Eeek Love

Take a close look: Cathie Jung's waist is a Guinness-record-holding 15 inches. For more than 25 years she's been tight-lacing—corseting, waist training. Why am I fascinated by this centuries-old practice? No, not because my own waist has added all the inches missing from this photo.

My passion for the skewed, the avant-garde, the idiosyncratic, or just plain contrary—my admiration for poets, writers, artists, visionaries, whistle blowers, and everyday goddesses—stems from a childhood trapped in the mind and body of  a Margaret O'Brien prototype.

Behind the pigtails I was a voyeur of the sensational. Even more bewitching to me than Grimms' capricious and sometimes cruel fairy tales was Hans Christian Andersen's story of a nice little girl who was given a pair of coveted red shoes. The shoes made her want to dance everywhere—even to church, which was forbidden—and as punishment she could not remove them. The only way to stop the dancing was to have her feet cut off. Champion of that little girl, I have danced life-long with the forbidden. 

Would this explain my odd lot of friends—each of them rare, remarkable, eccentric? Hell for me would be to live in a planned community where all shopping and entertainment are accessible by golf cart, an adult Disney World with smartly dressed Stepford People. They exist, of course, but none of my fantastics would consider living there. 

Mrs. Jung is not the only object of my affection. As a young teenager living in Arlington, Virginia, my favorite outing was to the Army Medical Museum in Washington, D.C., where I could gaze upon bottled congenital abnormalities, plastic models of malaria parasites, tracings of the world's largest foot.

I was stunned and delighted to read Katharine Dunn's Geek Love, about a couple who revive their traveling carnival by breeding their own freak show, fetuses altered in utero by various means to create a boy with flippers for hands and feet, Siamese twins, a hunchbacked albino dwarf, a normal-looking baby gifted with telekinesis.

At the top of my list of intriguing movies is I Spit on Your Grave, summarily dismissed as a "rape revenge film." I love its over-the-top story of a woman raped and left for dead who survives and exacts a fitting end for each of her rapists, one by one. It could be a nightmare, or a dream.

My favorite photographer? Diane Arbus, also drawn to the off-beat, the exceptional. Her photos of marginal people—dwarfs, giants, transvestites, nudists, circus performers, anyone whose normality seems surreal—show everyone unmasked. "There's a quality of legend about freaks," she wrote. "Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle."

The stages of my own life could be summed as a trip through the traveling show, my series of husbands and lovers—they of all ethnic groups, abnormalities of spirit, and size—having found me caged in various guises. I have emerged finally as a tattooed Eve unburdened by Adam.

(See companion "Side Show" poem)

Graduate School Jitters, 1975

I cannot breathe. Strangling, my words sound like alien croaks. My heart hums like a didgeridoo, a sound split from its source. There is no ground beneath me, I  am floating above myself and at the same time sinking.

I want to die. Now.

The professor clears his throat, praises my paper as the best one, trying to help. This does not help.

I've never before shared my opinion in public. I'm the only cross-over from sociology in the graduate psychology class, standing in front, facing everyone.

The professor coughs politely. The other grad students whisper, shuffle their feet.  

How awful. They pity me.

I wish for the ultimate act of kindness, a lightning strike. I think this is the most humiliating moment of my life, not knowing yet there will be other, greater embarrassments, until I find my voice.