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Emma Goldman was a Party Animal!

Date: March 15, 2010
Author: Vivian Gornick
Venue: KGB
Neighborhood: East Village
Free Drinks -- no
Q & A -- yes
Book signed -- no
UE Check Number -- 890765

One author who graduated from being an audience member at one reading, the Lore Segal launch at Melville House, to presiding over the podium at another, was Vivian Gornick.
For her KGB reading, I positioned myself at the top of the stairs, the bar is on the second floor, so I could intercept her before she walked in. I rather grandly welcomed her to KGB on behalf of, and here I was ready to launch into some dopey speech, but I merely said "Myself."
Then I made a joke about how odd it was to see such a big deal writer showing up for a reading without an entourage. Even though I am in awe of authors like Gornick, I was sometimes able to fake a bit of bravado in my conversations with them.
The reading was run by two young women and the audience consisted largely of their friends and colleagues. It was an audience where everyone would have had an opinion about the writer - actress Miranda July. Gornick was brought in like Chuck Berry at a rock show, a star from a previous generation.
During the questions and answer period after her reading, people asked Gornick about her early days in the feminist movement of the seventies. I asked her about the impact of "Our Bodies, Our Selves," an influential book on womens' health that was published in 1976. I love the time capsule quality of quotes from it such as "learning about our bodies in this way really turned us on."
Of course, learning about womens' bodies was really turning me on, too, in the period Gornick was describing. Any mention of "Our Bodies, Our Selves", a presence along with "Slaugherhouse-Five," and the Whole Earth Catalogue in the bedrooms of any woman I slept with during the Seventies, sets off my sexual reveries as forcefully as does that era's other prime erotic image, the blue plastic diaphragm box, also ubiquitous in dorm rooms and off-campus apartments.
Gornick and I, practically alone in the small bar-room, were the only veterans of the fight for womens' equality during the Nixon administration. True, my contribution to the struggle consisted of trying to sleep with as many young feminists, many of them wearing those drab, green T-shirts that were popular, as I could, while Gornick was an activist on their behalf.
That's kind of the same thing, right? Didn't that make me practically Gloria Steinhem to her, well, to her Vivian Gornick?
Another symbol of Seventies feminism is the vaginal speculum. I'm sure Gornick like me is no speculum virgin. A lot of Seventies memoirists cite the drugs and the music, but there was also a vogue for that bit of homemade gynogolocial exploration that occurred when friends used a clear, plastic speculum to examine friends. Don't even bother bragging about your Woodstock or Fillmore East or West exploits, if you never looked up a vaginal speculum. To have been young in the seventies and to have missed out on that would be like going to a scenic overlook and not using one of those mounted telescopes.
When I approached Gornick after the reading, I asked what she'd been working on lately. She said she'd just finished a biography of the anarchist Emma Goldman. She asked me if I knew who Emma Goldman was. I said that indeed I did and for some reason added that Goldman must really have been a party animal. I was hoping to amuse Gornick and I think that line did.
My increasing ability to amuse women writers, and male writers, too, but the dynamic isn't the same, was one way I could trace how the combination of absorbed and native pixie dust was germinating an author inside me.
After my short chat with Gornick, I went back to the bar and sat down. I sighed for all that I'd suffered to gather the pixie dust I'd gathered so far, both that night and in all the other nights of my readings project and for all the years that my own pixie dust has been bottled up, not dropping down on readers or audience members.
I also sighed because as all the years passed with my pixie dust piling up, somehow, I'd become old, old enough to be moved by remembering images from the movie of my youthful sexuality, now as dated as if I were remembering flappers and bathtub gin instead of dark green t-shirts and blue plastic diaphragm covers.