A Terrible Witness

This morning I was doing my usual jumbled struggle to the car – baby and car seat and purse and keys, coffee mug, diaper bag, heels spiking the slick grass hill – only, because the city has been redoing the sidewalk in front of our house, today I had an audience. It consisted of a group of surly-looking, beefy men, sitting blank-faced in a white truck parked in front of our yard. They watched me as I slung the bags around my necks, balanced the baby on my hip, stuffed my pearls in my pocket to put on later. The progress to the car is slow, pack-elephant like.

I don’t know what they were waiting for.

Then, all of a sudden, the one behind the steering wheel yells out to me.

“What’s number one?”

It takes me a minute to realize he’s referring to the sign in my yard, placed there the other night by my friend, about the marriage amendment law to be voted up or down next Tuesday.

I struggled with what to say. I was very conscious of standing on a hill, shouting to four guys in a white truck, about gay marriage amendments. I was very conscious of them seeing my ass when I bent over to tuck the baby in her carseat. I was very conscious of not knowing how annoying it is to talk about one’s political beliefs in this kind of situation.

And yet, this is often where we are when we are asked to give witness to our truths. It’s never with a flask of fresh water, a sound system, a lighted podium, and clearly written notes to follow, with a welcoming, patient audience, clapping every time you pause to breathe.

Who we are, the things we stand up for, often get questioned. My vegetarianism, for instance. It’s at the awkward first lunch with a new boss in a restaurant where every item on the menu is infused with bacon fat flavoring that I’m asked “why” and expected to be coherent, cogent, and compelling. And it’s precisely at those moments than I am totally incoherent. It’s one thing to offer a professional opinion to a stranger – you’ve been trained and you’re getting paid for the knowledge you bring to the table. It’s entirely another to lay out a conclusion, thought, premise, guess at the big philosophical mysteries of life for which you are not an expert, just another amateur, like most of us for whom this is our first time on the planet.

Think about it: having two plumbers debate the cause of a stopped drain is one thing. But having the same plumbers exposing their thoughts on life after death…

So, I know these guys were thinking ‘where does she get off.’ I felt like I was having to justify myself to these wankers. I say wankers, not to be personally insulting, but to describe their behavior, which basically consists of standing or sitting around a ‘job’ for several hours, only to actually run a drill or dump some sludge for about fifteen minutes. I wouldn’t mind being a professional wanker myself.

If my friend who gave me the sign were in my position, I imagine she would have marched right up to the truck, delivered a well-put-together speech on the liberties and rights of man as outlined in the Constitution, followed by an ad hoc question and answer period, during which she would learn everyone’s name, where their kids went to school, ending with a promise from all of them that they would turn out to vote.

Me, I loudly mumbled something in my faux- nonchalant manner about the marriage thing you know against gays but if affects straight people too.

The response? “OH.”

But what did I expect? I’m not a missionary.

On the other hand, what is the point of these kinds of signs? They are a show of support, right? To what end? People who agree with the sign will nod their heads, give a mental thumb’s up; people who disagree will do the opposite and maybe pee on my lawn. But is anyone actually engaging with the sign, changing their minds, thinking “huh, if SHE is against it, I should be, too! Afterall, look at how messy her yard is! That’s a quality person I should imitate in the polls right there!”

I’m not a missionary, but this may be the only way these signs work – people look and ask, and I get a moment on the soapbox in the spotlight to share something I find to be true. If I don’t really believe it – or don’t believe in my right to believe it – then why do I have this sign in my yard?

I am constantly hampered by one of the edicts that got drilled into me as a kid: Be all things to all people. As traveling theater missionary people, my parents and I were trained and expected to shift ourselves, like chameloeons, to integrate, with every new group of people we encountered while performing on tour. If attending a conservative church, we would wear high collars. If at the 7^th Day Adventist, we’d eat vegetarian. We’d drink with Episcopalians, we’d swear with the Catholics, and we’d forgo the makeup when with the Mennonites. The idea of sticking to our individual guns on anything was disallowed. You ate what they ate. You did what they did. The only truth to which we stuck like gum on a bedpost, was that of Jesus Christ as our risen savior. After that, it was all up for grabs.

So I’m really sensitive to apprehending the biases of others, of sending invisible feelers out to men in trucks to get a sense of their macho, their upset stomachs, their Old Virginian perspectives. I know myself to be skinnier than their wives, I know the Dali bumper sticker on my car translates to ‘art fart,’ if it translates at all. I know my daughter not being in pink marks me as a questionable lesbian. I know the unweeded bushes and the unraked leaves equate to either an absent or a pussy-liberal husband. And these things, true or not, are perceived as frighteningly awful and generally just wrong.

But the main difference between me and these guys – despite my assumptions about who they are, I know my instant judgments are most likely completely off – is that I would never, question someone about a yard sign while they were struggling to get in the car with an infant and coffee and heels – just out of pure politeness.

I would never yell at a person from a truck like that, either – about anything.

Because yes, I was trained to put other people first, because I was trained to constantly be an emissary of God, and emissaries of God don’t bark at people. On top of that, I was trained to be an actress, which means, not only did I constantly feel like I was on stage – the stage Shakespeare talked about, with Mr. Omniscient as my omnipresent audience -- but I was taught to be someone who watched others to learn how they act and behave, respecting the differences in people, always as a foremost principle, because the holy part of acting is learning an incredible empathy with members of the human race. To properly play someone on stage, to slip into the skin of another person, you have to understand them. And you can’t do that if you judge them.

The only time I skirt my religious-theater training and behave rudely, “as abrasive as a brillo pad,” as I was once described, is when I get drunk. That’s when I do things like joke with the overweight president of the University of Virginia’s literary guild about calling his college the “University of Vagina,” because I thought it was a clever thing to say, and I wanted to see his reaction. That’s when I take all my clothes off in the swimming pool at a party on a Saturday afternoon in the suburbs, because I feel like it. That’s when I ask people “who are you?” right to their face, impolitely, just because I want to know.

In other words, when I get drunk, my pleasure, my curiosity, my humor, my desires, come first, and I watch everyone squirm and scowl because I am saying excessive, dirty, scrappy, rude things. Precisely because I have spent so much of my life deferring beyond the conventions of good manners to meeting the emotional requirements of hungry souls, performing the role of the good Christian child, I am prone to finding assaults on Good Sense absolutely the funniest thing ever.

Which makes me very unfit for conversations that go beyond being yelled at from city construction trucks.