Excerpt from "The Field Guide To The North American Yaga":

While the North American Yaga does spend a large amount of its time slumbering, this behavior should not be confused with laziness. The Yaga necessitates adequate stimulation to keep it in top mental and physical condition and, if such stimulation is not found, will enter into a state of malaise. Such a state is to be avoided at all costs. An idle Yaga is an unhappy Yaga.


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Location: Work
Contemplating: Walking to the beach tonight
Listening: "Little Miss S" ~Edie Brickell

Peter is currently updating the photographs on his site and I find myself increasingly boggled by the utter beauty of some of the women he has known, paricularly the redhead--Sarah--and Victoria. The type of women, really, who by virtue of their appearance would likely leave me standing there, with not a thing to say (of course, that wouldn't be so unusual as I've always been "Um..." when confronted with a pretty girl). Perhaps if I knew them, it would be easier for me to imagine being able to form a cohesive sentence, much less approaching them with a camera.

I've recently realized something about my perceptions of beauty and how they relate to gender--and I'm not sure that it's a pleasing conclusion. Selecting photos for scanning and consequently mulling over the physical appearances of my friends much more than usual, I've realized that I tend to have much stricter definitions of beauty for women than I do for men. While I can dismiss a photograph of one of my female friends because the angle of her chin was wrong or the line of her nose was somehow thrown off, I will select an otherwise unflattering photo of one of my male friends simply because of the particular curve of his mouth or a startled look in his eyes. For the women, the beauty I find is in the whole--the overall image--and for the men, it's in the details--a raised eyebrow, a smirk, the traces of a laugh. I'm not sure how I feel about this contrast. Part of me wonders if it isn't some lurking societal programming leading me to be less forgiving of a lack of some form of "perfection" in women--a really insidious thought for someone who has been vocal in her condemnation of the "beauty myth" bullshit. *sigh* I'll have to invest some more time into
ferreting out the answer to that one.

Spiralling out into more thoughts on "beauty" and my personal notions thereof, I find myself remembering some of the most beautiful women I've ever met: Bronwyn, Nayda, Lorraine, Gina...


Bronwyn was a BFA senior when I was a BA sophomore in the School of Theatre and was something along the lines of an Irish/Swedish combination of curling red hair, light green eyes and a seemingly impossible mouth. Austin was so utterly taken with her that he would stop mid-sentence if she so much as appeared on the horizon when we were on campus. I was struck by her as well, but never really elaborated on this to him, as I suspected it would please him a little too much. We spoke once, at around 4AM on a Sunday in the Spring of 1996. I was sitting on the porch at Colonial, conversing with the dregs of one of our more catastrophic parties, when a figure seemed to literally glide up the walk and knelt on the steps at my feet.


"I know you." She said, staring up into my very startled face. "You're the girl in my Literature class."

Apparently, we had Literature of the Theatre together, but I hadn't noticed as we both frequently cut it, apparently on alternating schedules. I was speechless and simply nodded. There then progressed a scene that became more familiar to me with each passing year at college: Bronwyn crossed her arms over her knees, tipped her chin down and proceeded to confess to me. She told me about her childhood on the East Coast, her lifelong desire to be an actress, her flirtations with drugs and older men and that she had been raped coming home from a night class the year before. She talked for almost three hours and, when she finally rose, false dawn was edging over the tops of the palms. She told me that she had discovered that we had mutual friends who were running a D&D game and she had initially come over to invite me to join. She laughed, ran her hand down the length of my hair, and walked away. The game never got off the ground and she graduated later that Spring. I never spoke to her again.

Nayda was Puerto Rican and another Theatre major--a freshman BA that I met just prior to meeting Bronwyn. She was the youngest in my choreography class and, for some reason, immediately took to me. She had a simultaneously wonderful and terrible habit of walking up to me as I was lacing my character shoes, laying her head in my lap, staring up at me with huge dark eyes and, what else, confessing.

"I hate boys." She would pout, although the "boys" she was involved with were inevitably old enough to be her father. "You're a girl. You understand." I understood that she made it very difficult for me to breathe. She would grab a strand of my hair and twirl it around her finger while she talked about the latest transgressions of whatever man was in her life that month. I would try not to pass out. That was the customary exchange. I last saw Nayda sometime in the Winter of 1996, at the class's last performance of the semester. She was going home to San Juan for Christmas and wanted to know if I wanted anything. I smiled and shook my head.

Lorraine was Colombian, the mother of a year-old son when we met, and a recovering cocaine addict who loved to dance salsa. She lived with Austin and I in my apartment in Troy for almost two months and I came very close to falling in love with her. Perhaps I did. I've never been sure. There's much more to this story, but for now I'll mention that she was small, strong, and often seemed absolutely lost in the city around her. She died in Columbia in 1997.

Gina was in my fiction workshop during my last semester and happened to be the best friend of Austin's lover at Harvard Law. She had a bizarre beauty--almost feline, with almond-shaped eyes and a wide nose. She always seemed off-center somehow. We were cordial in class and I largely nurtured my crush on her from the other side of the room, until the party on the last day.

We had been exhorted by our professor to bring food, our favorite pieces of fiction and as much alcohol as our hearts desired. Somewhere in the middle of three hours, Gina excused herself and never returned from the ladies' room. When I finally found her, she was curled up in the corner of a stall, so drunk she couldn't stand. With the help of two other girls, I took her home--almost carrying her, as she leaned all of her weight on me with my arm looped around her waist. As we crossed the street from campus to her apartment, she offered to show me her tattoo (a quote from Lao Tzu in Japanese on her back). When I got her in her front door, she was nuzzling my neck. When I put her to bed, she blinked hard, sighed, and kissed my hand before promptly passing out. I kissed her on the forehead and locked the door behind me.