An Uncommon Woman

Let me start by saying, it was not a good day at work today. It was the kind of day where everything goes wrong, my productivity was thwarted at every turn and everybody needed something. Also, I got called out on something that was totally my fault- the kind of situation where you just have to apologize and take your lumps.

I came home and just caught the tail end of Fresh Air, where Terry Gross announced that playwright Wendy Wasserstein died today, leaving a six year old girl without a Mom. Although I'm not familiar with Wasserstein's later works, I love her early plays. She was a feminist who wasn't afraid to show feminism for what it really is- a disappointment, a failure not because the big bad men rained on our parade, but because we as women can't seem to stop judging each other. And yet there was always hope for the movement in Wasserstein's works, the idea that if we just stick together we may be okay.

We people who know me would ask why I ever decided to go to a women's college, I would refer them to Wasserstein's first play, Uncommon Women and Others. Wasserstein, herself a Mt. Holyoke grad, set this play in a women's college in late 60s/ early 70s. The crazy beautiful women wore skirts to dinner, drank sherry then snuck around the Housemother to screw with Princeton guys and make Rorschach ink blots out of their menstrual fluid. What can I say? This is the school I thought I was going to; in reality, I was about 30 years too late.

Wasserstein also became a mother for the first time at age 55 and a single mother at that. Now that's a fearless woman. Then she got cancer and died. Goodbye, Wendy. I'm sure it's no consolation, but I'm off to add your collected works to my Amazon wishlist. And now I'm draining the grape Kool-Aid from my glass so I can fill it up with some of the red wine that's sitting on my counter. What goes better with a big cry, Bourgogne or Montepulciano?