A couple of years ago, a new guy had been hired at my girlfriend's office. Before he started, Kathy asked her boss and another woman what the new fellow was like. As they began describing him—where he had gone to college and law school, where he'd moved afterward, and so on—he started to sound very familiar to Kathy. "It's not Francisco Santamarina, is it?" she asked, naming the brother of one of her best friends in high school. In fact it was. One of the women with whom she'd been talking, clearly in awe, said, "My god, you Catholics really do all know each other!"
Kathy's mom, it turns out, has the same notion about lesbians. Every time a local lesbian appears in the newspaper, Kathy's mom inquires whether we know her. The fact that we did indeed know Ann and Linda from Women and Children First and knew the owners, though not personally, of a local trendy cafe hasn't exactly helped us make a case that we do not, in fact, know every lesbian. The thing of it is, though, even when we don't know each other, we do—at least in a six-degrees-of-separation kind of way.
Several such six-degrees connections surfaced over the course of two days. On a Friday night I found myself out to dinner with a friend and two couples I didn't know. The first couple, it turns out, lives mere blocks away from us, shops at the same grocery stores, and has probably seen me there, without knowing it, in two-day-old sweat pants and a baseball cap covering my bed-head. Then, one of the women of the second couple started talking about visiting her retired school-teacher parents outside of Milwaukee, one of whom had been a high school principal. "Where outside of Milwaukee?" I asked. She named the suburb where I grew up. "Where was your father principal?" I asked. She named the high school I graduated from. "What's your last name?" I remembered her father quite clearly, though mostly from photos in the yearbook: being the overachieving nerd I was in those days, our paths seldom had reason to cross. The whole dinner ended up being a little eery: you think you're among total strangers, and then you discover they're neighbors and figures from your childhood—or related to those figures, anyway.
The next night, at my friend Penny's 50th birthday party, Kathy and I were making small talk with a friend of Penny's whom we'd never met. The woman mentioned she had sent her daughter to a Catholic high school —the one where Kathy went. Later, talking about all of the gay and lesbian couples on her block, the woman mentioned that one of these neighbors actually taught at the aforementioned Catholic high school—not, as you might be suspecting by now, someone who had been Kathy's teacher but, rather, the friend of an ex-lover of hers.
I never doubted the bumper sticker "We Are Everywhere"—I just didn't know that the "we" should be interpreted so personally: "We, the neighbors of your ex-lovers friends and the daughters of your high school principals. ..." It makes me think that, in the many social situations I've been in where I thought I didn't know anyone, I just haven't asked enough people the right questions. To save time, I'm thinking maybe I should write up a survey that I can photocopy and hand out to everyone I meet. The survey, which you can feel free to adapt for yourself, will be titled, "How Are You Connected to Me, Yvonne Zipter?" because if you look at this a certain way, with a certain Al-Franken-ish egocentric mindset, it can begin to seem like you are Rome and all lesbians lead to you.
The questions for that survey will obviously need to be exhaustive— Where do you live? Where did you grow up? What do your cousins-in-law do for a living? What Girl Scout camp did you attend? List every place you've ever been and the dates—so I may not have it ready by the next time we meet, but eventually we'll get to the bottom of just how you and I form a "we." Sisterhood is not only powerful, it's almost literal.
yzipter@journals.uchicago.edu .
