Thursday, April 6, 2006

Transitional Creature


Kathleen Warnock, Sarah Waters & Me! photo by Kelsy Chauvin

I feel like I'm a transitional creature, a missing link of sorts, not unlike the heralded recent discovery of aquatic/land fossil Tiktaalik roseae. I read about this Darwinian intermediary this morning in the NY Times and finally had a term for the way I felt last night.

To quote the biologist from the Times "It's like, holy cow." Or fish, as the case may be.

I attended the All Girl Action party for the brilliant author Sarah Waters in honor of her new novel The Night Watch. All the lesberati (you know, the literate celesbians) were there, packed tightly into a fabulous Chelsea apartment. I was star struck and somewhat agog that I had been invited into this crowd; how exactly did I make the guest list? Well, I made The D Word and have hung around the NYC Dyke scene long enough to know some of the lesberati peripherally. So, I felt like I bridged the evolutionary gap between fan and celesbian. Call me the missing link of dyke culture.


A model of Tiktaalik roseae, a fish in transition to becoming a land animal, photo by University of Chicago.