Synopsis "Eeek Love (in English)"
My passion for the skewed, the avant-garde, the idiosyncratic - poets, writers, artists, visionaries, whistle blowers, and everyday goddesses - stems from a childhood juggling the act of "good little girl." Behind the pigtails I was a voyeur of the sensational. Even more bewitching to me than Grimms' capricious and sometimes cruel fairy tales was Hans Christian Andersen's story of a nice little girl who was given a pair of coveted red shoes. The shoes made her want to dance everywhere - even to church, which was forbidden - and as punishment she could not remove them. The only way to stop the dancing was to have her feet cut off! Champion of that little girl, I have danced life-long with the forbidden. Would this explain my odd lot of friends - each of them rare, remarkable, eccentric? Hell for me would be to live in a planned community where all shopping and entertainment are accessible by golf cart, an adult Disney World with smartly dressed Stepford People. They exist, of course, but none of my fantastics would consider living there. As a young teenager living in Arlington, Virginia, my favorite outing was to the Army Medical Museum in Washington, D.C., where I could gaze upon bottled congenital abnormalities, plastic models of malaria parasites, tracings of the world's largest foot. I was delighted to read Katharine Dunn's Geek Love, about a couple who revive their traveling carnival by breeding their own freak show, fetuses altered in utero by various means to create a boy with flippers for hands and feet, Siamese twins, a hunchbacked albino dwarf, a normal-looking baby gifted with telekinesis. My favorite photographer? Diane Arbus, also drawn to the off-beat, the exceptional. Her photos of marginal people - dwarfs, giants, transvestites, nudists, circus performers, anyone whose normality seems surreal - show everyone unmasked. "There's a quality of legend about freaks," she wrote. "Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle." This collection of poems is a side show of performers from the circus of my imagination, the nice girl unmasked.
