Blonde Salvation

I’ve spent two days being throttled by the change of seasons (and how Californian my internal climate is) and sniffles and enjoying falling headlong into memory and sketching out, if I wanted to, what story I’d tell for myself and my growing up. Because it always feels good to go back, but especially when you have no excuse not to.

I usually use my tumblr for this sort of notetaking, but for the sake of all of it one place (and having more than one video to go with it), here’s some of what I’ve been watching, in all its bashed-up, barely captured and YouTubed resolution — the next lifesaving blonde icon of us daughters of the pop 90’s. First there was Laura Palmer (we’ve killed that one), and now, Madonna.

Truth of Dare. My mother canceled our MTV after the 1984 “Like A Virgin” performance. My godmother was the one allowed to hint to me that Madonna existed. She took my nearly albino cousin, not me, to go see her, with sprayed red M’s on their white-blonde hair. My mother flipped the channel in silent embarrassment when an afternoon show tried to explain how controversial the “Like A Prayer” Pepsi ad was while showing as little of it as possible. My mother helped me get on birth control. She reminded me often to “be modest.”

So with my bedroom door shut, I taped Madonna off the radio I got on my own in seventh grade, and made out with my first boy to “Crazy For You” and insisted a best girlfriend give me the new Immaculate Collection on CD because I wanted it forever and I knew it was all silly but Madonna was the first thing I liked that everyone liked and the first thing that made me love about myself what no one else did: my desire to be desired myself, my affection for fame, my messy and upsetting need to be loved.

My mother believes in appearances of the Blessed Virgin.

Someone broke into the house where I grew up, where my mother still lived, right before Christmas the year after I’d gone to college. We always wondered it if was my father, because of what was rifled through (divorce papers, financial statements), what was left behind (all the Christmas presents). Only one actual valuable was stolen: my mother’s gold rosary from Medugorje, Bosnia-Herzegovina. I’m not sure what kind of gold it was, or how much it was worth: she told me it had turned to gold when children to whom the Blessed Virgin had appeared had held it.

“It was kind of my protection,” she said.

I did my Catholic best and went to a gift shop in the suburbs near Boston, the kind that sells saints for bedside tables and tall votive candles in rainbow colors, that were it on Mission and 24th Street in San Francisco or Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn or South Street in Philadelphia, she would never dream of entering, even if the inventory was identical. I go into all of those. I feel better in the ones in cities, where my Catholicism is as complicated as anything I could get over-the-counter in there.

The only Medugorje rosary I could find her was silver, but I got it for her anyway, telling her it had been blessed, too. That I had to do myself, kneeling for the last time before the peach-lit statue of Mary in the Church in which I was raised. I never called her the Blessed Virgin, the Holy Mother. There was always another Madonna who came first.