What a Cute Little Flag
and other thoughts that sounds weird during Pride Month
Raise your hand if you knew June 14 is Flag Day!
Quick! How many of the stripes are red and how many are white?
(Did you know without counting?)
I remember being a kid and having to sit through a lot of numbers-related flag data on and around Flag Day: date of Betsy Ross sewing project, points on stars, stripes, etc. etc. Flags are interesting - you really do identify countries based on flags, even though I doubt that we often battle with a banner waving to identify us anymore when we’re off dropping incendiary devices in other countries.
I remember vividly the battles both private and public, in editorials and on playgrounds, surrounding the respect/disrespect pertaining to an American Flag when Bruce Springsteen’s famous Born in the USA protest song came out in the mid-80s. (Yes it is a protest song: you can protest something without hating it. Have some nuance.) The album cover’s controversy led to older people bringing up Abbie Hoffman’s flag-shirt; and the arguments surrounding wearing the American flag as clothing were only silenced by a legal battle. Now I look at the things that the American Flag adorns and it’s remarkable how much mores shift in one human lifetime.
Well. And that’s obvious because the Pride flag also didn’t exist before 1978….I was actually fairly surprised it was first flown in 1978. (Rainbow suspenders were big just then, thanks to Robin Williams wearing them as Mork from Ork on Mork & Mindy) The original Pride flag had more stripes then (teal and pink were removed due to fabric shortages and indigo was replaced with blue.) The first version featured eight stripes assigned by creator Gilbert Baker specific meanings: Hot pink (Sexuality), Red (Life), Orange (Healing), Yellow (Sunlight), Green (Nature), Teal (Art/Magic), Indigo (Serenity), and Violet (Spirit). In 1994, he made a mile-long version to memorialize Stonewall riots and that solidified the rainbow flag (with six stripes now) as the national symbol of gay pride.
On Friday, I heard a parade out my window and ran down to join it - the Sons of the American Revolution were doing their annual Flag Day Parade - just a bunch of awesomely happy children who had won an essay writing award (and their school classrooms) and one dance team and one adorable marching band (with white sousaphones! I love a sousaphone!!) — but the whole thing was quite professionally led by Scottish-costumed sanitation department workers who played and marched brilliantly…. followed by the one New Yorker who we all secretly longed to be, just for a moment in the sun.
The parade ended at Fraunces Tavern and the museum was open to the public for $1.
Good stuff!
Other great museums I saw this week were MoMA (yes, again, I’m a member!) and the newly reopened New Museum which had an exhibit on humanity which was mostly robots (including the inside metal frame of ET!)
Besides the museums and parades, and singing along with the New Yorkers on the street after the Knicks won, I saw an Ancestral Drag show (in which people performed their great-aunts) and I saw my friend Nick read at Fantastic Fiction, and attended the National Book Foundation’s 5 under 35 award ceremony, and had dinner with one of my oldest friends (we really need a new way to say this), and reported for Jury Duty and served my time. It was a pretty busy week, to say the least.
Writing News
I’m back to sending out stories. To send them, I work on them. It’s good to be working again. I want to get these stories out. In other news, I’m also hoping that my publisher comes through to redo the cover of A FLASH OF DARKNESS. This cover was good for the wild photos that people sent of the Book-in-the-Wild, but the cover doesn’t really sell the book.
My new book (THE BOY WHO LOVED TREES) is the opposite. The cover sells the book.
Random Final Thought
Happy Flag Day! Be proud to be whoever you are.
