politics & chiffon.

It was salmon pink chiffon. Almost enough said: if you’re comparing your aesthetic to raw fish, you’re not in a good spot. And I was not in a good spot.

It was supposed to be hot girl summer after a full year of the COVID-19 pandemic, in which I had lived with my parents and little sister in Winnebago, the rural farm town I grew up in. This was not the professional launch I had envisioned out of the prestigious Yale School of Drama. Never had I anticipated I’d be back to living as isolated as I had often felt as a young girl; a time which resulted in boxes and boxes of conscientious journals. This time, however, I did not journal, but nevertheless regressed in myriad other ways.

Hot girl summer had never been my thing; as someone with natural curves and a natural skepticism of the gym. I had always been a small girl, though one with hips, boobs and a butt. The kind of body type that isn’t perceived as innocent for nearly as long as it should be. And that’s all I really longed for; to be seen as boyish and lithe and genderless. Instead when I wore the same clothing as my peers, I was perceived as voluptuous and tempting. As I grew, I learned to disguise my figure to ensure my social survival; I wanted to stay in good graces with women and attract as little attention from men as possible. I tended to make a great sidekick to the life of the party.

Kenzie and I had met at boarding school in the quiet woods of distant Northern Michigan. She was one of those rare 16 year olds who seemed to instinctively understand how much power she held, and not only that, but how to wear it casually and comfortably. I remember the first time I saw her; her Jackie O cheekbones seemed to float, disconnected to any responsible sense of gravity or modesty. She sat on her knees in the Harvey theater where we had gathered for fall auditions; she threw her hair over her shoulder and as the September Michigan sun shone through the floor to ceiling windows, its glow seemed only the moon paying worship to the sun; she was undeniably luminescent.

I remember several of us girls gathered around her in someone’s dorm room, asking in hushed tones what sex felt like. She sat on the dorm room’s desk, legs dangling, as she told us her favorite positions. I can still see her in my mind’s eye, demonstrating the position where one partner’s legs are wrapped over the other’s and, like a six legged spider, they writhe together and rock back and forth.

Our boarding school was for artists; every student was there to seriously focus on a certain craft, ranging from filmmaking to oboe to ballet to creative writing. The college audition season was understandably pressurized as students awaited acceptance to every kind of elite school imaginable; Juilliard, USC, Harvard, MIT, Eastman, Curtis, Berklee, RISD, NYU, among myriad others. Our Valedictorian majored in physics at Harvard while simultaneously studying flute at the New England Conservatory of Music.

My inordinately achievement-focused-self was relieved when I was accepted to a top five BFA Acting program; Rutgers University in New Jersey. I was also relieved to learn that Kenzie had been accepted as well. It was a funny time; all of us perched on the edge of a life we already knew nothing about, awaiting a brand new transformation. As for Kenzie and I; our fates had been sealed to each other. We did not know what lay ahead as we moved to a part of the country that neither of us had ever even stepped foot in, but we knew whatever the next four years held, we would be together through it all; bonded by our formative years as art orphans in the big woods at the edge of the world.

After the required innocence of boarding school, college hit hard. It was a world of cocaine and alcohol and sex and no curfew. At the very first party of the semester, I emerged from the basement to see Kenzie, motionless, being carried down a hallway. She had fallen on her head on the concrete. When she came to, she was rabid; fighting anyone who tried to help her. She ran away from us all, out into the street. I followed her, trying to reason with her, as she ran away from me in a tiny dress in the cool September air. Her figure getting smaller and smaller as she receded into the dark night.

That night would set the tone for the next four years; by day, we studied acting with the fervor and self sacrifice of political activists, and by night, our world burned as we soared over the guardrails of life; each fueling the other. We had first row seats to each other’s self destruction and eventual slow build towards salvation.

In voice class we were given an assignment to choose three animals to represent different parts of ourselves and to write a short play about them. My animals were a monkey, a peacock, and a platypus. Kenzie chose a wolf, a frog, and a deer. My play mostly involved the depression and low self esteem of the platypus frustrating the perfectionism and exhibitionism of the peacock, evoking the naïveté of the baby monkey. Kenzie’s ended in the wolf killing and consuming the frog and deer. When she finished, our voice teacher, Susan (whose main personality trait was that she was a divorcee) looked horrified. After a beat, she just said, “No one has ever killed one of their animals before.”

Kenzie was polarizing. She would befriend new girlfriends with great flair, the honeymoon stage involving extremely compelling, but performative intimacy. She drew these women into her inner circle, inseparable for a time until it inevitably blew up, ending with Kenzie cutting her one time paramour out of her life. This pump and dump cycle played itself out with the usual fervor usually reserved for lovers. However, for Kenzie, such intimacy seemed only to be applied to women. The men in Kenzie’s life rotated in and out of her bed with both speed and anonymity.

After each fall from grace, Kenzie would reach for me and I would appear. My rationality and relative steadiness a balm to her re-discovered brokenness. We were opposites and drawn to each other through this magnetism of imagined completeness: where she was brazen, I was meek, where she was reactive, I was thoughtful, where she felt stupid, I was smart. Where she was unpopular, I was beloved. When we moved together in movement class, it was impossible to know where I ended and she began. Our culminating second year piece began with her and I on each of the shoulders of a classmate, arms outstretched behind us and our hands clasped, heads on each other’s shoulders: our bodies a mirror image, stretched open to the sky.

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Kenzie had left New York and moved to Ohio to pursue her dream of becoming a Republican. Also a lawyer. When she looked at me in the bathroom mirror and dropped her voice to a pained whisper; ’I wish I still had my hymen.. I wish I were a virgin.’, visions of Kenzie on 50 nights out with 50 different men ran through my head and I returned her gaze with a vacant and baffled look that might as well have been reacting to her pronouncement of marrying Jim Jones.

Nonetheless, hymen or not, she was getting married at the end of June and I was a bridesmaid. And I was to wear a bridesmaid’s dress of salmon pink. Because what better color for a group of pasty Midwestern white girls?

There were a few complicating factors here: the aforementioned Republicanism, which indicated to me I was likely to be swimming in a pond with not just Trump voters, but, being that her husband was a Yale Law grad; Ivy League Republicans; a truly special corner of hell. Besides the discomfort and social awkwardness of such a situation, there was the other complicating factor; as established by the moment in the mirror, Kenzie had become someone unrecognizable to me. She was now a conservative Catholic who did not believe in birth control or pre-marital sex. She had turned away in shame from her past artistic life, arms outstretched to Jesus, Donald Trump, and Bob. Her fiancé.