Throughout high school, I attended a lock-in at my high school for “Snowball.” I’m not sure if this exists outside of my corner of the Midwest, but my best recollection was that it was an anti-drugs (and maybe alcohol?) organization that hosted events for students in 8th grade through high school to essentially show them how to have fun and a positive outlook on life, without drugs.
The lock-in was hosted over MLK weekend and ran like a conference, with sessions and speakers throughout the building, along with a variety of social events in the evenings. (To this day, I still LOVE a good conference.) In the 4 years I attended, I was a regular at the annual open mic night—never presenting, only enjoying other people’s creativity; except for the one year that I had what I thought was the funniest idea I had had to date. I put my name on the list of presenters, and when called, I introduced myself and my piece, saying, “I’m Kristin, and this is a poem that has really just meant a lot to me—it got me through some tough times, and I wanted to share it with you tonight.” I then, with a completely straight face, read the following poem in its entirety, with full emotion:
I am Ebenezer Bleezer,
I run BLEEZER’S ICE CREAM STORE,
there are flavors in my freezer
you have never seen before…
For the uninitiated, this poem is called Ebenezer Bleezer by children’s poet Jack Prelutsky. The poem goes on to list 28 flavors such as “almond ham meringue salami” and “yam anchovy prune pastrami”. The joke was not well received… However, to this day, I still think it’s hilarious (if you don’t laugh at your own jokes, who will?). But I haven’t performed at another open mic night since.
That is, until last week. I was attending the Massachusetts Teachers Association annual Summer conference, and a few weeks prior, when they put out a call for open mic performers, I threw my hat in the ring. The theme was “Building on Legacies of Collective Resistance,” and, much to my surprise, I had the perfect piece to share. I didn’t know until the first day of the conference that I had been selected to perform. So in my downtime, I spent probably 6 hours revising and editing the piece to fit within the 3-minute time limit. Honestly, after all that work, I felt really good about what I presented. So good in fact, that I’ve linked it here.
One of the squares on my Summer BINGO card is to submit something for publication. I was ready to count this as a form of publication and mark that off – but after reading it aloud to an audience (and saying the F-word on a stage to an audience, which I didn’t realize was something I’d be hung up about), I think I want to try to get this – or some version of it- published for real. (Thanks Meg!)
Here’s the text of what I presented, but honestly—just watch the video. I’d prefer that you hear it in my voice.
***
Hi, I’m Kristin Brown, and this personal essay is called “Fostering Moxie.”
Before I begin, I want to acknowledge that the movie I’m talking about in this piece, while impactful to me, is not without its flaws – namely white knighting and tokenism. That being said, I respect it as a starting point and a stepping stone in the hopes that media will only continue to grow in its representation of diverse stories and peoples.
A few years ago, my high school freshmen had just finished a unit on “The Hate U Give,” and as any good teacher does, I was showing them the movie after we finished the book. As I was scrolling through Netflix to find it, one of my students pointed out the movie “Moxie.”
As I moved past the clip, the student couldn’t help but gush about how much she loved the movie and how much she thought I would like it. So, I made a point to go home and watch the movie that evening, and boy was that student right; I loved it.
The main character, a 16-year-old girl named Vivian, discovered her mother’s punk version of a memory box (a suitcase with band stickers all over it). Inside, amongst all of her mom’s memorabilia, she finds some fanzines. Vivian quietly takes in all of the content and doesn’t say much about it. Later on in the movie, the “jocks” at school (because remember this is still a high school movie, so of course there are the “jocks”) send out a list of superlatives to what seems like everyone at school – labeling Vivian as “most obedient” and a new girl at school, Lucy, as “the biggest C-word.”
Infuriated by this and inspired by seeing her mother’s zines and Lucy standing up against sexual harassment earlier in the movie, Vivian starts an anonymous zine called “Moxie” to call out problematic behaviors and elicit change in her school. In a call for solidarity, she asks supporters of Moxie to draw hearts and stars on their hands – showing a united stand against the list. When her mother comes home, she comments, saying, “That’s cute. What’s that?” pointing to the hearts and stars. Vivian gives the typical teen answer of “It’s nothing” before they continue their shared nightly routines.
At this point, I choked and sobbed, literally saying out loud to myself, “Oh my god, she’s been a good influence, and she doesn’t even know it.”
This movie showed me a blueprint of what our youngest generations are in the process of creating, while the older generations are complaining about how Gen Z are glued to their phones.
The impact of this blueprint was cemented into my understanding the next night, when I watched a YouTube video of one of the original YouTubers, Hank Green, saying that the reason that humanity is so worried about everything that is going on in the world, is because the world “… is really wonderful, so we’re protecting something great.” and “Things are hard…for reasons. Like you, right now, you are in the middle of the largest communications evolution in the history of the human race. So yeah, we’re gonna be bad at it! It doesn’t mean that we should resign ourselves to it. It doesn’t mean we can’t be better. But like, it’s not surprising that we’re having a hard time.”
Then, as if speaking directly to me and my particular brand of defeatist nihilism, he said, “I think that getting stuck in disempowerment is the worst place to be for challenging institutions and solving hard problems.”
Somehow, with those few words, Hank Green pushed me to figure out the type of woman that I was going to be from that moment forward. A woman who believes in humanity and the possibility to be better, and the need to fight, HARD, alongside those who come after us.
We must make ourselves into the mentors, cheerleaders, and support groups that we never had. Those young people must be empowered to create everything their brains can come up with. And as one of many self-driven, hard-working Millennials, we need to be the ones to make way for them. We need to let them fix the fucked up world because it is actually worth fixing. As Hank Green said, “Rage without an outlet is only ever going to make things worse.”
And I think we’ve all had enough of that.
