A Dancer With Bruised Knees, by Martha Thomases – Brilliant Disguise | @MDWorld

June 30, 2012 Michael Davis 6 Comments

My mother introduced me to the writing of Nora Ephron, who died this week of leukemia. My mom subscribed to Esquire magazine, which was a much different magazine at that time than it is now, and Ephron wrote for them often. I liked to read her columns. She was funny and smart at a time when women were supposed to be neither. She was married to Dan Greenberg, who was also very funny (How to Be a Jewish Mother changed my view of reality). Her book about journalism, Wallflower at the Orgy, made me want to be a writer in Manhattan. The New Journalism was just starting, and she wasn’t sure it was a good thing. She said, ““The image of the journalist as wallflower at the orgy has been replaced by the journalist as the life of the party.” I wanted to be successful enough to be invited to their home for dinner.

This was before she wrote screenplays. This was before she directed movies that became smash hits. Instead, she wrote a monthly column about women in a magazine for men. This was not like the “Jake” columns in Glamour, in which a man told women how to act with men. This was not a consumer column, like the ones that covered wines and cars. This was a column about how women lived, and what mattered to them. I was in college, and I was excited about the new feminism. Whenever someone put down feminism as humorless, dogma, I referred them to her columns.

I also stole from her shamelessly. When a pretty woman would complain about the prospect of someday losing her looks, I would say, “One of the few advantages to not being beautiful is that one usually gets better-looking as one gets older. I am, in fact, at this very moment gaining my looks.” (On Never Having Been a Prom Queen, August 1972)

And I loved her description of growing up flat chested in the 1950s — “That was the era when you could lay an uninhabited bathing suit on the beach and someone would make a pass at it.” (A Few Words About Breasts, May 1972).

There were other funny women writing about feminism. I very much enjoyed Ellen Willis, who wrote for The New Yorker and other magazines. I loved an essay she wrote in January of 1989, “Glossary for the Eighties,” in which she defined “humorless” as “what you are if you do not find the following subjects funny: rape, big breasts, sex with little girls. It carries no imputation of humorlessness if you do onto find the following subjects funny: impotence, castration, vaginas with teeth.”

In the same essay, Willis defines “oppression” as “the endless abuses committed by ideological fanatics – especially pushy blacks, women, Jews and homosexuals – against long-suffering regular people.”

Ellen Willis and Nora Ephron wrote from different vantage points. Willis was explicitly radical and leftist. She was the first rock critic for The New Yorker. Ephron came from a journalism background, having been a writer for the New York Post. When she turned to essays, Nora Ephron wrote about what she knew, and what she knew was life as an educated, upper-middle-class straight woman. This limited her perspective, but she never dismissed the perspectives of others. For example, writing about consciousness-raising in March, 1973, she said, “I don’t think the process works. Well, let me put that less dogmatically and more explicitly –– this particular group did not work for me.”

I met her once, at a benefit of some sort. I gushed about how much she had meant to me, and she thanked me, and then there was an awkward silence. I didn’t know what else to say, and hadn’t really left her much of a conversational opening. Luckily, there were many people there who wanted a moment of her time, and I was able to back away with some semblance of dignity. We weren’t able to become friends, and I was never invited to her apartment for dinner.

Since her death, I’ve read a lot of quotes from her that I had never heard before. Especially, there is the commencement address she gave at Wellesley College, her alma mater, in 1996. Here are some samples.

“One of the things people always say to you if you get upset is, don’t take it personally, but listen hard to what’s going on and, please, I beg you, take it personally. Understand: every attack on Hillary Clinton for not knowing her place is an attack on you. Underneath almost all those attacks are the words: get back, get back to where you once belonged. When Elizabeth Dole pretends that she isn’t serious about her career, that is an attack on you. The acquittal of O.J. Simpson is an attack on you. Any move to limit abortion rights is an attack on you — whether or not you believe in abortion. The fact that Clarence Thomas is sitting on the Supreme Court today is an attack on you.”

“Whatever you choose, however many roads you travel, I hope that you choose not to be a lady. I hope you will find some way to break the rules and make a little trouble out there. And I also hope that you will choose to make some of that trouble on behalf of women.”

“Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.”

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Media Goddess Martha Thomases likes to imagine an afterlife in which her mom shows Nora Ephron all the good places to eat.