Secrets and Tubes

It was late at night and I was sitting on my then-fiance's chestnut colored leather sofa in our rental house in East Lake, a neighborhood in Atlanta, cozied up in between one of our dogs and my cat. We were watching Seneca Falls and I wasn't prepared for the emotions that this film conjured up in me. Tears streamed down my face throughout the film. I couldn't stop smiling, but I couldn't stop crying either. When it was over, I tried to explain to him how the film made me feel-- but I didn't do well. There was something that I couldn't wrap my head around, couldn't put into words. Trying just made me cry harder,smile bigger and then I would lose more words.

It was like watching this film made me remember a secret that I had forgotten I was even holding on to. That secret was so buried that I couldn't have purged its details to him if I tried. I just knew it was inside me. And my god, I was so happy it was still inside me.

What I could wrap my head around was this-- I was overwhelmed with pride-- pride in women. I was overcome with an inner challenge that was yelling at me, "Get off that sofa and take it to the streets! Make a difference!" And I was completely steamrolled with nostalgia.

It was the nostalgia that really did me in that night.

Watching these young women travel to Seneca Falls made me think of my voyages in college-- one to Baltimore and one to New York City. It was me, three of my best girlfriends, whatever crappy car one of us had at the time, and a cross-country trip to celebrate that secret-- the secret within us. In Baltimore we attended the Feminist Expo of 1999 and in New York City we watched what seemed like every single famous woman in television and film perform Eve Ensler's "Vagina Monologues" at Madison Square Gardens.

I remember meeting Gloria Steinem, bell hooks, Eve Ensler-- all my heroes, or sheroes as we used to say. I remember driving through the long state of Pennsylvania on one of those trips, listening to Bikini Kill (and probably singing at the top of my lungs) and deciding that we would never again use the phrase, "That took balls!" to denote someone exuding strength. Nope, "balls" was completely replaced by "tubes." Not only did standing up to your parents, your boyfriend or your professor take some tubes-- it took a tubesy woman to do it.

It's funny, 12 or so years later, and I still only use the word "tubes." New girlfriends, new guyfriends for that matter, and they all say it too. It's less savage, I think... and stronger. It bucks the establishment, tosses up gender identity and still rolls off the tongue.

My last job I worked for a man who wanted to change the world (or at least the state of Georgia). The first time I said "tubes" in front of him, he laughed, double-checked that I was speaking about the "fallopian kind" and then took that word on himself. He noticed that our gigantic, hand-drawn 'goal-o-meter' that filled a 6-foot marker board in our office hub (you know, one of those thermometers that you color in incrementally as you work towards a goal) was rather phallic looking and he suggested I re-draw it to look more like a womb.

That was a man that got "tubes." He, in fact, was tubesy himself. I would never have known to describe him like that if I hadn't taken those trips-- those trips whose sole purpose was to honor our secret inside.

It's that same secret that still dwells in me today. I still can't tell you the secret, and it takes time to show it. But, I can say this about my secret. It's about being a woman. It's about discovering and then rediscovering womanhood, power, friendship, love, adventure, risk, refusal, emotion, strength, volume, intimacy and tenacity. And it's about being with other women. And it's about feeling proud and different but intimate and communal all at the same time.

Watching Seneca Falls made me want to listen to and care for my secret.
Bring it out a bit.
Love on it.
Listen to it.
Act on it.

Thanks Louise, for making a film that actually shows what this 'secret' is all about.