The National Organization for Women at Town Hall. A Christian Science reading room would have been big enough and much cheaper. If you count two ushers, there are maybe 17 people in the oceanic orchestra section. A fast start off the blocks for this well-advertised, six program “Women for Women” series—which has the balls to charge 25 bucks ringside, about what you’d shell out for a good lightweight bout at the Garden. Yoko Ono, tonight’s feature person, is a lightweight all right, but she couldn’t punch her way out of a paper bikini. Later NOW will bring the house down: about a hundred women from the balcony cheap seats. They half fill 15 rows of the orchestra. And, friend, you can tell a book by its blown cover. Census: one dozen befuddled men and the rest—though NOW, America’s largest lib group, has no particular gay bias—the rest are easily three-quarters rip-roaring lesbian.
Bow ties. Sailor suits. Wispy peach fuzz mustaches. One tattoo. Soup bowl butch hair cuts, shorter here than anyplace south of the West Point Chapel. And avoirdupois: this could be a Weight Watchers street mission. I think there’s some glandular hookup between gay and fat. Not funny, of course: sad. Desperate hot fudge sundaes. It’s hard to be a successful heterosexual when Charles Atlas would herniate himself carrying you over the threshold. Hard to be a successful lesbian for that matter. They snuggle and steal hugs in the semi-dark around me. It’s disorienting to eavesdrop on a female-to-female pickup. “Hi, there. I’m Zelda. Got a match? Hey, you look like a girl I used to know. I’m working on a book. How about drinks afterward?” The same posturing nervousness, the same corny lines I used to try. It’s weird and sweet. They’ve come not for Yoko or ISIS, the all-girl band, nor for women’s solidarity: they’ve come to find love.
Comments