It's Your Life; It's Not For Sale

Here on the Internet everybody’s on the hustle . There are sites that will sell you your own phone number if you let them. It’s a traveling circus really: "Duck in here to see the Bearded Lady!"  "See the strange and exotic Siamese Twins Joined at the Cranium!" Or.... "Just for the Gents: the Half Man Half Woman!"This was carny life circa 1930 and what red-blooded American rube wasn’t willing to spend a nickel to see a medical anomaly? Thank God we don’t do that anymore. Now if we want that up-close harrowing view we just have to watch the Operation Channel. (Seriously: ever catch a knee surgery? Scariest thing you ever saw; I  mean give me a chest-cracking over that any day. Do you know you have these globs of yellow chicken-fat all around your knee joint? Even skinny old Angelina does, with her Tinker Toy arms and legs.)Of course the Half Man Half Woman was  often just some poor lady with a prolapsed uterus.  And Siamese twins  we now call  'conjoined' twins and we pray them through their surgeries. As  for the Bearded Lady, it turns out we all have male and female hormones and how they’re balanced one to another shifts from person to person AND within each person over his or her lifetime.: “Mum, hi, you look great!” my oldest has been known to say on greeting me. "There’s just this one little hair coming out of your chin here!”  But seriously: think of the former Chastity Bono, now quite naturally called Chaz, in an interview from last spring: I'm so glad for her that she has finished transitioning now had a body that feels like home to her. And I HOPE we’re done pointing and smirking and setting up a peep shows when we encounter people who are 'different' because we can all agree that that’s not right, yes? If we have a little extra love/energy today let’s direct it to our girl Whitney, out of breath and struggling on her new world tour.  It’s true she doesn't look like herself these days. With Michael gone almost a year I know  she’s up near the top of MY pray-for list.Now here's Chastity-to-Chaz, the same as  she always was on the inside I am sure:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8M_-CJkO2A&NR=1]