“When times get tough, at some point, people instinctively know they need to lighten up in order to get through it.” Quote by Allen Klein
“Some people have this really clear memory of making that decision, and I don't. My earliest memories of being involved with drama or acting were in elementary school. My sister and I got dropped off at an after-school improvisation class, a time-killer for kids while parents were doing the groceries. I'm 6 years old, and I remember running amok and playing these games.” PeopleRunningKidsSchoolRememberParentMemoriesDecisionActingDramaMy SisterImprovisationElementary School Author:Jai Courtney
“I was a show-off as a kid and loved to dress up. I was constantly in costume, drawing mustaches on with eyeliner and letting my sister plait my hair and all that.” KidsMy SisterMustache Author:Jai Courtney
“There's that layering of selves that we can have with someone else across a long relationship. I go to the baths, the Korean spa. I love looking at the maps of people's bodies. The women have so many mastectomy scars and ectopic pregnancy scars and stretch marks, and all these things are amazing and wondrous to me. I guess I find it stranger not to attend to flux than to attend to it. But in a relationship it's also scary - you don't know where you're going to end up when you go through change.” LongScaryStrangerPregnancyScarKorean Author:Maggie Nelson
“I was always trying to perform, but never with some dream to be on the stage. The stage was wherever I was standing at the time. I was lucky that the department of education in Sydney had a program where you could try out for these ensembles - kind of like extra-curricular sports, but for little drama kids. I got into that system, and it took me right through high school.” TryingKindDreamKidsSchoolSportsDramaLuckyHigh SchoolProgram Author:Jai Courtney
“And as you got older, the training became more developed and precise. We did plays, we had voice classes with great dialect coaches. But I was never into it on a school level; it was this kind of private little thing I did. At school I was a rugby guy. At school I was a rugby guy. I was causing trouble with my mates and skating and tagging buildings, and smoking bongs.” KindSchoolGuyTroubleBuildingTrainingCoachesSmokingLittle ThingsRugby Author:Jai Courtney
“Most of the bio men on earth were born to women, so it's pretty ordinary! But I think because I had come from a matriarchy - my father died when I was young, and I only have a sister and a stepsister - when I told my mom and my sister that I was having a boy, they were both like, "That does not compute within our family relation!" It was like, "Girls only here!" Now that all seems very strange to me.” ThinkingMenEarthGirlFatherBoysStrangeMomRelationMy MomOur FamilyMy SisterFather DiedMy Father Died Author:Maggie Nelson
“I feel excited in that I think boys born to feminists have a leg up. At least, the ones I've met seem like they do. There's something really vital about that exchange. I think I'd only imagined, beforehand, handing down a feminism to a young girl. But I'm newly excited by the challenge of raising a boy.” ThinkingGirlChallengesBoysFeminismFeministExcited Author:Maggie Nelson
“I had this alter ego where I would go to the theater with mom. I wasn't embarrassed by it; it was separate for me.” MomEgoEmbarrassedAlter Ego Author:Jai Courtney
“Not to be too doctrinaire, but we live in the patriarchy! And therefore anything explicitly associated with the female gender, including motherhood, needs to be defensively claimed, because it's either devalued or sentimentally idealized, but not supported. I so thoroughly believe that female human beings have worth that I don't feel the need to argue it, but I think that there's a part of me that very specifically wants to make space for those ideas to be centralized, if only for the moment.” ThinkingBelieveMomentsFemaleGenderMotherhoodArguingPatriarchy Author:Maggie Nelson
“I know that a lot of feminist fears about the trans movement have been, "Wait, we never got to the part where we focus on women! We tried for a minute, but we don't want to lose the category all of a sudden. We haven't heard yet from the females with children called mothers, we haven't heard yet from all these groups!" On the one hand I'm very sympathetic to that, but the category of Women or Mothers, any of these categories, are on shifting sands and always have been.” ChildrenMotherWaitingFocusFemaleFeministSandSympathetic Author:Maggie Nelson