By Connie Schultz
Several questions are burning my brain after last week’s flare-up over The Wall Street Journal’s decision to run a photo of Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan playing softball.
In case you missed it — and bless you for caring about real news — accusations and denials were flying like foul balls over the decision to run that 1993 photo of Kagan at bat.
Was it an innocent attempt to humanize the spirited 50-year-old single woman? Or was it code for a sinister suggestion about which way her bat swings?
To which I respond: “Wait a minute. What?”
My questions:
Number 1: How many of my unmarried, middle-aged girlfriends with thriving careers and no children are gay and never told me? They have shared the minutiae of their everyday lives — including all those hilarious dates with boys masquerading as grown-ups — and they never bothered to tell me what they really wanted was a date with no Adam’s apple and a drawer full of underwire? I’m hurt.
Number 2: How is it that I played softball throughout my childhood, taught my son how to throw a ball and coached my daughter’s teams for years and I’m not a lesbian? What is wrong with me? God: Are you listening?
Number 3: How come so many of the lesbians I know are terrible softball players?
OK, make that one lesbian I know, but she’s one of my very best friends and she does everything else so well that my admiration for her sometimes morphs just a teensy, weensy bit into raging envy. Her name is Jackie. She is so talented that she regularly bursts into a Broadway show tune that provides the perfect soundtrack to whatever experience we’re sharing at any given moment. It’s uncanny, and it only took me four years to get used to it. Now I don’t blink an eye when she belts out Snoopy’s “Suppertime” in the produce aisle at Heinen’s.
The point here — and I do have one — is that Jackie, for all her God-given talents, is terrible at softball. Years into our friendship, I learned this after I asked Jackie to sub for an absent player on our newspaper’s co-ed softball team.
She did warn me that she was a little rusty.
“Con,” she said, “I haven’t played softball since I was a senior at Immaculate Heart Academy and saved the game to beat our arch-rival Holy Angels.” No, I didn’t confirm this because the only time Jackie has ever lied to me was when she said I looked very New York-ish after cutting my bangs with nail clippers. I know the Jackie-lie face.
Story Compliments Of The Plain Dealer
