No Lipstick, No Dancing, No Movies - Oh My!

"Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith. I consider the capacity for it terrifying." - Kurt Vonnegut

Grandma Valborg used to bring us to big stadiums filled with Unadulterated Believers and heavy men with large circles of armpit sweat, shouting over microphones, "Bring your sins up the aisle and throw them onto the stage! You can still be saved! Do it now, while there's still time!" My mom would get drunk (how? did she have a hip flask?) and I would hide underneath her skirt.

Many, many years later I was to find out that Valborg started life out as a Jew hiding in Denmark, making my mother Jewish and me too. Please see future post, "Oy, What A Relief It Is."

Which is what made her unflagging, vehement faith in fundamentalist christianity even more whack. And yes, it was whack even without that information.

No lipstick, no dancing, no movies. These were not only some of the "commandments" my mother grew up with, but apparently, according to Valborg's church, they are also confirmed in the bible somewhere. I remember asking where, specifically, since around Jesus' time and before there was no Revlon or cinema yet. And I seem to remember dancing mentioned in an upbeat, rather positive way (you know, unless it was around a golden calf or some other false idol...). My grandmother would look toward the heavens, shake her head, and make that sound, the one with the tongue that is so hard to replicate in writing: "tch, tch" or "tsk, tsk." And, of course, she would not answer. She was Danish! Please see future posts, "If You're Scandanavian, Please Raise Your Children Italian" or "The Silence That Is My Father."

Also, according to Valborg's church, no one but they are going to heaven. As a kid I understood this as having to do with the three aforementioned commandments. She feared, often verbally, for all our lives, filled with things like the The Twist and Lipsmackers and The Dick VanDyke Show. Or worse yet, full length features, like Singing In The Rain. When one of us got sick, the mourning would begin ahead of time, in preparation for the time to come when she would never see us again. "Ever!" she would weakly wail.

My Mom would smirk and take no heed, and I have to give her credit - these antics must have dragged up countless deprivational childhood scenes on her internal screen: of her father, Walter, having to push her out the back door while shoving a buck into her coat pocket, telling her to go ahead and go to the movies with her friends; of going to the school dance under the guise of attending a bible study; of chapped lips.

I bet leaving home was more of a relief to Mom than it was to most - and having her own home even more liberating. For whenever Grandma came over for dinner, it seemed to me that Mom would put on her full makeup regalia, turn the television toward the dinner table, flip the channel to a movie (any movie), and do the Charleston while dishing up the plates. While this could have had as much to do with the diet pills/methamphetamines she took daily, it sure looked to me like it was in direct response to them auditorium revivals we were dragged to where Grandma would beg her to go up to the front and throw her cigarettes onto the stage. Where Mom would get mysteriously, contentedly soused and my brothers would duck under the bleachers to dodge the flying spittle of the unquestioning believers while I hung onto my mother's leg, hoping to get home in time for Get Smart.

Today I am so very grateful to have had my mom as a mom. For even through all the dysfunction, confusion and sometimes tragedy of my childhood, my mom taught me, among many of life's lessons, that to be myself was the most powerful thing I could ever want to be.