Stephanie Summerville - An Indomitable Spirit

 

Thank you so much. So, I grew up in southern Indiana in the late 1960s to overprotective parents. We were a barely middle-class family living in a not-so-great neighborhood. But my parents wanted the best for me and better than what was in the world around me. So, to that end, I led a very sheltered life. I only went to home, school, and church. At the age of five, I began piano lessons. I could go there, but I could not play with any of the kids in my neighborhood. I could only play in the backyard with my little sister.

 

Now, my mother was a beautiful and elegant woman. She was a bit of a fashionista. She was the kind of lady that would get dressed up to go to the mailbox [audience chuckles] and she dressed in the style of Jackie O.

 

Now, my father was an incredible charismatic person. He had an upbeat attitude and a can-do kind of spirit. And he dressed and moved and looked like Sidney Poitier. And I was the center of his universe, as he was mine. When I was a little girl, as a toddler, he would dress me up, I'd go with him on errand day and he would be obnoxious with a camera. He would get total strangers to take pictures of us together. And then he would regale them with tales of my brilliance as a 3-year-old. [audience chuckles] 

 

So, when I got a little older, I was about 8 years old, I became more of the son that my father never had. And I spent a lot of time in his study. And we had one of those studies like you saw in the movies. He had a floor-to-ceiling bookcase with the entire Encyclopedia Britannica. And he had a big oak desk with clawed feet. And I used to sit in his lap and he would teach me how to write with a fountain pen. My father had the belief that one of the things that you needed to make your way in the world was a distinctive and impressive signature. So, he taught me how to copy his signature with a fountain pen and how to create one of my own, a unique signature of my own. And that's one of the best shared moments that I had with my father.

 

That and the 1976 Summer Olympics. Because first of all, it was our first world event together. And for the first time in Olympic history, something had happened that had never happened before. An athlete was awarded a score of a perfect 10. And it was given to Nadia Comăneci at the age of 16 for her impressive and flawless gymnastics routine. And my father explained to me how difficult that was because the athletes were rated on two different scales. They got a rating for artistic impression and one for technical merit. And those were averaged out together to get a perfect score. So, she had to get a 10 on both ratings in order to come up with a perfect 10 for a final score. And when I learnt this, I became obsessed with the Olympic rating scale. I began reading everything in my life [audience laughter] on the rating scale. My dad's pancake flipping, his left-hand turns into the driveway. My scales in arpeggios I could play, this thing took over my life.

 

So, in 1979, I turned 13 and two very important things happened. First of all, I got a summer job. And two, I began to notice boys. Now, this summer job was an early work program because my parents were like overachievers and they wanted me to get started on my job experience and character references. So, it was about me and about 19 other 13-year-olds. It was about a mix of 10 boys, 10 girls. And our job was to detassel corn, which I'm sure you all know [audience reaction and applause] in Iowa. Thank you. Hellacious, hellacious job, okay? In the burning hot sun and high mud. And so, after the first week of this, most of the girls cut out. So, it was only like me and one other girl by the end of the week. So, I instantly became the center of attention and the person-- one person who became the center of my attention was Robert Buster Townsend III [audience laughter].

 

And Buster.  Buster was delicious. [audience laughter] He was [chuckles], he was a fair-skinned, freckle-faced black boy and he had an athletic build. And he was not the brightest bulb on the tree. But I did not care because he could have read a grocery list and I was mesmerized. [audience chuckles] So, about a week of like fishing around with each other and flirting, we finally decided that we liked each other. And that's when Buster first made the attempt to kiss me. Now, I had not had the birds and the bees speech with my parents yet. And the only things I knew about sex I had gleaned from the Harlequin romance novels that my spinster cousin had left over at my grandma's house. [audience chuckles] 

 

And so, the things that I got out of them were this was first of all that all intimate relationships began with a kiss. And according to the writing, all of these women who got this kiss were somehow forever changed. [audience chuckles] Like the writing would get all flowery and you wouldn't know what was going on. But that's the only thing you could figure out. So, the only thing that I could parallel this with, the only other stories I could parallel this with in my own life that I knew about were Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde [audience chuckles] and Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Those were the only stories I knew where people started out one way and then something happened and they were forever changed. [audience laughter] So, I figured that if I started to-- if I had Buster kiss me, then something I was going to transform in some way that I could not control. So, I just wouldn't let him kiss me.

 

So, we went through this whole process where we would after work we'd hang out in the parking lot and hold hands and flirt and then he'd try to kiss me and I wouldn't let him kiss me. So, one day we're holding hands and my father pulls up into the parking lot kind of early. So, I go skipping off and I get in the car and I immediately notice that my dad is really angry and really silent. I could tell something is going on because he's staring straight out the windshield, and he's not looking at me, and he's gripping the steering wheel. And so, I look over, kind of nervous, and I say, "Dad, is there something wrong?" And my dad erupts into what sounds to me like this loud, long lion roar of a monologue. "I SAW YOU TALKING TO THESE BOYS. I SAW YOU HOLDING HANDS WITH THESE BOYS." [audience chuckles] And he pulls out, like, these big SAT words. "BOYS ARE LICENTIOUS AND NEFARIOUS CREATURES." [audience laughter] And so, now I am both terrified and amazed. So, he doesn't speak to me for the rest of-- the rest of the evening.

 

And so, we get back in the car, and he's taking me to work the next day. And he's giving me a less vocal rendition of the licentious and nefarious speech. But instead of me being frightened, I'm starting to get angry. And I'm getting more and more angry to the point where by the time we get there, I'm kind of pissed off. So, I look at him when I get out of the car, and I slam the car door and I turn around. And that's when I made the decision that I am going to let Buster kiss me, come what may. I didn't care. [audience chuckles] Didn't care.

 

So now here it is after work, and I'm standing in the parking lot, and I let Buster kiss me. And can I tell you, it was the most amazing thing. It was delicious. Okay? [audience chuckles] When our lips met, it was like somewhere in my mind, a door swung open to a room full of incredible sensations. And that room, I realized, was called pleasure. [audience chuckles] And it was like a medium long kiss. But when it was over, Buster's parents were there, and so he kind of disappeared. And I'm standing there, basking in the glow of this kiss. And I realize that this is a very monumental moment in my life. One that needs to be rated. [audience laughter]

 

So, I quickly-- it does. It does. So, I immediately start to rate this kiss. I'm considering its artistic impression and the technical merit. [audience laughter] And so, I decided-- I did. I decided to give Buster a 9.7 for technical merit and an 8.8 for artistic impression for a combined score of about 9.3 which I thought was good because it left room for improvement, but it was a pretty good kiss. [cheers and applause] So, I had settled all of that in my mind. And then I looked up and realized that I was the only kid left in the parking lot. So, I just started to walk home because that's what you did in the 1970s, we didn't have cell phones. You let your kids just kind of wander home. [audience chuckles] So now I'm walking home and I'm thinking about the consequences of this kiss, because now I'm going to be forever changed. So, I'm checking myself to see if there's any kind of transformation it's going to take place. And I'm developing contingency plans in my head in case my behavior changes and I can't control it. [audience chuckles] So, this is where my head is at.

 

And finally, when I get to the door of my house, before I can barely even knock on the door, my mother opens the door and she says, "I need you to help me with your father." And so, I go into the living room and I look and my father is lying in the fetal position on the couch, and he's shaking violently. And we had to take him to the hospital. So, we get him registered in emergency, and it takes about an hour and a half and we filled out paperwork. And my father comes back and he's lying stretched out on a gurney, and he's not quite shaking as much, but he's in a hospital gown. And I look at him and his eyes are very wide. They kind of remind me of the look that the bunny rabbits have that graze in our backyard.

 

And it was the first time that I saw my father looking so frail. And I said, "Dad, are you all right?" And with that classic smile and that can-do spirit, he didn't say anything, but he sort of just smiled and nodded. And as they wheeled him away on the gurney, my father's downward spiral begins as he spends 30 days in ICU and a coma and finally dies. And that's when my world began to implode. Because from that day, I never went back to that job. I never saw Buster again. And I never had time to process any of this because I was too busy trying to share household responsibilities with my mother while trying to keep up with the expectations of my father.

 

And it doesn't even really hit me until one day I'm 29 years old and I'm on my lunch break and I'm standing in an open-air parking garage, and the smell of corn comes wafting in over the Ohio River. And it comes back to me and I start to cry because I remember that the last real interaction that I had with my father was when I slammed the car door. And it didn't make me feel very good. I started to feel very guilty. But then the smell of the corn brought back the memory of that delicious kiss, [sobs] 9.7 for technical merit [audience chuckles] and 8.8 for artistic impression. And even kisses today have a very complex emotional feeling that it brings up inside of me of nostalgia and guilt and pleasure.

 

And it took me a very, very long time. But later what I realized was this is that no kiss in the world could ever taint or destroy my father's love for me or his legacy that lives in me of his indomitable spirit, his can-do attitude and his kick-ass signature. [audience chuckles] Thank you.