Phenomenal Women

I was rummaging through old files and ran into a speech manuscript from six or seven years ago. An organization paying tribute to some “Phenomenal Women” asked that I keynote their event. Here’s some of what I said then and would be willing to say again.

Although I don’t place myself among them, I’ve known some phenomenal women. I knew the First Lady when she was broken by addiction and by breast cancer. Decades before it was fashionable, Betty Ford looked into the camera and told the truth. And I knew Elizabeth Glaser when her body failed but her spirit triumphed. She, like Mrs. Ford, was phenomenal.

In Ghana, it was a mother with AIDS who had lost all nine of her children to the virus; now, she was caring for her dying sister. Inside Riker’s Island Women’s Prison, I met an amazing chaplain who loved the women others despise. In Rwanda, the woman for whom death in the Genocide might have been more merciful — she’d been raped, and mutilated, and shoved beneath the bodies of her children — came out of a crowd to gently ask how she might help me.

These women are bypassed in a culture obsessed with celebrity. They didn’t have Twitter accounts or Facebook pages. They did not crave headlines because they were not hunting for fame. Somehow, perhaps intuitively, they recognized that if name recognition is what matters most, Charles Manson would be our role model. Instead of nurturing celebrity, these women modeled character.

Then there was a women I met in Kansas City twenty years ago. We’d honored AIDS volunteers in a fund-raising champagne dinner hosted by a socialite who was well coiffed, wearing her three strands of pearls. As we sat together, occasionally chatting, she felt very…Republican. It wasn’t until we left that I discovered the truth.

As we came out of the ballroom into the warm summer evening, we were greeted by a busload of so-called “Christians” who’d driven in from rural Kansas to scream at us. They chanted “AIDS! AIDS! AIDS!” and “God hates fags!!!” and — pointing at me — “Die! Die! Die!”

In the screaming and the chaos behind the police line, the “socialite” with whom I’d had dinner surveyed the screamers, then sidled up to me and said quietly, “We must be doing something right.” She was dead a year later. Cancer. As far as I know, she never asked for celebrity or fame. But, God — the woman had character. She was, in a word, phenomenal.