I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Category: Humor

  • You Bet Your Life (from Deep in the Heart)

    You Bet Your Life (from Deep in the Heart)


    So that’s the antenna? I asked Daddy as we stared at the man on our roof. That’s it, Sheila Rae. Looks like something from outer space, doesn’t it? Rex, our lemon-spotted pointer puppy, was running circles around the house and barking at the men who were installing the antenna. The fellow on the ground holding the ladder glanced nervously between Rex and the man above.

    Hurry up, Perry. I can’t hold this thing forever, Homer Bookman called to his brother. We’ve got to install another one before dark. And it’s all the way to Shiro. So get a move on.

    Hey, Homer, Daddy said. What are all those wires hanging down from that contraption? Are you sure this thing’s gonna work?

    You bet, Glenn, Homer said as he helped Perry climb down. Can’t say I really know what the wires are for. They somehow grab the pictures and sound out of the air, and then they go to the box with the little screen. Bingo! You’ve got yourself a genuine television set complete with all the bells and whistles. Yes sir, you’ve bought the airwaves of the future. When people gather round to watch a program, they’ll say Glenn Morris is more than a school man. He’s a man who marches to a different drummer and is a forward thinker. He gives his family the very best that money can buy. In this year of our Lord 1953 the Morris family leads the good people of Richards, Texas to experience the unknown. Don’t forget to say you made this important purchase at Bookman’s Appliances, he added.

    Well, let’s give it a try, Perry said.

    You’re certainly a salesman, Homer. No doubt about it, Daddy said, laughing. Daddy led me and Homer and Perry Bookman inside the house to our living room where the new brown box with the tiny screen sat. It was almost as tall as I was and had several knobs. Homer gave Daddy and me a lesson on their uses. We were definitely impressed.

    Go ahead and turn it on, Homer instructed. It won’t bite. Daddy bent down and turned the first knob. We all stared expectantly. Magically, the small screen came to life with an unusual stationary design in the center: a black and white triangle in a circle with some black lines down the side.

    That’s the test pattern, Perry offered. It’s what you see when there’s nothing on a channel. It’s pretty great, isn’t it? We all nodded as we gazed intently at the miracle before us. Television. Like radio with a picture. Like having a movie in your own home. We were surely blessed to have this wonder in our midst. Everyone beamed with happiness.

    Well, Glenn, just sign here and it’s all yours, Homer said. Daddy signed the paper and shook their hands. I had no inkling at the time that my world was about to expand. The box with the screen would entertain, inform and inspire my own imagination. The only child had a new best friend.

    *************

    Dude, you better hurry up. It’s almost time for Groucho Marx, I called to my grandmother from the living room. I was in my favorite spot, sitting on the floor directly in front of the television. It was Thursday night and the quiz show “You Bet Your Life” was about to begin. Dude came in and took her customary place on the sofa in the back of the room. She had her Pond’s cleansing cream that she used every night to remove her makeup while we watched our shows.

    Groucho! Dude and I shouted in unison with the TV audience as George Fenneman, the show’s announcer, began his introduction with “Now, here he is. The one, the only ________!” From our living room, we helped the audience fill in the blank. Groucho himself was nattily attired in a suit with a bow tie and professorial eyeglasses. The smoke from his omnipresent cigar filled the screen as he gave us the rules of the show. Maximum winning potential of $10,000, which was small potatoes for quiz shows even in the 1950s. Say the secret word and get another $100. The papier-mache duck dropped down to reveal tonight’s secret word: Turkey.

    That’s a good one, Dude said. Groucha will have fun with that. She called Groucho “Groucha,” and I tried for a long time to correct her, but finally gave up. We loved the secret word jokes he played on his contestants. Tonight’s contender was going to become one of my favorites. She was a beautiful woman named Sylvia from Los Angeles. Groucho loved the attractive women and spent a longer time getting to know them than he did the men. Tonight’s interview revealed Sylvia had a husband named Jerry who worked nights for the utility company. You’d be amazed what you can do when your husband works nights, Sylvia said. She smiled at Groucho in a suggestive manner. You might be amazed, he quipped, but I wouldn’t. The audience roared with laughter, and so did Dude and me. Sylvia didn’t win or say the secret word, but she did give Groucho her phone number.

    I wanted to be Groucho. Not handsome like George Fenneman, but so funny even the married women flirted shamelessly with him. I saw myself with the cigar and moustache. Not at all a bad look.

    ****************

    Saturday mornings meant westerns for Daddy and me. The Lone Ranger rides again. The Cisco Kid and Pancho, the lovable sidekick, who made Cisco shake with laughter. Cisco seemed to be overly preoccupied with the angle of his sombrero, but he was crazy about Pancho. The Range Rider. The Adventures of Kit Carson. Sky King and his niece, Penny. What was that airplane about anyway? And why did Penny go everywhere with her uncle? Gene Autry the singing cowboy.

    And of course our personal favorite Roy Rogers, King of the Cowboys. We loved Roy and Trigger, his golden palomino steed. We tolerated Dale Evans, Queen of the West, and her main ride Buttermilk because Roy obviously thought so highly of her. We wished for a dog like Bullet, his German Shepherd, who could have been a big help herding cows at our farm. We laughed at the antics of Pat Brady and his jeep Nellybelle, who were always in trouble, and at Gabby Hayes with his original bear look. We knew all the songs of the Sons of the Pioneers and loudly sang along with them in the theater of our own living room. I was Roy Rogers. I rescued damsels in distress. I thwarted cattle rustlers.

    I captured bank robbers. I sang “Don’t Fence Me In” and meant it. I warbled“A Gay Ranchero” before gay was anything other than happy. When Roy and Dale were guest stars at the Houston Fat Stock Show and Rodeo, Daddy took me to see them in person. I wasn’t a fan of rodeos, but I endured the bronco riding, calf roping, barrel racing and unfunny rodeo clowns to see Roy and Dale. Then, in the darkness of the gigantic Houston coliseum, Daddy helped me make my way down the stairs from our seats to climb onto the arena railings as the spotlights searched the blackness for their entrance.

    What a spectacle it was! Roy and Dale rode Trigger and Buttermilk into the center of the ring to the music of “The Yellow Rose of Texas” blaring across the Coliseum. Their outfits were dazzling. Diamond-studded. Large silver belt buckles gleamed as the lights reflected off them. They wore matching cowboy hats with amber beads and white leather fringe against black cotton shirts. Lots of fringe. Leather black-and-white cowboy boots with flowers down the side that glowed in their stirrups as they rode. It was breathtaking pageantry to this eight-year-old Roy Rogers wannabe. They sang and talked and roped and sang some more, and the grand finale was their signature “Happy Trails to You” as they rode around the arena railing, shaking hands with each tiny cowpoke who had made the trek from their seats to hang on through the show and wait for their personal touch. I was mesmerized. I saw myself riding Trigger around the country and wearing that glittering cowboy outfit. I could make the hat and boots work, too. Not at all a bad look. Little cowgirls everywhere would love me.

    ****************

    “Say, kids, what time is it?” It’s Howdy Doody time!

    Television after school evolved from Buffalo Bob and the Howdy Doody gang that admonished us to be good little boys and girls while we drank lots of chocolate Ovaltine, to Dick Clark and “American Bandstand” which encouraged us to “rock around the clock.” Somewhere in between, we became Mouseketeers with our very own roll call and special head gear. The Hardy Boys and Spin and Marty were my teenage heroes, and I fell hopelessly in love with Annette Funicello. I could hardly pronounce her last name, but what did it matter? She was Eye-talian and so exotic. She was perky, too – in all the right places. If I could find out where she lived, I thought, I would fly there in one of those Sky King airplanes. I would take Penny, too. Then if Annette declared her love for Tommy Kirk or Frankie Avalon was undying, I’d still have the effervescent Penny. Delicious. I ordered the Mickey Mouse ears from the Mickey Mouse Club, since that was the look Annette obviously liked. Not at all a bad look. Say goodbye to Tommy and Frankie, Annette.

    Penny of Sky King

    *********************

    Turn off that TV, Daddy finally said one afternoon in early autumn. Let’s go outside to play basketball. I put the goal up for you so we could spend some time working on your game. Guess what? One of the biggest mistakes I ever made was buying that television all those years ago. Things haven’t been the same since. He was right on target. My emotional attachment to television did stand the test of time. The first one I purchased for myself was a small color portable in 1967 when I got my first adult job in Houston after graduating from college. It was one of a very few possessions I took with me the following year when I drove to Seattle, Washington to get as far away from the piney woods of east Texas as I geographically could without crossing a major body of water, like an ocean. I wanted to see if I could live my own life without fear of running into one of my Houston relatives wherever I went. I was twenty-two years old.

    In an unfortunate turn of events, I had to trade my beloved color portable RCA television for a month’s rent while there. I had spent the rent money on a marathon telephone conversation with a girlfriend from college who was in Hawaii training for the Peace Corps. I tried all night long to get her to abandon serving her country and come live with me. She declined. The telephone company contacted me at work the next day, told me I had exceeded my credit with them, and payment was due immediately. My landlady had coveted my color TV, and I learned a great life lesson in economics: the law of supply and demand plus lust equals no TV.

    The loss of the television was as devastating as the loss of the girl.

  • Outing at Soldier Field – Part 3 (from Not Quite the Same)

    Outing at Soldier Field – Part 3 (from Not Quite the Same)


    Soldier Field was like a religious experience for lifelong football fans. I grew up with Da Bears on television for the past fifty years. Teresa and I both knew most of the names on the murals that chronicled their fabled history. Red Grange. Papa Bear Halas. Dick Butkus. Walter Payton. William “Refrigerator” Perry. Jim McMahon. The wild and crazy players and coaches that were household names in our lives. It was like a trip to Mecca for a Muslim. It was holy ground for both of us.

    Our seats were in an end zone and very good. Hundreds of Bears fans around us with a few scattered Panther blues in the midst. It was a very different culture from our games at home. One of our first impressions was the maleness of the game. There were very few women in the entire stadium. Testosterone was the hormone of the hour, and it raged with a vengeance. The row of men behind us defined Da Bears as I always thought of them. Big blue-collar guys in their mid-thirties who loved their beer and their Bears.

    I learned some things I didn’t know, though. These men loved to sing. There was a fight song created in 1941, and the entire stadium was singing it on cue sixty-five years later. “Bear Down, Chicago Bears,” they sang lustily whenever the Bears made a good play or when the defense was asked to step up to stop us. That was a tall order this day. On the second play from scrimmage our quarterback, Jake Delhomme, hit our pro bowl receiver, Steve Smith, for a long touchdown pass to our end zone, and the tone was set. Teresa and I hugged each other, laughed, and were so excited. We couldn’t believe it, and neither could Da Bears. The rest of the game was close and could have gone either way, but we were never behind from that play in the first minute of the game. Unbelievable. Our relatively young professional football franchise held its own amid the echoes of the legends as the wind swirled around us.

    I begged Teresa for the blanket I hadn’t wanted to bring as soon as we sat down. And, although she tried to get me to wait until I was cold beyond belief, she did relent and put it around us. She also brought out all the scarves and wrapped them around our heads so that we looked like blue blobs sitting on black coats. We spent much of the game jumping up and cheering but then quickly trying to bundle back up when our blanket slid off. We froze.

    The men sitting next to us in our end zone said this was much too warm for football. They had wished for snow and sleet for the game so that our players wouldn’t be able to maneuver as well. The skies remained clear and sunny. The beer flowed freely, and the lines to the men’s restroom grew longer. The language grew saltier.

    Sometime in the third quarter one of Da Bears sitting behind us discovered an older fan seated several rows down from us. The man had a rainbow colored scarf and Da Bear said, “Hey, there’s a f—ing fag down there. Look at that rainbow scarf. Yeah, he’s queer and he’s proud, too.” All his buddies began discussing the fag in the scarf and then progressed to speculation about the number of fags on the Panthers team. Steve Smith was the most likely, they decided. I found it interesting the suspected football fag would likely be the Most Valuable Player for our win. Teresa and I looked at the man in the scarf and whispered he was most assuredly not gay; he had simply made an unfortunate coincidental choice in color for his scarf at the game. We should know.

    Da Bears behind us got drunker and rowdier and much louder as we entered the fourth quarter. At one point when they were out at the concession stands we talked about how offensive their language would be in other settings, but somehow we  rolled along and didn’t get angry. Maybe we were overwhelmed by the panoramic spectacle of Soldier Field. Maybe we forgave them because we were gracious winners. Maybe we were too cold to care.

    Toward the end of the fourth quarter the most vocal and possibly most inebriated Bear leaned down between me and Teresa and said to me, “You’re hot…I’d like to meet you in a hotel after the game for some fun. How about that?” I said thanks, but that wouldn’t be likely to happen.  He took it very well. Then, a few minutes later he leaned down between us again and said to Teresa, “You’re hot, too. How about a little kiss?” Teresa said ok and pointed to her cheek, but he was distracted by another guy and she was spared his affection.

    A little while later he leaned over again and said, “Hey, are you girls sisters?” Undoubtedly, there was a family resemblance due to the blue blobs on the black coats. “No, not sisters,” Teresa said. Silence as his inebriated thought process absorbed this. “Are you good friends?” He continued to try to figure out an increasingly puzzling situation. “Yes,” Teresa replied. “We are very good friends.”

    He let this sink in, stood up, and said in a thundering loud voice, “Very good friends…hey, you’re not lesbians, are you?” Teresa looked at me. Our eyes met, and we smiled at each other.“Yes,” Teresa said in the middle of Da Bears end zone in Soldier Field. “We are lesbians.” Da Bear announced this to all his friends and everyone else within earshot of his voice. “They’re lesbians – we’ve got lesbians sitting in front of us!” The shock was too much for him. It measured somewhere between disbelief and horror. He sank slowly into his seat. What happened next was astonishing. As his buddies began to get into the spirit of the “outing” and started to make loud derogatory comments, Da Bear would have none of it.

    “Hey, shut up,” he said to his friends. “That is not cool.” And with that, we never heard anything else from any of Da Bears for the rest of the game. Final score: Carolina 29 – Chicago 21. The underdogs won. Teresa told me later had she known we could quiet the end zone by telling them we were lesbians, she would have done it in the first quarter. I love that girl. She has set me free.

    To be sure, I have had many “outings” in my sixty years as a lesbian, but none more memorable or more public than the one in that end zone at Soldier Field.  An old Texas dyke with her South Carolina girlfriend on an unforgettable adventure surrounded by football history. It doesn’t get any better than this. It was bright and sunny the next day as our airplane left the runway in Chicago; Teresa and I both knew the Panthers hadn’t been the only winners that weekend.

    ***********************

    Thanks for making the trip to Soldier Field with us in January, 2006 – looking at Chicago in the winter makes me feel a little bit cooler in the heat of the summer in South Carolina. The “Outing” was a memory maker. Stay cool, stay safe and please stay tuned.

  • Outing at Soldier Field – Part 2 (from Not Quite the Same)

    Outing at Soldier Field – Part 2 (from Not Quite the Same)


    On Sunday, Game Day, we were caught up in our shared football passion. What  would we wear to sit in the cold at Soldier Field?  Most of our fan apparel was for warm southern weather so we had to wear layers of our blue and black Panther colors that we brought. Scarves and gloves and stocking caps, too.

    what we would have worn in South Carolina

    “Let’s don’t bother with the blanket,” I said. “It’s too much trouble to carry it through the Art Institute.” Did I mention we were taking a detour to spend a couple of hours at the Art Institute on our way to the football game at Soldier Field? “I think we might need the blanket,” Teresa said. “You know I’ll be glad to carry it.” I reluctantly added it to our bag of extra scarves, head gear and binoculars.  And off we went. The day was breathtakingly beautiful with bright sunlight, but the wind whipped its way into our bodies as it blew across Lake Michigan and onto the streets of Chicago as we walked.

    The Art Institute was crowded with the people who were not on their way to the Bears game. We covered as much as we could and were thrilled with the works of some of the same European artists we loved in Florence, Italy, last year. The mixture of artists and mediums was a visual assault. The personal discovery of a painting by Antonio Mancini called “Lady Resting”captured our attention. It was the only one by him, and we couldn’t believe how much this eighteenth century woman looked like Teresa with her dark skin and even darker eyes and hair. I remembered when my Uncle Ray met her the first time he visited in our home from Texas and asked if she were Eye-talian. How little we know of ourselves in this life. Maybe she was?

    We left art behind and joined the processional of Bears fans walking to the playoff game. Da Bears were out in full force – we were quite conspicuous in our Panther blues. We walked and walked and walked some more through Millenium Plaza and Park down to the Field Museum across from the new Soldier Field. I had to stop for a breather to sit for a few minutes before the final push to the game. And Da Bears just kept coming.

    We made our way to the entrance where we handed our tickets to the gatekeepers. Teresa went through just fine. “Your bar code’s invalid,” the ticket guy said to me when he scanned my ticket. My heart stopped. I couldn’t speak. I had ordered the tickets from an online ticket vendor called TicketDaddy, and I was nervous about their appearance when I got them in the FedEx package before we left. The man kept trying to scan my ticket without success and finally called his supervisor to take a look. He must have sensed that the senior citizen with the ticket was about to go into cardiac arrest if she didn’t get past him. The supervisor tapped my code into a hand-held computer that accepted it and told me to go in. I could breathe again.

    Teresa had been waiting for me while this minor melodrama had taken place but hadn’t heard what was going on. She said it was better she hadn’t. We were handed souvenir Bears rally towels as we went in. I almost didn’t take one. Then the fellow passing them out said, “Hey, it’s the Playoffs. You’ll need yours for crying when you lose anyway.” I took one.

    **********************

    Congratulations – you’ve made it through to the second round of the story! One more to go…please stay tuned.

  • Outing at Soldier Field – Part 1 (from Not Quite the Same)


    I realized at a very early age growing up in the piney woods in rural east Texas I was somehow different from my family and friends there. I didn’t understand the difference completely as a child.  And to tell the truth I spent a lifetime evolving from that early recognition to the social justice activist I became in my middle age years in South Carolina. “Coming Out” happened over and over again in many settings in my more than sixty years as a lesbian. At some point in your life, though, you begin to feel there will be no more surprises or discoveries. As they say in football, that’s why they play the game

         “Look out the window. It’s pouring snow,” I said as our plane touched down on the Chicago runway. Why do I say those things to a person who minutes earlier  clutched my arm and said with hushed hysteria, “We’re going down! We’re going down!”? And that was when the landing gear made the noise it always does in preparation for landing.

    “It doesn’t pour snow,” Teresa said. That’s my girl. Even the peril of impending death won’t interrupt her brain’s ability to spot an obvious grammatical gaffe. I love that mind of hers, but next trip it will definitely be sedated before takeoff.

    We were on one of those remarkable unexpected escapades that had never been a part of my life before Teresa. She is the definitive impromptu whirlwind that spices up my studious planning Taurus nature.  Life is an adventure, and I found it is not necessarily wasted on the young. This was going to be a big weekend for us.

    The Carolina Panthers, our pro football team in Charlotte, North Carolina, were in the 2005 NFC playoffs against the Chicago Bears. Teresa and I were both huge football fans and made the two hour drive from our house in Columbia, South Carolina, to see every home game during the five years we had been together. We watched some dismal losing seasons, but this year was a banner year. The win against the New York Giants last Sunday made this happen. So the following Friday we were on a plane from the warm and sunny state of South Carolina to the frigid windy city for the big game on Sunday afternoon at Soldier Field. Unthinkable in my prior life.

    The weekend was as remarkable as she is.  From the moment we got to our hotel in the city’s theater district downtown, we didn’t stop. In the midst of the wintry mix that night we walked to see two movies that weren’t playing in our town. Not one, two. Capote and Brokeback Mountain. Two movies with gay themes that would take several decades to be shown at home.  We saw them at a marvelous old theater called The Esquire that reminded me nostalgically of the downtown theaters of my childhood visiting Houston in the 1950s. Of course, the interior of the Esquire was broken up into the little theaters they all have today, but I could still recall the magnificent old Texas theater lobby in my mind. The smell of the buttery popcorn was the same.

    In between the movies, we had a wonderful Chicago pizza in a warm noisy restaurant near the theater. The people were friendly and in a jubilant mood. Tables and booths were packed. Standing room only. It suited our festive mood. By the time we finished the second movie and walked back to our hotel, we were exhausted.

    On Saturday morning we took a train out to the suburb of Oak Park, walked the streets of Hemingway and Frank Lloyd Wright. Teresa is a lover of books and authors, so this was sensory overload for her. We had a guided tour of the Hemingway family home for just the two of us. It was a slow Saturday for literary greats. We were the only visitors in the Hemingway Museum during the hour we were there.

    Next was the bitterly cold walking tour of the neighborhood where Frank Lloyd Wright began his career designing homes for his friends. My legs ached, and I could see my breath in the icy air. But Teresa’s face was alive with enthusiasm at the wonder of all we were seeing. Her intensity was invigorating, and so we moved on. She can never know enough. We never have enough time to see all she wants to see. There aren’t sufficient books in the souvenir shops for her to buy to read later to see what she missed while she was here. Never enough time to read them when she buys them. Her passion for knowing and seeing and doing is boundless; her energy is contagious.

    I was thrilled when we finally came to rest late that afternoon in a fabulous Mexican restaurant with plenty of heat besides the warmth of the picante salsa. I could feel my tired old bones begin to thaw. Teresa glowed as she related her favorite sights of the day. We took the train from Oak Park to downtown Chicago and made our way to our hotel. The plays in the theater district looked inviting, but we were afraid we’d pass out sitting in the dark for that long. Our hotel bed welcomed us with open arms.

    *********************

    When the heat index is over 100 degrees in South Carolina this week, I thought I needed a breath of cold air…brrrr….stay cool and please stay tuned.

  • Two Women on Faith and Hope (from I’ll Call It Like I See It)

    Two Women on Faith and Hope (from I’ll Call It Like I See It)


    “I know Papa has gone to heaven, and that is where I want to meet him. The Old Devil gets a hold of me sometime. I slap him off—and pray harder for the Lord to help me be a better Christian. I realize more that I need the Lord every day, and I want to love the Lord more and try to serve Him better. He alone can take away these heartaches of mine. I want to have more faith in Him. I have been so burdened, and I want to be happy. Serving God and living for Him is the only plan.” (excerpt from a letter written by my fifty-six-year-old maternal grandmother to a sister following the death of their father in 1954)

    My maternal grandmother’s belief that faith was the sole solution to the multitude of problems she faced throughout her life beginning with her husband’s accidental death that left her penniless with four children to raise during the Great Depression, a belief she expressed in the above letter to her sister, reflected her daily approach to “have more faith” that included a ritual of reading Bible passages while she sat at our small kitchen table and I lay in the darkness watching her from the next room, wishing she wouldn’t get up so early. But there she would be, struggling with her third-grade reading level to look for godly guidance in the ungodly hours before dawn. I want to be happy, she said, and God was her only plan.

    Shockingly, my paternal grandmother glossed over the deeper issues of faith in favor of a focus on hope. The Bible says there are three things that last forever: faith, hope, and love; but the greatest of them is love. This grandmother wasn’t concerned with the intricacies of faith nor did she overtly exhibit love toward others outside her immediate family, but she attended the same Southern Baptist church faithfully every Sunday. Her hope was for humor, however. Her belief was that in every Sunday church service she could find something or someone or, preferably both, she could use to entertain her family at the dinner table later. The poor preacher was irreverently skewered on a regular basis; no one was sacred at that table. She was a woman in charge of her home, family and most of the conversations that took place within both.

    This was the faith of my grandmothers. The church was the teacher for one, the Bible the textbook for both, and the interpretations ranged from the holy to the inadvertently profane. I listened and watched these women for as long as they lived and throughout my childhood absorbed their diverse values that blended with the Sunday School teachings and preaching of the Southern Baptist churches my family attended. I learned to sift the messages and keep the ones that appeared to lessen my likelihood of going to hell in an afterlife.

    My maternal grandmother’s duel with the Devil evokes strong feelings for me, but they are feelings of sadness for her inability to achieve that higher level of trust she desperately wanted, the trust that would bring her happiness. Her faith never could be quite good enough, and I refuse to believe in a god that inspires fear and irrational guilt. As for my dad’s mother, her irreverence gave me permission to begin to overcome feelings of shame when I faced the puzzles of sexual identity that were my life. My life has involved many choices, but my being lesbian was not one of them. My paternal grandmother had a unique relationship with her God, but her words and sense of humor helped free me from the somber sermons of damnation in my youth and encouraged me to think for myself. I wonder if she knew.

    *********************

    “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” (Hebrews XI, 1)