Episode 30 - Engaging with the Culture

I met Joi Razinha, known professionally as Tamra Henna, in high school. I had a couple circles of friends, one that smoked, drank, skipped school, and got into other miscellaneous teenage hooliganism, and one that was artistic, academically successful, and sat on the edge of the pool talking about Sylvia Plath and whatnot. Joi was in that second group, although she told me she maybe would’ve preferred to be in the first.

After reconnecting on Facebook many years later, as high school friends are prone to doing, I first saw Joi belly dance at a hookah lounge in Addison, I believe, around 2013 or 2014. I had never seen it before and had no idea how to react. She hung out and chatted with me between dances, and I realized that she was not the shy, quiet person I thought that I remembered from high school. She was smart, funny, and charming, and I’ve loved watching her adventures through the lens of Facebook ever since. As she says, I could do a whole series of episodes on her and her life.

Thank you so much, Joi, for the time and energy you brought to this project. If you like the result, we should definitely collaborate again. Hearing smart, thoughtful people talk about what they’ve learned and how they’ve learned it is the best way to grow, and looking into universes in which you yourself don’t live is the best way to expand your worldview and develop your compassion.

You can find Joi at:

tamrahennabellydancer.com

Instagram: TamraHenna_Official

TikTok: TamraHenna_Official

Facebook: Joi Razinha

Our theme song is “Start Again” by Monk Turner + Fascinoma. Music from Audiio: “Welcome to Us (Instrumental)” by Sebastian Kauderer; “The Slowest Journey (Instrumental)” by Good Weather For An Airstrike; “Bang Bang Bang (Instrumental)” by Moarn; “Acceptance (Instrumental)” by Frankie Orella; “Intertwined (Instrumental)” by As Tall As Pine Music; “Enter” by Christopher Galovan. Music from YouTube: “Arabic Wedding (arabic instrumental)” by Boris Skalsky; “Sahara Rains” by Hanu Dixit; “Shesh Pesh” byJR Tundr. The song “Ya Tamra Henna” was originally performed in the 1957 film by Fayza Ahmed, and this version was commissioned by Joi Razinha from, and performed by, Matias Hazrum. Other music was made by me on Ableton Live, except for the tabla and the outro music, which I put together from instrument loops on Soundation.

Here’s the transcript:

Joi: Well, it's funny that the name of your project is Caterpillar Goo. And that really made me smile when I saw it because, I think I had seen recently the whole thing about how, when a caterpillar transforms it essentially disintegrates and comes back together, and I resonate with that quite a bit actually, and I kind of feel like I'm always in a state of goo. I'm not sure if I've ever actually become a butterfly. I'm just always kind of gooey. Maybe that's not the same for everyone, but for me it's true. I'm always changing and trying to figure out who the hell I am just in general.

If you don't have any experience with belly dancing, it's okay to look at the dancer. It's okay to interact with the dancer. The whole point, if you're ever at a place and a belly dancer shows up, is for the whole evening to be more fun. No matter if the dancer doesn't look like what you expected them to look like, or if you are weirded out because you're not used to that, it's just all about having fun and enjoying the moment. I like it when my audience interacts with me. I want them to yell and scream and applaud, and they can tip, and they can get up and dance with me. I don't want touching or anything like that, obviously, but I want interaction. That's really one of the biggest things about being a belly dancer is that you are there to facilitate the party. And there is not a worse crowd ever than one that is I not looking or just refuses to be into it. It just sucks every bit of energy out of you. It is so hard.

I've done a lot of shows, and I've had a lot of people tip me in a lot of different ways. Depending on where I'm at, in the nightclub where I first started, in the beginning, they did not allow anyone to touch the dancers. So you could not accept tips in your costume. They could hand it to you, but it was mostly, they would come out on the dance floor, and they would do a money shower and they were allowed to dance with you a little bit, but the bouncer would escort them away from the stage if they stayed too long. That was awesome. I felt like such a rock star back then. But other places where I danced, where it was maybe a smaller restaurant, I would accept tips in my costume. And usually what I do is I tell them where I want them to tip me and, side of my hip, maybe I'll have an arm band, and I'll point to my arm band if… Maybe I'll let them do it in the front of, like in my strap. But a lot of people go straight for the front of the bra, and you just have to block it off. But, mostly it's Persian grandmas want to shove $20 bills down your bra, and I'm like, okay, I guess this is what we're doing now.

I've had very, very few incidents where people were really handsy, or I've had real problems. Occasionally you get somebody who decided they want to dive down the front of your costume to give you that whole dollar that they had in their hand. And you know, it's like, you just get really good at evasive maneuvering. But mostly people are respectful. The worst problems I had were probably with 20 year old college girls trying to twerk on me.

My dad is a Muslim, he's a white guy, and back in the seventies when everyone was converting to Islam, that's what he did, and him and my mom got divorced when I was really young. I was about two. And so I never, he wasn't in my life a lot because he went off and did his own thing. Spent some time in Bangladesh I think. And then got married again and married a woman of the faith and then went off and lived someplace else, and just wasn't a very present person in my life after that. He's lived in Turkey and Cyprus and places like that.

But I think the fact that he became a Muslim kind of in the back of my mind peaked my curiosity about the Middle East maybe. And so the story is that I was signing up for classes at community college in Austin and there was a course called Mideast Dance. So there was a connection there and I think that's what kind of peaked my interest. But I quickly realized that you're not going to connect with your Muslim family member by becoming a belly dancer. That's just not the best way to do that. And he's very religious, and there's a lot of tension in the Middle East between people who are very religious and people who are more secular, and the dance is definitely frowned upon in religious communities in the Middle East, because it's not how traditional Muslim women would behave, right?

So yeah, I started taking Z-Helene's class and, her name is Z-Helene, and there was, they used to have a show at the Student Union, and so that was where I went and I kind of saw my first actual belly dance show, and I was so enamored with, you know, the ladies were beautiful, and their costumes were sparkly and everyone's dancing and everyone's free. And, you know, I'm 19 at this point, 20, and I just thought it was amazing and it was so different from what I had been around growing up, that I was hooked. I really wanted to do that thing. And I really fell in love with it. I fell in love with the music, actually, is what happened. And it really did change my life. I mean, obviously it took me in a direction that I never would have gone if I hadn't taken that one class.

So yeah, I took a couple semesters with Helene, and her style was really a lot different from what I do now. She's a very American, hippie, goddess kind of thing. And as I started studying the dance, I kind of became a little bit more interested in how it related to the cultures that it came from. And, so I wanted to do more of the Arabic style. I loved the Arabic music. I wanted to use that kind of stuff and learn.

I had a job at a hardware store off of 29th Street. And I was a cashier for a couple years and one of the guys that worked in the paint department, people would come up to me and say, hey, do you know Jonathan's girlfriend is a belly dancer? And I was like, yeah, whatever, because this is Austin. And like the hippies used to dance at Eeyore’s Birthday Party in their patchouli and their broomstick skirts. And they were like belly dancers. And I was like, that's not a real belly dancer, you know, I'm just like, yeah, right. Whatever. And when they would go to Jonathan's house and see his girlfriend, they would go, hey, this other girl, she's a belly dancer. And she would go, yeah. Right. Whatever.

So then we met each other, and I don't even remember how we met, and she's probably been the biggest influence on my life. We're still best friends, like 26 years later. She was dancing at the Student Union. She was teaching through the Student Union. She started doing workshop productions and things like that. And I was just kind of her tag along buddy. I would do whatever because I was broke and she would let me come to things if I worked for her.

So I just, I was doing it as a hobby, really, only. And there were a couple of restaurants that I started dancing in, in the late nineties. There's a place called Ararat, a restaurant called Ararat on North Loop. And that was one of the first places that I gigged at. And then there was another little Persian place called Best Middle Eastern.

So I danced at a couple of places, but it was really intermittent. And, then in 2001, my ex and I ended up moving back to Dallas. And that really changed my life as far as actually becoming a paid gigging dancer and really, teaching and all of the things that I've been doing for the past 20 years.

I started working, Dallas had the clubs, it had bigger nightclubs, it had a Greek restaurant, it had a Lebanese club called Al-Amir, and it had Persian nightclubs. So it had things that Austin did not have. It had nightlife and it had paying gigs. So I started dancing in the clubs and either… I think I did my first professional gig in Fort Worth at a restaurant called Byblos, which is still around. It was New Year's Eve. He probably couldn't get any of the local dancers. And I was probably cheaper than the going rate because I didn't know what I was doing, but that was my first paying gig.

And then after that, a good friend of mine that I ended up dancing with for a long time in a professional troupe, she got me a job at Al-Amir, which was the prestigious club. It was where all of the Arab families went, and it was a really great international club. She got me a job there, and I started working on the weeknights when it was slow because you gotta work your way up in this business. And I think it was 50 bucks on the weeknights, and sometimes I wouldn't even dance because there was not enough customers to dance for.

But then the weekend shows were amazing. And it was a three level club and there were, it was packed with people. We had bouncers that would walk us through the crowds to the stage and it was just amazing. And so yeah, I danced there, actually danced at Al-Amir. That's actually the job that I've had the longest, my whole adult life. I worked at that club from about 2002 until I moved here to Ohio in 2021.

I have a website it's tamrahennabellydancer.com. I have an Instagram. It is TamraHenna_Official with an underscore. So my TikTok is TamraHenna_Official. And I'm on Facebook as Joi Razinha. And if you, I'm less politically vocal on Facebook than I used to be because I've been Zucked a few times and I figure I'm going to lose my privileges if I say anything more about what I really think about things politically on Facebook anymore.

Rod: I'm glad you said the Tamra Henna part, because I was going to ask you that. Where did the name come from?

Joi: Tamra Henna is a movie character, and she was in this movie. She was a dancer. She danced with the family circus, and It's kind of an Egyptian My Fair Lady story, like rich guy comes to the circus, makes a bet that he can take this girl and make her acceptable to society. And the dancer that plays the role, she was actually a dancer and an actress. She was one of my favorite of what they call Golden Era dancers, the dancers from the ‘50s, like the Golden Age of Egyptian cinema. The title of the movie is Tamra Henna. And the song is “Tamra Henna”. And the character is Tamra Henna. And I loved the song and the dancer so much that when I decided to pick a name, and this was back when it was the thing to do to pick an Arabic name if you were going to have a stage name or some kind of stage name, I decided that I would pick that name because it's a fictional character, and I figured I'm not passing myself off as an Arab woman. I'm naming myself after a fictional character so anyone who hears the name, who is of the culture, knows that's not my real name. And the song's a great song. I still love to dance to it.

Rod: With the belly dancing, what was it about it that resonated with you? Like how, how did it get it hooks into you so fast and deep?

Joi: Honestly I think it was the permission to move and to be kind of free. And I think that's what really draws a lot of people into it. And unfortunately it does tend to draw a lot of people who've had, you know, trauma, bodily trauma in their lives and have not been able to express themselves physically because it's so much about personal expression and expressing your sensuality, your… it's not so gendered as it used to be, but like when I started it was all about expressing your femininity and the whole goddess angle, and being a woman and yada yada. As of 2022, we've kind of moved past that somewhat and realized that both people who are male and female and everywhere in between, like to express those sides.

But I think back in the day, it was definitely marketed quite a bit towards women and freeing, kind of give a space to express yourself, physically and to dance and be sensual. And to feel beautiful. And I think that's initially what drew me to it. And there's a lot of orientalism in that as well. Like it's exotic, it's sparkly, it's a persona that you can put on. I think the thing that really kept me was definitely the music. It was deep and complex and it really struck me. And then when I started learning about how did people move to this music, it was also really different from any dance form that I had seen before. And I think that just kind of captured my imagination and really pulled me into it.

As you go along, you start creating, not necessarily a persona for yourself, but in a way it kind of is a persona for yourself. And I became a belly dancer, and that's who I was and what I was. It's not spiritual, but it is. It's very, very physical. For me, it was the way to get in touch with my body, and it's like that for a lot of different people.

Rod: I get the sense that you think deeply about how you engage with belly dancing as a white person.

Joi: I do. I definitely do more now than I did. I mean, there's racial bias everywhere, and it's just when you have people that start pointing it out, people who are of other races and say, hey, this has been our experience in this community, it's really kind of, it was a challenging time, and I think it still remains a challenging time. When you're a white person engaged with the world in general, you really look at it one way and then you have an idea of how the world is. And then when you start hearing other people's experiences, then hopefully you realize that it's not the same for everyone.

It's really easy as a white person to get sucked into, “I'm so put upon; nobody likes me because I'm white,” and I've seen that conversation happen. I know how people get sucked into the resentment of woke culture because I've seen it happen within the belly dance community. I have felt it within myself and had to wrestle with it and go look, this is not the road you want to go down. This is not going to uncover a part of your own personality that is good, so check yourself. But it's easy to do. And it did make me take a step back and try to be a lot more introspective with how I'm engaging with other people, with the dance form, the cultures.

And so I did have to be… I don't think I had to be; a lot of people have chosen not to. But I became a lot more introspective about what it means to be a white person in a space that is not mine. It's not my culture. I think a lot of dancers who spent a lot of time in this space just assumed we're getting these jobs and we're gigging, and it's because, always it's because of our ability or whatever it is that we have that is appealing to the audience and to the venue owners, whoever's hiring us at the time. And so we assume that we're getting jobs because we're the best person for it. And a lot of other people having found their voice online, were able to come in and say, hey, I'm a dancer, I'm a black woman. Or I'm a man, or I'm a trans man, or whatever, and I'm trying to get jobs. And I can't be hired because of racial biases that exist and people who are gatekeeping and who have a lot of say on who gets to dance and who doesn't. And sometimes it's because there's racial bias in the owners of the venues, and they tell you as a scheduler that they don't want certain kind of people. I know I have been told, I did the schedule for Al-Amir for many years and other clubs, it wasn't just there, but I've been told so and so looks old, don't have them back. I've never been told specifically, we don't want black dancers, but black dancers on the schedule have felt like they weren't welcome.

And I heard that from people who were in my community who said that that was the way that they had always felt. There's a lot of racial bias, all over the world. Anti-black racial bias all over the world. It's not specifically a white American thing. I've seen other biases, size biases, people being told that dancers were too overweight, too old, too this, too that, whatever it is. And some of it was in the professional spaces, where I was more familiar, and in other situations it was members of the community, say a teacher would make comments to her students about who looked right, or dancers being too dark for this or too light for that, you know, just whatever.

And so I think people started talking about the biases that they had experienced in this dance form. And it caused a lot of consternation, and a lot of people weren't ready to hear that maybe some of the things, the ways that they had behaved themselves, were problematic for other people. And there's a lot of controversy around it. I think that there are a lot of people who felt like it went too far. There was a lot of talk about canceling certain people, and some people needed to be canceled because they had really hurt a lot of other people and didn't really seem to care. But it's really interesting because it's kind of a microcosm of the same conversations that you may have seen happening in our culture at large over the last year or so. It happened within the community on a smaller scale, and with everyone being home and being online, people were talking about things a lot more.

So it did make me have to think about what was I doing? How was I engaging with other dancers? How was I engaging with the culture? You can't help the skin you were born in, on either side, but you do have to recognize how have I benefited, how have we benefited I should say, from being the right color or at least not being the wrong color.

And do I even really need to be practicing an art form that belongs to a different culture? And it took me a while. I never thought that I would give it up, but I really thought that if I'm going to do it, I need to be thoughtful about it. I've engaged with the communities personally for a long time. I worked in nightclubs that were owned by Lebanese and Syrian people, and I heard the conversation from their end on what are they looking for in entertainment, so I understand why am I making the entertainment choices that I am making. I don't present the dance form as a cultural exercise. It is very based in the traditional styles from the Middle East, but there's also an element of Las Vegas showgirl happening. And for some people, they feel like it invalidates the, like a lot of people want it presented as, this is a thing that I have learned, and it's an academic exercise, so I am doing this dance from this region and I'm, you know, and it's very specific. Whereas I come from the entertainment side of it, whereas I kind of know what the traditions are, but they've asked me to do fire. So, which is not necessarily traditional, but my boss is saying, hey, we want the New Year's show this year to be like, what can you do to make it bigger than last year?

So it's a real balancing act trying to stay somewhat traditional and always be respectful of the cultures that I am interacting with, but understanding that Friday night is Bollywood Night at the Arabic nightclub and the crowd wants me to dance to Bollywood music. And so I do, because they tip when you do it, because they're happy that you're dancing to music that they like and enjoy, you know what I'm saying? So it's real interesting. But if I posted a video of myself doing that, somebody online who has been studying belly dance and has some really, ideas about, what is appropriate and what's not, and are you being orientalist and are you doing all of that? They may look at that completely without context and go, what are you doing? You're just contributing to the muddying of the waters. And as an outsider to the culture, I have to understand what I'm doing and make sure that I'm not going too far, if that makes sense.

The teaching world, the hobbyist world, and the professional world are sometimes really different. And a lot of people made their living as dance teachers and had studios and taught a lot of people and put on a lot of big workshops and made money and produced other dancers. But depending on what area of the country you were in, you might not have any real opportunity to engage with anyone from any of the communities where the dance is native to, or where the dance is from. So if you're in some small town somewhere and there's no one who's from the Middle East, but you like belly dance because you were exposed to it, like you could open a studio and teach everyone that you know how to do this dance. And no one has met a single person from the Middle East.

So I think in a lot of cases, that's where there's some divorce from the reality of engaging within the communities and just a bunch of Western people, in a lot of cases a bunch of white people, doing a dance form that they can tell themselves a lot of different stories about that aren't necessarily true. Like there's a lot of incorrect history of the dance and how it came about and what it was for. If you've ever done any Googling of the history of belly dance, and I don't know why you would have, but if you ever do, there's a lot of stories out there that it was goddess worship, or it was birthing rituals, or it was this or that, or the other thing.

And none of those things are true. Belly dance is not thousands of years old. It's from the turn of the last century. And it kind of came out of, what we see today as being placed on the stage entertainment in nightclubs and in the movies and things like that, kind of came from the cabarets that were started in Egypt in the early 20th century, late 19th century, mostly early 20th century, but was kind of a result of colonization. There were nightclubs because people wanted to see Western style shows. And they were kind of catering to their own culture, but also trying to emulate the colonizers, perhaps, in putting these things together.

And then you get the movies which were heavily patterned after Hollywood. There would be musicals where, or any movie, didn't matter what the movie was, had to have a belly dance scene because it's what, people wanted to see stuff like that. So there was a lot of cross pollination even back then, but what we do today came out of that time. So what was happening before then, the dances that were the entertainment that was happening in people's homes, at weddings, at gatherings and things like that looked a lot different than what we see today.

And so, no, it wasn't thousands of years of birthing rituals and, and goddess worship, but when you're in a little town someplace or some place in California or whatever, it sounds really cool, right? It sounds great. And it's appealing to your customers who are middle aged housewives, and it sounds really awesome, and I want to worship myself like a goddess, or I want to take part in this dance that's as old as the pyramids. And so there's a lot of stuff going around out there that we made up. And now it's possible to be confronted with somebody who is from North Africa and says, wow, that's a bunch of bullshit. What are you doing?

So we're being confronted as Westerners with our own colonizer ways, I suppose. And it's not always fun. It's not always fun to hear. So it's been a tumultuous time within the community. And I don't know how that really has changed what I'm doing. I think it has caused me to think more about how I've benefited from my own privilege and to really examine, am I doing anything to help people who haven't been, for whom it hasn't been as easy to participate, am I doing anything to help those people feel more welcome? Am I making sure that the choices that I make don't stray too far and go into the realm of disrespect.

But I've been doing this for a really long time. I can do something else, and I guess that's kind of where I'm at right now. I'm not ready to do something else yet. Gigging is an addiction, truly. Performing is addictive, and steady income is addictive too. This year I'm turning 50. How many 50 year old belly dancers gigging in clubs are there is the question, and the answer is probably more than you think. But you know, there are younger dancers coming up and you don't want to be asked to leave, so it's better to leave on a high note. I don't quite look my age yet. And I can still teach, and I think I'm not too bad at that. I've done okay with the teaching, and I'd like to do more of it. I can still do it physically. I can still do everything that, almost, that I used to do before. I don't have any physical limitations yet. In this business, it's more about, does your client perceive you as being the right age to be entertaining them? Because ageism is a thing, yo. Everyone at the nightclub is still 21 and I’m not. But I do have to start thinking about what do I do when I'm not a dancer anymore full time. What do I do with that? So it's like the next chapter. And do I try to stay a dancer as long as possible? Or do I just chuck it and open a restaurant?

So I've talked about what I've been doing, but I really haven't talked about how it changed me, I guess. Like how did I change from being a really, really shy teenager to, I don't, I'm not shy anymore. I was really shy, or maybe I wasn't shy. I think maybe it was circumstantial. Um, you know, it's, I was always the new kid because we moved a lot. So I never had really the opportunity to make friends, you know, and this is when I'm going to get emotional. So just bear with me. So when you come from a really shitty situation, you, I personally don't want to bring that, like I don't want to burden other people with that I guess like how do you talk about it? I just wanted to go to school and get away from it. And I certainly didn't want to make school life for the friendships that I found there about my personal drama, I guess, so it was just like, I don't have anything good to talk about. So I'll just be really quiet.

I guess that's kind of where I was at at that point in time. And really, I, I don't know that dance changed me. I think it just drew it out what was already there, if that makes sense. I think maybe if I hadn't had the experience of becoming a belly dancer and having all of the different experiences that I've had through that, I might have stayed more reserved. I don't know, or just would've gone a different direction. But this was really a way for me to figure out who I was and who I am and really just express that. And like I said, I don't think I'm different. The transformation has been in allowing me to become who I am. It's like the butterfly isn't any different from the caterpillar. It's just the final form. It's the same DNA, right? It's just whether it's able to figure out how to fly.

Episode 025 - Everybody Is Invited to Play

I hope everybody out there is taking good care of themselves and each other through these strange days. This is our first episode since the COVID-19 madness sent us home, but I’m glad I had a chance to talk to Jonny Reynolds from inside Forbidden Fruit after hours before social distancing was a phrase I’d ever heard. Thank you so much, Jonny for your time, and I’m looking forward to when this is all over so we can all get out to a Bat City Bombshells show again.

There is adult language and adult themes throughout this episode, including human sexuality.

Thank you always to Flora Folgar for her editing skills and her voice talents in the intro/outro. And for always making me laugh.

Our theme song is “Start Again” by Monk Turner + Fascinoma. Other music in this episode:

“Downtown” by bensound.com

“Bossa Antigua” by Kevin MacLeod

“HIPHOPHOUSE” by B Side

“Dances and Dames” by Kevin MacLeod

“Man Outta Town” by FORGET THE WHALE

“Funky Junky” by Jason Shaw on Audionautix

“Cabaret” by Kai Engel

“Kitchen Suite” by Spiedkiks

“Funky Hunky” by FunkyFlo

“Summer Time | Boom Bap | Old School” by PRIDEOUT

Here’s the transcript:

Born and raised in Vegas. We all did theater and dance and all that stuff, We all had to learn an instrument. So I play the piano. I also play the flute. I say that I play the flute. I have not picked up a flute in like 15 years, but I was taught the flute. So yeah, no, it's I've always been a performer. I like being the center of attention. That's one of the things that I always used to say, it was, I love me. I'm awesome. 

I was extremely lucky to have the family that I do. My parents are even more crazy liberal than I am. I never really had to come out ‘cause I was never really in. I never did that whole, like I have a fake girlfriend or anything like that. It's like, Hmm. No. I had a boyfriend through high school. I was pretty much always out. I had a very supportive, loving family. My grandmother actually introduced me to my first boyfriend. So yeah. Multigenerational. We're all a bunch of just, yeah, everybody's free to do their own thing.

In my family, we never did that whole your pee pee and your hoo hoo, no, that's your penis, that's your vagina. If anybody touches it, punch him in the face. If anyone touches it without your consent. So we never had any of that kind of body shaming growing up. It was just, no, that's your body. You should probably know how it works. Try to love it as best as you can. And everybody has their own and you know, respect everybody else's.

But yeah, no, my ideas behind body positivity and sex positivity and just being open and friendly and let's talk about all this stuff really does go back to when I was a kid like this, there was never anything that was taboo.

Ms. Calizoria is a character that I developed years ago. I actually started drag at a really young age. I started drag when I was 14. So... And this was in Vegas, so a whole different world. And so basically my aunt was doing something. My aunt is a choreographer in Vegas and she was doing something and she got me, she was like, well, do you want to do it? And I was like, all right, fine. And after that it just kinda took on a life of its own. But yeah, I started drag at 14, and I really didn't have a character. I've done singing and dancing and art and theater pretty much my entire life, and when I first started with drag, it was basically like, I followed folks like Marilyn Monroe and Nina Simone and Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan, and so I liked that old Hollywood, those kind of ladies and performers.

And then I finally developed the character of Calizoria in high school when we moved to Texas, and the character came out of the fact that being young, black and gay in Texas, I just needed something to do. And somebody asked me, what was my name? And I was just like, Jonathan? No, what's your, who are you? And I was like, Oh yeah, I probably should come up with that.

So Calizoria was born out of moving to Texas and having to come up with a stage name. I was like Calizoria. It's Catherine the Great, Elizabeth I, and Queen Victoria put together. Calizoria. It also sounds like a ghetto black name.

For me, I am a man. I like being a man. It's fun to dress up as a woman, but I've never had like body dysphoria or thought about what it would be like, well, I've thought about what it would be like to be a woman just in the grander sense of the world. But for me personally I like being a guy. I do identify as cisgendered male. I use he/him pronouns. I answer to pretty much anything, but for me personally, I call myself a guy. So I've never struggled with it, myself. Now obviously being gay in Texas was an interesting experience. Dealing with other people's masculinity. High school was a bit of a nightmare.

So I've never had, I've never struggled with my own personal identity as a guy. Navigating some of the traditionally male spheres has always been interesting because I am a bit more colorful and flamboyant than most guys. But my usual approach to that one is, that's just me. If you don't like it, don't talk to me. That's just who I am. I'm comfortable in my own skin. I mean, I wouldn’t necessarily consider myself to be terribly masculine, but I like being male. I like having a penis. Life is good.

The only thing is that you just have to, every once in a while, you have to deal with somebody else's masculinity, and that's fine. I have more than enough ammo. Back in the drag scene, I used to be known, I'm very quick with hecklers. I can pick the biggest redneck in the room and talk his ass straight out the door. I'm not worried. I had a, actually at the Opulence Ball a couple of weeks ago, I had, I was wearing this gorgeous red fringe gown, and we were all just like standing out in the back alley, and somebody came by and screamed something or other. And my general response was like, what motherfucker? You want to go? Don't let this dress and these heels fool you, motherfucker. I can turn it on when I have to. So yeah, my usual issues with masculinity is dealing with other people's masculinity. I'm happy with mine.

I am the last founding member of the Bat City Bombshells. There's a couple of other girls that are about a couple of years behind me. But I, I'm, I'm the last founding member. We've been around 12 years. It's kinda scary to think about that. And when we first started, we were all just kind of flying by the seat of our pantyhose. But nowadays I'm one of the people that I actually own the company. We are incorporated. We are a business.

So, when we moved to Texas and I was still doing drag, this is in the early 2000s. So anyone listening to this, this isn't about the Austin drag scene now, but almost 20 years ago, back in those days the Austin drag scene was cutthroat. It was, the way I usually describe it is, I don't know if you've ever seen the movie Showgirls? Well, there's a scene in there where one of the dancers takes a handful of beads and throws them out on the stage, and so the lead dancer slips and breaks her hip or something. And so then she becomes the new lead dancer and that's basically what the Austin drag scene was like. Like everybody was out for themselves. There was no community. Nobody supported each other. It was very cutthroat. And that was very different from Vegas where everybody got along and everybody was friends and blah, blah, blah.

And so for a couple years I just stopped performing. And then one day I was, this was when I was working at Lucy in Disguise, it was the end of the Halloween season. We're all fucking exhausted, and this gorgeous woman comes in to buy pasties. My friend next to me, Riley DoRight. She was calling people for their late costume returns and this woman comes in to buy pasties, and I'm showing her pasties, and Riley was like, are you a performer? She was like, no, these are just for my husband. And Riley was like, you should be a performer. It’s like, okay. And then Riley started talking to her about… ‘Cause she was putting together a burlesque troupe, ‘cause Riley had moved here from Amarillo. She didn't want to be a solo performer, but all the troupes back in those days, once again, this is about over a decade ago. This is a different scene than it is now, but back in those days, the Austin burlesque troupes weren't too nice either. So when Riley tried to join a troupe, they basically told her to grow her hair out, shave her pits, and cover up her tattoos, and lose 15 pounds. And she was like, fuck you, I'll do it myself.

And so Riley was like, I'm starting a troupe. And I'm like, you go girl. And then Tracy came in to buy pasties, Riley was there, I was there. And we were just like, I'm starting a troupe. Do you need an emcee? I'm a great host. Yeah, you can come in, and you should be a performer. And we just collected friends and misfits and whatnot. And that's how the Bat City Bombshells were born. Basically everybody that told us that we shouldn't be on stage, like screw you guys, I’ll do it myself.

The Austin community has been, I won't say hard fought, not amongst ourselves. We've had to fight a lot of venues and a lot of managers and quote/unquote producers. But no, the Austin, there actually is an Austin Burlesque Alliance. We all work together. We have worked very hard to build the community that we have. Right now there are about 8 different troupes and over 50 independent performers in the Austin community. And we do look at it as a community and we try to, we all try to support each other. We try to go to each other's shows.

I used to say that the Austin burlesque community is unionized. There's a minimum amount that you get paid. There is a minimum amount that we charge for shows. There are some venues that have free burlesque shows, but we make sure that those free shows still pay the performers because they used to try to pay with exposure. Any artist or performer or band has always heard that, Oh, yeah, no, you, you do a free set, but you know, there'll be a crowd of 500 people. So, you know, you'll get more fans that way. You play for exposure. No, we don't do that. If you perform, you get paid. One of my number one things with the Bat City Bombshells is that if your foot touches that stage, you get paid. Sometimes a performer might have to drop out of a particular show, but if you were there for rehearsals, if you help somebody with their number, if you helped with costuming, if you did something to support the show, you get paid. Nobody, none of us have the time or the luxury to do this for free. Everybody needs to be supported.

Rod: Is that sense of community and family, is that part of the history and culture of burlesque generally? Or did you fight for it to make it true here or is it part of the culture?

Jonny: It is a part of the culture, but it is also something that you have to strive for. But yeah, you create your own community. And I think the Austin community, we built it. And part of that is just the kind of Austin friendliness of, hi, we're all friends. Let's all work together. Let's cut the bullshit. Most of the bullshitters are gone. Thank the gods.

Rod: Did you ever perform as a burlesque dancer yourself or do you just, you just emcee these shows?

Jonny: Oh yeah, I did burlesque probably about five years. I started out in drag and I did drag for a long ass time. I did drag for about a decade. So then I was about 24 when I stopped performing and then a couple of years... And then after that when we started the troupe I used to do a few numbers and basically, you know, I'm just going to be honest with you, I just dusted off some of my old drag numbers and took my clothes off. I was like, I already know the choreography. I’m not coming up with a whole new number. I got costumes and music and cues I got. Nah. So I did burlesque for a whole minute, but I'm more funny than I am sexy. Most of my numbers were either over the top and campy or just weird and goofy. So nah, I like to, I like the stand up drag queen aspects of burlesque, of it more than the actual, like take off my top. So I did burlesque for a whole minute.

Burlesque has a long history. I mean, about a hundred years or so. Which is why for the Texas Burlesque Festival, we always bring in a legend. And I'm one of the producers for the Texas Burlesque Festival, so we bring in somebody that was doing it back in the 50s, the 60s, the 70s. Our headliner this year is Judith Stein. Oh, what is it? The Greatest Beaver in Canada or something like that is her tagline.

Rod: That's a good line.

Jonny: She started back in '72. So we’re bringing her out. We've had so many legends have come out and I've met so many famous people several of whom are no longer with us unfortunately. But I love the fact that I at least have the opportunity to meet them. ‘Cause when you start talking to the legends, you have the women that mainly did, they were like New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Boston. Like that was their scene. And then you have the women, that toured all over the country, they're doing shows in fricking Tupelo, Mississippi ‘cause they were willing to pay. And so you have the folks that went that route. And so everybody has a story, and we all have a great deal of respect for those that came before and those that are still out there now.

Rod: You do like national tours and different venues or do you go do like is there like a festival circuit that you do?

Jonny: There's the festival circuit and then there’s two big burlesque events every year. There is BurlyCon, which is a big burlesque convention up in Seattle. That is huge. And then there is BHoF, the Burlesque Hall of Fame. BurlyCon is about education and learning and, and again, meeting people from all over the country. And then so that one's more about like taking workshops and like improving your craft and you know, learning from these other people. And then BHoF is when everybody just comes together, gets dressed up and you just watch like the Hall, it's the Hall of Fame. It's like the best of the best performers. And so that's always a fun one. BHoF is in Las Vegas, so for me it's just going home.

Rod: I was curious how gender and race lay over this. Like for gender, it seemed like most of the performers were women, but I did see a couple of shows where there was a man, but he seemed to be a featured performer, not like a regular part of the troupe. And I was curious how, how gender plays into it.

Jonny: Male burlesque or boylesque or manlesque or whatever the term is this week, it is a novelty because it's different. It's not thunder from down under. It's not necessarily puppetry of the penis. It is still held to the same standards of burlesque. It is expected to be performed and danced, and there's a story to be told, and there's usually... and just like in a traditional female burlesque, there's also a wider acceptance of body types these days. Back in the day it was like, you either look like Chris Hemsworth or not. That's how it worked. Now there are very thin guys. There are some wonderful male performers that are a bit heavier, that are a bit huskier that are rocking the dad bod, if you will.

One of the newest members of our troupe, his name is Rock God. But yeah, he's a bit on the heavier side, but his number fricking killed it at our Anti-Valentine's Day show. And so gender is becoming more fluid because there are also now trans performers, trans men and trans women that have gotten into burlesque. And so, and I'm not going to say this is true everywhere, but I will say here in Austin, it is everybody is invited to play. Some of the best performers in town are transgender. And we, it's one of those, you know, what are your preferred pronouns? And that's how we go with it. 

I will say as far as race goes, we're doing some work on that. It is not uncommon to have maybe one person of color in a show or in a troupe. We have several in our troupe, but again, we're weird. If you talk to Toni Elling who came down, I want to say Toni was here 2013, 2014, for the Texas Burlesque Festival. But Toni Elling tells a story how she would get booked, but it wasn't, it basically wasn't until she became a star and a headliner that she would get booked in some of the bigger theaters and some of the bigger clubs. So she literally had to like work her way up from the bars. Whereas certain performers, literally they went from the chorus line straight to the main stage, and she didn't have that opportunity, so I would say that a lot of people of color probably don't get their just due as performers. Now, there are some amazing performers. Ray Gunn, Nina Josephine... I'm not even gonna try to start naming people ‘cause I have a terrible memory, but there are some amazing performers. 

Like I said, here in Austin, we have gotten rid of a lot of toxic producers. So it was just like, hey, don't do this show, don't work with these people. I won't name a specific festival, but there was a whole big blow up over one of the festivals in the South that in that particular city, just in that city, they had a huge black burlesque performer base. And that particular festival did not book a single black person. Like no black people. Like basically no people of color whatsoever. It was all thin, young white women. That was their entire three day festival of nothing but thin, young white women. And there was a huge outcry about that. And then one of their producers came out and said, sorry, didn't notice. And the other one came out and was like, it's our festival. Get over it. As far as I know, those people are no longer producing because basically across the country and across the spectrum, everybody was like, and I'm done with you. Not performing with you anymore. You're not invited to our festival. Get over it.

But yeah, so that's one of the things in like... Oh, just recently there was a troupe that came through Austin that was out of New York, and I can't remember what their name was. But basically it was like this entire troupe of these gorgeous black people. And there it was just like so much gorgeous brown skin and all y'all, and we just saw the show, or we saw the ad for the show, and we were like, who are they? What the hell? There's an entire black burlesque troupe in Austin, and I don't know about it? And then when we looked it up, turned out they were like touring from New York and we were like, Oh, okay. Well that's amazing cause yeah, if there was an all black burlesque troupe here in Austin, I need to know about that. Austin needs to know about that.

But yeah, so there's Fat Bottom Cabaret, which is all curvy women of color. They have a pretty wide spectrum from Latinx, I think is what we're supposed to say now. I say Latina still. I mean, one of their members, I love her. Her name is Chola Magnolia. I love people. Come on now, if you're gonna, you don't necessarily have to be racist about it, but embrace your culture. Come on now.

Rod: Where do you, where do performers generally come from? Like are they people that have done it their whole lives or the sense I got is that some people come to it later in life. And I always thought like people, and maybe especially women, and maybe not especially women, get to a certain age where they're just, they're ready to just say fuck all the bullshit of people pleasing and, and it's about me now. And there's such a sense of like confidence and body positivity and just that feel to burlesque. I just wondered if these, if a lot of the performers came to it later in life.

Jonny: It's kind of a mix. I will say that there are, I'd say probably about 50/50. There are some folks who have long backgrounds in theater and dance and whatnot, and then there are some people that are literally like, they came to a show and they were like, I want to do that. And either they reach out to a troupe or there's the Austin Academy of Burlesque. So we actually, there actually is a place to learn burlesque here in Austin. You can either learn to become a performer, or it's kind of like that pole dancing for exercise, just because you go to a pole dancing class doesn't mean you're going to go down to Yellow Rose and apply for a job. Same thing with burlesque. Just because you take a couple of burlesque dance classes, it doesn't necessarily mean that you're ready to hit the stage.

So some folks go through the academies, some people just they've decided that, yeah, no, fuck the bullshit. This is how I want to feel. And one of the things that I've heard from, her name is Cruel Valentine. She's a performer. But she’s a bigger girl. She wears it well. She has no problem with it. And one of the things she says is, one of the best feelings you'll ever get is when your big ass is naked on stage and 500 people are cheering for you. And I would have to agree, like hell yeah. So yeah, it depends on the person, but I think, I think it's about 50/50. A lot of people come from an actual dance background and then a lot of people are just like, you know what? Fuck it. I can do it. Step back and watch.

And that's actually one of the great things about the Bombshells is that we actually, we teach, we coach, we help. Not everybody in our troupe is a trained dancer. Not everybody in our troupe wants to be a trained dancer. And some people I think are better because they are not in their head trying to go five, six, seven, eight. Nah. Hit the stage, go with what feels right. And you know, you do have to have a sense of musicality and rhythm. But other than that, no. You don't need to know how to do like a full on Bob Fosse number to hit the stage. If you can dance around topless in your kitchen while making macaroni and cheese, come on down.

But I think burlesque is kind of in a transition right now where a lot of people are trying to find their own voice instead of trying to fit into a mold, ‘cause there’s classic burlesque and then there's neo burlesque and then there's like different ways that you can do it. And so a lot of the classic performers are what are now, are the folks who are now becoming the legends of our generation. But the fact is that a lot of the folks that are coming up now are looking at those classic numbers and those classic performers and thinking to themselves, well, they're already doing the glove peel and the boa dance and everything else. What the hell can I do? And I think that actually sparks a lot of creativity in the sense of, yeah, what the hell can you do? You can get up there and do a walk step, you know, take off a glove. Sure. Or you can get up there in spandex and dance to frickin’ ‘80s hair metal. As long as you can make it work, cool. If you have, you know, some deep emotional stuff that you're trying to work through and you get up there and do a somber, slow strip to frickin’ Evanescence, cool. What can you do? Get creative. You can't just do a, well, you can just do the walk and peel, but we've all seen that. What else you got?

Rod: Well, we're sitting inside Forbidden Fruit. Are you an employee, or are you part owner? Do you have a stake in this place or…?

Jonny: I'm the general manager and the quote/unquote heir apparent. In a couple of years when the sisters retire, I'm going to be buying the store from them. Let’s see, we've been around since 1981, so right now the tentative plan is 2021. So Lynn, who was one of the people who started the store, so that'll give her a solid 40 years of doing this. And then yeah, I'm going to be taking over the store and I'm very much looking forward to it.

22-time winner of Best Adult Business in Austin, Austin Chronicle Reader's Poll. We've, but we don't take it for granted though. We actually feel very appreciative every time we do win ‘cause yeah, the Austin, I think there's like seven different sex stores in Austin. So the fact that folks keep coming back here makes me happy.

Rod: How did you come to it?

Jonny: When I was in college and doing the drag circuit and whatnot around town, Lynn and I used to do shows together. It was me, Lynn, Coco Lectric, a few other people, Goldie Candela. This was, they weren't quite burlesque shows back in those days. It was called the Saturday Night Sex Party. It was up North. It was just this weird just naughtiness that we were doing. And so that's how I got to meet Lynn. So I knew Lynn before I started working here. I knew Lynn from shows and then one day, it was after Extravagasm, we were both frickin’ tired. We were standing in the box office counting out money. And at the time I had quit my job at Lucy in Disguise, and I was just living on my savings, and I literally just looked over at her and I was like, are you hiring? She was like, actually yeah, our manager is about to leave to start his own store. And so I came in, I interviewed, and yeah, and that's how I started working here.

We try to be the not creepy sex store. So the store is very open. You can see from one side to the other, there are no racks where someone might be hiding and doing something untoward. We also, we curate our products. We don't carry everything. We do have people who come in and they'll look at our dildos for example, and they're like, wow, these are kind of expensive. Yeah, they're also dual density silicone from some of the best manufacturers in the business. If you're looking for like a $20 jelly thing to like, you know, use as a gag gift, sorry, we don't have that. We do have some less expensive, I usually tell folks I can get you anything from $10 to $200. Just depends on what you're looking for. And so if you're looking for a little vibe, yeah, I can get you a little vibe for like 15 bucks. It's still going to be a nice little vibe. It's going to last you. It's not going to be a cheap, breaks in three days type of deal. So that's another one of the things that distinguishes us is that we curate and make sure that we carry the best that we can get within any given price range. But then also we do custom orders. So for those people that you know, can't quite find what they're looking for or they really like this one, they just wish it was in purple. Okay. I can get you one in purple. Probably take about three or four days.

Rod: The vibe that I got when I was here as a customer was that it was just very relaxed, very open, very honest, very direct. There was no sense of titillation. There was no sense of embarrassment or anything. Do you think that's a fair assessment? Like is that a goal of the business?

Jonny: Yeah. Yeah, I mean that's the, that's the whole point of it. It's like this isn't, I mean, you can try to go for the titillation factor if you want to, but no, these are products, this is human sexuality on display. This is what, I'll have, you know, someone coming in to buy her first vibrator and you know, might be a little underwhelmed. I usually ask the same three questions, large, small, internal, external, and what kind of power are we talking? And go from there. Like, we don't need to get this, what do you want it to be? Flesh tone. Do you want it to feel real? No, it's a toy. Calm down.

So that's our, that's our general approach is treat everybody like people. Come on in, and no question is weird. We don't do any of that what’s referred to as kink shaming. We don't do any of that. So I've had folks come in and they'll come up and they're like very quietly whisper and it's like, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm I'm looking for a glass toy. Oh yeah, come on down. My glass stuff is back here. It's like, you don't need to whisper. What of my number one things I always say, I tell folks is this ain’t Target. Spit it out. If you can't say it here, if you can't say it, you can't buy it. Them’s the rules.

Rod: How did you get into teaching classes? Did you do that from the very beginning, or did you work your way up to that?

Jonny: Ah, I worked my way up to it in the sense that I was told, you should be teaching classes. And so that was I already worked here for probably about three or four years. And at that point I was facilitating the workshops. So I helped run the store while the workshops were going on, but somebody else was actually teaching. It's actually one of my favorite workshops to teach is my fellatio workshop. And that was literally, that workshop literally came out of a friend of mine who... this was back in college. She swore that she would never suck dick. It's like the most disgusting thing in the world. Why would anybody put a penis in their mouth? That's so gross. She would never do it. Fast forward to her studying abroad in Scotland, and I get an email, “Hey Johnny, how do you, how do you do that?” So I created a PowerPoint for her.

And this wonderful woman who has since retired, her name is Charla Hathaway. She was a sex educator. She was actually one of the first people that started teaching here back in the ‘90s. So Charla taught here for a while. Charla used to teach our Fellatio 101 class, and I would facilitate, and Charla would ask me questions, and she would always start it the same way she would go, Jonny as a penis haver and a penis lover, what do you think?

And then one day after the class you know, I was writing her the check, getting her paid and giving her the evaluations and whatnot. And she was like, you know, you know enough about this stuff, why don't you teach this class? Like I'm not a teacher. She was like, yes, you are. Okay. Maybe I can teach this class. And so I kind of did a bit more research and kind of looked up if I were to teach this class, what would I talk about? And kind of went from there.

And so most of my teaching experience just comes from working here at the store and just answering a million questions a day. So it's like, yeah, I do know all of this stuff. Spread the knowledge. So that's how I got into teaching was basically somebody told me that I should teach. She didn't just tell me, she basically kind of made it sound like I didn't have a choice. You're going to teach this class. And I was like, okay. So that's how I first got into teaching, and then I just more and more stuff that interested me and I found out more about it and I was like, people should know about that. Let’s teach a class.

So the same thing with my anal workshop, which was one of my, that actually my anal workshop was actually my favorite workshop to teach. Cause that's where I’m like, everybody's got one. You can play with it, go for it. But then I have people who come in and they're like, what if it hurts? Well, it's not supposed to hurt. Well, what if it does hurt? Then stop doing it. Assess, try more lube, try a different position. There's different things that you can do. But it's not supposed to hurt. That's one of the things like, cause we sell a lot of kink, bondage, and BDSM gear, and one of the rules of the store is that we do not sell anything that harms the human body. We do sell things that hurt the human body, but we don't sell anything that harms the human body. We don't sell spermicide. We don't sell condoms with spermicide. We don't sell any oil-based lubes cause oil-based lubes break down latex barriers. We don't sell jelly toys and things like that because a lot of the, if you open a toy and it's like sticking to the plastic or like has a funny smell, don't put that in your body. Yeah, there's a reason why you got a 10-inch dildo for 20 bucks. Don't put that in your body. It's just weird.

A lot of folks ask why we're still around. Like how, you know, the internet's a thing. Why would anybody go to a sex store? You can buy everything online and it’s like, you can. Not quite sure what the hell you're going to get. And I've actually said that to people who come in, they're like, I can find this on Amazon for $30. No, you can't. I guarantee you you can't. You can find something on Amazon for $30. It's not going to be that product. And if it is that product, I guarantee you it doesn't come from the manufacturer, and it doesn't come with a warranty. So yeah, best of luck.

We're a small store. We try to make sure that we have the best of the best and if you can find it cheaper online, if you want to risk it, go for it. But there is still some value to coming into a store and being like, nope, that's the exact one that I want. I'm going to take it now. I don't have to pay shipping, and I know it is what it actually says on the box, and no one has used it before. So that's my number one thing is, if you're going to buy online, be very careful. Otherwise, you know, go into a store, talk to somebody. It's okay. We generally try to be friendly unless it's first thing on a Sunday and I'm slightly hung over. I think that's about it.

Rod: Anything you wanted to plug? Like any upcoming show, like it usually takes me a while to do this. So you got to show next weekend it's going to be too late, but...

Jonny: I would say Texas Burlesque Festival at the Long Center. That'll be April 24th and 25th. Tickets are on sale now. We're going to have some amazing performers coming in literally from all over the world. So yeah, if you can't go see a show in Tokyo, maybe come down to the Long Center in April and you can see some performers.

Rod: Wow. That's a nice venue.

Jonny: Yeah.

Rod: That's cool. All right. Thanks Johnny. I really appreciate it.

Jonny: No problem.

Episode 024 - Pants and Kilts and Dresses

Amy Haden-Knost talks about her military service during Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, online dating, same sex marriage before Obergefell v. Hodges, and becoming a grandparent. My thanks to Amy for sharing her time with me, especially since I don’t think talking is her favorite pastime. This was the first interview I’ve done long distance, so it was fun figuring out a recording solution, and a backup solution for when that fails, which it did! But I still got the audio. I’m always grateful for learning opportunities.

Amy and her wife Renee (who is also my sister) rescue, transport, foster, and adopt Rottweilers throughout the southeast. It’s a cause that’s very dear to their hearts and to the hearts of the houseful of dogs (and cats), so if you’d like to support that work, please check out Florida Rottweiler Rescue Ranch and Sanctuary, in Dover, Florida, and consider supporting their mission.

And as always, thank you to Flora Folgar for her love, support, and voiceover talents.

Our opening theme is “Start Again” by Monk Turner and Fascinoma. Other music that appears in this episode:

8:09: “Higher Up” by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com

11:50: “The Rise Of Heroes” by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com

15:05: “Acoustic Guitar 1” Creative Commons Music by Jason Shaw on Audionautix.com

18:22: “Black Knight  by Rafael Krux” - https://filmmusic.io/song/5617-black-knight-

22:03: “Can You Feel” by Nordgroove</a> from Fugue

26:17: “Alone Lonely (Instrumental”)  by Michael McQuaid from Fugue

29:23: “Call to Adventure” by Kevin MacLeod

33:41: “Blue (Instrumental)” by Rojj from Fugue

37:27: “Danse Macabre” by Kevin MacLeod

43:53: “Blue Ska” by Kevin MacLeod

Here’s the transcript:

In theory, everybody thinks that I’m the one that quote/unquote “wears the pants in the family” and all that other fun jazz because, well, I may look pretty good in a suit and tie or a shirt and tie. But that doesn’t mean I’m more manly, and honestly, in our type of relationship, that’s the whole idea is that there isn’t that male person in the relationship.

I mean honestly, she’s the one that says walking down the street, people are like, oh yeah, you’re gay. And they look at me. You’re gay. But she has to come out every single time. She passes. She passes as a straight woman. I mean, it’s one of those, she’ll even say it. She’s like, yeah, you totally pass as gay. That’s not a problem. People look at you and go, yeah, ding, you’re done. She’s like, where people look at me and go, so who’s your husband? And she’s like, actually, that’s my wife.

Renee’s telling me to go upstairs, so… See? I told you I don’t wear the pants in the family.

Well, actually, in this family, we’re pants and kilts, but then again, some of the big, burly, hairy dudes that we hang out with wear kilts as well, so that’s an OK thing. What’s more dainty and feminine than doing bench presses and back squats and deadlifts? And in all actuality, every woman should be doing that anyway, because it’s good for their muscular structure as well as their bone growth. Being sedentary is not good, ever. I mean, I hate that I have to work behind a desk and work with a computer all day. But that’s only 8 hours out of my day. After that, I usually leave, and we go to the gym, and we work out for at least an hour or so.

We do Weight Over Bar, Weight for Distance, well, Heavy Weight and Light Weight for Distance, Sheaf, Stone, whether it’s Open or Braemar, Hammer Throw, and then Caber. Caber is the small tree.

We’ve done the whole Ancestry DNA thing, and I’m like 93% British Isles, which covers England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, in which I think 55 or 60% of it is Scottish and Irish. So yeah. I’m kind of heavy on that ethnicity. But yeah, we got into it because we decided, hey, there was a Celtic festival over in Gulfport, Mississippi, and we went, “Let’s go see what’s going on over there!” So we went, and we went and wandered around the festival, ate the foods, and had a couple beers, and we started watching some of the Highland Games, and I’m like was watching them do Weight Over Bar. And I was watching this, and I’m like, this is like a kettlebell snatch, but you let it go. I said, “I think I could do that.” And Renee’s like, “OK, then let’s get information and find out where the next one is.” And so the next one, because that was like in November, and the next one was in March in Dothan, Alabama. And so I was like, “OK, then we’re going to practice with whatever we can practice with.” And so we started, I took a couple kettlebells home, and I took just a sledgehammer to use as a hammer and went out to a baseball field and started throwing stuff and started figuring it out.

And then I competed that, in Dothan, and then afterwards, Renee’s like, “I want to do it too.” I went, “OK, then let’s both do it. It’s not a big deal.” And so the next competition was in April in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, so we drove up there, and we both competed up there. And we’ve been just doing it since.

It’s fun. I mean, it really is fun, and it’s such a small group that are very supportive of one another, and around here, when we go to the games in the different areas, we see the same folks. And so it’s kind of like friends getting together. We’d all go out to dinner the night before, and then we meet on the field for competition the next day, and then have cold beer that night, the night afterwards.

We train together, so now, after doing this for about a year or so, we’ve actually gotten to the point where it’s like, OK, she’s trying to do Weight Over Bar, or I’m trying to do Weight Over Bar, and we don’t hit it, but the other person’s watching, go, “OK, it peaked at this point, so you need to take a step either forwards or backwards.” And so it’s like, “Oh, OK, cool.” And so we make the adjustment, take a big swing, and it makes it. And it’s like, “OK, there you go.”

I don’t really think about gender identity necessarily. It’s like, you have the 1950s stereotypes of what a mom’s supposed to be and what a dad’s supposed to be, but things progressed over the ages and the years, and I don’t think that is something that is a common thought now necessarily with gender roles. I mean, friends of mine at work, we were talking that being in a same sex relationship is common practice. You wouldn’t think this back in 1950 or 1960, but you see that every day now. You see Target commercials. You see airline commercials. So it’s not really a thing anymore. It’s one of those, you can be whatever you want to be, however you want to be it. You don’t have to be limited by what gender you were born.

I’ve got pictures of the whole class pictures of going through middle school and high school, and it’s like, no. No. I just… I mean, you can see picture after picture I am just who I am. I’ve heard about people, “I had a horrible childhood” or “I had a horrible time when I was in high school.” Yeah. I can’t relate, because I didn’t. And I know, most people would be like, “How is that possible?” It’s 100% possible, because I just didn’t have that situation.

I mean, I grew up right outside of D.C., and so it’s one of those, it was I would say fairly open, even my middle sister, which is 4 years older than me, her best friends were a whole bunch of gay guys. OK? She’d go clubbing with them and had a blast, and that was back in the ‘80s, which was way before anything blew up and exploded in reference to the same sex culture. I grew up there, and then I moved out to Colorado for 12 years. There wasn’t anything that somebody went, “Oh, by the way, you can’t be this way.” Or “you can’t be that way” or “you have to do this” or “you can’t do that.”

I pretty much wore whatever clothes I wanted to, except there were a couple occasions where my father was very, very stern with, “OK, this is a big event. You have to wear a dress,” and I went, “No, no! No, don’t make me! Don’t make me!” of course, because me and dresses were not a thing. And then I came home from school after getting class pictures in my dress and put on my jeans and t-shirt and my boots and went out and rode my motorcycle. So it all worked out. No harm, no foul. It was just the way it was. It was just me.

It didn’t matter who you were. Everybody played pickle with a baseball and hopefully you didn’t hit the window or hit each other. You played kickball in the park down the street. There was no, “Oh, well, girls get picked last” or “boys get picked first.” No. It’s everybody plays.I grew up in a really weird society, or maybe that was just my fog of consciousness of it. Maybe I just lived in that little bubble world or a cloudy day, the cloud over my head, and I just didn’t notice. It’s like, “OK, people are people. OK. We grow up, so that means we have to buy bigger clothes and bigger shoes. OK.”

I was actually stationed at the Air Force Academy. That was my first duty station, and then after being there for about 4 years, I got sent down to Peterson Air Force Base, which is on the south side of town. I was a contracting officer. So I got to buy supplies and services and did construction there. I bought their space simulation chamber for their physics department. And then I bought their lasers. It was a laser machine that actually helped the physics students learn about wavelengths. And then of course, I had stairs built on the terrazzo between the dining hall and the terrazzo with heating elements in them because they’re granite, and you can’t shovel granite. So they had to have heating elements underneath so when the snow and ice would come on, it would flip a switch, the heating elements would heat up the stone and remove the snow and ice.Those were like cool little moments at the Academy. But I mean, it was a lot of fun. I mean, I had a lot of fun doing my job, working and contracting, and then I went down to Peterson and did more advanced stuff. And then I also was one of the procurement agents for the Cheyenne Mountain facility as well, because that’s, Peterson kind of covered that too.

I was in the Air Force active duty for almost 10, and then I’ve been in the Reserves for just over 3. Air transportation. That’s like the official title. Pretty much anything that has to do with getting things on and off of airplanes, that’s what we do. Whether it’s people, cargo, special stuff, rolling stock, like if they had tanks or any type of vehicles that needed to get to a destination, we would load them up, and then the plane would take off. I drive a forklift. I can drive all the forklifts. I can drive Halvorsens, which are 25K loaders. Yeah, all that cool, fun stuff. 

And then I got out of the military in 2001. That was 15, almost 16 years. That was to raise my kids. And that was I was supposed to go on a 15-month “short tour” is what they refer to it as. A long tour would be a full PCS with family and everything. Short tours, in the active duty world, at least back then, I don’t know if they still do them, were just like little 12 or 15 month stints at an alternate location, kind of like a TDY, but it was a little more permanent. TDY is “temporary duty station,” so… And PCS is “permanent change of station.” So I was scheduled to go somewhere for about 15 months, and I went, “Eh, my kids are 2 and 4, and I really don’t trust their dad to actually raise them correctly.” And so I went, “OK. What are my options if I don’t go?” And they went, “Well, then you’ll need to get out.” And so I went, “OK, for my kids’ sake, I’ll get out.” So I did.

We were not married. We lived under the same roof, and we had kids together. One’s 20, and one’s 22. That was a long time ago. And now she’s a mom of her own, too. We are officially grandparents now. That’s crazy. And I actually held him the other day, and I went, “Oh my God, he’s so teeny tiny. What the hell?” I’m like, “How can a little human be so tiny?” And he, I mean honestly, at birth, he was as big as my first one. Same size exactly. I’m like, I’m holding him like, “Oh my gosh.” And I’m like, “Ooh, little tiny toes.” 

I’m like, I don’t… It’s a word, but it’s kind of weird, and I probably won’t feel that way until he says whatever. Because everybody’s like, “Oh, what are you going to be called?” I’m like, “I have no idea.” Well, that’s what Renee’s like, “Um, I’m just going to be Renee.” And I’m like, “You know what? He’s going to call you something, and you’re going to figure it out, and that’s going to be your name.”

You know, Nana is a banana. A Nana is what a small child calls a banana, and I do not want to be called a banana. So I’m like, you know what? If he utters the phrase ‘whatever’, I grew up with a Red Grandma and a White Grandma, because Red Grandma of course dyed her hair, so she had red hair, and the other one had white hair. It made total sense. So, again, it will be whatever is uttered out of his mouth. If he decides to just call me Amy, that’s fine.

Zero involvement, and Renee yells at me all the time. She’s like, “Oh my God.” But I know she was heavily involved in the whole AIDS thing in San Francisco, and she has people that were dying of it, and have died of it. That affected her a lot. It didn’t affect me at all. She goes, “You just turned a blind eye to everything. I just cannot believe you didn’t… like, you weren’t a part of any of that, and you didn’t know about any of that.” I’m like, “Nope. Sorry.” I mean, I didn’t know of anyone I grew up with or in the area or that I was friends with that had it, or have it now.

In high school, Renee of course, Renee and I have totally different views when it comes to high school and even middle school and growing up. She was “Errrr!” I mean, you know. Where I was just kind of like, OK, I was in band, and I played sports, and I had good grades, so yeah. And I hung out with the jocks. I hung out with the theater nerds, you know, the drama kids, the chorus kids, the band kids, even the rednecks. I was friends with everybody. It just didn’t matter. It’s like, if you were good people, I hung out with you. If you were bad people, I was going to tell you you were a bad person, and you need to shape up.

Before Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was slammed down and said, “Hey, this is what we’re going to do. This is a hardcore policy,” it really wasn’t an issue. Nobody cared, and it wasn’t in the forefront of anyone’s mind. But as soon as that came to headlines that Clinton’s going to be, “Oh, no, we don’t have to ask this anymore. We’re not going to ask it; you don’t have to tell us. You just behave and watch your Ps and Qs.” Well, for the most part, we were all like, “OK, well if you’re not going to ask, and I’m not going to tell you, then I can kind of live my life as long as it doesn’t affect my job.” Where in all actuality, from being there in uniform at the time, it became a witch hunt. I mean, it was one of those, people were seeking out people doing wrong so they could go, “Oh no, no, no. He came out of his room!” or “She came out of her room!” It was more of that rather than, “Well, we’re not going to ask, so it doesn’t really matter.” And don’t even give them even an inkling of an idea that something may be happening, because someone’s going to go to OSI and go, “Hey, I saw Jane come out of Suzy’s room at 6 o’clock in the morning.” OK. And of course, now we’re wasting OSI money and time by investigating something that, “Oh, they were just studying together. Who cares?”

I mean, truthfully, yes, I was personally investigated, but it got tossed out. And I mean, they asked my roommate, because I had a female roommate. They even asked… They brought her in and asked her questions, and then I had several of my friends go up,  volunteering to say, “Hey, I want to put in a statement.” And so, it’s like, pretty much at that point it got tossed out, because I had probably at least a half a dozen people go up and go, “Hey, I want to voluntarily put in a statement for this person.” And once they see all that come through, they’re like, “Yeah, no, we’re barking up the wrong tree here.”

I was very happy when that ended, though. It’s like, “OK. So you’re gay. So? And? Do you do a good job? OK. That’s all that matters.”

We’re almost 14 years later, so… But yeah, we actually met online way before all the cool dating sites like match.com and eHarmony. There was a wonderful little site that apparently I joined, and I was fairly new. It was actually specifically… It’s called ButchFemmeMatchmaker.com. As funny as that is, it was an actual real website way in the early 2000s before all of this other stuff has come out. And it matched more masculine and more feminine people together, if you… And you can pick and choose, say you were quote-unquote butch, which is the more of masculine visual. If you like other butches, you could say, “That’s what I’m interested in.” Or if you were more feminine, and you liked more feminine, then you could say, “I was interested in more feminine.” I mean, it just kind of curtailed you in your… You could refine your filters, quote-unquote.

And well, she messed up, because she was searching for new individuals that had joined the site to see if anybody intrigued her, and she forgot to put in a zip code. So she pulled up all of the new people on this website rather than just new people within a certain proximity of her. And of course, I popped up, and she just looked at my picture. I can even show you the picture. It cracks me up. She’s like, “That’s the one that got me.” I’m like, “OK, whatever. It doesn’t make any damn sense to me, but OK.”

And then she clicked on my image and went through the profile, and she went, “Dammit. Why you gotta be so far away?” And then she went back, and she revamped her search, and she did her own searches, but then she actually clicked on my link two more times. So she actually viewed my profile three times in the same night. I got home from work, and the cool part about this website was that if somebody had viewed your profile, you could see who had viewed your profile, even if they didn’t give you a comment or leave you a message. You could see who it was, and so you’re like, “OK, well who’s been checking me out?” I mean, it’s common sense. I look up, and I’m like, “Wow. Who are you?” So I clicked on her profile, and I read her profile. It was very, very honest, as was mine. And I was like, “You know? She seems like a really cool person. Hmm.” So I sent her a message, and I went, “Hey, I viewed your profile. You seem like a really neat person. I would love to chat with you more.” That’s it. Knowing she is 2600 miles away. It’s never going to happen, or at least the chances are like so far and few, I just, she seems like a cool person to chat with.

OK. And then all of a sudden, whoop! She sends me a message back, and I’m like, “Oh shit! She’s online! Oh damn, that was fast.” And we started chatting.

We chatted for probably 5 or 6 hours that night, just chatting on the web, just typing up words. That’s all it was. We were both very, very truthful, but I had not said my name, nor had I given her my phone number, and so, at the end of the conversation, I was like, “Well, I’d like to call you sometime.” And she goes, “OK,” and she gives me all of her phone numbers, so I picked up my cell phone and called her. 

She came across the country alone with the boys and the 3 cats.

My family’s kind of different. I’ve introduced her to my mom, and my mom’s actually come here to visit. But yeah, my parents are southern Baptists, and they don’t view this as a good thing. They hope that the good Lord will cure me of this.

Well, and the thing is, I was raised in a Catholic family. Even growing up Catholic, it was no big deal. It was just do what you do as long as you’re a good person. It didn’t matter. You know, be kind, be good. And then once my parents changed their faith and converted over to southern Baptist, they’ve been quite interesting folks, shall I say. There’s lots has gone on, so I don’t know if changing their faith pattern has modified their perceptions and their, the way they do things. I think it does. But as long as they’re not harmful to each other, I really don’t care.

But yeah, I remember when Renee introduced me to you all when I drove up with her and the boys, and apparently the first night there was that huge gathering, and it was, the chairs were set up in like a round circle she told me. And she’s like, it was so weird, because we all sat around in a round circle and talked. I was like, “OK.” And she says, “And I really wanted you to be there, but I really didn’t want this to be focused on Renee Day and oh my God, what crazy crap is Renee bringing into the family?” And I was like, “You know what? I’m fine. I’ll just hang out at the hotel and just chill. If I go swimming, I’ll go swimming. Don’t… It doesn’t matter. It’s fine. Whatever. You know, I’m not going to push this.” And then apparently she finally got your dad aside and went, “I brought a friend.” And he went, “OK, who is it?” And so they had a chat and talked about it, and that’s when I met you guys at the Pancake House. And then I remember being grilled by Meg and Kathleen. They were sitting across the table from me, and it was like the fire, question, question, question, question, question, and I’m like, “Oh, crap! I didn’t know I’d have a kevlar vest for this shit!” Oh yeah, it was one of those… It kind of… Afterwards, it’s like, Renee’s like, “Are you OK?” And I’m like, “I think so. I’m still in one piece. I think I’m OK.”

We had decided we really wanted to get married after being together for a year, but we couldn’t because there were only like two states, I think at that time, that legalized it. And we’re like, “You know, we really want to get married at home. We really want to get married where our friends and family, blah blah blah blah blah.” Normal normal. Normal stuff. And 5 years later, I went, “To hell with this.” And she went, “What?” I said, “Let’s go get married.” And she went, “What?” I went, “Let’s just do this. If we’re going to do it, let’s just do it.”

I had proposed after a year. So it was a very, like 5 year engagement later. I mean I was just, you know, because we had talked about it, we had talked about it. I was like, “I’m tired of waiting. I’m tired of waiting for Florida to get off their ass and do what they should do. Let’s just go get married, and then when Florida recognizes it, then Florida recognizes it.” And she went, “OK.” And so I went through every single state, because there were 6 or 7 states that allowed it. And I went to every single state and looked at their requirements, because D.C. actually allowed it, and we were thinking about going to D.C. to do it, but D.C., the problem was is time, being that our kids were all still young, we couldn’t leave them for like a week and a half. And with D.C., say, you went in and put in, requested your marriage license on Monday, there was a 3-day waiting period, so you had to wait 3 full days after that. So that meant you could pick up your marriage license on Friday and go get married, but you had to have that waiting period.

So, I mean, I went through each state that it was possible in, and I found Connecticut, believe it or not, there was no waiting period, there was no required blood test, and you did not have to have witnesses. So that means we didn’t have to bring anybody. The only thing you had to have was an officiant, and so I found a nice little lady up in Connecticut, and she was an officiant, but more so, just our photographer. She took some pretty darn good pictures afterwards. And we went to a little town in Darien, Connecticut. We show up, and I’m in a suit and tie, and Renee’s in her dress that she’s made, and we go to the Clerk of the Court, and the lady turns around and goes, “Oh, are you two getting married?” And what does my smart ass say? “Oh no, we dress like this all the time. We’re just here for like trash schedules.” And she looked at me and went… And of course Renee, at that point, elbow went right in the arm. I was like, “Ow! I’m sorry.” It was hard to resist.

So we got… I mean, we paid quote-unquote half down for our marriage license. You have to pay them like 20 bucks. And then when you bring it back after you get married, and you know, to get it actually officially certified and stamped and all that, then you pay them the rest of the fee. So it’s kind of like you have to pay a down payment on it, and then you pay it off when you get back. So we grabbed the marriage license, went down to a wonderful little park that we had explored the day before that our officiant suggested, and we found a cute little probably hundreds year old bridge in the backwoods area, and we went, “This is perfect.” And so that’s where we got married. And we went back, she took the marriage certificate back and signed it officially in front of them so they could witness it, and they stamped it and approved it and said, “There you go.” Done. And then we flew home a couple days later.

Yep, it was just me, Renee, and Mary. That’s it.Yeah. I mean, it was super easy, super fast. It’s one of those, Renee will gig me about the saying of the vows every time, because we originally had said we want the shortest possible, don’t make me talk a lot. OK. So I find the shortest possible. “Do you take… to be your lawfully wedded wife?” “Yes, I do.” “Do you…?” You know, very, very simple. We’ve already said that, and I’m like, “OK, we’re in like Flynn. Cool. We’re good to go.” And she went, “OK, Amy, repeat after me.” Renee stops, and she looks at me, and she went… she just started laughing, because I looked at Mary, and my eyes got like the deer in the headlight, and I went, “You mean I have to say more?” And she went, “Yeah, officially you do.” And I went, “Oh, damn. This is going to get rough. I thought I was in. I was done.” And she went, “Nope. You got more to say.” And I went, “Oh, crap.”

Actually, we didn’t have a lot of issues. I mean, even, you know, we’re down here in the Redneck Riviera, southern Alabama, whatever you want to call it. We’ve had two occasions that I kind of remember that I kind of laugh at and go, “OK.” There was one, we were going into Wal-Mart years and years and years ago when we actually shopped there on a regular basis. And there was an older white gentleman pushing a cart, and his wife was walking next to him holding her purse, and they were walking down the aisle, and Renee and I walk in. Of course, we’re a couple. We’re holding hands. It was no big deal. And we thought his head was about to pop off in like a total Exorcist moment, like totally cranking all the way around. And his wife turned around and took her purse and slapped him upside the head and went, “You need to look forward, sir!” I was like, “Oh, damn!” I mean, because it was very, very apparent what was happening.

And then, the second thing, oddly enough, we were in Mobile, because we hadn’t ever really gone to Mobile, so we drove over for a day just to kind of walk around downtown Mobile to see the sights and grab something to eat, just kind of relax and kind of be a tourist. We weren’t even holding hands. We were probably walking about two feet apart, just walking down the sidewalk, just chatting, talking. And this older black man, he was probably in his 60s, maybe early 70s, walking the opposite way. So he’s walking towards us. He just gets past us and goes, “All these goddamn gay people!” We both just kind of… Because we were just talking, and we weren’t holding hands. There was nothing that he would’ve seen. Just stopped and turned around, and he’s just shaking his head as he walked down the street. And we’re like, “I have no idea what the hell that was all about.” But that was actually really funny.

That’s really it. I mean, over 14 years, that’s like, OK. Everybody just kind of live and let live, and just don’t worry about it. But then again, we’re not the militant type. We’re not the ones that are jumping up and down on statues and flag waving and armband wearing and all the other stuff that you see on TV or you’ve seen on TV in the past. That’s not us. We just live our lives.

Episode 023 - Let Loose the Bird

Today we have Clay Boykin, a Marine, a retired business executive, and a New Compassionate Male. He was called to servant leadership in his professional life and in retirement has made connecting and helping others connect on a heart level his mission. My favorite quote of his from this interview is, “And this whole idea that once one is committed to one’s path, and they’re in line, and they’re on purpose, that providence moves, the divine will of God moves… Well, let me tell you, that’s not a metaphor. I’m learning that every day. The next thing happens, the next thing happens, the next thing happens. And I’ve got more uncertainty financially now than I’ve ever had, and I’m more at peace than I’ve ever been because I’m on purpose.”

The word “heart” appears 17 times in the transcript below, and Clay is definitely living his life completely in touch with his heart. My sincere thanks to Clay for all the time he spent with me on this project, literally hours before boarding a plane to Kenya. He is something to behold.

Our opening theme is “Start Again” by Monk Turner and Fascinoma. Other music that appears in this episode:

“Redwood Trail” Creative Commons Music by Jason Shaw on Audionautix.com at 7:26

“Tiny People” by Alexei De Bronhe at 11:27

“Rastafarian” Creative Commons Music by Jason Shaw on Audionautix.com at 13:46

"Almost New" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License at 17:16

“Marathon Man” Creative Commons Music by Jason Shaw on Audionautix.com at 21:08

“Living in Hope” from Purple Planet at 25:24

"Laid Back Guitars" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License at 28:01

“Haunted” from Purple Planet at 31:21

“A View From Earth” Creative Commons Music by Jason Shaw on Audionautix.com at 33:05

“2 Above Zero” Creative Commons Music by Jason Shaw on Audionautix.com at 39:23

"Carpe Diem" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License at 44:25

Here’s the transcript:

I went to Texas A&M, and I got a Marine Corps scholarship there and took a Marine Corps commission, and that was in ‘76. When we were freshmen, they marched us over to the Memorial Student Center, and they said, “You memorize these lines.” It was an inscription. It was a Bible inscription. It was John 15:13: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friend.” And that’s the heartbeat of A&M. And so I went into the Marine Corps. I served 4 years there, and I wouldn’t trade that for anything. If a person is looking for an example of leadership, and leadership from the heart, it’s there in the Marine Corps.

In the Marine Corps, they teach us about servant leadership, and that really was ingrained, although they never used that term. So leadership begins there. Old gunnery sergeant back in the Corps, when I first checked in as a second lieutenant, and I said, “Look, Gunny, What can I do to help clear things out in front of you, from in front of you, so that you can do your job?” He’d pull me over to the side sometimes when I was heading off in a direction, and he’d say, “Lieutenant, don’t do that.” And he’d kind of keep me on the straight and narrow, and I’d support him.

When I got out, and I got into the corporate world, that spilled over. And I brought that into Motorola. I’d have supervisors and lead production operators, and I didn’t know about semiconductors. I didn’t know about test floor or anything like that, so I really had to rely on them. And so it was the same principle. What can I do to help you do your job and clear the stuff out of in front of you so that you can come through and be successful. Today I would say that I brought heart and spirit into the organization, but back then, we called it leadership, and I thought about it as servant leadership.

Motorola had gone through a quarter where it had lost money, the whole corporation, because of the downturn in DRAM prices. Well, it was a $250 or 260 million organization. I got there mid-year, and we ended up at $300 million. And so it’s time for forecast. I’m the marketing director. And I said, “Well, I’ve done an analysis, and based on this chart and numbers here, I just want to grow the business wisely, just add $100 million a year to it, and that’ll be good. But you know, I’ve done a little bit more study, and I think we could really do $460, so let’s forecast $460, but let’s budget on $400.”

They said, “Well, that’s fine. What are these numbers.” I said, “Well, it’s funny you should ask. I was looking at the Austin American-Statesman this last weekend, and there was a chart in there, and I found a correlation between that chart and the trends in that chart and our business, and so I’m using that as a guide.” “Well, what was that chart?” “Well, it turns out it was the history of rainfall for Austin, Texas, by month, for the last 10 years.”

Well, you could hear a pin drop. “What?” You know, “what?” And this really happened. The point being is, nobody can forecast, and you can’t forecast DRAMs. Sales guys were like, “Did you hear what Boykin did, forecasting on rainfall?” During the year, the sector president would come poke his head in the door and say, “How’s the rainfall forecast doing?”

Now, here we are in the semiconductor industry. High tech. And it was fun. There’s so much stress. And we had this crazy vision that we were going to forecast our business based on rainfall. It was crazy. But it was something to rally around.

Well, we missed the forecast. We did $461 million. We beat it by $1 million. Now think about that. A volatile market goes up and down, and bingo. You hit the number. Now how do you do that? It’s not by analyzing things. It’s by people putting their heart into something. People seeing something greater than themselves, being part of a bigger picture and getting some good energy out of it.

People noticed that. People engaged with that. People felt connected. And to notice that, and to bring that out within a group of people, within an organization, is to connect on a deeper level and aim at something greater than yourself. That’s the formula of success from my standpoint. About 3 years later, the organization was about $750 million.

So fast forward. I left Motorola after 22 years and went with a couple of startup companies. I ran one here in Austin for about 3 years, and then I was with one that was based in New York City.

I was running pretty fast and hard. I was pretty worn out. In ‘07, we took some vacation with Laurie’s family to Jamaica, and while I was there… You know, I like to get off into the woods by myself and just enjoy the peace that’s there, and I had my little Swiss army knife, and I would make things, just using whatever’s out there. And I started to realize that I was really not feeling well, that I was having symptoms that I thought were heart attack symptoms. But they would come and go. As long as I was calm, I was fine, but if I exerted myself, I would start feeling really bad. And I thought about going to the doctor, but then I thought, mmm, we’re in Jamaica. I don’t know that I really want to do that.

So I just stayed calm, and I also contemplated that really this is, these are heart attack symptoms, and this really could be it. And then I continued to work on my crafts. I don’t know what it was, but I went into an incredible peace during that time. It was leaning against the veil, as they say. Part of it was, gee, there’s a lot I don’t have to worry about anymore. But the other was just, I don’t know, it’s hard to put words to it. And there was almost a mystical experience, the things that happened there before we came home.

Well, sure enough, 24 hours after we got back to Austin, I had a quintuple bypass. I had 3 months of convalescing, and so I had a lot of time out on the patio reflecting on that and asking the questions. Who am I? Why am I here? And where am I going? And really thought hard about that and had a lot of confusion about that point.

Because you know, we guys, that’s what we’re taught to do. We’re taught to go to school, get out, climb the corporate ladder, so that someday you can retire and do what you wanted to do in the first place. Well, that sets up a real anxiety. I’m always looking over my shoulder as I’m climbing the corporate ladder, and that’s a way to trip up. And so I was reflecting on all that.

Well, I went home. The market was crashing. A few days after I got home, I got laid off. First time since I was 16 that I wasn’t earning a paycheck in some way, shape, or form, and I panicked. I really did, and began working desperately to get work. I barely got an interview for 2 years, and it took me down, hard. And I was just questioning my worth in the world, and goodness, I was deep depression, extended, eventually hospitalized.

So coming out of the hospital, I thought, “OK, maybe it’s time to go get back into church or something like that.” And so I would go down to church downtown on Sunday for 8 o’clock service, and I’d run up to the Unity Church for 9:30 service, then I’d head across town to the Austin Recovery Center for an Episcopal service over there, and I called that churfing. And I remember specifically, it was about 9:20 in the morning, January 3, 2010, I walked into the Unity Church for the first time, and if you’ve ever talked to anybody that goes to the Unity Church, and they’re talking about their congregation, they say when we walk in, we feel total love, total embrace, no judgment. And for me, I felt like the prodigal son. And it really, really touched me.

I remember early on, I’d sit in the pew talking about making notes and mind mapping everything, and I’d cry. There’d be tears. Something Reverend Steve said that really struck deep, but you know, one day he was talking, and I don’t remember the overall talk, but at one point he said, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I don’t have to build a condo there.” And I slapped my forehead. I thought, “Oh! I have choice! I can choose to move away from this victim mode. I can choose to do something different, take a different path. It’s well within my power to do it.” I was 54 learning that lesson.

After I’d been there for about a year, Reverend Donna came up to me, and she said, “You know, I think you’d make a good prayer chaplain.” And I got this big old lump in my throat, and I said, “Well, that scares the heck out of me, and so I guess I’m supposed to say yes.” And I did.

I became a prayer chaplain there, and I’d make hospital visits periodically, which I never was comfortable with earlier. What do you say to the person? What is there to say? Well, I’ll tell you what you say: nothing. You just show up, and the right thing will come, and it will come from the heart. But more than anything, it’s just the presence, sincere presence, to stand there and basically, “I see you.” To be their witness that they are going through something. At a certain level, that’s healing in itself. Those are the experiences that, and the opportunities to really connect on a heart level that I found over at the Unity Church and being a prayer chaplain.

A couple of guys, there were only like 3 or 4 of us out of 30 prayer chaplains, you know, 3 or 4 guys, and we started getting together to say, “OK, well what does holding space really mean? What is prayer really about? How do we show up? How do we make hospital visits?” And so, we decided to meet every week and talk about it. And it was a very formative time for me because I grew up not trusting men, and so I was beginning to step into being, it’s OK to be vulnerable. It’s OK to speak.

And I look around the foyer after service, and all these men are out there, and they’re not talking to anybody. And I said, well, if I have this feeling and this drive and this curiosity, and I’m afraid to talk to another man, I bet you there’s another guy out there that’s like that, or maybe there’s a few of them.

So in one sense, it was self-serving. I said, “I’m starting a men’s circle. I’m going to do it once a week, because that’s what I need. I don’t care if anybody shows up. I’m putting the word out, and I’m going to be there and set a drum beat. I’m going to show up.” And I did, and we had 12 guys show up.

So we started there, and we’ve been gathering every week for 7 years. And we may take off a week or 2 during the year, but that drum beat is there. And we’ve got a different mix of guys every Monday night. We’ll have 18 to 20. We had 37 one time this last year. And it’s so fascinating how we figured out how to set a container that’s safe, where people can, men can step away from everything that’s going on out there, and they can sit with other men.

And that’s really the essence, and I’m not teaching anything. I’m facilitating. And it’s interesting to watch the dynamic, especially when trust is built that a man can speak his heart, and nobody’s going to try and judge him. Nobody’s going to try and fix him. But he’s going to be heard by other men and accepted for where he is in life. Where can you go and do that? This is the one place for me where I can safely do that.

And that’s another thing. At the very beginning, I would say, “I want to make sure everybody has an opportunity to speak.” So I’d go around and make sure everybody had spoken, and then I pulled away from that because there are guys that are coming in there, and they’re wounded, and it’s enough for them to be in a circle of men. That’s a big step, and then just to listen and hear the experiences of other men. And they will assimilate themselves, and at some point they’ll say something. So that’s sacred time, and I can almost see the wheels turning when somebody is silent in there. And to hold space for somebody because they’re on their path, and there’ll be a time when they’ll share. More times than not, somebody that’s been silent for a long time, I mean weeks and weeks, first time they share is incredibly profound, and we all come out better for that.

Here’s an interesting fact: last year, 49.4% of the people who went to that website were women. And I was talking out in Bastrop, Texas, around the table at a luncheon that I was at, and I pointed that out, and they said, “Well, why is that?” And I said, “Well, the most obvious is that they’re women looking for a resource for their man.” A woman sitting next to me, very seriously looked at me, and she said, “Clay, I’ve been following your website for a long time now, and let me tell you why. I’m a man in a woman’s body. Where do I go? Where do I go to figure this out?”

You know, I knew intellectually, but to look into her eyes and see the pain, and to hear those words was very sobering to me and reminded me that we have no idea of how far our ripples go. And if we’re putting good energy out there, you have no idea of all the good we’re doing in the world. It’s still men, OK; on the website I also point out that it’s anybody who gender identifies as male.

And that’s the other thing is, I don’t ask anybody to commit. Guys will come up to me and say, “You know, I’ve been going and stuff, but a few months ago, I kind of got sidetracked, and business, and life and stuff, and I really need to commit to come back.” And I said, “No no no no no no. Don’t set yourself up for failure. You’ve got enough commitments in your life. You don’t need another thing that you’re going to beat yourself up for when you don’t show up. Set an intention. Set an intention. My intention is to be there. And I’ll be there, it turns out, when the time is right.” That’s how it plays out. It gives much more latitude because there’s so much going on in life. This is a place to relax and go within. It’s a contemplative circle. We can be pretty shallow at times. We pride ourselves on being shallow at times. But we can go really deep as well.

Back to the job side of things, I had resumes everywhere, and I got this phone call, and it was a young fellow at Office Max. And he said, “Clay, you’ve got a resume as long as my arm. What are you doing applying for a $9 job part time at Office Max?” And I said, “I just got to reconnect. I just got to reconnect with people.” And this was right after I’d started going to the Unity Church. And he said, “Come talk to me.” So I did, and he said, “You’re not going to be here long, are you?” And I said, “No, but I’m going to be your best employee that you ever had. You see, I’ve got to reconnect with people. I have to have that energy, that interaction.” And so he hired me.

So I went from the top of the Empire State Building, at the top metaphorically, and my next job was $9/hour part time. But that $9/hour job was so enjoyable, to observe myself learning again and observe myself connecting again, and just the energy made a huge difference. And then about 6 weeks later, an old Marine Corps buddy heard of my circumstance, and he called me up and said, “Let’s have coffee.” So we did, and he described what the position was, and I said, “I’ll take it.”

So I eventually became general manager of that company, then moved on, did some business development work, and then this past October, I decided that, you know, reflecting back on Jamaica, sitting in the woods, at the end of my life, doing my arts and crafts, doing something creative and being at total peace, that’s what I was doing at the end of my life. Well, what’s to say that today’s not the end of my life? And am I doing what’s mine to do? Am I on purpose? And it was at that point, I got home, and I said to Laurie, I says, “You know, I’ve been doing this for 42 years. I’m tired. It’s time to change. If I don’t do it now, when am I going to do it?” And so, the 1st of October, just a few months after my book came out, I left the business world.

When I was a kid, that I would catch birds with a box and a stick and a string. I caught one one time, and I had it in my hands, clasped down, and I could feel its wings fluttering in my hands. And my Mother said, “What do you got there?” And Dad’s like, “Let it loose.” And I was a little kid, and I ran off with it. Well, in the process of running off with it, I didn’t realize that I was squeezing down on that bird, and I killed it. And that fluttering that was in my hands, that I could feel, translated up into my gut. That twinge, that anxiety, I felt like it had been transferred into me, and I was filled with guilt and shame. And metaphorically, I grasped that anxiety, that flutter, with my hands, my one hand was guilt and the other was shame. And I held it tight.

And that flutter is the divine energy. And guilt and shame is what I’m holding it in. And you know something? It’s stronger than we are, and it’s going to come out one way or the other. So when I can turn loose, open my hands up, turn loose of that guilt and shame, that divine energy, that light can integrate with us.

So yeah, October 1, I said OK. You know, I said it in my book, I’m committing the next 20 years of my life to men’s work, and I mean it. I put it in print. I guess I need to do it. Well, a couple weeks after that, mid-October, a woman called me up and said, “Let’s have coffee.” And so we did. Turns out that she was the local director for Charter for Compassion, Karen Armstrong’s organization. And she and I talked, and she said, “You know, Clay, you really ought to go up to the Parliament of the World’s Religions. It’s in Toronto, the last week of this month. And if you decide to go, would you represent me up there?” I said, “Well, yeah, is there any budget?” And she said, “No.” So I thought, “Well, OK, this is another one of those things where this door is opening, and I need to walk through it.” And I did.

Well, Karen Armstrong had an influence on me in my book. Just look up Charter for Compassion, and one, sign the charter saying, “I as an individual believe in these principles that are about the charter.” IPeople think about compassion as being the soft side of things. Some people say, well, that’s the bleeding hearts club. It’s anything but that. I say compassion is not for sissies. Sometimes you have to do hard things. And the president of the Charter says that a compassionate city is an uncomfortable city because they are leaning into the norms to affect change, and that’s uncomfortable at times.

So I set my intention to meet Karen Armstrong and give her a book. And there she is, and to get my picture with her holding my book. It’s pretty cool. But I also had looked, and I said, “I want to meet the board chair for the Charter.” And I kind of ferreted out where he was, and I went and talked to him, and I shared with him what we were doing with our men’s circle. And I pointed out to him and said, “You know, I’m just looking around here at the Parliament, like 10,000 people, 80 religious traditions, countless sessions going on. Do you realize that there’s not one session on men?” He said, “My goodness, isn’t that something.” I said, “Yeah, and furthermore, the Charter for Compassion has got 12, they call them sectors, their initiatives. And the last one, they’re in alphabetical order, the last one I saw on the website was Women and Girls. Where’s the Men and Boys?” I said, “My vision for the Charter is that there be a Men and Boy....” Well, I said just men. And he said, “Well, if you add boys to that, why don’t you write it?”

And I said, OK. Another door opening. No, I’m not going to sit down and write it. But I’m going to create the conversation. He said to me, “OK, why don’t you introduce yourself to the woman who leads the Women and Girls sector? and you’ll see what she’s got going on, and learn from that.” That’s what we’ve been doing. And the truth of the matter is that in a way, the Women and Girls sector are giving birth to the Men and Boys sector. I’m translating what I’m learning. It’s not going to be the same. We have different things going on with us. We have different issues and stuff.

So I’m still up there at the Parliament, and I run into an organization called Gender Equity and Reconciliation, International. In a nutshell, they are about deep healing between men and women. And it’s recognizing that both men and women are wounded by the patriarchy and creating a space for women and men to come together and do that deep work. And I spoke with them for just a few minutes, But he said, “Why don’t you come out? We’ve got a facilitators workshop. I said, “Well you got any budget?” He said, “No.” I said OK. So after the Parliament, I flew home, changed clothes, and flew to Seattle, and I spent a week out there. And it was a transformative week for me.

And for men and women to come in together, a group of 20 or 30, and to go to that level, and to hear each other’s wound, to connect on that level, there’s an alchemy that happens. And it’s eye-opening. It’s one thing to generally know, but when a person really gets down to it, and they’re sharing that most intimate fear, that wound, you can’t walk away and be the same person. It changes you.

But this is what is so exciting to me about the Gender Equity and Reconciliation. We’re doing our work. We men have got to up our game. We’ve got to come up here and meet women where they are, and that work is work that men have got to do with men. We’ve got to get over this “I don’t want to be vulnerable” business. You know, there’s half a dozen different models for men’s work, and there are hybrids and stuff, but you’ve got the Jungian model, you know, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover. You’ve got Robert Bly, which is mythopoetic. You’ve got Mass Movement. You’ve got neopagan, drum beating in the woods. You’ve got the traditional, you know, Knights of Columbus. And then you’ve got this integrative reflective.

All those models are kind of an outside-in approach except for the integrative reflective. These are “break the man down, get him to his heart, and then grow him from there so that he can connect head and heart.” What the Circles of Men Project recognizes is that there’s a whole population of men out there that are already in their heart, and they’ve gotten there because something is broken. They’ve been broken open. They don’t need somebody to break them open; they’ve already been broken open, and they’re in shame, or they’re in fear, or they’re in guilt, and they don’t know where to go because they’ve gone through their recovery program, and they’re looking for something a little bit higher level, maybe something a little more positive. And I can speak with my wife deeply, but there’s still a level underneath that that she just doesn’t have a frame of reference to connect. So I need to go to another man, but we’re raised, “Don’t trust other men. Don’t show your underbelly.” So where do I go?

So if we can create a circle of men where we can begin to open those hands up, connect with one another, then we can do our work. That will enable us to then be ready to move into something like Gender Equity and Reconciliation.

Now, that’s not to say I don’t agree with those other models. I do. Matter of fact, I’m in conversation with the board chair for the Mankind Project. Mankind Project is a big one, and it’s about rites of passage, and it’s about breaking, I want to say it’s productively, but it’s opening the man to examine himself. But it’s coming in from a different frame of reference. Absolutely valuable, and the Mankind Project is also connected to Gender Equity and Reconciliation.

And it turns out that one of the women who is a trainer for the Gender Equity and Reconciliation organization is from Kenya. And when I was out there, she said, “Why don’t you fly down to Kenya and do some work here. Do a men’s retreat here.” And I was going to do that, but a rocket attack on a hotel in Nairobi kind of shut things down. The State Department said no go. But tomorrow, I’ll be on my way to Kenya. I’ll be running a young men’s retreat. It’ll be a 3 day retreat. The first evening at least is going to be one question: what is it to be a man in Kenya? Who am I, this western white male, to come over there and think I’ve got the answer? You guys gotta teach me first. Help me. Assimilate me in, so then I can take my wisdom and share it. Not teach it, but share it, after we’ve built trust, after you’ve heard my story, after you’ve seen me open and share, stand in my truth with an open heart. It’ll be 30 or 40 young folks, and I’ve got 2 gentlemen that are there from Kenya who are my co-facilitators. I’m just thrilled with the opportunity.

So things like that are unfolding and unfolding and unfolding. Every day something’s unfolding. And this whole idea that once one is committed to one’s path, and they’re in line, and they’re on purpose, that providence moves. The divine will of God moves. Well, let me tell you, that’s not a metaphor. I’m learning that every day. The next thing happens, the next thing happens, the next thing happens. And I’ve got more uncertainty financially now than I’ve ever had, and I’m more at peace than I’ve ever been because I’m on purpose.

So in years past, I’d be a bucket of nerves right now. I’ve got to get my PowerPoint slides. I’ve got to get this thing all nailed down before I go, and I’ve got to go blah blah blah. Well, no. I’ll show up. And it’s how I show up and recognize that so much of life cannot be scripted. It’s all about showing up.

So I’m thrilled to be doing that. After that… Let’s see. I come back, and a few days later, I go up to Baldwin City, Kansas, and there’s a men’s retreat there that I’ll participate in. And then I come back from there. I go to Houston, and the Unity of Houston has invited me down to work with their team to give them a workshop on doing a men’s circle. And they had some budget to spend on that.

Rod: Somebody finally said, “Yes, there’s a budget.”

Clay: Yeah, all of this has been out of my own pocket! Yeah, but so I do that, and I get back from that, the first couple of days of October I fly to Atlanta. I get picked up there to go to North Carolina to do another Unity retreat. And I come back from there, have a little bit of a break, and then October 16th is an alchemy event in Seattle, where the woman who heads up the Women and Girls sector and me and a group of people are coming together to put on a day-long event, and there’ll be men coming and using circle principles to get a sense of what it feels like to speak on a heart level with other men. Women running circles, doing the same work, and then in the afternoon we’ll come together and have a mini-taster they call it. They’ll get a taste of what the Gender Equity and Reconciliation work is all about. There will be, we’re anticipating about 300 people to be at that. So it’s blossoming.

In May, I was invited to join the Gender Equity and Reconciliation team at the United Nations. And we put on a workshop for the Committee on Spirituality, Values, and Global Concerns. The first step into the United Nations. And what an incredible experience that was, to be part of that, women, men and women from all over the world. And the common theme is the patriarchy system around the whole world, and it’s wounded the whole world. And to be in that, immersed in that, with the United Nations of all places, again, I would’ve never dreamed that. And to make that, just those few days, it moved the needle just a little bit.

I go back to servant leadership. To create an inspired vision, to model the way, to enable others to act, to encourage the heart. That’s… To set a vision for something greater than yourself. It’s connecting at the heart level with another person, connecting on a level of compassion, bringing that good energy into the environment. And that’s not la la land, that’s the real deal.

Why not connect at a deeper level? I spent my career chasing a paycheck and had my chest cracked open and was reminded that there’s a little bit more to life. And look at the stark difference that I’m witnessing within myself since the first of October. I am connected to something greater than myself, and I’ve got a passion for it. And it’s helping me heal along my path. And I’m trusting that to make it sustainable, that the funding will be there, the part-time consulting work will happen. But I’m not focusing on getting this job or getting that job. I’m aiming at something higher.

Rod: Well, it’s good to know that you’ve really slowed down for retirement, have a nice relaxing time sitting on a beach. You’re a busy man, and I really appreciate that you committed the team to me and my little project.

Clay: Well, I appreciate the opportunity. I really do. And I want to thank you too. Well good. Are we complete?

Episode 021 - No One Gets Out of Childhood Unscathed

Wow, that was a long hiatus! Welcome to Season 3 of Caterpillar Goo. This season, let’s do a meditation on something that I think has great potential for changing the world: non-traditional understandings of masculinity. Our first episode of the season is an interview with Brad Clark, a member of the Austin Stay-at-Home Dads at the same time that I was a member. Brad is an amazing father, and I love following his continuing adventures on Facebook, especially in the summer when he and the kids engage in what he calls Camp Dad. Now that’s a summer camp!

Brad opens up about what it was like growing up a smart, creative, artistic kid in the middle of rural west Texas, the heart of high school football culture and cattle ranching, and how that childhood affects and informs his own parenting today. Thank you so much to Brad for sharing his time, and for being open and vulnerable in talking about some difficult topics.

Our opening theme is “Start Again” by Monk Turner and Fascinoma. Other music that appears in this episode:

“Bully” by Tarantula at 8:21

“Wild Ones” by Jahzzar at 11:25

“Ice Where Your Parents’ Love Should Be” by Kyle Preston at 16:27

“Happy Clappy” by John Bartmann at 23:06

“Paralytic Insomnia” by David Hilowitz at 25:49

“All Who Are Weary” by Hyson at 29:27

“Caterpillar Brigade” by Podington Bear at 36:41

“Catharsis” by Anitek at 42:33

Special thanks to Flora Folgar for her time, her support, her encouragement, and her editing skills.

Here’s the transcript:

I always loved art, but I had no idea how to do it, but I just wanted to make things, invent things, be a scientist, and probably because of Batman and all the gadgets and Spider-Man getting powers but having to invent his own webslingers. For like a 5-year-old, that’s it. You’re going to make this stuff.

Because I grew up in the middle of nowhere on a ranch, there’s not a lot of time to think about doing other stuff. There’s always something going on. There’s activity and a chore to be done. There just is. So, I was pretty lucky that I could still just spend the day making cardboard weapons to match He-Man’s sword, or sit and draw characters and just run around and play.

And so when I got further along in school and realized that the kids around me weren’t reading the stuff I was reading, and the kids around me weren’t drawing and had almost a hatred for art. There were several times, even at like 1st grade or something, you know, “Look at the microscope and draw what you see.” And mine came out pretty well, or I’d be really excited to try to draw it well, and then for I don’t even know what reason, the negative reaction towards any of that was so strong from the kids in my class and from just general. It just felt like any kind of trying to be better for myself was met with, “Oh, you think you’re better than us.” So that was really difficult, because I always wanted to connect with people.

I think being an only child and having interests and expressing that, I had very little feedback besides the dogs and the cows and my parents that… how you interact with other people and express that can affect how they react to you. So in school, and growing up, I had no idea what… why… like, “I told you this fact! If you don’t believe me, why are you dumb?” I’m sure that that was the impression I was giving off, and I had no idea. Right? I just get super excited about it, and then, my parents’ willingness to protect me from having to do the chores and the work that other kids were probably having to do allowed me time that they didn’t have. And maybe that created jealousy..

I got good at running. The playgrounds were the buried tractor tires and scales. And I figured out really early on that I could fit in the smallest tire, so I could run faster than the kids chasing me, and I could get to the small tire and wedge myself up in it. And if I got there first, they couldn’t find me very fast, so I could hide in the tire. And then I could, if they left me alone, then I’d come out, and I’d run somewhere else.

But ignoring it, I just never knew how to do that. They were doing stuff to me. They took my stuff. What do I do? I ignore it, and then I never see that thing again? Or do I tell the teacher? Most of the time, I got in trouble equally or worse than whoever was picking on me. They did something; if I retaliated, I got it worse. If I didn’t retaliate, I was still involved, and I still got punished, and in west Texas, that meant the stupid… In elementary school, it meant the principal with a paddle with holes drilled in it, in a big wooden plank with tape wrapped around it that whistled when they swung it. And then you’d sit in the hall and hear the other kids screaming. And then it was your turn.

And then you’d be in trouble because they also now came out of that not learning a damn thing except that, “We both just got punished, and now I’m going to get you. When we’re out of here, I’m coming after you.” Right? And then you had to ride on the bus with them.

By the time 9th grade, yeah, I’m in high school, that question now just was like, “Oh no. What’s wrong with me? I’m broken. Something’s wrong.” I’m not the sports kid, and into weird things and just on top of being incredibly shy and not wanting to be in front of people, or talk in front of people, and I didn’t want to. If I got up from my desk, the things I cared about it at my desk were going to be stolen. The kids that didn’t like me or that were bullying me were going to do things to make it worse for me to be up in front of everybody. So every time I had to do something besides just sit at my desk and get through the day, it just meant that I was a target.

And so, again, I would look at that and go, “Why are you acting that way? That’s stupid.” And if you tell people that, that does not work. Guess what? It just makes them not like you. And I didn’t care for football either. I was like, “This doesn’t have swords or guns or adventure or bull whips like Indiana Jones. This is just people standing around, then they run into each other. This is dumb.” This is also a very unpopular thing to have as an opinion in a group where everybody plays football.

But so, that’s the pattern that’s been over and over again, everywhere I went. And it turns out, again, that that is not the best way to approach socializing with other kids. But I liked being around girls from birth. I don’t know. I remember just liking being around girls for whatever. I just, I like them. They’re not mean, usually. They would like to draw, or they would do other things. “OK, well, I’m sorry that you’re an idiot, and I don’t want to hang out with you, but your girlfriend is nice, and I like her. I’m going to hang out with her, and if you have a problem, too bad.”

Again, not great social skills. It sounds stupid, and it sounds like it’s a… like, “Oh, well, you know, you could’ve tried to be friends with people.” Yeah, but I didn’t want to be friends with people that were doing the things they were doing, and I didn’t know how to be friends with that and be OK being around it. Like, “Oh, they’re going out and drinking alcohol on the weekends. Well, that’s… I don’t want… That’s not what I’m doing. I’m underage, one. Two, do you know what that does to you?”

So I just went like, “Art. I can hide in art.” And I ended up hiding in the art room and theater and finding creative ways to just not be around the rest of the school. I loved animation. I loved special effects. I liked movie stuff. I liked building things. That’s what I still wanted to do. It was just hiding in the arts until I could get out of town. And as soon as it was done, that’s where I left. It’s like, “I’m going to go to school in Florida for film. That’s what I’m doing. I’m just going to go, just get out and start over.”

I went to school for film originally. And I was in the game industry. That was where I wanted to be, and I got hired. Yeah, animation was the direction I was going, and quickly I ended up in a bunch of other different positions, some technical, some animation, some programming, some just solving problems and figuring out solutions for things. And I loved it. I mean, I loved doing the work, and I liked the challenge of it, but I was stuck on a computer all day in an office. That was years of my life. Well that means you come in, and you leave at dark, and the weekends disappear, and there’s no sun, and you basically are on your computer for 14 hours a day. Carpal tunnel. My wrists and arms locked up.

That was my experience from going from working in a world where I was working all the time and handling stuff, and people were relying on me, and I could figure out anything, to realizing that this is not healthy. We’re going to have a kid. I’m going to try to stay home and be the parent for awhile, because that was, in our relationship, the better choice. She, my wife had a better job, more stable hours. I was flexible with work. I could pick up work easily. I could do freelance, or I could stay connected to the industry easier.

I’m just going to do this for like a year. It’s no big deal. But also, I’m sick of working, and I want to see this kid before…” I’ve watched other people around me go through divorces working overtime, through multiple kids that are, they don’t even know who they are. I’m not going to do that. And it’s expensive. Me working overtime to not see my kid to pay extra taxes and daycare? This is stupid. I’m not doing this. My wife is fine with me staying home. She wants to keep working. Let’s do this. And that was what the catalyst was.

So then, I’m now staying home with my baby, and I look around, and I’m like, “Yeah, I am a guy staying home with a baby. And this feels comfortable to me, but why is everyone else freaking the fuck out?” You know? Like, you go to a store, and everyone’s like, “What are you doing? Oh, look at you! How lucky! Are you taking the day off work?” And it’s like, “No. What’s wrong with you?” You know, it was like that same reaction of like, “Dad’s can be parents too. What kind of… What’s wrong with all of you?” You go to a playground, and it’s like, “Oh. What’s this guy doing here?”

So like that transition, coming from… It was the best thing I could have ever done was to quit full time, working in an industry that was toxic and overworking, and I was hiding myself in the work. Now I’m a parent. I’m a dad. I’m a stay-at-home dad, so that’s what that is. Because my reaction to that was, “I can figure this out,” it made for a great fit most of the time. “Oh, she’s crying. She’s upset. Go through the list. I can handle this stage.” 16:08

And you can’t fix shit. Nothing is solvable, because that little person that you’ve just introduced into your house is a separate human being that I could not connect with growing up. I was a… If it was an animal, fine. If it was a human, already I didn’t know what to do with you, really.

And it turns out that now you’re living with a bully worse than any of the kids that you’d grown up with who’s now got everything that is a flaw, they can trigger immediately. And really, it’s just everything that I was self-conscious about or worried about or scared of came forward, because you start imagining all these things and projecting things out, and it comes back on you like, “Oh, you’re responsible for that. You have to fix it. If you don’t, all these things are going to happen. Oh, it’s your fault. You’ve failed. You can’t do this.”

And I thought all of that was squared away. I thought I had handled all of it. Turns out, when you have children, anything that you thought you had handled by basically just shutting down, putting away, or walling off does not stay there. Surprise! No one tells you that part of parenting. Like, guess what? They are going to mirror back every insecurity and every worry and every stage of your life. As they grow, they are going to continue to shine lights on and break through and expose and wear away anything that you’ve put up in defensiveness and not dealt with.

I’d never dealt with it. I had masked it. I had pushed it back. I had let it just sit there simmering, and when I would get angry or upset, it was always me. This is my fault. I’ve had, at that point, 20-plus years of people giving me social feedback that something’s wrong with me, so at that point, I was just the ultimate self bully and self punisher.

2004ish, if you were a man with a baby, “You must need help. You can’t handle this. No man should be out with a baby.” And you’re like, “OK. I’m not just borrowing some friend’s baby to try to pick up women. I just want to go play at the park and have my kid see other children.” And the overwhelming reaction is, that is wrong. Also in here is, “You’re an idiot. You’re wrong. You’re lying to yourself. Everyone else has already told you you’re a failure. You’re a failure.”

How do you separate that? You push it away until the kid reflects back because she’s had a bad day, or she doesn’t understand how to walk or just learning to be a human, and then you suddenly feel like you have failed because you can’t understand what they’re going through, or you can’t fix it. And now you also can’t fix it for the person you’re living with and who you love. So now you feel like you’ve let everyone in the house down, including yourself.

And then we had our second kid, and I met more dads, and the economy crashed, and everyone was out with their kids everywhere. You’re finally around enough people that are good at what they’re doing, and you’ve made new friends. And you’ve got that experience, like, “I can handle a baby.” You’re changing them in the dark in the middle of the night blindfolded, half asleep, and the baby ends up back asleep. You know, it was not a big deal. Like this is easy.

I think when the economy shifted, and everyone suddenly was having to just survive, parents, men and women both, were like, “I don’t care who’s watching the kid. We can’t pay for daycare.” So you’d go to the park, and there’d be all kinds. It wasn’t just nannies in one end of Austin and moms in the other and then some random dads in the middle of Austin. It was just like everybody was out everywhere trying to just get by. I just feel like I watched that happen as we were having our second kid, and I was like, “This is now just the world. Everyone is just the village mentality. Everyone’s gotten this experience a little bit, and it’s not as weird.”

And I’m sure some of that is confidence, right? You’ve gotten more comfortable as a parent, but also, you just quit getting that reaction from people, like, “Oh, there’s a dad.” So I think for me, when I realized that I was a good parent was when we finally started music together and started going to classes, and the environment basically normalized adults laying on the floor playing with instruments and singing and goofing around, and also my kid made a best friend, and I connected with other parents, and I was like, “OK, this is good.”

And I was in a room full of new mothers, I was the experienced mom of the group. They were all having panics about all this, like being a new parent. And I ended up being the experienced parent, which was a weird feeling. There was just such a drastic shift that, on top of me being confident with my kid and it not being weird to just see a guy with a baby, having the experience of being the mother hen, the experienced mom in the group, was such a good feeling for awhile. And it took the self-confidence and kept it high, and also the worry about being out and someone bothering me about it went away.

And that was all great. That felt comfortable. And then it turns out you still didn’t deal with anything. I had done such a good job of lying to myself that I had taken care of it, that when stuff went wrong, and went wrong-slash-a child’s normal development, and they developed differently, as far as a strong-willed child who is ready to take on the world, and you included, that cycle of “Oh, I need to be prepared for 3 hours of just surviving my child.”

The next child didn’t have that fight. They would just stop. “I’m not going to talk.” Or they just would start to react, and in me, I reacted the way that I did for the first kid, which was, “This is a fight. I’m going to have to survive this for 4 hours, and then it’s going to be fine.” And instead of handling it, I would immediately jump to that place of “panicked, scared, bullied by my own kid” father, which is a terrible place to put yourself in when your kid is just upset because they didn’t get the right cereal spoon or something.

It was just anger, just grouchiness and being snippy. It wasn’t that I was just stomping around. No, it was just lots of little things that I would find and pick at and dig at. And we didn’t spank the kids, and we didn’t… It wasn’t a physical thing, and I wasn’t trying to be verbally abusive. And it wasn’t even that it was that intentional. I was super aware that I didn’t want that to be the message, but it didn’t matter because in my actions and in my words, that was coming across. I didn’t need to say, “Oh, you screwed up,” whatever, and berate them, but just in the interaction, you’d look at it from the outside, and you’d go, “Oh, that is not healthy.”

When I fail, if I get upset, if I yell or I get… if I storm off, or I just explode and take out angry words and just… what words are the most punishing, most manipulative, like just a societal model for what will cut someone down to nothing. Because I practiced on myself for years. I know exactly what words are going to hurt and do damage. It didn’t make me a good father or husband or a good person. It just was exhausting.

And I couldn’t stop it. I could just see it. I could just watch it, and I couldn’t do anything about it. And then every time that would happen, it would reinforce that I was a failure. The bully that was in me, I would attack myself twice as hard. And so it would just continue, and it would just stack on and on until I just couldn’t handle it. I just didn’t feel like I would ever be able to fix it.

You hit a point where you have to get help and you’re afraid to ask for help, because that means that you’re a failure. In my head, it was, “I don’t even know how to ask for help, because what are they going to do? There’s nothing they can do. I should be able to fix this.” I couldn’t be a good role model. This was not how they should be seeing human interaction.

But I finally, finally, reached out to one of the other dads, and I said, “I don’t know how to get help. I know that you have experience with mental stuff, and I just don’t even know what to do.”

He said, “Well, I have a therapist I go to see.” And it was, he was like, “I was freaking out all the time, and then they just said this one thing to me, and once that was it.” I was like, “Are you kidding? It was that simple?” I just basically went, “OK, it’s OK to get help. It’s OK to get help, and it’s OK for it not to work and me to try again. Why am I afraid to try? Why am I punishing myself for punishing myself? It doesn’t even make sense, so finally, I’m going to do it.

I went in, talked to her for a little bit, went “OK.” Came back. “Yeah, all right. I’m going to come back and talk some more.” It started off just, “Yeah, tell me what was your parents’ sacrifice,” whatever. “I was scared to upset them.” Just the history of my worldview. And then she said a couple things, and I just couldn’t even speak. I couldn’t stop crying. I couldn’t talk. And when I did, it felt like I had taken, she said it was like shrapnel, but it felt like a cloak of 100-pound weights had just been dropped or something sharp that was keeping a wound, like a splinter that wouldn’t leave. It just came out. And the moment that happened, it was just like, “Really? Was that it? That can’t be it. I don’t trust it. It can’t be that easy to have asked for help, talked for a little while, and made it better. That’s bullshit. No way.”

I went home and talked to my wife, and weeks went by. I was trying to do some of the things that we had talked about, and it didn’t feel like it was working. It still just felt like I had masked it, and I’ve worked around it. Like cheating on a diet or something. It was just like, “This is not…” And so we talked some more, and there was another few sessions where it just was… I think one session was basically an hour of me barely able to breathe and crying, and another layer, and another piece of just glass being taken out, and over and over again, where it was like, “I don’t think there’s anything left. There’s nothing still in me that is hurting me. I’ve described it. I’ve talked about it. I’ve pulled it out. I trust that I’m enough, and I’m OK. I don’t have to punish myself for this stuff anymore. It’s OK to fail. It’s OK not to have everything under control. It’s OK to be broken.

Obviously, you can’t just flip a switch and be fixed permanently and perfectly, but I know what that process was. Once you go to the gym, and you see the weight machines and you’ve been shown how to use it, you don’t suddenly forget. Once you’ve learned it and learned the process, it’s familiar enough that you can come back to it, and it doesn’t feel like, “Oh, I’ll never be able to do this.” And that’s how I feel like with when I know that I haven’t slept enough, or when I know that things are just rough. I start to react badly or, “Well, I messed up.” And that’s where it ends most of the time. I may still react poorly. I still may watch myself explode a little bit or throw some fuel on the fire just to watch what happens, but the fallout after is not there.

I felt like I needed something for me, I started back in martial arts. I went, and I just wanted to do something again that was just for me, to get out of the house. I lost like 40 pounds, and I didn’t think that… I wasn’t trying to lose weight, it was like, “Oh, I feel good.” I don’t feel like I’m the fat kid anymore, which was also the other ridiculous part of growing up. It’s ridiculous that I was being picked on about it, but it’s ridiculous that I accepted that as the truth.

And I finally went, “OK, well why? What is that? Why am I accepting that negativity and holding on to that?” The embarrassment of just taking your shirt off at the pool or with the kids or whatever, you’re just like, “I can’t. I don’t… I’m ugly.”

And then I finally went, “Well, why? How stupid is that? What is that feeling keeping me from?” It’s keeping me from doing all kinds of stuff. “I should be better.” And what came out of therapy was, every time you feel like that… You should be? Says who? Why are you putting that pressure on yourself? You’re learning. Accept the learning process. Accept that you’re doing this, and that’s OK. That’s why you’re doing this.

And that was the biggest shift ever, because I finally was allowing myself to go through the process of learning, and it wasn’t embarrassing to not know how to do something, or it wasn’t embarrassing to fail. Because it was just a way to build. This is now something I get to work on, instead of punishing myself over and over, why didn’t I do it already. How stupid is that? “Oh, you should already know how to do this.”

You know, I watched my kids from birth fail over and over again to try to learn how to walk, to speak, to read. The only way they got through that is because they didn’t care. You don’t have a baby who’s embarrassed to try to speak because they can’t speak already. They just try to say the words over and over again until they figure it out. And you encourage that. “Yes! You said, ‘Da.’” You know? The encouragement level is so high for even an attempt. Why don’t I give myself the same permission?

And so every stage of my life, every point of contact, it just opened up so much more richness in my ability to try things and learn things and to not punish myself over it. It was incredible. You know, I’m going to go to the pool and learn to dive with my kids. And so, if you want to see something funny, it’s that for a summer camp with me and the kids was me on a diving board learning to high dive, without my shirt on and moms watching their 4-year-olds walk up the ladder that a 6-foot 40-something-year-old is on at the same time learning to do the same thing that they’re 4-year-old’s doing, and I was like, “I don’t care if I’m… I don’t have 6-pack abs; I just… I’m getting to learn how to dive with my kids, and I get to show up, and I get to be here.” And it was the most fun thing ever. I was the only adult, and what happened out of that was people were like, “Ah, I wish I could’ve done that. Oh, that’s so great you’re doing that.” Yeah, it is. Nothing’s stopping you from doing it either. And I would’ve missed all of that because I wouldn’t have given myself permission to do it.

Asking for help and then accepting the help, was the biggest thing that, besides meeting my wife, that was such a huge shift in my entire world that was… that I didn’t know I needed. There’s… It certainly is felt. It’s felt in my relationship with my wife. It’s felt in the relationship with the kids. It’s felt with being brave enough to just stand up in front of a group of people and learn to dive. And yeah, I’m going to fail bad, and I’m going to try again. And a few times, I smashed hard, and everyone felt it and heard it, and I was like, “Yes! That was awesome! I completely tried the best I could and failed, and I’m going to get it again.” And then I’d go up again. And I couldn’t have done that 3 years ago. I mean, I couldn’t have done it before going to therapy and just coming to terms with allowing myself to actually go through the process of being vulnerable and learning how to fail in a way that gives me growth as opposed to just punishment.

And I still don’t really understand how. I don’t know what therapy did. I don’t know how it worked. I don’t know why going in and talking to a stranger and just having reassurance that it wasn’t something broken in me from someone who I had no connection with, that allowed that to connect where I had blocked it off before. Clearly, everyone has their own stuff. Clearly, if you see one person that looks like they’re together, there’s a hole somewhere that they’re struggling with. No one gets out of childhood unscathed.

Episode 018 - Too Old For This

Earlier this month, I told a story at the Austin Public Library’s live storytelling event. This whole project is having the desired effect of making me more comfortable with public speaking, and storytelling themes are a fun way to have a built-in writing prompt. I highly recommend it as a creative outlet!

We have two more episodes almost complete. As always, please rate and review us in iTunes, and if you have a story you’d like to share with us or you’d like to be interviewed about a transformative experience in you life, let us know! i’m at rod@rodhaden.com.

Our theme song is “Start Again” by Monk Turner + Fascinoma.

Here’s the transcript:

So I am definitely way too old for this. Deep in a dark cave, with my heart pounding, and my lungs burning, and my limbs weak and shaky, I know, with absolute certainty, that I am going to have a heart attack at the age of 42 and die. And the rangers will have to come and fetch my body. And my son is going to be traumatized for life and have nightmares about dark, narrow spaces. And children who will never know my name will whisper stories about me over campfires: The Ghost of Enchanted Rock!

And actually, I didn’t die in that hole, so don’t be scared. It’s October, and Halloween is coming, but this is not actually a ghost story.

When my son was born, I became a stay-at-home dad. I quit my job, and I spent all my time with him. We went everywhere together. We did everything together. But as he started to get older and went from a baby to a toddler to a preschooler to an elementary school kid, I got more and more depressed. He went to school, and I didn’t know how to get back into the workforce. I didn’t know how to represent that time on a resume. I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up. So because I didn’t know what to do with myself, I did nothing. I would drop him off at school, and I would go home and go back to bed. And I drank heavily, every day.And my marriage that wasn’t exactly rock solid to begin with, started picking up speed on its downhill race towards divorce.

So when my son was 7, and I found myself with him on top of Enchanted Rock, I was not in great shape spiritually, emotionally, and definitely not physically. I can tell you, it is a long, steep walk up that rock when you’re 50 pounds overweight and you have not exactly been keeping up with the cardio. So I was already spent when he noticed a little wooden sign that says, “Cave Entrance.” So I thought, “Well, let’s go check it out,” but it wasn’t like a cave. It was a hole in the ground, about two feet wide. And I thought, “Well, that can’t be it.” But a group of about 10 or 15 high school age kids came by. They were with a church group, and they started disappearing into the hole, one by one.

And my son said, “Dad! Dad! Can we go in the cave too, Dad? Can we go?” And I thought, “Oh, shit.” I had been a Boy Scout, so I had a flashlight with me, you know, “Be Prepared,” so I couldn’t use that excuse, but I started thinking, “What if I lose him down there? What if he slips and falls and breaks a bone? Or what if I do? His mother was already pretty annoyed with me at this point, and if I lost her son or brought him back in several pieces, it was not going to be good for the marriage.

But I had never discouraged him from trying new things and finding out what he was capable of, and I didn’t want him to grow up terrified of the world and all the many ways that it could hurt him. So I said, “Sure, buddy. Let’s go.” And we went down into that hole after those kids.

And he wanted to be the one to hold the flashlight, so I put the wrist strap on his wrist, and he was just bursting with pride and excitement. And I was the best dad in the whole world.

And then he scrambled off like a monkey, going after those older kids that were surging through that cave, and I was left in the dark. And I couldn’t see where to put my hands or my feet, and I was not the best dad in the world. I was just the biggest idiot.

But I managed to reel him back in with my voice. He came back, and he shined the light for me, and we worked our way through together. There was a lot of climbing and sliding and crawling. It was a very narrow, slippery space. And he kept calling out, “Hey guys! Wait up!” to those older kids. He is an only child, and he’s very sociable, and he very much wanted to be on their team. So I tried. I tried to go faster. But my heart was pounding in my ears, and I was drenched in a cold sweat, and that’s when I knew, I was not going to make it out of that hole. We were too far from the entrance to go back, I had no idea how far it was to an exit, and I did not have very much more left in me.

But at that moment, we heard one of the high school kids say, “Hey look, a light!” Thank God! And we came around the corner, and sure enough, there’s a gap in the rocks, and the sunshine is shining through, and all those kids have kind of bottlenecked at the exit, waiting their turn to climb out. So my son got to catch up with the kids at the back of the line and chat, and reminisce over the gave and go over every inch and remember every nook and cranny, and I heard him say, “Yeah, that wasn’t so hard.”

So no, I was not too old for this. But I was too far down a dark, deep hole of my own. And I started to climb back out. And within a couple of months, I quit drinking. I got back on track with the exercise. And within about half a year, I had accepted that my marriage was over, and I got a job and an apartment, and I started living again.

So my son, now he’s 11. When we go back to Enchanted Rock, which we do a couple times a year now, he encourages the people that we find there that are almost too scared to try. They stand on the edge of that hole, and they look down, doubting themselves, and it’s almost like he’s talking to that other version of me when he tells them, “It’s not that scary! You can do it. Come on, we’ll do it together. I’ll show you!” And he does.

Episode 004 - The Quiet Man

Rod Haden

I hope you're all having a wonderful holiday season! I certainly am. Time is flying and my days are packed. This week we have a conversation with my father, Rudy Haden, a man who has fascinated me ever since I was a wee lad. He's that special kind of quiet that invites others to project onto him whatever they want him to be. Getting him to open up about his past, present, and future, and what he thinks and feels about all 3 was a very special treat for me. I've known the man for 45 years and heard some stories when we talked that I have never heard before. He is my role model for what it means to be a man, a father, and husband, and though we are very different from each other, I couldn't have asked for a better teacher. Thanks, Dad!

Transcript:

I don’t move around very good. I’m in pain quite a bit. It comes and goes. It comes and goes. Some days it’s worse; some days it’s not. It doesn’t seem to depend on how much exercise I get. Some days it’s painful to exercise; sometimes it’s not.

I sit and try to meditate, and it does nothing for me, but when I’m really quiet, or when I’m just totally listening to music, it’s like somebody plants knowledge into my head. I know and I understand things, which I had no idea before. So my meditation is basically checking out and listening to music.

Early on in our marriage, I was in an apprenticeship program, tool and die maker. I had to really concentrate at work. And it’s not easy for me to relate to other people, but I really worked on the journeymen. I would constantly hang around them, and ask them questions, and ask them the best way to do stuff, and I got in as I guess a favorite pupil with about 3 or 4 of them.

So that when I’d come home, I was exhausted, and I would lay down on the floor and play a Beethoven record or something with earphones on, and Robbie would get so pissed off at me because she was making dinner and taking care of the kids, and I was checked out. She didn’t understand that that’s the way I did my meditation.

I’ve been in and out of a lot of churches. My parents were married in a… I can’t think of the religion right now. Reverend Grace. I remember the name of the preacher that married them, and that was there. The guy wore a collar, but he wasn’t a Catholic. But he was deaf. He ministered to the deaf people. He was deaf himself.

He was in the deaf community, and in the basement of his church is where they held all the deaf fraternity meetings.It was based on the Masons. Only it was all deaf men. It was called the Frat. That was what my mom and dad called it. The Frat. We’re going to the Frat. When they went to Frat, the women all sat outside in the waiting room. The kids played on the floor. And when the big meeting was over, they’d throw the doors open, and everybody would go in and have a big social event.

And then my mother’s side of the family was deep into the Reform Christian Church, and I went to a lot of Bible schools and Sunday schools and stuff in that until I was about 3rd or 4th grade. And then I felt like I needed to get hooked up with different churches, so I went to a Methodist church, I went to a holy roller church with a friend, and I went to a couple of Catholic services. As a teen. None of that stuff stuck with me. 

Just because there was so much religion on my mother’s side of the family, I don’t know, I just felt like I was supposed to do it. In order to be accepted by them, I should have a church, but I never could find one. And I came away from it having no respect for organized religion because the main thing they wanted, no matter what it was, they wanted money up front. Seemed like everything was driven by the collection plate. If you were a big donor, you got a lot of attention. If you weren’t, you didn’t get much. And that’s what really turned me off. 

My dad was born on the farm in Kansas, and he was sent to the Kansas State Home for the Deaf and Blind. My dad was born deaf, they think because in the early days when they had the traveling doctors going around the frontier and the farms and stuff, my grandmother evidently had a lot of morning sickness, and the doctor prescribed quinine. Well, later on they found that quinine did stuff to the unborn child. 

My mom came over on the boat from Holland witH her mother. And my mother, we don’t know if she was born that way, or it was some kind of sickness or something that she got in Holland or on the boat or what, but ever since she was a baby, she was deaf. Then my mother was, because she was deaf mute, she was sent off to the school in Colorado Springs.

The strange thing is that the Colorado School for the Deaf and Blind insisted that deaf people learn to lip read and speak, and so my mother was pretty good at lip reading and speaking. And they were discouraged from using sign language, so if you compare the deaf people now that use sign language to the old people that use sign language, now it’s all really broad and all over the place, and the older people, their signs are all close in and secretive about it, where now they’re just flamboyant about it. Their signs are all over the place. 

And my dad, the Kansas School for the Deaf and Blind weren’t that way. They were teaching them to do stuff and sign language and be able to be self-sufficient. 

See, in my dad’s side of the family, all the people learned sign language, the hearing and the non-hearing. So I had no idea whether they were hearing, any memory of whether they were hearing or not. On my mom’s side of the family, I had one uncle that learned the deaf sign language, learned the deaf alphabet, and he could do that. He was the only one that made any effort to sign to my mother. All her other brothers and sisters didn’t because she had been sent to school, and they were told that she was to learn to lip read, and so they would talk to her. But the thing of it is, it’s really easy to ignore somebody like that, because all you do is turn away. Turn around, they can’t see your signs. They can’t read your lips. So, whenever there was an argument or something, it was easy just to walk away from that.

My dad’s family had a big get-together once every summer. They came from all over the place. They were Kansas, Nebraska, western Colorado, and they’d have these big, long picnics on the weekend, and there were aunts and uncles and cousins. I didn’t even know all the cousins I had. But I never just seemed to fit in.

He worked in a factory. He started out in a printing shop, a paper cutter. Cutting stuff for the print shop. Then ended up in Shwayder Bros./Samsonite, cutting stuff for the suitcases and plastic tops of card tables and chairs. And my mom worked there on the assembly line putting stuff together. And my Uncle Jim and Aunt Julia also worked in the same factory. Shwayder Bros. hired a lot of, I guess what they called the handicapped people. 

Clarence, he was a rancher. He raised horses, and at one time he had a riding stable up on Lookout Mountain just above Denver. And they had 2 boys, and the youngest one, John, he had a pinto pony named Ruben. And they taught me how to ride. And I could put the bridle on Ruben, lead him over to the fence, they had a rail fence, and I’d climb up the rail fence and get on him. And I was, what, 5 years old.

John would go off hunting. He’d go out, he had a rifle, and he’d go out shooting magpies. I had no idea what magpies were. I was determined I was going to follow him one day and see where he was going, and I’d see these cow patties in various places, you know. So I thought cow patties were magpies, and cousin John shot them. I couldn’t have been 4 or 5 years old. And then he, one time he put his rifle in, we had a, there was a kind of a mud room entrance to the farmhouse, and he left his rifle leaned up against the thing, and he had a thing in the chamber, and I went up there and was messing with it, and I inadvertently pulled the trigger. And it shot a hole in the roof. My Uncle Clarence was really pissed off at John for doing that.

My bed was in this big room where the radio was. There was no TV in those days. It was during the war. World War II. I remember there was a big old tree in the backyard. When I wanted to get away, I’d just climb up in that tree and sit up there all by myself. Could see the whole neighborhood. 

I don’t remember when I realized that there was a hearing world and a deaf world. You never knew. I mean, you could talk to some people, and you had to sign to some people, and some people were talking and signing, and you know, there was no distinguishment. And a lot of the deaf people could read lips. I don’t know when I realized that. I suppose it happened to me some time in high school when, you know how high school gets. How clannish and cliquish it is, and some kids are favored by the teachers, and some aren’t. I realized I was different. During high school, I was really aware of it because people would kind of shy away from me. If I tried to be friendly with somebody, they wouldn’t necessarily because I was a child of dummies. That’s what deaf people were called in those days. They were deaf and dumb. The deaf and dumb part came from deaf and dumb, couldn’t speak. But the dummy part carried on as not being intelligent.

And then in high school, I don’t ever, in junior high or any of those, I don’t ever remember having a parent-teacher conversation. Nobody ever, none of my teachers ever contacted my parents, even when I wouldn’t do my homework or my grades were down. There was nothing. They just passed me along. And in high school, I signed up to take a Spanish class, and I was discouraged. I should take English. I was going to sign up to take some math classes, and I was discouraged. I was to take a general math class where the big thing was to learn how to write a check and keep a bank account and pay your taxes. There was none of that geometry stuff. I didn’t get hooked on that stuff until my senior year in high school. I finally got into an algebra class. 

And I hated high school. I just didn’t fit. Didn’t know how to talk to girls. I had no experience with girls. When friends come over, it was really awkward. If somebody came home with me, it was really, really awkward because of my parents. My parents would try to be friendly with them, but they didn’t know how to deal with it. And so they just dealt with me away from my house.

I really got big into leatherwork because I had an Industrial Arts teacher, Mr. Landon was… he taught Print Shop, Leather Shop, and Woodworking. And I took all those courses. Originally I thought I was going to be an Industrial Arts teacher, then I thought about getting a degree to be able to become a forest ranger, but there was no way. I couldn’t figure out how in the hell I was going to go to college to do that. Although it was a lot easier to go to college in those days than it is now. The costs weren’t so damn much. 

 And I was really into skiing, through the Boy Scouts. Some of us in the neighborhood learned to ski. It was scary in the beginning until I learned to parallel ski. Once I got out of the snowplow thing. I got fairly good at parallel. I never was Olympic quality, but I could do alright. I just loved the freedom. Just felt free. Riding up to the top of the mountain and letting go. And then after I got out of the Navy, I really went into it for a couple of years. In fact, that’s how I met Ruth, my first wife. We met through a friend, and she was really impressed with my skiing. I took her skiing every weekend. She was really into that. And then somehow we ended up getting married.

I really got into skiing, and it was a really good friend that we skied with a lot. And he said he was going to join the Navy. At that time when you turned 18, you were eligible for the draft, so I turned 18 in 1955, and that was right between the Korean War and the Vietnam War, that period. His argument was, “If we join the Navy before we turn 18, we get out on our 21st birthday. Plus the Navy will send us to school.” He laid it out, you know, that we were going to end up getting drafted for 2 years anyway, and there was this opportunity, and I felt, “Yeah, this is a good idea.” It wasn’t all that analytical, it was it felt right. And so I did it. So we joined the Navy. We took tests and everything, and both of us qualified as machinists.

Yeah, I was out in ‘58. I rejoined in ‘61. I was out for 3 years.

I remember going and applying for this one job, and the guy interviewed me and said, “No, you’re too young. You couldn’t do all that.” And then that was the end of the interview. He didn’t believe me. And at the same time, I was going to night school, it was late ‘50s and early ‘60s recession. And you’d work for 3 months, and you’d get laid off. And you’d work for 3 months and get laid off. 

And then when I had such a hard time with all the on again, off again jobs, and I don’t know how I found out the Navy came up with a need for my particular skill. When I got out the first time, I was a second class petty officer, and they… I found out that I could go back in as a second class petty officer, got assigned to a ship in San Diego. We started, originally it was all those old diesel boats, and we worked on those all the time. And then the nuclear subs started to come in. Some of us were cleared to work on the nuclear subs.

So then I was going to make a career out of it. And I just remember getting a call, the piping over the com. And I just remember, “Petty Officer First Class Haden, report to the quarterdeck!” And I thought, “Oh crap! What have I done now?” I go up there, and a guy hands me, you know, he served me with separation papers, and I opened them up and looked at them, and it was, you know, legal language about… I showed the officer, and I said, “I don’t know what to do about this.” And he said, “Well, the first thing you ought to do is get a hold of the chaplain.” 

I knew things weren’t really good with us, but I didn’t think they were that bad. It was a real slap in the face getting served. I was just dumbfounded. “I don’t know what to do now? What?” I had to ask some officer who was probably a lieutenant junior grade or something and was probably 23 years old or something, you know, “What do I do now?”

So I made an appointment with the chaplain and talked to him, and then he got her and me into counseling. And it broke down and went to divorce. It was really traumatic. I had no idea what to do. I was at a loss. And that chaplain gave me options what to do. “Well, you can just not contest it and let her have the kids and stay in the Navy.” And I thought, “Crap, I’ve seen too many of those guys. I ain’t going to be one of them. I want a relationship with my children.” He just gave me all these different options to think about. If it’s something physical, like a computer or a computer program or a piece of machinery or a car or building or something like that, I’m very analytical. But when it comes to feelings and interactions with people, I’m more intuitive. One of my big things that I’ve known over the years is that when a door opens, you look to see whether you want to go through that door or not, whether it feels right or not, and that’s pretty much the way I’ve gone. From being a piecemeal machinist to a maintenance machinist to a tool and die maker to a numerical control programmer to a software developer, and that’s where I was until I retired. But all of those were, a door opened and I went through. There was no analytical thing about it. Did it feel right? Yeah, that felt like it was a good thing to do. 

And then when the divorce happened, I had already... You know, I was committed for another 4 years. And the padre, the chaplain, said, “You know, you could file for custody. If you get custody, you could get an honorable discharge for hardship.” And I just felt like, “Am I good enough to be a father to those kids?” And I just had the feeling, “Yeah, you can do this, but it ain’t going to happen anyway, but what the hell. Go for it.” And I’ll be damned if it didn’t happen. And I thought, “Oh crap. Now what do I do?” At that time, Harold had just gotten a divorce, and he was a single father with 2 kids. He had this big house. And he said, “You could come live with me, and we’ll help each other out.” And so we did. 

And it’s the best thing that ever happened to me. But at the time, more than resistant to it, I was confused by it, scared of it. What am I going to do now? What am I going to do with the kids that I love so much? I had heard so many terrible things about split families, you know, kids bouncing back and forth and back and forth, loyalties, mothers saying bad things about the father and the father saying bad things about the mother, that at one point I thought that if I ever have to get divorced, then I’ll just let go of the kids, not be in their life. Well that was dumb-headed. I realize that now. Just so many things happened there that I had no clue. I had no idea what I was doing. Just taking it a day at a time.

And then when I got out of the Navy the second time, because I worked on nuclear submarines, I had a top, not a Top Secret, but a Secret clearance, so when I came out, I went to Rocky Flats, which was the big nuclear plant. They made triggers for the atomic bomb. And I applied there, and they said, “Well, it’s probably going to take about 6 months to get your clearance through the FBI.” 3 weeks later, I got a call says, “You’re hired.” 

I was a maintenance machinist. We just went around fixing pumps and stuff, generators. And they opened up an apprenticeship, and I was close to 40 years old. The cutoff date was 40. And I took the test, I went into the interviews and took all the tests and everything they gave us, and there were 2 of us that were picked for the apprenticeship, and I went into that. So I went into the tool and die shop, and that’s where they made all the tooling and everything for the equipment, the nuclear stuff. It was all classified stuff.

Well, when I got… finished my apprenticeship, I became a journeyman, and I worked nights. But during that time, they brought in a milling machine that was numerically controlled, and all those old journeymen, they had no clue about that thing, so I really jumped on that, and I learned all about how to manually program it. And so whenever they wanted to put something on there, why, I was assigned to do it. They had other numerically controlled machines all through the plant. Well, there was an opening there for a programmer, and I applied for it and got it. And in the meantime, during that time I had taken some nighttime college courses on FORTRAN and drafting programs through The University of Colorado.

You know, you get out of marriage and everything, and all you’ve got is work and little kids, and you just figure you need something else. That dating thing was not analytical. That was totally gut. I kept seeing it in the paper and throwing it away, seeing it in the paper and throwing it away. And I read it and thought, “Aw, what the hell. I’ll try it.” And I was ready to give up on that because I had 2 or 3 bad dates. I remember going and walking down the steps into her garden level apartment. And opening that door, and thought, “OK, this is a good one.” And we went out, and the rest is history.

It was such a whirlwind. We were going to get married at 6 months or something. I didn’t think it was right to get married right away. The divorce wouldn’t even be final until March. So then we thought, “OK, in the summer. No, let’s get married in June. How about Spring Break?” And I thought, “My God, this is soon!” But I’ve been following her lead for years. I just know that it sure as hell worked out. Here we are, almost 50 years later. 

When Mom and I met, she was determined that she had found me and that I was the guy, and she was going to marry me, and I had just 2 years ago gotten out of a marriage. I didn’t even know who the hell I was. I had 2 little kids, was living with my brother in his basement, and your Mom was determined we were going to get married, and she was going to have 2 kids. And then we got married, and she was determined she was going to have her own kid. And then she had her own kid, and then she determined that she wanted another one. In those days, it was all the hippie thing, you know. You replenish yourself. So I’d already, I was the husband and a wife, and we had a boy and a girl, so when I got married again, I said, “OK. One more, for Robbie.” But then she was Empty Arm Syndrome or something, and she was determined she was going to have you. And so we had you. Best thing in the world.

After I worked at Rocky Flats for 7 years, I got laid off because they were cutting back, cutting back on nuclear bombs and everything. So they had to cut back on the staff, and they ended up closing Rocky Flats because it was so contaminated. For a long time, I had to go in and be monitored by medical once a year because I was exposed to americium and some other chemicals I don’t remember. I’d go in, and they’d take blood. I was exposed, but I was never contaminated, so I was alright. 

I knew that if I was just a piecemeal machinist, I’d be doing that 3 months on, 3 months off thing for the rest of my life and never getting out of debt. And so I just followed the path. I knew that I had, because the layoff from Rocky Flats, the Bomb Factory, I was back in that mode of working in small shops for short periods of time. And I knew that I was going to get into numerical control. I wanted to. But my goal was the eastern boundary of Colorado, anything west, and the southern boundary of Colorado, anything north. And all I kept getting was this crap in Texas! And they kept offering to bring us down here for a weekend, for a Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and put us up. And I thought, “Well, what the hell. It’s an opportunity to get out and spend the weekend on somebody else’s dime.” And I came down here, and I was interested. They were interested in me.

Because I worked so hard at it. I spent a lot of time self-educating. The computer has been the best damn thing in my life. Although I got a lot of enjoyment out of my kids. Just enjoying watching you do things and try things and being assistant coach for your soccer team and watching Rik at swim meets. I was a timer and a stroke judge, and I also shot the gun. Starter. It was either sit in that stupid tent, or else go out and participate. Mom just really enjoyed sitting there, and I enjoyed watching how the thing worked and keeping track of Rik’s times.

Yeah. I got involved in Scouts because of you. They fill out those papers, and I’d very carefully fill them out so that I didn’t raise any flags to where they’d want me to do something, and then when you guys went into Webelos, I said, “OK, I can do it for a year,” and the next thing I knew, I was a Scoutmaster. I seemed to get all the misfits. We had some strange kids in our troop. 

One of my favorite memories is that Ford Escort you had, when I taught you how to put new brakes on it. We went through one wheel together, and then I showed you how to do it, and then I said, “OK, you’re on your own now.” And then watched you do it on your own. It was big. 

Ruth was a very outgoing person. Early on, her dad was a senior forest ranger, and it entailed being lots of parties and groups and cocktail parties. And it’s pretty much the same with Mom now, Robbie. I’m just also-ran. I just tag along. We go into groups, and she’s willing to talk to anybody, and I have a hard, hard time. Especially with people I don’t know. I can open up like to you. I can have a conversation with you, or I can have a conversation with Rik. You get into a group of people like Rik’s New Years or Christmas when he has people over, I have a hard time talking to those people. Some of them I can talk to because I know them, but I can’t talk very long. I don’t know what to say. My brain just does not work that way. I’m very very shy. I had a hard time in my jobs too. I just never really fit into those kind of groups.

But the thing of it is, my brother Harold went through the same experience, and he didn’t have any trouble. My cousin Jimmy and my cousin Elaine. Man, Elaine was really into it. I mean, she could talk sign language with the fastest of them. And I couldn’t. I could tell that people automatically slowed down when they talked to me, and I would say, “What?” a lot, and they would spell it out, and then I would understand what the sign was. But deaf people don’t like to spell things out. And so, it was easy for me to check out because if you’re not looking at somebody and reading their signs, you’re not conversing with them. So you’re looking over here. They’re signing, and you’re not paying attention. And it’s a cop out, and I realize it now, 70 years later.

If I had nothing in common with, I’m at a loss. Walk up, you know, Robbie can talk to store clerks and have conversations, and I don’t know what the hell to say other than, “Have a good day.” I don’t know how to deal with those kinds of situations.

My mom was good at it. And my dad too, just talking to people. My dad carried a little pad of paper and a pencil in his shirt pocket, and he had no qualms at whipping that sucker out and writing, talking to people. And my mom would talk to them and try to read their lips. Biggest problem she had was that once people learned that she was reading their lips, they would exaggerate everything, and she couldn’t understand it.

Best thing I ever did was get hooked up with your mom. She’s given me so much love and stability. We still have our rough edges. Mostly it’s me not talking to her enough. That’s because she’s lost all her friends in Dallas. It’s become more important to her to be more interactive with me. I have to cope with it. One of the things is, this iPhone here, I couldn’t live without it. See that? 10:30? This one here. 10:30. It’s my alarm clock. It means “Get up and talk.” When I get up out of bed, it’s time to get up out of bed, because I slept in as long as she will tolerate, and I have to talk. Sometimes I just go on down the hall, saying, “I’m walking, and I’m talking. I’m walking, and I’m talking.” And then we’ll get in a conversation, but sometimes it doesn’t work out. This one here says, “Get up for PT” which is physical therapy, “and talk, and have a happy face.” Because she’s convinced that those girls will work harder with me if I have a happy face with them. The therapists. So that’s how I’m learning to cope with that stuff.

Big thing that we have is that she’s the balloon, and I hold onto her string. I keep her grounded. But every now and then, I have to kind of float with her. To keep me in the world. Not let me crawl in a hole. To give me love.  And it works. It works for us.

In Richardson after the stroke, I was pretty much isolated, just me and Robbie and my therapists, and the therapy ran out. Robbie over the years before that had been talking about someday we need to move to Austin to be with our kids and grandkids, you know. And then when I was in in-house rehab, I just realized that maybe that’s what we ought to do. And then it was a whirlwind.

I had nothing more there. She had all her friends and her contacts and her woo woo stuff was all up in that whole area up there. When we came down here, she had a, she’s still having a rough time, but she had a really rough time in the beginning, mostly with the driving thing. Over the years, I’ve had to map things out for her. And I still do that. I map out where she wants to go. I’m really proud of her, because she’s got to where she’s really moving around a lot.

Big events in my week are physical therapy, and now that’s about to stop and I have to do it on my own. I have to force myself to do it. It’s too easy to blow off. Mom will say, “Let’s go to lunch,” and I blow the rest of the afternoon off, which means I don’t do the exercises I should. I’ve got to do it, got to get myself on a regimen. You know the old saying, “Use it or lose it?” With me it’s really true. If I don’t do it, I’ll lose it. My walking is worse than it was 6 months ago. Although I try. I just don’t seem to be able to get the rhythm good enough, fast enough. And Robbie’s really patient with me. She just walks along at a slow crawl, either behind me or by my side.

She does a lot for me. She’s walking a narrow line about doing stuff for me and not doing stuff for me. She has to decide what I really need her to do and what I can do on my own. I try to do my own laundry, but she’s pretty much grabbed a hold of that. When she hears me kicking the bucket down the hall, she runs out and grabs it and does it, but she leaves the shirts and pants for me to hang up, which I can do. I can fold the other stuff, too, but she has a need to do something. So it’s a fine line on what she wants to do and what she wants me to do.

I’ve had a couple of times since I stroked. I thought my family would be better off without me, but then I realized that’s not true. Robbie would not be better off without me, even though she has to do so much of the physical part of it. I still keep track of the finances and when things need to be paid, the mortgage and utilities, and I give her moral support. I keep reminding her that she needs friends, and she needs to make them. She’s found a couple of lady friends that she really likes that she has coffee with on Wednesdays but I really wish she could find a clan. I just have to keep reminding her that she needs to look and not give up on it. So I can’t give up. I still got to hold that string.

The biggest thing is that she got all her talking and communication with all those people she had up north, and now she depends on me to do it, and it’s difficult for me. I try hard to do it, but it doesn’t satisfy her needs. People project onto me that I’m stuck up and antisocial. It’s not true. I just don’t know how to be social. It sounds like a cop out, you don’t know how. Of course you should know how. I read all kinds of books on how to do it. I can’t do it.

I don’t know if I can pinpoint things. It’s just a path. Some of it’s rocky and some of it’s grassy and easy going, and some of it’s a struggle to climb up, but I’m just on this path. Hadens are resilient. I don’t know whether it’s in genes or whatever the hell it is. It’s there. My next goal is make it to 85. Try to talk to my wife whenever I can. Enjoy my kids and grandchildren. I’m satisfied with my life.

 I don’t know how you’ll make sense out of any of that.