Short and Sweet (cause I gotta run)

You ever have those weird encounters. You know, you’re sitting in a cage and someone throws a dirty Kleenex at you?

So back when I lived in NYC and I did whatever PeTA asked whenever they called I ended up doing a number of cage demos out on the street in Manhattan. The idea of the cage demo was to put a donated and possibly “bloody” (with red paint) fur coat on me and then stuff me into a cage so small I couldn’t turn around. This was to show the inhumane conditions animals on fur farms face. Then I was to crouch all scrunched up in the cage and look sad. If you know me, you know I excel at little so well as looking sad. So there I was.

Frequently such demos were ample opportunity for people to take pot shots, physical or verbal. People threw dirty Kleenexes at me and other trash. Men would walk by and say the strangest things like “If I gave you a fur coat you’d wear it and like it.” Or “you wouldn’t be out here if you were my wife.” Um yeah.

But there was another type of frequent heckler, the middle aged women who would say things like “I used to be vegetarian, but when you get older you’ll realize how stupid it is.” Or "One day you’ll learn you can’t change anything so then you’ll grow up and stop doing stuff like this.”

But I wonder what it is with the ex-vegetarian phenomenon that makes certain people so bitter and virulent against the still-vegetarian, still-vegan contingent. Is it guilt? Is it that the bitter can’t stand to see anyone else not bitter? I don’t know.

At time like that, when someone is trying to sweep in on me with their bitterness I have to pull up the knowledge of Beatrice Wood, to show me the antidote to bitter, wronged people who toss aside their convictions as unrealistic.

Beatrice Wood lived from 1893 to 1998 and she had been vegetarian most of her life, I think she made that decision either in her teens or early twenties. She had failed love affairs with some of the biggest names in modern art, and was influential in the Dada period. What she relished was the love, the opportunities, the beauty and the silliness, rather than dwelling on the bad endings. She was still creating art until the end of her life. I saw a documentary made when she was 102 and she walked around her studio barefoot in flowing skirts and silver jewelry and sculpted “naughty figurines” of nudes from clay.

Aging doesn’t have to mean giving up on vegetarianism, aging doesn’t have to mean becoming sharp and grumpy and snapping at people. So when people tell me I’ll give all this up when I get older I think about Beatrice Wood and say “not if I can help it.”