My Chauvinist Past
Someone should have slapped me every time I said "I don't like chick singers." [Not enough punishment, Charlie. -Jane]
Sometime around 1998 when I was a senior in high school, I was driving my cluttered Chrysler LeBaron from Chicago to my crappy hometown of Morris, Illinois, about an hour south. In the car with me were a pair of friends, both of whom were women, and we were discussing the punk show (The Broadways, Mary Tyler Morphine, and the Arrivals if I recall correctly) we had just seen at the Fireside Bowl.
“Have you ever listened to Bikini Kill?” my friend asked, “I think you’d really like them.”
“Meh,” I responded, “I don’t really like bands with chick singers.” [Reader alert – as a friend of, fan of, and even opening band member for the groundbreaking legendary Bikini Kill, you had better believe that there is an epiphany coming, or this probably would not appear on this website. We have standards. -Jane]
If I had a time machine I wouldn’t go back to gaze upon the glory of classical Greece or throw baby Hitler into a burlap sack filled with stones and toss it in the Rhine. I’d go back to that morning, grab little punk Charlie by the shoulders, and tell him to stop being an idiot, particularly around people he wanted to impress. Then I’d circle back and kill Hitler…