I Wish I Had a Red Dress Read Free Page A

and told me we’d have no problem being approved. At the appropriate time, they allowed me to make a three-minute statement and I used my time to stress the importance of self-sufficiency, since I know politicians are big on self-sufficiency and I am too. I worked in phrases like “breaking the cycle of poverty” and “taking personal responsibility for correcting societal ills.”
    I even handed out copies of our basic Circus credo, which I wrote at my kitchen table when we were brand new:
     
    Ten Things Every Free Woman Should Know
How to grow food and flowers
How to prepare food nutritiously
Self-defense
Basic first aid/sex education and midwifery
Child care (prenatal/early childhood development)
Basic literacy/basic math/basic computer skills
Defensive driving/map reading/basic auto and home repairs
Household budget/money management
Spiritual practice
Physical fitness/health/hygiene
    The professional grant-writing people told me it was a pretty radical statement for general distribution so I agreed to leave it out, but at the last minute, I made enough copies to hand out anyway. I wanted to give these guys a feeling for how seriously we’re trying to impact the totality of these young women’s lives.
    Secure in my delusion, I chattered on for my allocated three minutes, then thanked them for their time and offered to respond to any questions they might have for me. At that point, I thought I was doing pretty good. Nobody had yawned or excused himself to go to the bathroom and then the Honorable Ezra Busbee cleared his throat and cocked his head in my direction.
    Congressman Busbee is a tall, thin, intense-looking manwhose jacket sleeves and pant legs are always a little too short, which makes him bear more than a passing resemblance to Ichabod Crane. In spite of this unfortunate image problem and his total lack of support outside of his own small district, he’s been around long enough to sit on a number of powerful committees, including this one.
    “I’ve got a question for you, Joyce, ” he said with a tight little smile like we had a first-name relationship going. “May I call you Joyce?”
    I wanted to say, Of course, if I can call you Ezra, but I didn’t. I needed his vote.
    “Certainly,” I said, with my own small smile.
    “Well, Joyce. ” He held up his copy of the “Ten Things.” “This is a very interesting document.”
    Was “interesting” good or bad?
    “Thank you,” I said.
    “Can you do all these things?”
    “Almost all,” I said.
    “Then would you call yourself a free woman? ”
    “Yes,” I said. “I would.”
    “And that’s what you’re raising over there in . . . Idlewild, is it? Free women? ”
    He made it sound like I was running an illegal mink ranch. “Well, I wouldn’t say we’re raising them, ” I said. “Most of our core constituency is eighteen to twenty-two.”
    “And they already have babies?”
    I kept my voice as neutral as possible. “Not all, but many of them do have children, yes.”
    He nodded and peered through his glasses at the list, reading through it again quickly. “And what’s your definition of a free woman again?”
    I think that for some men, using the word “free” and “woman” so close together seems such an obvious oxymoron that they assume it must be the setup for a funny story. Ezra struck me as that kind of guy.
    “A free woman,” I said, reminding myself to keep smiling too, “is one who can fully conceive and consciously execute all the moments of her life.”
    I could tell he had no idea what I was talking about.
    “Look out, Ezra,” chuckled the committee chairman, a jovial grandfather from a tiny town as far into northern Michigan as you can go without falling into Lake Superior. “I have it on good authority that Mrs. Mitchell here is something of a women’s libber. ”
    What century were they living in? The other members of the committee chuckled, but Ezra was not impressed. He waved the “Ten Things” in my