INSIDE OUT
Still Feeling Groovy
I have been spending a lot of time, lately, with women who are 30 years younger than me. No, I'm not taking a page out of Mary Kay Letourneau's book. I am writing my own, if you will. And mine—rather than being about robbing the cradle—is about unexpected friendship. Four years ago, when my partner Kathy started a mentoring program for LGBTQ undergrads that paired them with like-minded faculty and staff at the university where we work, I thought, 'Ugh—I can't bear to add one more responsibility to my schedule.' But those four years have flown by, and I still maintain contact, sporadic though it may be, with my first two 'mentees,' now graduated.
My current mentee and I have especially hit it off, and Kathy and I find ourselves spending time with her and with Kathy's new mentee on a somewhat regular basis, having dinner together, taking them to art openings, and sending a flurry of e-mail amongst us. I consider them friends now. But as it turns out, friendship is not the only benefit. And in case you have the opportunity to cultivate a friendship with someone much your junior, I thought I'd detail some of those benefits for you.
1. You will keep your HQ, or hip quotient, updated. I did not know, for instance, that there is a type of music called mash-ups ( a.k.a., 'bastard pop' and 'bootlegs' ) , where two or more songs are overlaid—as for example, the theme from Batman, the Beatles' 'Taxman,' the Surfaris' 'Wipeout,' and Interpol's 'PDA.' I'm rooting for a mash-up of Meg Christian's 'Leaping Lesbians,' Rolling Stones' 'Dance Little Sister,' and Bush's State of the Union call for the anti-gay marriage amendment. And I had never before heard of emo punk—'emo' being, according to Wikpedia, 'an abbreviation of 'emotional'' and 'emo punk' 'broadly used to describe almost any form of guitar-driven alternative rock that expresses emotions beyond traditional punk's limited emotional palette of alienation and rage.' Now, I'm not saying I'll be giving up the Indigo Girls and Bruce Springsteen for, say, Saves the Day or Flogging Molly, but I like knowing that this genre exists. And how hip will I seem to my next mentee, when this one graduates, and I can talk about hardcore emo or booties?
2. Your vocabulary will stay more generally current. For instance, whereas I might simply leave an event, Kathy's mentee is likely to 'bounce.' And a neighborhood of questionable safety might be described as 'sketch.' And many of us might think that Ellen DeGeneres, at the start of her show, dances, whereas, in fact, she actually 'drops it'—the 'it' in question here being her booty. Oh, yeah: I am one groovy chick now!
3. They keep you humble. For instance, when you ask, that first time, what 'bounce' means in, for example, 'The party was weird so I bounced,' the young'uns may mistakenly assume that all of your vocabulary dates from a time when Snuffy Smith and L'il Abner ruled the Sunday comics and begin explaining to you what it means to 'hook up' with someone or to give someone 'their props,' which, in case you were wondering, does not mean to give them an article used to help stage a play.
4. You can relive your own tumultuous days as a young dyke—from a grateful distance. When they agonize over whether they should approach someone they're attracted to or how to forget the one that got away or what they should do when they graduate, your own youthful exploits—mm, say, the time you 'dated' a married woman or moved across the country because your first girlfriend, who wasn't 'really' a lesbian, started seeing another woman—will loom large in your memory. But, thank god, will stay in your memory!
5. You can start a lot of stories with phrases like, 'When I was your age' or 'You kids today,' as in, 'You kids today have it so easy with the Internet. When I wanted to stalk someone, I couldn't just Google them—I actually had to follow them and then pretend to run into them!'
6. You will praise allah and thank the gods and bless Buddha that you are exactly the age you are. And that you don't have to be quite that young ever again.
© 2005 by Yvonne Zipter.
Yvonne Zipter can be reached via e-mail at her Web site ( www.yvonnezipter.com ) .
