Tammy Armstrong’s Questions for Me

Tammy Armstrong has jumped in (HURRAY!) and posed three questions for me to answer. So let’s get right on them!

I wish I had been less shy and more outgoing (a little back history: we moved to a very small town from a city when I was ten and I never got over the shock of being “the new kid in town” where everyone knew my name and treated me like a familiar before I knew any of theirs!), and I wish I had known what transgender was so I could have named it and claimed it back then (which is one of the reasons I wasn’t more outgoing: I knew I wasn’t like most, or any, of my classmates!). But that was then and this is now. Back then, if I had named and claimed it, I may have been slapped in a rubber room. You just never know. We’ve come a LONNNNGGGG way since the 1960’s, thankfully!

I’m not a current movie or TV watcher so I’ll harken back to Star Trek The Original Series. I loved Gene Rodenberry’s IDIC (Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations) ethos and the fact that people from all over the earth (and in the skies) worked together respectfully (in most cases!).  I have always envisioned a future where our bigotry and “othering” is a thing of the past.  So yeah, Star Trek (as imperfect, misogynistic and ogle-centric as it was for men viewers) still reaches me where I live. I just overlook the nonsense and the hedonism and go with the other morality plays it posed.

Can I choose living or dead people?  If so, hands down, I’d choose DeForest Kelley. He was so even-keeled, level-headed and becalming, he’d help me not panic and keep us on task as to how to survive.

Here’s a funny example. Carolyn Kelley told me this story to illustrate what she meant by “De doesn’t do anything rushed or fast”:

During WWII, no nylon stockings were being manufactured because all the nylon was being used for  military needs, so Carolyn and her girlfriends would always draw lines down the back of their legs to simulate the “look” of wearing nylons, so they didn’t appear bare-legged. (Nylon stockings back in the day had seams running down the back.)

Well, one morning or afternoon, Carolyn and two of her friends (probably Anne Jolly and Bette Ireland) were in the bathroom, taking turns standing on the toilet seat so someone else could draw lines down the back of their legs.  De was apparently out in the living room monitoring his watch, because they were due to be somewhere soon.

When it became obvious that the ladies weren’t going to finish their leg-work anytime soon and were likely to miss their rendezvous with whomever or whatever, Carolyn said she heard him say from outside the closed bathroom door (and she mimicked him here), “Laaaaaaddddiiiiieeeessss, weeee haaaavvveee to Huuuuuurrrrryyyy!” in the least-hurried way she had ever heard anyone try to hurry others.   It cracked them all up!

So, I don’t see him panicking for being stuck on an island. I see him saying, “Wellll.  I guesssss we’d betttttteerr think about what weeee need to doooo to surviiiiiivvvvveee here. I haaaavvveeee sommmee ideeeaaasss.”

Not quite like the sloth in Zootopia, of course, but certainly not in any way frazzled or fearful.

I could survive nicely next to someone like that! Someone to moderate my “Let’s hurry and get this done!” since timetables would no longer be of much use!

But if I have to pick someone who’s alive right now, I’d choose Lisa Twining, hands down.  We just “get” each other and we both know how to survive off the land, so we’d quickly acquire what we need from the island. We’re both very well-read and have spent our lives learning constantly.   We’ve probably both read enough about homesteading (and we’ve both lived on ranches/farms) that living on an island might feel like paradise instead of prison.  I guess that would all depend on which island we found ourselves on! We’d befriend the critters (the ones we couldn’t or wouldn’t eat to sustain ourselves) and have a whee of a time!  (If wishes were fishes.)

Thank you again, Tammy Armstrong, for these new questions!!!