MarLa Sink Druzgal

Many many thanks to Marla for sharing her space with me!

So one of the first things that grabbed me about Marla’s blog was that she seems able to make friends anywhere. I know, I know: she’s not without her awkwardnesses, and has shared more than one cringe-worthy exchange in which everything she tried to say came out wrong. But, fundamentally, she really seems to have an open heart and a natural ability to make connections with others.

When Marla asked me to do a post, I was first really excited, because it’s nice to know that people like what you have to say, but then I got really anxious. Like, what if I was boring?! And I was almost certain to go on too long! But I thought about her blog – her travels, her writing – and where I met that. And realized that she can travel like she does in part because she connects. In beautiful ways. But I didn’t really know what to do with that observation.

And then I was doing a little reading around a few days ago for a post of mine dealing with a Dylan Thomas poem, and I opened a rarely used old Norton Anthology. There was an old plane ticket in there – the kind where they staple the receipt to that little envelope into which they push your boarding pass, long before the days of print-at-home passes or any of that. It took me a minute to place it: Nashville to Detroit? When on earth…

And then:

Oh, right: the Michigan Womyn’s Festival, summer 1996.

See, I quit college in 1996, and drove across the country with a friend of mine. (Let’s stay here just a minute, because I think it will provide useful shading, even though it seems like a tangent.) After some camping and wandering, we went to San Francisco, and settled ourselves first at a hostel, and then at a seedy by-the-week hotel, in which we shared a double bed and a private sink, and a bathroom with our floor-mates. Interesting time.

My friend was gay, and I was 20 or so, and it was an incredibly emotional period. I mean, my friend got a job at a pizza place in the Castro, which – to her – was the first place in her life where she felt able to be fully, completely herself. I think a lot of her excitement and passion rubbed off on me, because that’s when I felt my first glimmers of political interest – largely in support of gay and women’s rights.

Anyway, we had our crazy time (which felt like years but was really only months); my world was widened by a factor of ten or twenty; she went home to help her sick dad; I moved to Nashville because why not. But we made plans to spend a week together at the Michigan Womyn’s Festival that summer.

So this festival is, like, this enormous week-long, internationally known event in which a whole rural area is cordoned off as a woman-only space, and there are literally no men allowed, and there are all kinds of drum circles and dancing and writing workshops and poetry and art… and, yes, a whole lot of toplessness and hairy armpits too, if you’re curious. You noticed, I’m sure, that ‘womyn’s’ is spelled with a ‘y’, for instance. That kind of festival. I was just finding my feminist fire, and this festival seemed like the perfect venue for me to fan it in.

I had a little tent to myself, since my friend was sharing a tent with her girlfriend. And we must have done things together, but frankly my primary memory of the event is of being alone. And not just ‘being alone’ in the way that I’m often alone these days, where I feel relaxed and comfortable in my own company. ‘Being alone’ like I was watching all these people open up, drop defenses, shed clothes, share old wounds, make new art — and I was silent on the sidelines, unable to respond to their openness or enact my own.

Like, here is what I remember of that festival: dreading meal-times, because I couldn’t pretend my aloneness was just ‘waiting,’ or ‘resting,’ or ‘expecting.’ It was just fundamentally being alone. Or a writing workshop, where a woman shared some secret pain, and broke down weeping, and the other women closed in around her and rocked her and held her, and I stood back, watching. Or my own dialogue with myself about whether or not to go topless, and my ultimate decision that I didn’t want to draw any attention to myself, so I wouldn’t.

(Why I thought one more pair of boobs at that boob-fest would have drawn any eyes I can’t say.)

I was talking to the husband about this after finding the ticket – he was terribly curious about the whole thing, not knowing me to be a person willing to engage in such festivals – and he asked if it was the first time I’d ever realized that I couldn’t connect to people like ‘everyone else’ (obviously it’s not literally ‘everyone,’ but we’ll go with that for convenience’s sake).

And the answer is no, but it was the first time I ever put myself in a situation where I was surrounded, for days, by people making beautiful, deep, moving, personal connections with each other, and I saw that I myself was entirely, fundamentally, unable to participate. I mean, I went to workshops, and learned to play a song on the shekere, and chanted some empowering lyrics, and even wrote (but did not share) poetry. I learned, I grew, I explored, I loved. But I don’t think I talked to a single person that whole week apart from my friend and her girlfriend, and I certainly didn’t make any connections.

It kind of makes me sad that, looking back, the main thing I remember from that week is the crushing realization that I couldn’t do what most people seemed to do so naturally. I felt so alone. Surrounded by so many women who, I’m sure, would have wanted me to be celebrating every moment with them.

Now, I just wouldn’t go to such a festival, knowing that I couldn’t integrate myself naturally enough to feel welcome (by no fault of anyone but myself). For instance, my old ATS dance teacher is hosting what looks like a pretty amazing weekend camping and dancing in upstate New York, and I thought about going, but… yeah… I think I’ll stay home.

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About The Dancing Professor: I’m a one-year-out-of-grad-school professor at a fancy-pants university, which is everything I hoped it would be. (Thank god, too, because earning that PhD was no walk in the park.) I’m enjoying my new normal-person life enormously – dancing, sewing, hanging out with my cats, fish and husband (not necessarily in that order), reading, playing piano, and generally liking post-student life – but what I am *not* doing is writing as much as I should be. Or, like, at all. So this is a place for me to get back in the habit of writing, and maybe start to work on the ideas that might some day become articles and papers. Til then, I will write for a at least a half hour a day, every day, on anything at all, and we’ll see what comes of it.

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Want more of The Dancing Professor? Marla does! Marla wishes that (as a hairy armpit, topless dancing extrovert) she had gone been at the Womyn’s Festival, seen The Dancing Professor silent on the sidelines and sashayed over to her. Marla would have talked distractedly about her flowers in springtime, how the daffodils and forget-me-nots crowd together in showy displays of yellows and blues, reflecting their cliche of blue skies and summer sun, and how she would search the woods for the reticent trillium. She would talk about the flower appearing only three weeks of the year, in deep white or crimson on her property. She never cuts it; never brings it into the house. Because while the daffodils and forget-me-nots are an abundant rush of stimuli that carry over indoors, the reticent trillium blooms most exquisitely when left to its own environment. Marla would then have given The Dancing Professor a hug, apologized for her dangling baubles, and flitted away again.

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Traveling Marla is unplugged for three weeks while she prepares for her move to South Africa. She put out a call for guest posts (see original request here), and is grateful to receive so much support! Please see the full list below.

Please support these writers by reading each of their guest posts and checking out their own blogs!

Thanks, as always for taking time to read my blog and comment. Although I’m offline right now, I will return in a few short weeks when we’re settled in South Africa and I promise to read all of your comments!

Love, Marla

Ingrid, of Live Laugh RV

Ned Hickson of Ned’s Blog

Rose, of On the Go Fitness

Pierr Morgan

Leslie and Amanda, of Survival is Relative

Colin of Uber Beast Mode

Robyn, of You Think Too Much

Baz – The Landy (Out and About and Having Fun)

Brandon: my quirky, brilliant, dashing nephew

Dallas, of Crazy Train to Tinky Town

CultFit

Caroline, of Currer and the Bells

Dakota Garilli

Trophos, of The Dancing Professor

Leo, of Doggy’s Style

Kayla, of Encounter Peru

Benjamin Prewitt – Expression of my life – An evolution of art

Kriscinda, of Heavy Metal Homesteading

Lynne, of Home Free Adventures

Jeff: my witty and hilarious ebberlubbinbrudder

Jody, of Human Triumphant

Julie of J-Bo.net