No pride at all–that’s a luxury a woman in love can’t afford
So I finally decided that, rather than clicking through to half the sites I read from Dean Esmay’s page, I may as well take the trouble to update my link list so I can actually get other places from here. Of course, the operation was fraught with hazard. Have I mentioned lately how much I detest default smart quotes? I forgot that Word has that particular annoying feature, so of course, when I hand-coded the links in a Word document and then cut and pasted into my site, MT was like, WTF is that junk in your href tags? Sigh. You’d think, as someone who’s spent his whole working life negotiating between word processing and DTP programs in English and Japanese, I’d remember how that little stuff can screw up your life. These two-byte characters are going to drive me to drink.
Or maybe there’s hope. In the course of getting my links together, I was reminded of this report on IGF that Teresa Heinz Kerry…well, here’s the citation from The Washington Blade:
Heinz Kerry appeared to mix policy issues with motherly love, drawing repeated shouts of appreciation from both lesbians and gay male delegates. She told of how she was moved at a campaign appearance a few months ago in Washington state, when a man told her in a question and answer session that his relationship with his mother was strained and told her, “I want you to be my mother.”
“It was clear that he had not made that peace with his mother and he wanted someone who loved him,” Heinz Kerry said. “And so, at least, if nothing else, you’ll have a mom in the White House,” she told the crowd. Added Heinz Kerry, “You can call me Mama T.”
That remark prompted the gay delegates to jump to their feet while chanting, “Mama T!”
Cool! I know what let’s do. Let’s have La Ketchup address each of us as “Little Mary,” which not only has a reassuring ring of protectiveness but is also the name of Virginia Weidler’s character in The Women! Doesn’t get much gayer than that.
Cheese and crackers. I normally think the word codependent an especially annoying neologism, but I can’t think of anything better to describe a room full of grown men and women who are begging to be patronized and a woman who’s only too glad to win their affection by doing it. Time to find a new shrink, ladies.
(You, too, Mrs. K. Mama T.)