Rosemary Hamilton
In her memoir, Rosemary Hamilton takes us down the runways of her life in search of The Truth. What she goes through to find it, well, trust me . . . you've never gone this far with a Southern Belle before.
As she exposes a life defined by labels, titles, and the expectations of others, pieces of all our lives emerge: the families that influence us, roles that define us, divorces that haunt us, and our spirits that save us.
A sufferer of ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder), her inability to focus takes her on an extended vacation when she accepts an invitation without really reading it.
"A normal person would've known that those private rooms in the brochure were padded, and the mint juleps at five----poured from pill bottles. It was an honest-to-goodness looney bin."
While on this, the longest, darkest runway of all, a "Yankee" therapist strips her of all titles and labels, only to give her a new one---SBD (Southern Belle Disorder). When she learns that her pedestal has stood on rocks of stigma, she takes off her tiara and chisels away! As a flight attendant she chips off a pretty big chunk; as a comedian she chips off more; she moves to Harlem and chips off the rest. There, a crash course on the long-term effects of hypocrisy and discrimination forces her to examine the stuff she has carried since childhood.
"Beneath a New York blizzard I found my apartment. But when the snow melted, I looked around and the only white thing left was me. That's when I added yet another label to the ones I already carried. It was 'White Girl,' and there was not another one in sight...."
Be warned. Inside, there are emergency landings that will knock the tiara right off your head!
Rosemary takes her years of on-the-runway training as a Southern Belle and beauty-pageant winner, combines it with eighteen years as a flight attendant; shares her years of psychiatric therapy; throws in a few of her newspaper columns; draws from her years in New York as a "minority" in Harlem and comedian on New York Comedy Club stages; and adds a bit of satire from her days as a political columnist for a New York newspaper and —voilá!—you’ve got the most entertaining presentation of a gut-wrenchingly honest and dysfunctional journey ever taken through the highs and lows of a southern life!
An in-demand humorist and speaker, Rosemary takes on topics meant to be not only funny but to encourage other women (and men!) to identify the roles they have been assigned, the diagnoses they have been given, and the oppression they experience--and to reject them all as they remake themselves on their own terms!
In the process of her own recovery and search for answers, she hopes to have found a few for the readers as well. If not, they will surely enjoy the journey.
I never imagined God would show up in a place like this, and certainly not with the missing spine of my therapist! But there it was--an honest-to-God backbone on this follower of Freud. His once-yellow streak had miraculoulsly turned a macho shade of redneck red as he clenched his jaws, stepped up to the plate, and called a meeting with the administrator of this nuthouse and me.
"Your fixation with putting her in a seclusion room--now that's insane!" he said to the bewildered leader of my ward. "There's not a psychotic thought in her head. Now now. Not next week. Not ever! And you knew that!" His face was on fire. "She should've turned around and walked out of here the day she arrived." He hesitated, I assumed, to search for words that would take it all back. Instead, he had worked out a killer ending. "Outpatient therapy is where she belonged--and frankly," he sighed, "that would've been just fine with me."
This Yankee shrink had just done a near-perfect impersonation of a rifle-toting redneck protecting his chicken-eating mad dog from being locked up or blown out the back of a pick-up truck. In my attempt to help the man, I had taught him that expressing anger was a good thing, and he was sure giving it a trial run--as a southerner, for some unknown reason, but he was doing it, just the same. Obviously, I'd neglected to tell him to stay within his (Yankee) comfort zone. I'd also forgotten to teach him about humor.
"Why'd you do that?" I asked him, as I watched the administrator shuffle off like a sissy little girl. His jaw dropped. "Dammit," I threw up my hands. "You should've asked me first!"
"ASKED YOU? ASKED YOU WHAT?" He was losing it.
"Well, maybe--just maybe--I wanted to be a lunatic!" I said, basking in the success of what I was pulling off. I stepped closer and raised my voice. "In this place, joining a group of nuts who don't know where the hell they are was beginning to sound pretty good to me!"
If he hadn't been concerned about what Freud would think, I'll swear, the man would've taken his own life right there on the spot.
