A Memoir - 1990

In 1990 I was working with this young guy from British Columbia, Canada. Let's call him Barr Beadwell. Barr was a strawberry blond with a chest that seemed to go on for acres, and a bubble butt (he had to have pants specially tailored to fit that butt). When he'd been out in the sun, his eyebrows got bleached to where they just about disappeared. As you can guess, that all added up to "attractive."

One thing that struck me: One time Barr asked me to mail a letter he'd written to his parents. It wasn't addressed to "Mr and Mrs Sam Beadwell," or "Sam and Catherine Beadwell," but "Mom and Dad Beadwell." Kind of childish.

Barr was in the process of getting married. Oh, I guess the way to put it is that he was engaged and his fiancée was planning their wedding. Since I worked with Barr for nine months, the wedding took place while Barr and I were working together, and I was invited.

I should mention that Barr and he fiancée both belonged to some sect that, Barr told me, was simply called Bible Study. No doubt Barr was brought up in that group in British Columbia; but I guess the bride was a local gal, and the wedding was to be in a church here in the Chicago area.

That wedding was a bit of an experience for me. There was one African-American person in attendance, and that was the boss that Barr and I worked for, who came with his wife. Otherwise, as I looked around, a totally white audience.

I'd gone by myself, and I was the only single person there. (Unlike a character in a movie I recently saw, it never occurred to me to get a date for this wedding.) The ushers—all very young guys, naturally, friends of Barr's—were in the habit of offering an arm and escorting the female half of every arriving couple to their seats. They didn't know what to do in my case, and were visibly distressed!

The sermon part of the wedding contained a lot about the wife's pledging obedience to her husband—all very traditional (that is, pre-feminist) gender roles. I was quite surprised. You know, in this day and age. . . . I'd never met the bride, but I had the impression she was, shall we say, spirited, or had a strong personality. I have to wonder how long she might have gone on buying into that "subordinate to thy husband" shit.

Copyright © 2009 Richard Stein