Roots and Boots and Tattoo Energy
Y’all.
I’m going to be real with you, my brain has not been with me the last week. See, without going into the gory details I’ll let you know that I have been the lucky recipient of not one but TWO ruptured eardrums as a delayed response to my flight home from our Hawaii shoot. Fear not, I shall survive. However, the last week has been a weird alternative reality where my head has seemingly been stuffed in a fish bowl causing pain, headaches, ringing… all the disorienting shit. Alas, here I am trying to listen to music for the first time and contemplating sharing thoughts and stories that have been resident in my brain all this time, it’s just a matter of luring them to the surface.
Natasha Lyonne. For a multitude of reasons she pops up on my socials a lot. I’m not complaining but without fail I always, always then consider the movie, But I’m a Cheerleader the 1999 satirical classic. This thought train then ultimately finds me considering the concept of roots. Not literally, “I am a living plant that stretches out into the soily abyss of the earth” but like, “What are the first origins of this currently formed or forming part of myself?” In the movie they focus on the roots of one's sexuality. I’ll admit that 95% of the time I find myself in a conversation about roots it is about sexuality. But, I find myself often considering the roots of a lot of things about myself. It’s like Ancestry.com for every decision and life-altering scenario (whether I know it or not at the time) I’ve ever been a part of.
For the sake of what brings us all here, I have been considering my creative roots. As a kid I only ever thought I would be the first female to play in the NBA. Seemed feasible. (It wasn’t). As I got older and eased a bit more into self-awareness, I was uncertain how to tell my own truths so I gravitated towards books and movies that pulled the curtain back on realities that didn’t exist tangibly in my small town life. Most often, those things resulted in the awareness that sexuality was something to be considered and explored even if never discussed in “real life”.
There was a small video store that took up residence in an old brick firehouse in my hometown. I don’t even know if you could call it a “one stoplight town” since the stoplight only ever flashed but there was a town curfew of 10pm - the video store closed at 9. It was both walking and biking distance from my house and probably one of the places I remember most vividly from my youth. I went there a lot. A lot, a lot. The owner’s name was Jim and he knew me well enough that some days if I didn’t have the money, he would just let me take a video because he knew I’d always be coming back. He was not wrong.
I don’t remember the circumstances surrounding the first time I rented Foxfire but I was probably thirteen and caught up in the swirl of lightness and darkness inside of myself. My queerness was always there. My ability to express it was not. Watching this movie changed my life.
Picture this: it’s 1996 and the cover of a vhs tape has five teenage girls you can tell have been through things staring (glaring?) at you and you don’t know whether you want to be them, date them, or tell their stories. You don’t know it at the time but the actress in the front will become a small obsession of yours - a twenty year old Angelina Jolie. Behind her an actress of the same age before she became one of your favorite singer/songwriters, Jenny Lewis. We also have queer icon model, Jenny Shimizu.
I rented this movie weekly. I rented it sometimes twice a week… and they were three-day rentals. There was no downloading or buying online and it was nowhere near mainstream enough to buy it from a store. So, eventually I hooked up our family vcr to my small tv/vcr combo in my room and illegally recorded my own shotty copy. If I had turned to a life of crime, this probably would have been my root for that as well. Alas, it was not a life of crime I was lured to, it was a life of emotional depth and connection and frankly a young understanding of the problematic nature of many cishet white males. All things that would shape my existence as a queer human and storyteller.
The 1996 movie was based on the 1993 Joyce Carol Oates book of the same name with the addition of “Confessions of a Girl Gang”.
If you don’t know who Joyce Carol Oates is then that is something you should correct asap.
The book is set in the 50’s and is superb. Book jacket description: “The time is the 1950s. The place is a blue-collar town in upstate New York, where five high school girls are joined in a gang dedicated to pride, power, and vengeance on a world they never made–a world that seems made to denigrate and destroy them.”
The movie, set when it was filmed, also had a tagline a teenager such as myself couldn’t ignore: “It took them 17 years to learn the rules and one week to break them all.” I mean COME ON.
I suppose the point I am trying to make is that I do believe, in one way or another, we all have a thing (or two or many) that are the things that send us on the paths we go down. Foxfire the movie was a game changer for me, and even though it could be considered to have an amount of queerbaiting and every single time I’ve watched it I have wished for a different ending, I can say it definitely inspired me to want to write and tell queer stories.
At thirteen you don’t exactly know how to go about that and it may have taken me years and years to get here but I am and I truly believe I have this film to thank. I also have it to thank for my (still ongoing) boot addiction, unrealistic desire to hail a tractor trailer truck in the middle of the night to wherever it’s going, strong urge to get an at-home needle and ink flame tattoo while surrounded by my friends and candlelight in an abandoned house while passing around a bottle of booze.
I’ve also come to terms with the fact that those things are probably here to stay and I’m solidly okay with that.
