The call is to write in your blog about a time you experienced sexism.  Ha!

Since Dana Reeve died yesterday, my mind is very much on Marlene, who also died of lung cancer.  So I’m going to write about a time Marlene and I experienced sexism.

During the first part of the 1980s, Marlene and I were the bestest of friends.  We were, in fact, a little too close, but that’s the stuff of another story.  We had dinner together three or four nights a week, either alone or with Burt, her husband.  One night Mar and I met for dinner at the Cheesecake Factory in Beverly Hills.   It’s not a very large restaurant and more like a deli than anything more impressive.  We were standing at the front of the place, waiting for a table.  Now the thing you have to know about Marlene and me is that when we were together, we never shut up.  Our conversation was constant and intense.  If you’ve ever had a really close friend, one who finishes your sentences and understands who you are even when you don’t, then you know what I mean.  Marlene and I were like that.  We also were multi-tasking talkers: we’d have several simultaneous strands of conversation going and, maybe, we’d be knitting or cooking or whatever.  This evening we were checking out the cheesecake, which was in a cold counter in front of us.  And we were talking about–who knows! 

We were so totally engaged in the cheesecake and each other that we never really saw the two men standing beside us.  They were, I can now tell you, alta cochers, old farts of a genre produced all too well by Beverly Hills.  Actually, they were Beverly Hills by way of Queens, New York.  Short, jowly, with pot bellies and deep tans.  And they were old, did I say that?  Old, as in 70 or more.  And we were not old. Marlene and I were in our late thirties or so then.  So, there would be no way, even if we were paying attention, that we would see these men, really see them.  But they saw us. 

We were crouching at the counter, debating the merits of this cheesecake or that.  Marlene was a bit of a purist, she being a New Yorker, after all.   I don’t remember what we decided, and I don’t remember how the alta cochers got our attention.   Still crouching, we turned to look up at them and realized our heads were at their crotch level.  One of them smirked and said, “While you’re down there…”

Writing this now, twenty some years later, it doesn’t seem so horrible.  Except it was, and I wonder why.  Perhaps it’s that Marlene and I  were at that moment and in all of our dialogues so intensely involved in creating ourselves , and to these two men, we had no selves to create.