Elizabeth Crane: Sally

Elizabeth Crane

Sally (Featuring: Lollipop the Rainbow Unicorn)

THERE IS NOT ONE THING even a little bit sad about this story. This is pretty much the happiest story ever. If you’re all up into War and Peace or whichever, you won’t find it here.

This story is about a woman who was always herself. What better story could there be than that? Plus it’s true, or mostly true. It’s true enough. It’s true-seeming.

One presumes that Sally, is her name, started out being a girl who was always herself. You have heard it told that she was herself as a teenager, so it’s a logical conclusion, even if it is hard to imagine. Because do you know any teenagers who are themselves? I doubt it. Teenagers are all about being other people. You so wish you’d known her when you were a teenager, but she was born in the ’70s, so she would have been in preschool at the time. Although Sally at four was probably more you than you are after all the therapy. You don’t really know much about her life as a preschooler, so you don’t know whether her parents did anything really right or really wrong, and my feeling is that it doesn’t really matter. My feeling is that Sally became Sally regardless of whether or not her parents did anything right or wrong. And I’m not talking about genetics either, since I don’t know thing one about that. Let’s just put it like this: On the day Sally was born, the stars collided or the planets aligned or the people stepped over the cracks and it worked out how it did. All you know is, maybe if you had even babysat for her or something, your life could have gone a different way. You could possibly have learned from her even then with regard to being yourself. I realize you’re fine now, but there were some ineffective years. We both know it.

So but look at Sally. She’s That Girl looking at herself in the store window and seeing versions of herself all around the city, except if That Girl had an eyebrow ring, big boots, and was a happy, funny revolutionary and there were no Donald Hollingers. Nothing that looks like Donald Hollinger, nothing that acts like Donald Hollinger, no ex–Donald Hollinger to be gotten rid of. No Donald Hollinger of any kind. It’s not that she doesn’t enjoy the company of men, you have heard that she does, it’s not even that she wouldn’t like the company of a nice man, you have heard this as well, it’s simply that having a man, even a nice one, is not critical to her being completely, joyfully Sally. This, to you, is only theoretical. To you it’s something to hope for, but you are not feeling so completely joyfully you without a Mr. You. Seventy-eight percent joyful on a good day, maybe, which is an improvement over other times in your life, but still. Do you see what I’m saying? Do you know anyone like this? Probably not. But you should know Sally. You should be Sally. Fine, be yourself. But like Sally.

From what you know, Sally as a teenager had, like, beliefs. She had things that she believed in. I know, what’s that all about, right? But she did, and Sally made a decision not to ever compromise her beliefs, which is, well, come on, who’s ever done that? Not me and not you, because it’s hard, think about it, think about all the seemingly small compromises you’ve made in the category of people you’ve dated alone. It’s hard to know which choice was worse, Gene the judgmental environmentalist (judgmenvironmentalist?) or Philip who thought it was his right to park illegally without paying tickets because his taxes more than covered it, which on his salary from Quiznos you can be sure they did not. And how about that time you didn’t tell them they forgot to scan your Lucky Charms at the grocery store and you told yourself the fact that they happened to be called "Lucky Charms" was a sign that it was okay, just this one time. Or that time you ate a Quarter Pounder (with cheese!) after you swore you’d never eat at McDonald’s again after reading Fast Food Nation. Or spending actual cash money on a copy of Star magazine on impulse at the supermarket checkout because on the cover it alleged a prurient relationship between Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal even though inside the title read, Jake and Maggie: Siblings! which is what they always do and you should have known it, and you felt positively greasy afterward even though it was only ninety-nine cents, because you have to live with knowing that ninety-nine cents of your money went to perpetuating more of the same. (Not to mention more fanciful scenarios like let’s say if some huge low-priced chain store that was known to use child labor in sweatshops offered you three million dollars to be in their new ad campaign, at the very least you wouldn’t just say no flat out and probably you would even think, Hell yes, what values? first before you thought the whole thing through to the point where you were possibly conflicted but were leaning toward a complex, supposedly ethical justification for going through with it.) What about being best friends with Jessica Sandler in third grade because her dad took you to FAO Schwartz and bought you a Little Kiddle even though Jessica Sandler was kind of spoiled and bratty, and even though she was mostly nice to you she was often mean to other people. Who wouldn’t be friends with Jessica Sandler for a Little Kiddle? Sally. Is who. No way would Sally sell out for a Little Kiddle. Sally was disappointed in the world, a bit, but not in a dark despairing, Oh, I’ll just go mope around to a Morrissey record teenager kind of way, in a You know, I might be able to do a little something about this kind of way.

Which is what she did. And you can imagine why, because who wouldn’t listen to such an engaging, funny chick? We already know how easily influenced you are, what with your Jessica Little Kiddle history, so imagine what might happen if you met up with Sally, and she charmed you like she charmed me, and she said, There’s this thing wrong with the world and this is what I tried to do about it, and whatever her story happens to be that day, because she has a lot of them, it will in some way be funny, and this story will make you feel like changing the world actually is possible, in bits and pieces anyway. What you especially admire about her is the way she’s not all righteous or whichever, she’s not even, You kinda need to go do some stuff too. But it will happen because she’s that compelling. You will want to do what you can do. Try not to be disappointed if it doesn’t seem as cool as what Sally’s doing. Not possible. Making art is not unimportant. Tell yourself that. No seriously, try.

Sally got her hand in like sixteen pies from the get go. Seventeen if you count actual pies, which is something Sally enjoys and partakes in frequently. Zines and what have you. Princess Vanessa Lipstick McGillicuddy Tells the Truth, her first zine, is legendary in certain circles. In zine-reading circles. You didn’t even know what a zine was before Sally. Sally is the kind of person who let’s just say for example if there’s an awful war going on, or if large numbers of people and even corporations are opposed to similarly gendered people getting married, or if people are opposed to other people having opinions that are different than those people’s opinions, or if people are listening in on your phone calls and reading your e-mails and calling it security, or I don’t know what else, unlike me and you, she won’t be like, What am I gonna do, go march or something? Because crowds freak me out and plus what’s the point? Sally might march or she might not, but what she will do is hang around the White House holding a bunch of balloons, smiling, and get reporters to ask her why she is hanging around the White House holding a bunch of balloons, and then cheerfully tell them it seemed like a pleasant way to say she was against the war and would they like a balloon? Or maybe she’d do something like go into elementary schools calling herself "Storyteller Princess Vanessa Lipstick McGillicuddy" and then read fairy tales and other books that she’d rewritten to get little girls to rethink the whole happy ending needing to have a dude in it or that a Barbie-shaped body would be a sort of effective emotional problem-solver of any kind and that maybe a happy ending was one where you stood outside the White House with a bunch of balloons. And more pies like this. Pies that never even occurred to you.

A little-known fact about Sally is that she has several situation-specific superpowers. Let’s go back to the White House, for example. Sally might discover, upon leaning against the front gates, that she suddenly had a rubbery quality that would allow her to slip right through. Think of the possibilities! I mean, rubbery is not the same as invisible, but if she could get through, think of what she could do on the inside of the White House with all those balloons! They wouldn’t know what to do. They would be all, This lady with a pierced eyebrow came into the White House and gave out balloons! And someone with a lick of sense, like maybe a guard or a secretary who has no interest in party lines or anything, just wants to make her Kia payments, says, So? And everyone else would go, So? So? So? And the lick-of-sense lady would say, Yes, so? as in "so what?" and the White House people would be like, You can’t just give out balloons around here, but no one can say why, exactly, or find a law that says you can’t, which is what they run around trying to do while Sally waits patiently in the office of the press secretary, who listens to her opinion about the war and being against it, and exactly why, and this gets relayed to the media via the press secretary because that’s their job, press secretaries, to explain things to the press like how people with balloons get into the White House but to try to tell it in a way that it seems threatening but that they have it under control and even though they believe in freedom of speech they don’t believe in, well, balloons, maybe. You don’t know.

On the rubbery front, she discovered while rehearsing for a school reading that she could grow herself a Barbie body. Freakish to be sure, but what a perfect illustration of how wrong that is, to see a Barbie body on a real person! Besides not wanting to freak the kids out, Sally feels like even she isn’t immune to abusing her superpowers. Like if there were some two thousand–dollar pair of the cutest big boots ever and she had the ability to psychically make salespeople offer her a ninety percent discount, she knows she might do it. Plus, even Sally doesn’t really know what all her superpowers are. Sometimes they just show up. Like the rubbery. The thing that’s important about this fact is that she doesn’t use them. She doesn’t think it’s fair. I’d use them if I were really in trouble, she says. But I haven’t had to yet.

Fine. Maybe this is less true than I led you to believe at the outset. Maybe she doesn’t have superpowers. Maybe she kicked a boy in the knee once in grade school. Maybe he deserved it. Maybe she’s lonely, maybe her mom makes her completely nuts sometimes. Maybe her dad reads the paper during dinner. Maybe she doubts herself on occasion. Doesn’t matter. All the better if one or more are true, then there’s more hope for you. You don’t think so. But you don’t need to know.

Anyway, then you find her. No, she finds you. She thinks there’s something about you. How is that possible? Because of the art, she tells you, even though you hadn’t said that out loud. To which you say, But that’s what I like to do. To which she says, No kidding. To which you say, Well then, and, hm.

Finally one day she tells you a story about how she goes to the park with her new kite, and her new kite has a rainbow unicorn on it she named Lollipop, except it’s not very windy on this day so Lollipop isn’t getting a lot of air, except Sally doesn’t really mind, because she is cracking herself up that she has a kite with a rainbow unicorn named Lollipop. It’s like the most perfect image of actual joy you’ve ever heard of, forget babies in pumpkins or whatever, this is a grown woman frolicking and cracking herself up with a kite and a unicorn. It should be on the cover of a magazine, except it isn’t, because the magazines are clogged up with Angelina Jolie always, as though there’s no one else, and maybe Angelina Jolie isn’t a role model for every girl or woman, do you see? Maybe the world would like other options. And you can relate, because sometimes you crack yourself up, which is probably why you like her.