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I'm Hadditt

~ 87 year old Marylou Shira Hadditt, born a Southern Belle-Jewish Princess, is a civil rights and political activist, lesbian feminist, mother, grandmother and writer who says, “I want to share my stories before I die."

I'm Hadditt

Monthly Archives: October 2013

January at the Art Institute of Chicago

29 Tuesday Oct 2013

Posted by hadditt in Chicago, Memoir

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Art Institute of Chicago, depression, Georgia O'Keefe, Monet

1967-8
The best thing about Chicago is the Chicago Art Institute. I spent hours there. When I was in the depths of depression, I sat on a small bench in a small dark blue room losing myself in Caillebotte’s painting of a beautiful woman and handsome man walking on wet lavender cobblestones beneath a large black umbrella. Other, happier times, I gazed at Monet’s haystacks: haystacks in the snow, haystacks at sunset, haystacks at midday. A room full of happy haystacks.

For a year or so, I was a student, At that time, students had to walk through the museum to access the school which was located in the in the basement. The joy, of course, was classes started at 9am and the museum didn’ t open ‘til 10:30, With my student ID, I got to wander wherever,

One cold January a Georgia O’Keeffe perspective was being hung. Amid the unpacked wooden crates was O’Keeffe herself, dressed in black, with a large cane handled umbrella, pointing this way and that to properly hang her paintings. There were six or seven versions of her Jacks-in-the-Pulpit. When you entered the gallery, horizontally, at the end of the long hall way was her astonishing Sky Above the Clouds . O’Keeffe approvingly nodded at their installation.

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Thank You, Daniel Ellsberg

25 Friday Oct 2013

Posted by hadditt in Activism

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

activism, Daniel Ellsberg, Edward Snowden, marching for peace

July 2013
A big thank you to Daniel Ellsberg for his column
on Edward Snowden in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat (“Snowden made the right call”), In my opinion, this is one of the most important
pieces of journalism I’ve yet to read on the NSA Snowden affair.
Ellsberg clarifies where our country’s ideals of freedom were in
1971 and how far away from any of those ideals we have come in the
past 40 years. It tears my loyal heart in two when Ellsberg recalls
being released $50,000 bond and his own recognizance compared with
Bradley Manning’s three years of imprisonment, including eight
months of solitary confinement, with no charges. Ellsberg stated
that what Snowden “has given us is our best chance…to rescue
ourselves from out-of-control surveillance that shifts all
practical power to the executive branch and its intelligence
agencies.”. Face it or not folks, we are living in a police state.
Ellsberg’s column is our wake up call.

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Lesbian Archives of Sonoma County: The Beginning

22 Tuesday Oct 2013

Posted by hadditt in Activism, Lesbian, Memoir, Sonoma County

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

activism, LASC, lesbian, Lesbian Archives, Sonoma County, The Sitting Room, Women's Voices

A Personal Summary of How LASC Came to Be

2013

Summer of 2006, JJ Wilson, feminist. retired Sonoma State University English Professor, told me that someone in the SSU History Department was planning an oral history of the Sonoma County women’s movement. JJ suggested I volunteer to be sure lesbians were included.

Well. They weren’t.

A year later, six or eight of us local lesbians attended a well catered luncheon to celebrate the History students’ research and to examine their time line of women’s activities in Sonoma County. We found, to our disappointment and surprise, that absolutely no lesbian groups were mentioned: No Women’s Voices newspaper, no Lesbian Voters Action Caucus, no Women’s Studies department, no Pride Day parades. Nada.

A student’s justification was that the oral history of Sonoma County women was only a small part of the syllabus – the focus was on a history of feminism beginning with the American Revolution. She also pointed out that only the Press Democrat, a NY Times owned newspaper, was their research source. No one knew the existence of twenty-year old Women’s Voices Newspaper.

While their oversight made us invisible, we set out to make ourselves visible by creating an archive which describes the role that lesbians played in Sonoma County activism – and which made things better for all women.

My friend, Ruth Mahaney, feminist, lesbian and former chair of Sonoma State Women’s Studies, drove me home. We sat in my parking lot a long time, simmering down, seeking ways to change the situation.

“Hey. We can’t let this happen. We have to do something about it.”

“We need to organize the lesbian community”, I responded.

“I know. Let’s give a party. We’ll invite every lesbian we can think of.”

“Let’s make it a re-union.”

“Let’s have it out on my place on the Russian River”, said Ruth.

“And a pot luck, of course,” I replied.

We garnered enough names from our address books so that over thirty long time lesbians arrived, food in hand, for the first party. We recorded both video and audio memories and stories. About twenty people came to the second reunion, fifteen or so to the third, and at the last reunion six showed up: Nancy Moorhead, Mary Kowatch, Tina Dungan, Ann Neel, Ruth and me. We gave ourselves a name and formed the steering committee—Lesbian Archives of Sonoma County—LASC. Our purpose: to archive 30 years of lesbian activity from 1965 to l995 on video tape and with ephemera –to build an archive for future researchers and writers with knowledge about Sonoma County lesbian activists in the latter part of the 20th century.

In the past five years, we researched and listed sixty different local organizations and businesses started by lesbians. We have videotaped five individual community leaders and eighteen community action groups (ranging from Moonrise Café to Women’s Voices; from the Gang Band to Women’s Studies to Lesbian Voters and more.) And have more individual and group interviews scheduled for this year and next year.

We sponsored an historical afternoon with long time lesbian leaders, Sally Gearheart and Phyllis Lyons that attracted an audience from the entire Bay Area. With a grant, we purchased video and editing equipment. Our Steering committee has expanded from six to nine with the addition of Nancy Kelley, Tia Watts and Lynn Adler.

…a pretty good record for a handful of lesbians with a dream.

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A Half Century of Peace Marches

17 Thursday Oct 2013

Posted by hadditt in Activism, Memoir

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

activism, Hyde Park Kenwood, marching for peace, Pete Seeger, Vietnam Moratorium

Chicago February 1952 Fifty one years ago this February I bundled myself and my two year old son, Steve, in layers of scarves, coats and mittens as protection against Chicago’s bitter windy lakefront. A hundred young parents, members of the Committee for Peaceful Alternatives, pushed strollers or held small children’s hands, as we walked a half mile along Hyde Park Boulevard to the frozen lake shore. Staunchly facing the bitter wind, even more staunchly rebelling against Harry Truman’s threat to use The Bomb against North Korea. (and today, how ironic, North Korea might use The Bomb against us.) Two weeks ago my son Steve, now 53, took his young nephews to the Peace March in San Francisco. I told Steve that if I’d had a wheel chair, it would be his turn to push me.

Washington, November 1969, the Vietnam Moratorium. I’d taken a charter bus filled with hippie students from the University of Chicago,. Forty-one year old me was caught in the midst of “never trusting any one over thirty” . We shared wine, bread, cheese, joints, passing them from one side of the bus aisle to the other. Someone in the back had a guitar, another a penny whistle. More festive than political. Songs and conversations softened to a hum late into the night. We awoke at daybreak in western Pennsylvania. A scattering of snow on the hillside was pink in the sunrise. From deep within the bus, a voice softly sang : “Oh beautiful for spacious skies”, until all the voices filled the entire bus – filled, it seemed the entire world. Even the driver joined in. How very much we loved our county.

Kenwood February 2003. I watched throngs worldwide march on a soundless TV while I listened to KPFA radio. My tears flowed when I heard an aged, cracked and weak- voiced Pete Seeger sing “Over the Rainbow.” I hoped he would sing “Down by the Riverside” as I’d heard him do so many times, but if he did, Pacifica did not broadcast it – Seeger, whom I first heard at Union Square, New York City in 1948 when I went to a rally for Henry Wallace for president. Pete Seeger – remembered rent parties in the 50’s after he’d been black listed and couldn’t get gigs. He often sang at Steve’s nursery school. Seeger, Studs Terkel, Zero Mostel, Shirley Lens – among those who stuck by their ideals and principals and lost their jobs to blacklists.

Marylou Shira and grandson Nile, 4th of July 1985 (?) Photo by Sean Sprague.

Marylou Shira and grandson Nile, 4th of July 1985 (?) Photo by Sean Sprague.

Santa Rosa January 2003, I stand on the street corner waving a sign, looking like an aging Barbra Streisand. I forward emails; I sign petitions, I call senators and representatives. And everywhere I hear and see and smell that unspeakable thing that I don’t want to write about. Instead I look out my window and see the jonquils budding and think about spring – spring that comes and blooms and renews itself and renews loving.

And that’s what we need to do. Love. Pray. The Jews have a myth: that if every Jew everywhere in the world kept Shabbat all on the same Saturday, the messiah will come and bring peace. I’m trying to find hope in all this chaos. My daughter, Gail, read me a letter from a Buddhist friend who wrote that we need to love everywhere and everyone. We even need. to love Bush and Hussein. And maybe if we love everyone, all of us all at the same time, we will have peace. I feel alone sitting here at my computer. Alone as when Roosevelt died or when Kennedy was shot or when King was killed. My world is teetering. I want to be very small and curl up on a fat comforting lap and be patted and hear a kind voice say that I am only watching a bad TV show. And then I can turn off the TV. I yearn to be like those bright jonquils— growing up from the dark damp earth, bringing springtime, bringing hope.

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Her names tell the story of her life

15 Tuesday Oct 2013

Posted by hadditt in Memoir

≈ 3 Comments

In addition to all of the above and its various mutations, my life has included two husbands, two traumatic lovers, four children, some travel, and forty years of being bipolar 1 (That’s the bad kind of bipolar.) You can get a better picture of all my various manifestations, by what I wrote as a sign to go on the urn of my ashes:

“Here lies the remains of:
Mary Louise (Boots, Bootsie) Holzman, Deutsch, Stauffer
Also know as
Marylou Hadditt
Whose Hebrew name is
Shira

Her names tell the story of her life.

And that is what you will find in this blog. Bits of pieces of what I’ve done, where I’ve been, who I lived with, loved with and fought with.; pieces of joy and clumps of regrets; victories and disappointments. Paper dolls and illustrated stories. Trip journals and photos of long lost friends.

I invented my last name in 1975, when I entered the Women’s Movement and left my second husband. Here’s what I wrote at that time:

I’m tired of a sir name
I want a her name.
I’ve had my first husband’s name.
I’ve had my second husband’s name.
I’ve had my father’s name
and my grandfather’s
and my great grandfather’s
all the way back to Adam’s rib.

Frankly,
I’ve had it!

That’s it.
I got it.
My her name.
I love it!
Marylou Hadditt,
That’s me.

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For my mom

15 Tuesday Oct 2013

Posted by hadditt in Uncategorized

≈ 4 Comments

Welcome to Marylou Shira’s blog. I’m her daughter, Penny, and I have made it for her. My mom is 85, and I think this will be a great venue for her to share a life’s worth of writing and artwork.  I was inspired by the blog,  Margaret and Helen and thought, “well, Marylou certainly has lots to share.”

As one of her daughters, I’ve witnessed only  a portion of my mom’s journey. I know her story includes growing up privileged and Jewish in the South during the depression, civil rights activism, being a working woman before the term even existed, through feminism, divorce, mental illness, lesbian activism, recovery and renewal. She is also an accomplished writer and artist.

ML PS 1961

I will be in the background – this is Marylou Shira’s blog. Welcome to the world.

 

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