Portrait d’une Femme

The age demanded an image of its accelerated grimace —Ezra Pound Idiot Wind, Blowin' every time you move your teeth —Bob Dylan You were energized by your epoch. The difference between a harmless nut—John Doe, Jane Doe, plain Jane, practically any mediocrity—standing on a beach and the same harmless nut riding a wave of (now) cultural self-righteousness about to tube. A tsunami armed with thunderbolts. Empowered—yea, packing. You played everything to the sympathetic studio theater of your hearers, a chorus-cum-sounding-board. They were your doo-wop boys and girls, your clique and claque and Marshall stack. The church hall chairs scraped, the cheap black crepe backdrop rustled “cutting edge” at you. You paid attention to how they oohed and aahed for you, and then pantomime hissed, and balled their fists and bayed for blood: the half-lustful half-men betraying their half-gender when they weren’t speculating what you were like in bed, the frightened girls who’d never seen anything like you but thought it might be fun (after Goth) to be a Maenad, the Pharisaic mothers going home to their chilly fires, their dim, furtive, put-upon husbands and their neo-feral offspring with a “there but for the grace of God” on their bony lips.