Ms. Darby

Frieda y Diego Rivera by Frida Kahlo

Our new landlord just called. I picked up the phone;
“Hello?”
“Hello, uh, Mrs. Burns?”
“Uh, no.”
Silence. I wait. Ball’s in his court.
“Um, is this Darby?”
“Yes, it is.”
“And, uh, you’re not Mrs. Burns?”
“No. I am not. I am Darby Strong.”

I relay this chapter because enough is enough. First of all, I would be Mrs. Burn, no “S”, as my loved one’s surname is Burn. Secondly, are we living in the year 2005, or did I just get bonked on the head with the Betty Crocker cookbook while darning my husbands socks and end up in Patriarchville, USA? Sometimes, it is difficult to tell.

I had reported earlier that our move to the South had unearthed this strange beast, marked by its constant assumption that two heterosexual beings seen together, anywhere, must be married. This beast presides within a huge amount of the population here, but somehow has not spread to the more progressive areas of the South and seems to have never survived in the North. I, being from the North, haven’t the immunity required to deflect the neverending barrage of male identity placed upon my femaleness. My system is weak against the husband assumption strain of the beast, and I don’t particularly care for the shot that helps me get used to it, either.

The best part comes when I mention that I don’t want kids…

Filed by darby at 5:19 pm under General
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Jacquelyn McBain is one of those artists whose work grabs you by the throat and won’t let go until you consider it. From The Orion:

ANY ART, HOWEVER OBSCURE, may suddenly become an important influence for a new generation; one never knows when the past might become revolutionary; when some historical, ostensibly dead art may be resurrected as vital resource and trustworthy guide in an uncertain present. The current return to the Old Masters, as seen in Jacquelyn McBain’s excruciatingly-detailed paintings, is indeed postmodern in the sense that it involves the search for emotional warmth and authenticity in a cold, inhospitable world; a large, very public world in which one must make one’s own privacy to survive…

…McBain gives the familiar dialectic of nature and society, man and woman, a subtle new ecological expression. The threat to woman and to nature are one and the same for her; both are victims of man and the society he rules and the technology he invents. There is no protection against man and his destructive technology here.

Filed by darby at 8:10 pm under Arts, raves
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