If You Don't Cook, are you a Criminal?

When I was growing up my mother ruled the kitchen. Touching anything in it or helping was out of bounds. It was her domain. As for the housework, I never bothered doing anything but occasionally tidying my little room. there was a woman that came in once a week to clean up. And my mother did the rest. Laundry was also my mother's domain. She had a washer and later a dryer. These were mysterious machines to me. I remember the smell of freshly cleaned laundry in the winter. She used to hang up our clothing in the little boiler room in the basement to dry. In the summer she had a clothesline in the back. I never thought to help her, and she never asked.

I left home brutally. One day a man came in and threw me outside. He said that this was the last day I would ever be inside, and I would have to live outside from then on. I stayed on the street just outside my house for several weeks: incredibly to myself, day, and night. then he took me to New York for some reason. We got to give Little Stevie Wonder his big break by opening a closed theatre to the passerby so he would have an audience to listen to his music. He had come with his young mother (he was a small boy) all the way from the south to have his big break in New York City. Only when he got onstage, he found out that New York theatres closed Sundays. This guy, Patrick, who kept me outside, somehow had free reins of the theatre. He opened the doors. The Little boy danced and sang. And the rest is Stevie Wonder History.

As for me, I returned home to the house I once knew. No one knew what to do with me. NO one was there who was my family. So, an obliging janitor from the Psychiatric Hospital down the street got me a session as a Playboy bunny model. That is why what I remember from then on, I a blur but that the main thing was a lot of confusion and screaming pain.

I remember a man waiting near the grocery school near our high school offering vague promises of marriage. I vaguely remember ending up as a call girl in Korea. I remember that this guy dressed me up as a vamp for my high school prom and the students elected me high school Queen. As I have been thinking about stuff it comes to me that that is how this janitor from the hospital got the great idea to make me into a Playboy Bunny model. Yes? No?

I remember getting a role in the new Star Trek series on production in California. I was to be the romantic lead opposite the star William Shatner. They did not have a lot of money so they would use one model to play opposite him. I was poor with a broken face. He was going to have a lot of energy. So, he would work to heal my face. As the face would heal it would go through distinct stages. At each stage, I would become another female romantic lead to play opposite the star. My memories are unsure. I remember he chose me for the part because Mr. Shatner was smaller than the rest of the people there: it was a height thing. I was about his size.

I also remember the film crew dressing me in a little tiny leopard skin outfit. I was to imitate a jungle warrior, and it was like a cat print bathing suit. They were filming me to make some publicity material for the series and the photographer told me to go onto the street somewhere on Sunset Strip in Hollywood and menace cars with my spear. I remember that.

What I do not remember is my parents or any of the neighbours standing up for me. I remember living in a very repressive household in which sex was taboo, so all this sexy stuff was extremely difficult for me to manage. It was incredibly wrong.

Another thing is that obviously, we were quite poor. So, what I do not completely understand is why my mother stopped me from learning about any kind of housework at all. Why did this little family unit forbid me to do that? Society has both forbidden and condemned this lack for my whole life, I have extraordinarily little ability (and now I am old) to cook or clean. In fact, much of the insanity I have had has to do with starvation and a bad living environment. Even now as I write fortune bids me to find a new place. For many years I have lived in my present home and for many years they did not permit me to even prepare an alternative meal. In other words, once more the authorities forbid cooking. Now that I must leave, I am wondering what is going to happen: Am I expected to gather food anyway I can and live that way? I still do not cook, and I still do not clean very well. I know that you are supposed to do this. And I have experienced living by myself and not being too able to do this. And there has been extraordinarily little support to help me learn how to do this all my life. And yet society has punished me for this lack. I wonder what is going to happen now.