don’t wear lip liner. Just sayin’ …

It was my first “Girl, Wash Your Face” moment … 25 years before the discredited Rachel Hollis’s book by the same name came out.

If I’m being honest, the truth was - I no longer knew who I was, or what I believed. I wanted to be the earthy-crunchy woman writer who smoked cigarettes and sipped black coffee Joni Mitchell-style until the wee hours. Who did open-mic nights for essayists and poets. A free bleeder and freedom fighter for the oppressed. It all seemed so cool, with “seemed” being the operative term. It was nonstop intellectual seduction, a never-ending feast for the mind. 

With one important caveat. 

It was super exhausting and depressing. My feelings were confirmed, in part, by the fact that so many of my “role models” in feminist work, art, and literature had committed, or would later commit, suicide. 

Virginia Woolf, the famed English writer who wrote “A Room of One’s Own,” was one of my favorites because she pioneered stream of consciousness as a narrative device. She finally went mad and drowned herself in a river by putting stones in her coat pockets. She was 59. 

Sylvia Plath, a 20th century American poet who wrote confessional poetry, stuck her head in a gas oven after sealing the rooms between her and her sleeping children with towels, cloths, and tape. She was 30. Her son, Nicholas, hanged himself in 2009.

Carolyn Helibrun, the mother of academic feminism and the first tenured female English Professor at Columbia, inaugurated the discussion of the oppressive patriarchy in feminist thought, as distinct from a traditional understanding of patriarchy. She took sleeping pills and then suffocated herself with a bag over her head. She was 77.

A classmate in Critical Theory, also a poet and counterculture mentor, died of cardiac arrest in the middle of the semester. She was 40. We cited the 12-steps of Narcotics Anonymous at her service. It was the first non-Christian funeral I’d ever attended.  

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A few weeks after Julia’s funeral and my revelation that “hippies don’t wear lip liner,” I found myself sitting, once again, with a cup of piping hot coffee, my trusty Doc Martens, and a full face of makeup, asking myself …  

If it’s all so liberating, why do so many movement leaders commit suicide? 

Is it an act of will, or defiance? 

Or is it just a coward’s escape from the chaos they’ve created in search of a freedom unhinged from community, connection, and a shared life with others?     

I didn’t know the answers, but it spooked me. A lot. 

I’ve had mood swings and depressive episodes my whole life and the through-line of clinical depression in the lives of these now famous dead feminist women wasn’t building my confidence for embracing radicalization as an uplifting way of living. 

I was dazed and confused.

Angry and let down.

But I didn’t know by whom.

What I did know, however, is that hippies don’t wear lip liner, but I do. 

And it was time to find ME …  

This was me pre-piercings and hair cut circa 1993. I’m still trying to find some pics from the “hippie” days if I still have any. I’ve been known to purge incriminating evidence of my bad hair years, so it could be a fruitless endeavor.

November 24, 2022