YESTERDAY WAS NOT THE END.

This project started to hum in my head on Thursday, when I was struck with divine inspiration. (Kathleen Hanna = as divine as it gets; rock camp = heaven.) “Girls can have mustaches,” she told us. “Girls can totally have mustaches. When people would look at JD funny when she went into the women’s bathroom, we’d just say, ‘Women don’t all look the same.’ And you guys, feel free to use that line if you want.”
I wanted to use that line. I also wanted to wear a mustache at the showcase. So this actually began yesterday, when I drew on my face with eye pencil (eyebrow? eyeliner? who knows?) that had been bought and brought (I. LOVE. ROCK CAMP.) specifically to draw mustaches on girls’ faces. And I was so inspired by all the awesomeness of the whole week that I said, “I want to wear this at school!” And Courtney said, “That would make a good blog!”
So this is the official beginning. This is an exercise in bravery. I want to make people think about gender and self-expression and boundaries and images and perception and beauty, but mostly I want to make myself be able to say what I believe. I think it’ll be performance art, sort of, and a work in progress.

Rock camp is not the best place to garner weird comments if you’re a girl with a mustache. That is closely related to why I love it so much. There were many other girls with mustaches, and no one even batted an eye (eyelid? eyelash? I don’t know). Some people from the Real World (e.g. my parents) kind of laughed and said, “Nice look,” and then were horrified when I told them about this project. But other than that, it was a non-thing. Excellent.
When I got back to where I live, deep in the Real World, I went contra dancing. Contra dances are also pretty gender-bending-friendly. Lots of men wear skirts, and some men wear high heels, necklaces, and fluffy dresses. And women frequently dance with other women, if only because of an uneven gender ratio. The people who said anything said “Nice mustache” very genuinely and smiled as we were spinning around and awkwardly staring into each other’s eyes.
Eventually it got smudgy and my sister said I should wipe it off. Then some people were like, “Where’d your mustache go?!” One guy, who had a mustache himself, said I looked better without it and asked if I’d been in a play.
“No,” I said, “not a play. A feminist rock’n’roll camp!!” Yeah!!

Love,
N.