The Accidental Activist [vanityfair.com]

She appeared to be the perfect plaintiff in a case that changed America’s political landscape: Roe v. Wade, decided by the Supreme Court 40 years ago this month. But Norma McCorvey, now 65, was never what she seemed: neither as the pregnant Texas woman who won fame as abortion-rights icon “Jane Roe,” nor as the pro-life activist she would become.

by Joshua Prager / vanityfair.com

It is a spring night in rural Texas, and crickets sing as a woman in her 60s with broad shoulders and short brown hair stops a pregnant young woman on an empty sidewalk. The older woman has heard that the younger woman, her neighbor Lucy Mae, may be seeking an abortion. “You don’t have to do this,” she says, her brown eyes and long loose cheeks filling with emotion. “Children are a miracle—a gift from God!”

The women are performing a scene in Doonby, a movie about a drifter who awakens a sleepy Texas town to its spiritual possibilities. The movie, tentatively set to be released this year, is directed by Peter Mackenzie, a Catholic filmmaker from Britain. It stars John Schneider, best known for The Dukes of Hazzard, who is a born-again Christian.

The older woman is born-again, too. Her name is Norma McCorvey. She is not a professional actress. But back when Nixon was president, McCorvey landed the role of a lifetime: that of “Jane Roe,” the plaintiff in what would become one of the most divisive legal actions in American history.

Forty years ago, on January 22, 1973, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wadethat women had the right to an abortion “free of interference by the State,” as Justice Harry A. Blackmun wrote in the Court’s majority opinion. The decision greatly expanded the legal boundaries for abortion in the United States, allowing women to terminate a pregnancy at any point during the first 24 weeks—that is, through the first and second trimesters. (Roe did, however, permit states to impose regulations in the second trimester, including who could perform abortions and where. It also gave states the right to ban most abortions in the third trimester.)

McCorvey, under the pseudonym Jane Roe, had brought the precipitating lawsuit in 1970, when she was pregnant for a third time and living in Texas, where abortion was prohibited unless the life of the pregnant woman was threatened. (The Wade in Roe v. Wade was Dallas County district attorney Henry Wade, the named defendant.) Roe v. Wade was a watershed legal ruling. But it also helped to turn abortion into the great foe of American consensus. Subsequent cases have made it clear that the Supreme Court majority in favor of abortion rights has been eroding, from 7 to 2 in Roe to 5 to 4 in cases decided in more recent years (with the majority deciding against abortion rights in a number of cases). Roe is undoubtedly the most familiar legal ruling in the minds of most Americans—not for nothing did Katie Couric ask Sarah Palin in a 2008 interview to cite any Supreme Court case except that one. But few people know much about the woman who prompted the ruling in the first place.

Norma McCorvey, now 65, has presented a version of her life in two autobiographies, I Am Roe(with Andy Meisler, 1994) and Won by Love (with Gary Thomas, 1997). In McCorvey’s telling, the story is a morality tale with a simple arc: An unwanted pregnancy. A lawsuit. Pro-choice. Born-again. Pro-life. Peace. The truth is sadder and less tidy. And with the help of a cache of documents retrieved two years ago from the clutter of a Texas home she had abandoned, as well as interviews with people once close to her, the story can be more accurately told.

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Holy health: Hospital program aims to boost community health [gazette.com]

by Barbara Cotter / gazette.com

Judging from the questions and statements in the survey that Patsy Janeba took one day, you could almost see her stretched out on a couch in a therapist’s office, mulling over her existence.

“In general, how satisfied are you with your life?”

“What keeps me up at night?”

“I suffer most with …”

This, however, was not your typical setting for deep soul-searching — though executives at Penrose-St. Francis Health Services believe it might be the perfect place to ask such questions. Janeba was at church, and she took the survey with the others at Trinity Lutheran Church to assess the spiritual well-being of the congregation.

The survey is one cornerstone of a relatively new Penrose-St. Francis program, the Church Health Project, part of the hospital system’s longstanding effort to boost community health and wellness by reaching people through their places of worship and emphasizing the connection between body and soul.

“Generally speaking, if you were to ask a church what its health care ministry would look like, they’d say, ‘We visit the sick and we bury the dead,’” says Penrose-St. Francis Vice President of Mission Integration Larry Seidl. “What we’re trying to do here at Penrose-St. Francis is ask the question: ‘What can a church do for its members to keep them well, or to be with them differently in the process of getting sick?’”

For about 13 years, Penrose-St. Francis has been helping churches create health ministries, with guidance from its team of Faith Community Nurses. Some of the 20 Colorado Springs churches that Penrose-St. Francis works with offer basic services, such as blood-pressure checks and flu-shot clinics. Others, including Trinity Lutheran, have a more robust program.

“It really depends on the church, and what resources they have” says Cynthia Wacker, head of the Faith Community Nurses. “We always encourage them to make sure they open it broadly enough so anyone interested in health and wellness — counselors, spiritual advisers, mental health professionals, chiropractors in the church — can be involved in the wellness of this church.”

Click to continue reading the article…

 

The Up Documentary Series Is the Anti-Reality TV [gawker.com]

by Rich Juzwiak / gawker.com

If Michael Apted’s Up series of documentaries plays like the older, more relaxed brother of reality TV, it’s because that’s basically what it is. Launched in 1964 as a one-off special of interviews with 7-year-olds in Seven Up by director Paul Almond, the film surveyed 14 kids of various economic backgrounds to explore England’s class system (it was based on the repeatedly invoked Jesuit motto “Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man”). Apted, who helped cast that film, then took over and has returned to its subjects every seven years to document their lives over time. Though the films are still inherently political, what emerged was less of an economic survey and more one of humanity. Reality TV is often referred to as a sociological experiment, but the Up series is as bona fide of a longitudinal study as pop culture has ever offered.

56 Up, the series’ eighth film and most recent entry, features all but one of the people interviewed in the first film. It aired last year in England and opened last week in America. While you feel the project’s prescience – our cultural ideal that, as Apted put it to me last week in the First Run Features office, “every life is worth sharing” – the film plays vastly different than what you’d expect from reality TV. It’s almost two and a half hours of soft-spoken, 56-year-old British people describing their quiet existences which, in most cases, seek to avoid drama as opposed to reveling in it. Take Jackie, who describes a string of familial deaths she’s endured since 49 Up, and whose mother and ex-husband have since been diagnosed with cancer. She is without a partner, suffering from rheumatoid arthritis and her benefits have been taken away, forcing her to rely on her sons for support. And yet the tone of her segment is as upbeat as the rest. She likes her life, she says. We see her meeting men. She is, in fact, here to make friends.

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Sherry Lansing: Envisioning late-life careers [jewishjournal.com]

Posted by Danielle Berrin

In the summer of 2008, at a national gathering of Hadassah in downtown Los Angeles, nearly 2,000 women shrieked with delight as Sherry Lansing, the pioneering first female to run a movie studio, coolly extolled the upside of aging.

“I used to think 60 is the new 40,” Lansing said brazenly, dismissing the pithy phrase as platitude. “Now I say 60 is the new 60!”

Lansing was the keynote speaker that morning, there to discuss her transition from workforce leader — specifically, her 14-year tenure as chairwoman of Paramount Pictures — to philanthropist. Although some say she was poised to become the first bona fide female mogul, Lansing turned 60 and decided instead to pull the curtain on her Hollywood ambitions. “In my late 50s, I started to get bored,” she confessed during a recent interview. “I’d had a wonderful career, I loved movies, I loved my time in the film business — but I felt as if I was repeating myself. The highs weren’t as high; the lows weren’t as low. I had this pull to have a different kind of life.”

Widely regarded by her industry colleagues as both kind and intellectually curious, she sought to develop a more expansive legacy, one that could parlay her career into a late-middle-life calling. By no means did she plan to retire — that would not be her nature — but she sought an encore, a “third act,” as she put it, that would give her life purpose and meaning and enable her to share some of her very considerable fortune with others.

“She was incredibly measured and clear-headed about leaving,” producer and former Disney executive Donald De Line said about her exit. “But I thought, ‘It’s too seductive, the power, the job itself is so thrilling.’ I think everybody kind of thought, ‘OK, that’s what she’s saying — she’s not really gonna go. People can’t give up those jobs. Usually, they go kicking and screaming and have to be pushed out the door. That was not the case with Sherry. She turned 60, and she was gone. And she never looked back.”

But privately, Lansing feared the unscripted day. A notorious workaholic, she agonized over the potential emptiness. “She was concerned that after being so immersed in the world of entertainment that she would maybe feel she didn’t have enough to do,” her friend, the author and philanthropist Cheryl Saban recalled. “She reached out to everybody and asked, ‘What am I gonna do with myself when I retire?’ ”

Click to read the rest of the article at Jewish Journal…

What if you woke up in a different person’s body every single day? [io9.com]

by Michael Ann Dobbs / io9.com

There have been plenty of young-adult novels about young people searching for their identity — literally or figuratively. But few have taken the concept as far as Every Day, the new young-adult novel from David Levithan, the co-author of Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist. This is a coming-of-age story that manages to pack some age-old philosophical questions about selfhood and the body into an unconventional love story.

In Every Day, A is an identity without a body. Each day, A wakes up in a new body of another 16 year-old. A has almost none of the usual markers of identity: A is genderless, sexless, without race or eye color, neither attractive nor unattractive. A takes these qualities from the bodies A inhabits. While A has access to the bodies’ memories, A experiences the world differently from the individuals he or she inhabits. And A has no control over whose body he or she will end up in tomorrow. A has, over the years, developed a sort of moral code built primarily around a strict non-interference policy. Which all comes crashing down when A wakes up in the body of Justin and falls in love with Justin’s girlfriend Rhiannon.

A tries to stay in touch with Rhiannon, which is difficult when A is different person each day. Eventually A tells Rhiannon the truth about his or her existence. From there, the book focuses on the young couple’s struggles to establish a relationship, when A is never sure who he or she will be tomorrow. A’s experiences as all these different people could have been nothing more than vignettes, but A’s love for Rhiannon and desire to see her again is in the background of each of these lives, complicating everything A does.

There are plenty of signs that the book could have turned into a more run-of-the-mill thriller about a unique supernatural being discovering its race or some other ridiculous plot. Luckily, Levithan stuck to the love story. He also uses the first person — thus avoiding the unfortunate “he or she” that I’ve used above. The book has an overall dreamy, fantastic quality that fits A’s wise beyond his or her years personality. While many of the daily episodes and interactions are very grounded, together they add up to something poetic. A’s life is, necessarily, deeply internal and this is reflected in the language.

 

One of the things I loved about the book was it defies easy labels just as much as A does. It’s a contemporary YA romance, but it’s also not just a romance book. It’s a fantasy book, in that there is no technology or rational scientific explanation for A’s existence or ability to move between bodies, but it’s not like any other fantasy books. It’s like a science-fiction book, to the extent that it’s about big difficult-to-answer questions, explored through an incredible narrative, but again there’s no tech or science. It’s just a unique lovely book about young love and identity, wrapped up in the impossible.

This isn’t necessarily Levithan’s first venture into speculative fiction — his poetic novel Boy Meets Boy takes place in what could only be described as an alternate or near future universe in which the school’s popular, quarterback is also a drag queen — but he is better known for his co-authoring of realistic teen fiction like the aforementioned Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist. He was also involved in editing The Hunger Games. In fact, he’s probably the busiest person in YA fiction. Aside from writing and editing, he also organizes readings and teaches in the Writing for Children program at The New School (where, full disclosure, I had him as a professor).

Get your book read by the top editors at Harper Voyager — without needing an agent! [io9.com]

by Charlie Jane Anders / io9.com

 Breaking in to the book world can feel like an impossible quest — but now, there may be a major shortcut. Harper Voyager, one of the top science fiction and fantasy publishers on three continents, is open to unagented submissions for the first two weeks of October. They’ve put up a portal at HarperVoyagerSubmissions.com, which will go live Oct. 1 but already has submissions guidelines and other key info.

These submissions are for Harper Voyager’s new e-book-only imprint, although the FAQ says “[t]here is the possibility that submissions will be published in print as well.” They’re looking to release one Harper digital original per month, so they need 12 titles for the next year. Books would be simultaneously published in the U.S., U.K., and Australia.

Diana Gill, executive editor with Harper Voyager in the U.S., tells io9:

I’m very excited about this — we stopped accepting unsolicited submissions over 10 years ago after 9/11 (back in the olden days when it was still paper in envelopes!), so it’s great to be able to start again, especially working with my colleagues. One of the best parts of being an editor is finding a fabulous new story, and one of the worst is having to turn it down because it won’t make the margins it needs to. With more digital originals we can try more things — different genres, different takes, etc. — and publish more voices, and doing so in conjunction with Em [Coode] and Deonie [Fiford] is even better. We’re all looking forward to it… and stocking up on lots of caffeine!

The FAQ over on the submissions portal doesn’t mention anything about payment, just saying that the authors will receive all of Harper Voyager’s usual editorial and promotional services “at no cost to the author.” We asked Gill about payment terms, and she says the details of advances and royalties are still being worked out because of the different legal requirements in the three different countries. But there will definitely be royalties, and more details will be forthcoming soon.

And finally, Gill seemed pretty optimistic about putting out print editions of at least some of these e-book originals:

Like our sister imprint Avon Impulse, we offer short print runs for many of our digital originals (for example, Jocelynn Drake’s “Bound to Me,” which we published a few months ago). Avon Impulse has already moved several authors from digital originals to print — we’d love to do the same, and are expecting to do so.

http://io9.com/5943000/get-your-book-read-by-the-top-editors-at-harper-voyager-++-without-needing-an-agent

Yes, There is Still Amazing Good in the World

 

George Dennehy – playing Iris with the Goo Goo Dolls @ Musikfest 2012

Ten Things I Wish the Church Knew About Homosexuality [Jim Rigby]

The Olympics Showcase Diverse Body Types, Body Snarking [jezebel.com]

by Doug Barry

For two weeks, the Olympics present the viewing public with a diverse range female body types, many of which will remain unrepresented in future advertising campaigns. Women who compete in the games, argues Time‘s Sonia Van Gilder Cooke, provide a counterbalance to all those glossy, airbrushed photos of magazine cover models and actresses who offer only a single, unrealistic physical standard.

Though women in the Olympics are creepily objectified, they also help expand the public’s idea of the many shapes women’s bodies can have. According to Jo Swinson, a British Member of Parliament and founding member of the U.K. Campaign for Body Confidence, the Olympics are “one of the times we actually get to see women without makeup on on television.” Swinson believes that, because athletes spend years honing their bodies to perform a single, highly specific task, there’s an “honesty” about their bodies that most celebrities, by contrast, do not demonstrate. That’s because female Olympians are trying to win competitions, while celebrities and models are essentially helping create the illusion of a certain kind of physical perfection in order to sell something.

Still, the Time piece opens with an investment banker taking his friends to a women’s beach volleyball match simply because the volleyball players are wearing bikinis. And even though the Olympics showcases the diversity of the female form, it also presents body snarkers with an opportunity to judge female athletes on their physical proximity to the cover model aesthetic. That’s part of the reason why NBC’s “Bodies in Motion” video features volleyball, field hockey, and track and field athletes prominently, and why there’s nary a female bodybuilder in sight.

Though certain male body types (the swimmers and divers, let’s just say) are ogled and idealized, male shot putters, weightlifter, or basketball players aren’t subjected to the same snarking as their female counterparts. British weightlifter Zoe Smith, for example, fought back against Twitter criticism that she looked like a “bloke,” which is just a Britishism for “bro.” British swimmer and four-time Olympic gold medalist Rebecca Adlington showed the world how cruel strangers can be when she retweeted something sent to her in June: “You belong in that pool you f— whale.” Australian swimmer Leisel Jones also became the subject of a terrible “fat or not” newspaper poll that, thankfully, readers took for the mean and stupid editorial decision it was.

Female athletes lose out in the endorsement race that follows the games because, according to Phillippa Diedrichs, a senior research fellow at the Centre for Appearance Research at the University of the West of England, scoring endorsement deals “becomes very much about [athletes'] bodies and their appearance and their being shown to be attractive as opposed to what their bodies can do.” As women’s sports gain popularity among spectators (the U.S. women’s track and field team, for instance, did waaaaaaay better than the men), that endorsement disparity between male and female athletes may start to change, which would go a long way, in turn, toward helping change the prevailing advertising industry’s aesthetic preference for impossibly thin (and exceedingly airbrushed) women.

http://jezebel.com/5934001/the-olympics-showcase-diverse-body-types-body-snarking

The Crossdressing Room [gawker.com]

by David Torrey Peters

When I was six, my mother left a box of small garbage bags lying around. I found one, cut the bottom off, and used the cinch-tie at the top to make a small, crude dress. I put it on and looked at myself in the mirror. As my reflection stared back at me, a wave of well-being surged over me, sweeping away any real specifics of that moment. All that remained was a feeling of correctness, like finding just the right word to describe something: a reflection of myself as I knew myself to be, but had yet to see. I turned away from the mirror with a new sensation of beauty and lightness buoying my step. I descended the stairs to show my parents, who sat in the enclosed porch.

Passing through the kitchen, I spotted a coffee cake on the counter. Brimming with satisfaction, I felt a sudden inspiration, a desire to be generous. I pulled the coffee cake off the counter and held it in my arms before me. In my garbage bag dress, I walked into the porch and carefully placed the cake on the coffee table. Hands on my hips, I announced to my parents, who stared at me with their coffee cups in hand: “I’m a waitress!”

There was a moment’s pause, during which, but for the sparrows flitting past the windows, time appeared frozen. Then my mother shifted her glance to my father and the two of them burst out laughing. I held still, wearing only my underpants and the garbage bag, confused, because I felt beautiful, and why couldn’t they see that? The notion that I should be embarrassed crept up on me—and then with the force of a physical blow, I was. I fled the room, tripping and sliding on the makeshift hem as I went, the plastic clinging to my suddenly hot skin. “Oh, come on!” my father yelled back at me. “There’s nothing wrong with being a waiter.”

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http://gawker.com/5933857/the-crossdressing-room?comment=51776316