Text Box: Perhaps it started in nursery school. My mother Joanne, a recent Antioch College early-childhood education graduate, took a teaching job at Jack and Jill nursery school in suburban Detroit. The school was owned by Beulah Van Vleck, a robust widow with a personality equally loving and stern. Mom took the job when her two boys, Scott and I were of nursery school age, so that she could still be a part of our pre-school life and get paid for her work in a field she had her degree in. While we attended Jack and Jill nursery school, Missy (as everyone called Beulah Van Vleck), became good friends with my mother and father. And soon Missy became godmother to my brother and I. This had the practical effect of immersing me into a realm exclusively populated by robust, single, aging nursery school teachers who were friends with Missy. Missy would pick us up and take us many places, including to her church, the Church of Christ Sciences, i.e. Christian Science. Many years later that I learned that in the Trinity of the Christian Scientists, the Holy Ghost is considered to be feminine. Moving along into an experience in the child’s garden of kindergarten, I was picked to play Prince Charming in Snow White. This was certainly not a role I went after, as it required wearing tights and kissing a girl. After the requisite tight-wearing trauma and all the ribbing from the little kindergarten boys about me kissing a girl, the whole event was fading away when my mother received a phone call from the mother of Snow White, inviting me to Snow’s six year old birthday party. Little did my unsuspecting mother or I realize, but at this backyard bash the big event was the marriage of Snow White. And you guessed it, I was to be the groom. Text Box: Goddesses Gallery reviews the WACK! art exhibit

After all, in the minds of my female kindergarten classmates, I’d kissed Beauty, now I had to marry her.

 

I recall myself objecting to this marriage, but I must have run smack into the cajoling, insistent resolve of Beauty’s mother and the combined pleading of my female classmates, because the wedding went forward as they had planned.

 

Flash forward to my adolescent awakening. I didn’t have any more interest in girls by this point than I had had in kindergarten. Yet suddenly and against my conscious will, I began being kidnapped by decidedly mature women.

 

These were nocturnal nappings, orchestrated by the varied women who inhabited the caves below my family’s two-story red brick house in Pleasant Ridge, Michigan. Did the women actually exist? No, but you wouldn’t have known that had you been inside my fantasy dreams.

 

The women came up from their caves into my bedroom through secret passages in the walls of our house, entering through closets and trap doors into my bedroom. They would take turns taking me down into the Earth with them for sexual initiation rites.

 

It is important to know that I was in no way actively generating these fantasy dreams. Recurring “Naked Ladies Club” occurrences were completely natural, my body/mind’s way of awakening my testosterone flow and, well...you get the point.

 

It wasn’t until many years later that I would think back to these truly  foundational sexual fantasy experiences.

 

I picked up an unopened box of pastel chalk that my parents had given me as a birthday present years before and, as thought about appropriate subject matter to depict, “The Naked Ladies Club” and my vivid male fantasies leapt out and begged for expression.
Text Box: Because I was documenting fantasy, I started with my first NLC experiences and painted them, also depicting the caves and the passages I had been taken down in my adolescent dreamscape. A few years later, as I was skimming “The Los Angeles Times” book review section, words started jumping out from a review toward the core of my reptilian brain. The reviewer was sharing comments about the book titled “The Chalice and the Blade.” The review talked about ancient ceremonies that women conducted in caves and about an ancient reality that had been turned on its head by modern civilization. It spoke of pre-civilizations as nature oriented and female-centric matriarchies, “partnerships” between men and women, not domination of women over men. This theory was so new to me that I found myself rushing to the source material myself. Pre-eminently cited in Riane Eisler’s chapters was the name of UCLA archaeologist Marija Gimbutas. I rushed to the library to read her books, such as “Language of the Goddess” and “The Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe.” Also liberally mentioned was James Mellaart, archaeologist of one of the earliest cities, Çatal Höyük in Turkey, at its heyday 9000 years ago. He had found artifacts and the paintings on human-made walls (not caves) that he said were unmistakable goddess representations. I have been exploring prehistory with a passion ever since. Witness this web site.