Family Values
December 22nd, 2006 | Uncategorized
Longtime denizens of this site will recall my erstwhile assistant Cathy Resmer, who left me a year ago when she and her partner were about to have a baby. Last summer Cathy did one of those StoryCorps things with their sperm donor, Jules. It aired on Vermont Public Radio, and now NPR is going to run it again on Morning Edition. It was a very charming, well-done piece–their story is such a compelling mix of conventional values and hard core dominant-paradigm-subverting. But don’t take my word for it. Check out Cathy’s own link-filled blog post here and listen to their story. But make sure you have some kleenex handy because it’s a real weepie.
Oh, the other reason why I like Cathy and Jules’s story so much is because it reminds me of my comic strip. And in fact, I’m pretty sure I saw Jules riding his bike around town the other day, hauling a trailer with his three-year-old in it. I had to do a double-take, because he looked just like Stuart. Except with more hair.
4 Responses to “Family Values”
Thanks for that link to Kathy Remer’s story. Burlington, huh? The community she describes, where a lesbian couple could introduce their sperm donor to a nice woman to date sounds like a healthy place to be. It reminds me of one of May Sarton’s novels (the name? I’ll get back to you about that) about a New England fishing community where people of all different persuasions think each other are okay. And people don’t have to stick with one kind or be labelled a traitor. (Granted, I have not done much attempting to mingle since the 90s so maybe it has changed all over.)(Kathy’s story makes me want to try.)
It also makes me think of James Baldwin’s really long novel about the red haired white guy in love with a black guy…ANOTHER COUNTY! Yes, that’s it.
Story Corps is an awesome concept.
Thanks for the link. I love the intimacy of Story Corps and I find the idea of cataloging our regular human lives/tales/concerns so Howard Zinn. It’ll be a lot harder for ‘them’ to burn us all at the stake with this kind of humanitarian evidence about our lives being broadcast and saved for posterity.
Best of luck to Cathy, Jules and their families.
Hey, thanks for the link. Just wanted to point out that the piece that will air on NPR next week is actually not the same excerpt. We had a 40 minute conversation, and VPR broke it down linearly, but I guess the NPR piece will focus on just a couple anecdotes. Or at least, that’s what they told Ann-Elise. In case anyone cares…
And hey, the coolest thing, I think, is that the Library of Congress has a copy of our interview (they get copies of all the StoryCorps interviews). And if you search for “Darth Vader” in the StoryCorps LoC archives, you’ll find our conversation. We mentioned Darth Vader at one point (evil absent father figure who tries to kill Luke with a lightsaber), and the woman who was recording us wrote down DV as one of the tags for the interview.
Silvio–
It was probably a typo, but the title of the Baldwin novel is Another Country.