This guy Joe...he’s allright!
“Your story about the calf reminded me of one that I recall personally. It was the mid-1970s, and my young uncle’s car had gotten stuck on the beach during a sudden, howling thunderstorm. Our beach house was bursting at the seams with family members willing to help push the car back to the road. Among those chosen to take up the task were Louise and Jean, two of my grandmother’s female cousins. They were fraternal twin sisters, the last in the family to be born in Italy. At the time they were pushing 55 but were in great shape, strapping and the size of Amazons, their skin tanned into a dark, olive complexion. I wasn’t allowed to go because I was only eight years old.
An hour later, they came back to the house, soaking wet but mission accomplished. They entered carrying Mickey, their cousin, a man of slight frame, who had been knocked over by the wind and who had sprained his ankle. The first thing Louise and Jean did when they came through the door was to drop Mickey unceremoniously on the couch and ask me to fetch them beers from the refrigerator. To this day, I look back and think: Those were two of the sexiest women I ever laid my eyes on!
Not surprisingly, when I later went to college, during the height of the PC wars in the late eighties, campus feminism often puzzled me and sometimes angered me. These women would never in a million years choose my great-aunts and cousins as their role models. In fact, they’d probably cast scorn on them as backwards hillbillies. And you know what, those relatives of mine were hillbillies, in a way, or their equivalent in rural southern Italy. But I suppose the sisterhood of feminism was a rather small tent, the way it played out on campus. Their loss, as you’ve pointed out for years.
When I saw Sarah Palin’s speeches just before and during the Republican convention, I turned to my boyfriend and said, “This woman is the biggest threat to Democratic chances to the presidency since Reagan.” He understood immediately, but others I said that to initially had no idea what I was talking about. Clearly, they never had a Louise or Jean in the family!
Regards,
Joe Baranello