Y'all Fancy: Joan Jolt and Miss Lady

For Joan 1986-2013

The story of Y'all Fancy:

It went like this. I had just met Joan Jolt at our Varieties of American Feminism 1830-1930 seminar, courtesy of the NEH. We were, like, legally obligated to become friends because of roller derby reasons, though we wouldn't know how good of friends yet. On what I remember as the second day we were walking back to our cars through the steamy disgusting swampy Mississippi River heat that is St. Louis in the summer at noon, y'all. I remember that she farted as a sign of our derby kinship. Love.

Anyhow, we got into a discussion where I was lamenting the olden days, where derby ladies just stank after they played and that was that. Recently, in my league, ladies had begun to spray their pads down with homemade organic derby pad deodorizer IN ADDITION to washing them with some sorta frequency. I felt a pressure to also not be disgusting. "Oh look at me, I smell good at brunch, and I'm maybe not gonna get MRSA!" I mockingly impersonated a fictional amalgam of these cleanly girls.
"Oh, y'all fancy!" I yelled to nobody as we walked toward the Delmar Loop. We were pretty amused at ourselves. She had on her grey "pajama skirt," a detail that seems important now. This is also the conversation where we invented the, as-it-turns-out, incredibly useful phrase, "dookiefoot." We often yell-talked at each other perfectly sober out of sheer excitement for our words and sharing, and I yell-talked "dookiefoot" when trying to describe my discovery of what post-practice derby girls smell like, when I used to attend brunches while injured and thus, unstanky. Turns out we actually should try to be cleaner.

Dr. Perry, the leader of our seminar wanted us to complete some sort of writing project during our seminar. Joan, mostly sensibly, wanted to do some writing and research related to her thesis. During a previous NEH seminar, I had reviewed sources related to beauty culture during the New Negro Renaissance-- which seemed to be both interesting to me and to my audience. As a hairstylist, by trade at some points, and always in my heart, I wanted to continue with this work. However, since I'm a scholar, or arguably a pseudo scholar, as a hobby more than anything at this point, I didn't want to produce a scholarly work, which would feel dead on the page, with no outlet. I wanted something that could grow beyond the seminar and edutain the masses, or at least my friends. Hence the blog.

I played around with a few names involving fanciness. I played around with the subtitle endlessly until I got it right. Then it hit me: Y'all Fancy. We had thrown the phrase around a few times since its initial utterance during our MANY outings. The more I thought about it the better it seemed to capture all I wanted to include in the blog. The best part though, I knew already, would be telling Joan. Since I'm given to drama, I merely informed her of how much should she love it. I wrote the first entry and let her know she should check it out ASAP. I can't remember the details, but I know she was unreasonably excited, as was our individual and team custom.

In comparison to my last post, written 3 months after her death, the posts in St. Louis were incredibly easy to write. They just spilled out. I know that this was partly the luxury of time, and partly the intellectual incubation of the seminar, but it was also Joan. Others have said likewise about her, but she was my biggest champion. She was my audience. She also double-checked my sometimes patchy sense of history.

Over the course of the four week seminar, we became close friends through many adventures and misadventures. We fed off of one another's desire for FANCY and bonded over our shared experiences as Southern Feminists From Crazy States. I put a red streak in her hair and taught her how to tease it big. We gave Chicago and ourselves new assholes during our trip to visit Hull House. I have some lingering guilt over distracting her from her writing (newsflash: I'm distracting) but she always said that the informal exchange at conferences was more important to her than the official pageantry. And we informally exchanged a lot of history and feminist theory at all the dive bars St. Louis had to offer. Drunk History had nothing on us. Our friendship persisted even after parting ways and always, there was a little scholarly spark between us: generating lessons, discussing what's wrong with academia, crying while Junot Diaz spoke, editing her Claude Lightfoot paper, planning graphic novels about unsung feminist heroes, decoding the cultural history of mid-century modern houses while we lusted over their double doors...

Over the past month or so, I've read more and produced more writing than in the whole rest of the year before that. I suppose that I'm trying to prove to myself, like everyone who knew her, that I can do what I used to do with her, without her. In a way though, she will always be my audience for this.