Out of Steam

Saturday I woke up in slow motion, bogged down by all the things I hadn’t had time to think or feel while dashing between fundraisers and speeches and various other rainbow festooned events. I pruned down my to do list, figuring I could save some energy by just doing the most important things, filling the cat’s fountain and washing the dish.  But even those felt like an effort.

 

The Saturday of Pride weekend is the Dyke March, an unpermitted march for people who identify as women that starts at Bryant Park and goes south on 5^th Ave.    Since many of the  Church Ladies are men, we don’t join the march.  Instead we post ourselves at 30^th and 5^th, so we can sing the traditional “Gods is a Lesbian” as the crowd goes by, with various friends popping out of the crowd for greetings and hugs.

 

I have been there every year for so long that I can’t remember when I started. I have watched new Ladies, including an increasing number of cis women, join and Ladies leave us, particularly Elizabeth, Sr. Mary Cunnilingus.  I was even there the year I couldn’t stand and had to sit in David’s beach chair.  I kind of wished I wasn’t there that year because being so low to the ground made me feel simultaneously present and apart, which was disconcerting.  But not to go would have let the body win.

 

Being a Church Lady requires an effort – dressing up, although I tend towards the simple side, and then singing the same two verses over and over for the length of a march, and just projecting a kind of upbeat energy.

 

As the afternoon wore on, in my mind there was a list of steps- dig out the Church Lady dress, put on the dress, find my wallet, head out the door.  But I couldn’t find the spark to light the ignition and get moving.  I might as well have been a pile of rusting metal at a scrapyard.

 

I’m usually one of the first ones there, so when Brownie arrived he texted me, thinking I was nearby.  I didn’t know how to respond, I wasn’t too sure what had happened myself, so I settled on “out of energy” and then wound up trying to explain it to Ben, too.  And then I went to bed with an assortment of cats who were surprised, but always willing to sleep