Story Thirty-Three

That time my mentor died.

Let me tell you a story about Barbara Ehrenreich. I was nervous at my first literary conference and I felt pressured into attending all the panels. This bitch rocks up to me and says “don’t you find this all so awful, I hate these things.” (Mind you, I was scheduled to headline my own panel later that day.)

I’m sitting in the back row, timid as all hell around all these people with degrees, and she surreptitiously hands me a crumpled tissue. Inside it there are three joints. She tells me “you get that past the TSA by just putting them in a pack of cigarettes.”

The woman did not smoke cigarettes. She kept a pack on her so she could smoke weed at boring conferences.

She was my idol.

Coaching a younger writer into feeling good enough to present is a hell of a thing and this lady did it like it was nothing, and also taught me how when you’re an older woman you can get away with mad shit because there’s such a benefit to other people thinking you’re invisible. I hope I live to be half the woman she was. But I know she’d say I already did, and just to carry on warts and all.

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All pictures below were taken in Berlin in May of 2022. Enjoy!