Another Jane

When I was seven, I moved to Berkeley, California. It was 1968. To describe the move as mind-blowing would barely begin to render a picture of what it was like. Before Berkeley, I had lived in the Santa Barbara mountains across a creek from a dirt road and then for a year on the edge of a San Joaquin Valley small farm town where my dad was growing beans. My best friend there owned a bull. I had a stink bug collection. Life was quiet, comprehensible, and noncontroversial. Then I moved to Berkeley. My parents had divorced and my dad had custody of all four of us kids. We went from a nuclear family living on beans to. . .an unemployed dad trying to get food stamps from a system designed to accommodate single moms. Social uproar all around me. A new girlfriend/stepmom who did yoga, was vegetarian, and believed in the occult. A friend/stepsister from New York City who knew swear words.

But in Berkeley in the late sixties, I didn't know Jane Fonda. During all the social unrest and resistance to the Viet Nam War, I missed the controversy surrounding Jane Fonda's trip to Hanoi. I experienced the war locally, peace marches through the streets, chanting "1 2 3 4 we don't want your stinking war!,” the renaming of the park near my sister's Junior High to Ho Chi Minh Park (Ho Ho Ho chi Minh, Viet Nam is gonna win!). Riots in the streets, tear gas, road blockades, officers in combat gear aka the Blue Meanies, everything seen from the height of a scrawny kid not even a decade old. My world view didn’t come from celebrities like Jane. It came from my dad and his girlfriend, from home. War is wrong; peace is better. Power to the people. The End. I had no idea why there was a war in Viet Nam, no idea why Americans were there. I didn't know who Ho Chi Minh was. War was just wrong and we could say so: "saying it loud, saying it proud!” Being opposed to the war in Viet Nam was all lumped in with being against racism, against traditionally-taught American history, against gender discrimination, against capitalism, against Republicans, against Nixon, against oppression, bras, chain stores, shopping malls, conformity, artificial fabric, food processing, beef, veal, deforestation, killing whales, clubbing baby harbor seals, littering, garbage, lying, plastic, pollution, wasting water, Religion, dresses, panty hose, ruffles, Florida orange juice, gay bashing, California grapes, Safeway, commercials, public schools, Barbie Dolls, nuclear weapons, nuclear power plants, cities, commuting, oil companies, hunting, guns, greed, competitive sports (except baseball, especially except the Oakland A's)…

As a child of a liberal hippy dad and his live-in girl friend, my life was constant lessons in restrictions. I couldn’t shop at Safeway because they sold California grapes which in turn defied the cause of Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers Union. I couldn't drink Florida Orange Juice because Anita Bryant, the OJ Queen, hated queens. I couldn’t eat meat because it was a dead animal. I couldn't flush after peeing because it wasted water and destroyed the environment. I couldn't play with Barbie Dolls because they promoted a bad image of women. I couldn't attend regular public school, because it was too institutional and didn't nurture free thinking. And through all this, I lacked the guidance of Jane.

It was years later when I was starting college that Jane Fonda reached my radar screen. I was at U. C. Davis, fast becoming disillusioned with my plan to major in math. I had loved math in high school, but my first college math class was dull as dirt. I already knew the calculus and my teacher looked like Santa Claus. The room was filled with engineering students who didn't care about the beauty of math. In truth, I made that fact up, since I was too nerdy to talk to anyone. Then one day, Jane Fonda was speaking on campus at the exact same time my math class convened. I was saved! I cut class, because I had finally found a reason that my over-active conscience would accept, and headed off to the Quad to hear Jane. She was married to Tom Hayden at the time and hollered about important things I knew I should care about, but I don't remember any of it. I was just enjoying not being in math class. I changed my major to "Undeclared" and didn't set foot in another math class for a year. Jane helped me to acknowledge that I could be doing something better than what I was doing--studying math just because I liked it. Math for math's sake, no social or ecological benefit in mind. I didn't actually do anything better, but she showed me that I could.

At Davis, I was also going the way of typical freshmen who study all the time, because they have no social life and are over-acheiving perfectionists: I lived on bagels and ice cream and began to look like like the Stay-Puff Marshmallow Man. Luckily I was at Davis, exercise zealot central, and took up running, roller skating, swimming, jazz dance, and gymnastics. Those last two were disastrous, but I  still became an exercise fanatic. The kind who goes on a five-mile run at midnight because I ate a snickerdoodle.

And then, in 1982, Jane Fonda's Workout tapes started rolling out. She had such a great body and that hollery voice. She sounded just like she had that day on the Quad, except this time she was yelling about my glutes burning. I paid more attention this time. I began to wear leg-warmers and black leggings. I did everything in eight counts. I think I got thinner, but I had a warped body image, so I didn't see it. I identified with Jane, her struggles as a child, losing her mom (mine was still alive, but not present in my life), feeling unloved, thinking she's fat when she's not, general low self-esteem. It was totally lost on me that she was born into extreme privilege and our life experiences were incomparable. My dad was an unemployed bean-farmer who played classical harpsichord on the street, hers was Henry Fonda. My mom ran off to New York City to explore not being a mom, hers committed suicide. It didn't matter. She hollered and I did leg lifts.