friends of Bitch

Tonight, four of us contributors to Michelle Tea's latest anthology, It's So You: 35 Women Write about Personal Expression through Fashion & Style, read at Powell's.

Mary Christmas started the night off with the story of her illustrious career as a young New York fashion model ending with an ill-timed family move to Chicago, where modeling perms for hair salons was considered top of your game.

I started my day brunching with Tammy Oler, a contributing Bitch writer who recently moved from Denver to Brooklyn. We met at a Middle Eastern restaurant in Brooklyn, where we drank too much coffee and geeked out about nonprofit organizing and online versus print publishing.

After, we strolled through Fort Greene Park where we stumbled upon a bizarre looking beetle/bee of sorts that neither of us could identify. Eh?

We arrived back in New York in the early afternoon. Tonight's party was organized by the wonderful Deanna Zandt, a media tech smartie who works with many leftie media outlets. (She'll be presenting a workshop at the WAM! (Women, Action, and the Media) conference at the end of March called The Revolution will use Media Technology.) She also cuts a fine strawberry.

This morning we met up with Amy Hoffman, editor of the Women’s Review of Books and author of the soon-to-be-released An Army of Ex-Lovers. We met at Zaftig's, a Jewish deli, where we chatted over oatmeal and borscht about what's happening at the Women's Review and what it's like living in Boston.

After fetching tonight's food and drink, Lisa and I took the train out near Boston College to meet up with two of the folks at Our Bodies Ourselves, the Boston Women's Health Book Collective — Judy Norsigian, one of the founders and current executive director, and Wendy Brovold, who handles communications and outreach.

We took a train back to New York this morning and headed to the grocery store for food and drink for tonight's fundraising party. Unbeknownst to us, a good chunk of the city's population had this, Indigenous People's Day, off. And a good chunk of them decided to spend it grocery shopping. I'd never seen such chaos at a grocery store. It even reigned in the restrooms— a long line of people snaked out the door and around the corner, while an exasperated security guard directed traffic into each restroom amidst people crying of toilet paper outages from the stalls.

As I climbed the stairs from the subway headed for Penn station, the strap on my enormous bag broke, so I was left carrying it like a sack of potatoes. Which was a huge bummer because I'd left my other bags in Brooklyn. 

Lisa was waiting for me inside the station, and we boarded the train to Washington, DC. It was close to 90 degrees when we exited the train station to board the subway, and on the subway, lo-fi advertising for Nike flashed at us inside the tunnel. Ugh.