Nice little
girls. It’s a phrase I’ve always disliked. Nice seems such a passive word. It
doesn’t do anything. My dislike of it was further compounded when certain friends’
mothers’ told me “but nice little girls just don’t do that.” All I wanted to do was pretend to be a truck-driver in a
childhood game of make-believe. I knew I wasn’t actually a truck driver. I was
just sick of playing fairies all the time, an occupational hazard of being my
mother’s daughter. She used to make wings like these for a living:
Not that my
mother is flaky at all. She has little time for “wishy-washy people” as she
calls them, and ran her market stall wearing a lacey fairy dress, enormous glittering wings and Dr. Martin boots. Even though her occupation was couched in the mystic and the
fantastical, her business acumen and work-ethic were anything but whimsical. So
I was brought up in a very women-doing-it-for-themselves atmosphere, and my
heroes as a child followed the same flight path, amongst them of course, was
Amelia, another woman with wings.
I often
used to play Amelia Earhart in games as a child. Some historically enthused
playfellows assumed the roles of Fred Noonan, and Paul Mantz. In our little
yellow cardboard box made to look like The Canary, we were seeing imagined
lands. And it didn’t matter that we were two little girls and one rather grubby
little boy. We were free in the land of synaptic lightning. Amelia and her
dream made our small dreams come alive, and later when I was a teenager
struggling to navigate by the stars of my own impending adulthood, I looked to
her again.
This was a
time when a lot of other people had definite ideas for me and my future.
Conventional ideas. Safe ideas. My parents, particularly my mum, were good
about not getting too involved. It was the unsolicited advice from everybody
else’s parents that left me stranded on a desert island of indecision. When
there are so many options, what do you choose? They said: Be sensible. Amelia
said: follow your heart and see where it takes you.
As a teenager, my heart belonged to the
theatre. The people were dazzling, able to pull characters out of their own
vivid imaginations and wear them. Alex, a fellow thespian, and now my husband,
wore a Scottish accent for months on end and talked about turnips with
excessive fervor. Bruce became a cat and pranced about on stage to the haunting
strains of a kazoo orchestra. It was all marvelously silly.
The human
heart is surprisingly good as a compass then, so Amelia, with her daring
bravery and adventurous spirit proved to be an excellent role model. I explored
the world of theatre and was rewarded with beer and love.
Now I
intend, in the pioneering spirits of Amelia Earhart herself, to explore the
world of beer.
The world
of beer, much like the world of aviation in the 1920s and 1930s is fairly male
dominated. There are some wonderful Brewsters out there, of course, but even as
recently as this year, a woman was told she could not enter a home-brew contest
because she lacked the correct set of genitals. I can understand gender
segregated competition in cases where a genuine difference in performance is
observed, but for beer, it seems quite absurd, as any differences between the
process a Brewer follows to make a beer and that a Brewster follows would only
be dictated by personal preference. Gender segregation, or in the case of
Rachel Beer, not being allowed to compete at all, only serves to reinforce the
popular opinion that beer is a drink just for men. Or maybe (as I suspect to be
the case) they were just jealous of her excellent surname.
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